Finally got into the accomp for “Mormorio,” more on renaissance violin bands

I haven’t written the viola staff down yet because … well, there’s no reason to at this point. I can hum the thing in my sleep. But at long last, I’ve got the piano part down up to the initial “ruscelli e fonti” part that moves into AM. It needs some more tweaking to bring out some of the pretty bits that catch the ear when a chamber orchestra does it, and I also embarrassingly added an extra triplet in the meter that needs to get gone. *sigh* It forces me to remeasure everything, but hopefully the downbeats will fall in nice places. I guess they will; that’s how Haendel wrote it, after all, and if anyone can be trusted to get this one right, it’s him.

Then, once it’s done and large enough to start getting unwieldy, I can start poking around in Lilypond and figure out how to do more than one part. Not looking forward to it, but it shouldn’t be too terribly painful.

Still thinking about Podcast 60 on RBP’s “Violin Adventures”, too. The more I think about it, the more the old violin bands sound like typical party bands of the sort that would play at a wedding reception. Even the on-the-arm technique of bowing and holding the instrument lets it sound more like what you’d need if people are dancing, laughing, talking, scraping chairs against the floor, possibly eating … You need a rougher-edged sound to be heard over that, and if the intonation is a bit off, well no one’s listening for it. They just want nice stuff to dance to.

It reminded me of the way that classical guitarists will hold a guitar versus many rock guitarists. Most classical players will sit or at least hold the thing up pretty high, which gives them nice strain-free mobility on the fretboard for virtuoso playing. A lot of rock and metal players will carry it very low; I think Neal Schon’s guitar is practically around kneecap-level. It’s much harder to play accurately like that and without strain, but it’s how it’s done in that world and it “looks cool.”

Same thing with renaissance violins and their country fiddle descendents. You don’t have six sour-faced Russian judges listening for mistakes while you’re playing; you have a roomful of your friends sharing beer and fries who are looking to enjoy themselves and possibly sing along if you play something they like.

Instruments are played in the manner that’s best for their individual context. There’s no one “right way” to play. It all depends on what you want to achieve. If intonation, subtlety, and clarity are most important and you’re playing for a picky, attentive audience, then you play on the shoulder. If you are looking for a sound that carries over conversation and dancing and the audience will be more welcoming and less nitpicky — and if it’s 1543 and you want to “look cool” to that girl in the front row giving you the eye — then you play on the arm.

STAY PUT, DAMN IT!

The A on the G string keeps moving around! I’m in D now so it’s flatter than when I play stuff in G, and it’s irritating me.

I know, this is part of why I’m sawing away on this damn box of string in the first place, so I can go digging for the notes and tweak them. But there’s a lot to be said for an A just being an A instead of wandering around because it’s suddenly playing a different role.

*argh*

And furthermore, why do I not hear this when I am at the piano? I’ve got some sort of contextual tuning going on in my ears where something will sound peachy on the piano, and then when I pick up the viola, I’m hearing, “Sharp! Sharp! Sharp! WTH?!”

In other news, the shoulder rest is back. I plan to decisively and without hesitation vacillate on the topic of whether I feel more comfortable with or without it. Or not.

The Tavern Violin and Left-Handed Playing

Podcast 58 and podcast 60 make an interesting pair.

Renaissance violin bands are sounding to me a lot like rock bands. The violin wasn’t treated in most renaissance-era lists of instrument techniques because “everyone played it and it was everywhere,” it was more of a working-class tavern instrument than one associated with people of quality, most violinists played dance music and weren’t expected to read music but improvise, they stood while playing, they needed to make a bright sound with lots of overtones to be heard over party noises … Next to Bibbens’s statements about her experiences in rock bands (the relative unimportance of reading music versus improvving), it becomes obvious that the violin was the electric guitar of its time when it was first created. If you’ve ever been to a wedding reception where the band consisted of the typical drums-keyboards-bass guitar-lead guitar, you’ve heard the equivalent of a renaissance violin band.

Also, the stream of statements in podcast 60 about how the bow is the soul of expressiveness, the left hand is secondary, the music comes from the bow, etc. etc. etc. stood out to me instantly. The next time someone tries to sell me the BS bill of goods about how being left-handed and putting the bow in the off hand is an “advantage” because I get to waste my better hand on the less important side of the instrument, I’m going to have them listen to this podcast. Then, I’m just going to slap them.

Also interesting to think of the nonsense I’ve dealt with learning to play left-handed in light of the comments David Douglass made about playing a renaissance violin on the arm as opposed to the shoulder and having violinists come back stage and yell at him for it. Pine sounded incredulous, but any left-handed player can tell similar stories. (Right down to the similar tales of country fiddlers being tolerated for both playing left-handed and playing on the arm because they are assumed to be lesser players who don’t know any better.)

We may live in the 21st century, but some people are still in the 14th it seems.

In other news, I seem to have ditched the shoulder rest for the moment; we’ll see how long that lasts. The divot the viola is making in my extremely inadequately padded collarbone might demand either the return of the rest or a more padded cushion.

More theremin-like sawing

“Con rauco mormorio” on the viola.

I think I’m going to stick with this and get it down nicely. I like it, and I like the way it sounds. It has a nice viola-centered compass, and I’m highly motivated to get it right. And it’s good exercise to work on bowing and how to manage it.

You know …

I also need an article on the Foodie Revolution for Music and how badly it’s needed …

Shovel a little free time at me, and it’s yours.

Backing up a bit on the C#m

I would almost have forgotten that the only reason I got the Fm to come to a conclusion was because I allowed myself to make multiple detours on the way where I threw out entire phrases and sections that didn’t seem to work or that didn’t do it for me. Thus far, I haven’t done that with the C#m. I’ve gone slowly and a bit more deliberately, but I haven’t frogged anything thus far. I might be overdue for it. I think the stuff that I had half-congealed in my brain as the next bit of music to come has to get shaken up and see what new shape it takes when it settles down. I like bits of it, but there are ways in which it’s not doing what I want it to do, so into the frog pond it goes.

I’m also concerned that I’m … overmodulating. Just switching chords too often and with too much of a clockwork rhythm. The only thing I’ve written where I just allowed myself to settle into a nice, placid I with a few easygoing deviations into V or IV-V was that George Winston/Clementi thing in GM that got shoved into a piece of tupperware and stuck in the back of the freezer. (WordPress is marking “tupperware” as incorrect without capitalization. I refuse to bow to the juggernaut of megalomaniacal corporate power when exercised within my spellchecker. How about kleenex? Or nylon? Yes on “kleenex,” but no on “nylon.” I think DuPont lost the rights to that word through decades of non-enforcement.)

Anyway. I think I’m going to let the music get a bit mooshy in the next stages, and see if I can’t stick in one chord for a while instead of bouncing around all over the place once/twice per measure.

Eventually, I’d also like to do something that isn’t in a triplet meter, but I’d like a lot of things.

What’s your real goal?

For classical music outreach, I mean.

“To communicate how relevant this music is to the community!”

Try again.

“To enable people to see the beauty I see in this music.”

Closer. Try again.

“To get people to find beauty in classical music instead of the junk they listen to now.”

We’re getting warmer …

“To convince people they should be more like me!”

Bingo.

All too often, it’s not about relevance. It’s not about “connecting with people,” unless you plan to tie that connection around their waists and haul them over to your side of the fence by main force. Unfortunately (or not), people can sniff this sort of thing out very quickly and will simply not pick up the rope if they have successfully sussed out what you plan to do with it.

Do you want them to see the beauty in Brahms, or do you want them to put down that damned secondhand guitar and pick up a violin instead?

Do you want them to fall in love with Mozart, or do you want them to fall out of love with AC/DC?

Do you also want them to stop voting the way they vote and eating what they eat and start doing both the way you do? In the end, do you want that church-going NASCAR fan who likes a good burger to turn into a vegan Buddhist Democrat … coincidentally just like you?

If you are all about reforming the culture of classical music, do you just happen to want to do it in a way that puts your favorite music front-and-center? Do you claim to support programs that place classical music into the hands of average schmoes but speak out against the ones that won’t promote your favorite music within that sphere? (Avant-garde art music fans, I’m looking at you.)

Yes, I’ve said that orchestras had better prepare for an onslaught of Queen and Journey pops concerts in the future, and yes I love that music. I’m not promoting it or making a public cry for them to include it. I’m not calling out the LA Philharmonic’s YOLA program for not including it. I’m making a prediction. $20 and a steak dinner says it’s going to happen within the next ten years. Probably sooner. What I want isn’t the issue here — it’s a matter of what’s likely going to happen. I’d like it if they included Jeff Lynne, too. But they aren’t going to.

Anyhow …

In the end, is classical music outreach all about them, or is it all about you?

Because it’s not shiny, idealistic altruism if your desire to share the Wonderful Things You Love hinges on first convincing your intended victim that they suck. You aren’t selling the transcendent beauty of Brahms, then. You’re just selling tooth whiteners or mouthwash.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard self-centered, inflexible babble masquerading as classical music promotion out of the mouths of people — promoters, enthusiasts, professors, even a very few unfortunate musicians.

“I don’t care what they are doing with the music. Let’s face it, they aren’t very good. I want them to come and listen to me when I play it.”

“Sure we need pops concerts! There’s always a segment of the audience that’s unadventurous, timid, and can’t understand elevated things, and the orchestra will have to cater to them as well!”

“The problem is that schools aren’t promoting my favorite kind of music to kids anymore, and they end up listening to the garbage and junk that passes for music today.” Following this is often a litany of the only the most shallow and foul-mouthed forms of it, as if Rachmaninoff could be invalidated as unchallenging and shallow by equating his work with a Clementi student piece.

“I taught a class for nonmusicians, and by the time I was done, all of those kids liked Schubert better than the garbage they had liked a mere three months before. They told me so.” This was unfortunately a paraphrase from one of my own favorite singers, Russell Oberlin. I could have smacked him, both for his arrogance and for his naivete in thinking that those kids had really stopped listening to their favorite pop music because one little college professor — him — had informed them that it was junk.

No, this attitude is not rare. Anyone who thinks it’s merely confined to the above people is kidding themselves. This is the dominant attitude among most lovers of classical music — including a lot of people who think of themselves as daring pioneers for the popular reform of classical music. “I don’t care what they are doing, I want them to worship me.” “Surely they will feel complimented when I lower myself to their level.” “My music is perfect and wonderful, theirs is garbage”. “I’m all for the revolution, as long as I’m central to it and recognized as such.”

Stop acting like you have the community’s best interests at heart when you only want them to admit that you are superior to them so they will want to become like you. That Tea-Party voter who likes hockey, weekend barbecue, and Schlitz malt talls will probably stay that way even if you manage to crowbar him up and get him to a Mozart concert. (You won’t manage to get him to listen to Philip Glass, so stop trying.) If you want him to keep coming back, ashcan the insinuations that he’s genetically inferior and that Mozart will help him become as fabulous as you. Or that Mozart will help him recognize and genuflect before your fabulosity. He doesn’t think you’re fabulous. He thinks you’re an arrogant jerk, and if he fears Mozart will either turn him into you or force him to worship you, he’ll actively avoid listening to it.

You need to stop thinking of him as genetically inferior, no matter how deeply you bury it. I’m not asking you to hide your disdain better, I’m asking you to not disdain them in the first place. This music belongs to them as much as you.

Stop disdaining the community, and maybe they’ll stop avoiding you.

If you are truly, honestly incapable of not disdaining them, then for God’s sake, shut up about classical music because you will do far more harm than good.

This is hard, though. It is extremely difficult for the people who move within the back-office spheres of the current classical music industry to imagine that not everyone wants to be like them. And even for those of us who play the music and who have become educated, we still don’t want to become like them. We don’t necessarily see the hockey-and-Schlitz part of our past or present as something to apologize for or eradicate. We really, really don’t.

But yet again, since that world runs on private donations, that type of person is simply going to own the back-office space in the current classical music industry. I’m not sure I see a way out for it.

That world might go away, leaving classical music to private citizens who enjoy playing it on whatever instrument they have to hand, which is not a bad way to survive. It would certainly revitalize it. I’ve heard too many beautiful renditions of a Bach cello suite on electric fretless bass guitars to think otherwise. Honestly, Bach is just as anachronistic on a modern Bosendorfer as it is on a Pedulla. Ask any HIPPster and they’ll tell you. (Actually, they will probably tell you even if you don’t ask.)

What comes after ping-pong and bam-bam-bam?

That sounds like the lead-in to an off-color joke. “A cigarette if you’re lucky, antibiotics if you’re not.”

I think I’m going to have to just go in a different, more leisurely direction on this one. It’s been a bit of a downhill race from the beginning, with each downbeat being the opening for the pickup to the next section. The ear hasn’t really had any time to catch its breath. I think I need to ease up, or else the thing runs the risk of being a one-trick pony or exhausting the ear. Essentially, it’s time to slow down a bit and play the role of the andante second movement to let the ear get a breather.

We’ll see how that goes.

Classical Cargo Cults: Taking the Wrong Lessons from Popular Music

I’ve said elsewhere that classical music insiders lack respect for their surrounding communities. They whine when they have to program or play music that typical people like or connect with — which is sometimes gorgeous symphonic music that’s every bit as complex as anything written 100 years ago. And they have heart attacks when people suggest playing Bach or Tchaikovsky on a non-symphonic instrument.

Why?

Because average people like this stuff.

Eew, them?

Yes. Those people whose money you need on ticket sales to stave off Chapter 11? Them.

The disdain for the typical surrounding community is palpable. The classical music industry needs the community’s money through ticket sales, but it hates playing what they like, which is often beautiful and complex, and wants them to keep their cooties off of it. (And by the way, I’m not talking about the musicians. I’m talking about the management and funding structures. The musicians rarely if ever disdain any one entire form of music.)

However, the classical music industry also wants to be relevant to them at the same time. Or relevant enough to get them to open their wallets.

Pop and rock doesn’t reflect this disdain in its music. That’s why pop and rock make more money, because they don’t disdain their audiences. In fact, they often write music from the point of view of the typical listener. (Billy Joel, Carly Simon, and Jonathan Cain are geniuses at that — and there’s more of them. I’m only mentioning the ones that a typical 45 year old would know.) They write and perform things that ennoble the audience as they are. “Here you go: here’s a song (ex. “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” or “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”) that speaks of what rhetorical-you, the listener, are feeling and living and have experienced. It is noble, and by extension, you are noble.” That is why people love that music.

When I was thinking of why people love, as an example, “Don’t Stop Believing,” it really hammered that point home. This is a song that ennobles the emotions felt by no one more elevated than your typical blue-collar kid who feels trapped by their surroundings and who is in the midst of a deep episode of “anywhere but here.” That’s essentially all the song is about.

It’s certainly beautiful just as a piece of music, something so catchy and meaty that it almost demands that you listen to it from the minute the opening hook starts. But there are a lot of songs with catchy hooks around, and they aren’t all the most downloaded song ever on iTunes. This one ennobles the audience. It doesn’t act like the listener is just a cheap little working-class nobody who has to be ushered into the World of Fabulousness occupied by the elevated musicians and insider audience. It doesn’t promise to elevate the listener by first reaching down to them. It can’t. It was written and performed by people who had been blue-collar kids looking for a means of escape themselves.

Yet what conclusion does the classical music insider reach when pondering why this sort of music has such a devoted (and financially rewarding) following?

It must be the video screens! Oh, and Steve Perry ran around on stage in jeans. Maybe if we had video screens and our musicians wore jeans instead of tails (Perry, in a massive stroke of irony, often wore both) we might get the same reaction!

This is cargo-cult reasoning — that empty aping of the shallowest gestures from a given culture will result in that culture’s bounty raining down from out of the sky.

Only the most pathologically distant, culturally incompetent people, who couldn’t connect with the average listener if their lives depended on it, would conclude that the video screens, flashing lights, and blue jeans were the secret to that music’s success. Only people who have no idea what it means to grow up trapped in a grey industrial life, fully aware that one either escapes when the getting is good or one will live out one’s entire existence in an undemanding, poorly-paying job, tied down and forever unfulfilled, could possibly see nothing but the lights and jeans in popular music. It’s boggling.

And yet, since the classical music industry often runs on donor support — the support of very wealthy people — the back offices are skewed in favor of people for whom caviar luncheons are simply the way the universe works. Moreover, if that world runs on donors, there’s no other choice.

As a result, I don’t think that the current classical music industry can ever manage to reap the level of audience devotion and connection that popular music can. They function in a world where connecting to the very rich is an absolute requirement, since donations are how they survive. Connecting to the ordinary person is in direct opposition to this.

Hence, they are left with nothing but the empty gestures of popular music to mimic. The wrong lesson is all that they can bring into their world, because the right lesson just doesn’t breathe the same air.

Geeks, Clem Kadiddlehopper, and Steve Jobs: Lessons for Music Insiders from the World of Technology

There is a serious psychological similarity between people who love and create music and people who love and create technology.

They both can’t fathom that not everyone wants to get into the cables and theory up to their eyeballs. Some people just want things to work without lifting the hood all the time.

They both look down on people like that, even if they refuse to admit it.

Technical geeks think that a half-day spent buried up to their noses in a software manual because their first attempt to install the software caused their computer to spontaneously melt is the best way imaginable to spend a half-day. Further, they think that people who don’t want to waste a half-day like that, don’t want to do so because they are simply too stupid to perceive that it’s fun. Add a little misogyny to the mix, and disdain for old people, and they will imagine that most of these people are also female and have grey hair. And are stupid.

Musical geeks think that a half-day spent studying a pocket score for some alarming thing written by Schoenberg, absolutely necessary if one is to go see the thing that night and get even the most basic grasp of what the hell Schoenberg is trying to get across, is a half-day well-spent also. They also have lovely mental images of people who don’t want to do that, calling them timid, unadventurous, uncool, unhip, non-with-it, and probably owners of used AMC Pacers with duct tape on the bumper. (And stupid.)

Basically, both will round-file anyone who doesn’t want to immerse themselves in the super-geeky technical R&D considerations of their favorite pastime as that guy down there. *points*

Clem Kadiddlehopper

Neither will admit that most people are just not into spending hours at a time up to their nosehairs in the minutiae of what for them isn’t a vocation, but simply something that should work when you want it to work. They resent technology that arrogantly sets itself as an obstacle between them and sending their vacation photos to their nephew. They are annoyed by music that is so hostile to the idea of communication that it refuses to lift a finger and expects them to do all the work.

They want the damned computer to just work. They want the music to just say something.

Of course, there will always be geeks who like the inner workings of things, and from time to time, I’m one of them. I don’t want a steady diet of atonal music, but I was happy to sit there with my eyes closed for a quarter of an a hour and at least see what happened when I was taken by surprise by that Lutoslawski thing a while back. I wouldn’t want to install Ubuntu on my laptop and run it as a matter of course, but I’m happy to code the database backend for a website in perl as well as opening Photoshop to make the sparkly colorful pictures to go along.

And from that fencesitting position, I can also point out that it’s irksome and self-defeating for techno-geek insiders of any stripe to expect those outside of the inner circle to:

1. react the same way they do to the inner workings of their stock in trade, and
2. consider those who don’t react that way to do so simply because they are stupid and not because they just have other things they’d rather do with their time.

Classical music, art music, whatever the hell you want to call it, needs one of those guys down there. *points again*

Steve Jobs

They need a guy who understands that the vast bulk of the consuming audience wants something that doesn’t have seventeen thousand buttons on it and require you to keep six types of cables straight before you can even turn it on. They want a device with one button on it. At most. They want a device so intuitive that you don’t even need an owner’s manual for it. (Does anyone know anyone who actually read the owner’s manual for their iPhone? Who needs to? Start poking, and the device all but explains itself to you.)

Before the Gospel according to Steve was put out, technology was tailored for the tastes of what they called the Early Adopter: the geek who had to has to have every new gadget the minute it comes out. Usually male, usually white, usually educated in the relevant technology, usually well-monied. (Starting to sound a lot like the art-music crowd, eh?) The majority of the gadgets designed for these types had — I am not making this up — more buttons than they needed in order to make them even harder to use, because they were designed both by and for people who thought that spending a day buried in the manual was fun.

And no one else bought them. The device designers had cornered 100% of the 0.0002% of the market that likes that stuff, and wasted no time patting themselves most enthusiastically on the back for having done so.

This is what happens when the insiders do the marketing.

Then, along came Steve — the white male geek with money who seemed to come from another planet, but who could at least rely on those shared characteristics to persuade the rest of the geeks to actually listen to him when he said things that people who didn’t share those qualities had been saying for over thirty years. Suddenly simplicity of interface uber alles was the watchword. People own computers now with no buttons at all. And they have engulfed the planet with them. Because Steve recognized that most people don’t want to hit six buttons when one will do. Or when none will do.

That’s why Apple owns the entire planet and currently enjoys an enormous market share. Even people who have Blackberries or Androids instead of iPhones generally synch the things up to a Mac someplace, and own an iPod. Nowdays, Early Adopters might line up for the latest iPhone, but that is only after two decades of disdain for Macs as suited only for mere teenaged girls and art majors. (Sort of like how pops concerts are viewed today as suited only for the Lawrence Welk crowd and the tone-deaf.) The techno-insider Early Adopters were well behind the curve and only came to it kicking and screaming after it threatened to leave them behind.

Face it. Just like most people do not want to hit six buttons when one will do, most people also don’t want to spend their entire morning prior to a music concert studying theory and scores. They may not even want to sit through a pre-concert lecture. They just want the damned music to do its job without requiring extensive self-assembly first. In fact, that pre-concert lecture might only serve to enforce the idea that self-assembly is required. You need to come early so we can teach you how to put the thing together before you have a hope in hell of making sense of it!

Sure, I like theory and scores. Most people do not — and they aren’t stupid, timid, fearful, uninteresting, boring, and non-hip for it. Alex Ross might prefer to go to one of those scary Berg operas with a pocket score in hand, but I bet if anyone tried to sit him down and talk him through an Ubuntu installation, he’d be ripping what remains of his hair out in seconds. Even though I and all my friends throw parties when Ubuntu comes out with a new version. Dapper Drake? Galloping Gazelle, or whatever the hell it’s up to now? (Off to Google: Natty Narwhal, apparently.) I and all my cool in-crowd friends know what that means, so surely the rest of the planet knows as well, or if they don’t, they’re dying to and will welcome any attempt to explain it to them forcibly and in great detail.

You see Alex, first you have to cross-wire the framizam, and then you install the hoop-de-whatchamacallit, google the new release of the firmware, reinstall your Megabyte, and reverse the polarity of the neutron flo—hey, where you going? Get back here! Luddite!

Poor Alex. Timid. Afraid of new things. Not too bright, obviously. Frightened by the unfamiliar … Surely he’ll fall in love with computers if only I pounce on him next time I see him and explain it to him again louder. He’s been avoiding me for some reason, though. I know! I’ll have a nice hour-long wine-and-cheese pre-installation lecture on operating systems, and I’ll corner him and get him to listen to me then. I’m sure he’ll fall in love with operating system minutiae then.

This is all the fault of schools that don’t start teaching kids the basics of programming early enough!

If classical music wants to save itself, it needs to stop marketing itself to the geeks and Early Adopters. There will always be a market for those types, sure. But they are a tiny market, they are hostile to the rest of the market, and they need to be satisfied separately. Small, chi-chi venues that seat 250 are absolutely great for that. But habitually presenting that sort of thing in a hall with 5,000 seats in it is a guaranteed recipe for an empty hall.

Classical music had better aim wider than them. The dreaded pops concerts, with John Williams and Howard Shore. What the hell is “pops” anyway but a put-down for “music that means something emotional to the vast majority of our surrounding community?” Salutes to Queen and the Beatles. (Brush up your “Open Arms,” string players, because in ten years, it’ll be Journey.) Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The entire classical music industry has to stop aiming for the guys who like more buttons on their gadgets when fewer will do. This means that guys like that have to stop doing the marketing.