Music Therapy

Composing Music

2012-01-29T09:16:00.003-05:00

Over in this post, Kyle Gann says the following:

It felt as firm as though I had had a math problem with an incorrect answer, and I recalculated and got the right one. It “clicked.” Every composer knows this click, or should. It doesn’t feel as though I simply “liked it better.” Even though there is no objective criterion against which I can measure a phrase in a piece I’m writing, right and wrong answers come up. Because such judgments are made in the right brain, I suspect, there are no words to justify them. When I’m about done with a piece, I put the MIDI version on a CD and play it over and over in my car as I’m driving and – this is the crucial part – try not to listen to it. What happens, as I have my mind on other things, is that every wrong note in the piece jumps out at me and attracts my attention. This works, I think, because when I’m focusing on the piece (with my left brain), I can justify to myself anything I put in it, but with my peripheral (right-brain) listening, things that are wrong become impossible to ignore. My peripheral listening catches the mistakes. My conscious, analytical brain puts these oh-so-clever ideas in, and my intuitive, unfocused brain tells me the ones that don’t work.

I'd previously come up with the analogy that for me composing is game like and puzzle like, and that when you get something right there's the feeling of winning the game or solving the puzzle, but Kyle's description is much better and goes much deeper, and I agree that listening to a piece in an unfocused way is different, but hadn't realized it until reading this.

note to regular readers - the picture for this series of posts isn't here because I'm migrating from a five or six year old iBook to a brand new MacBook Air - and going from dial-up to wireless that's now available here on the farm due to a new cell tower not to too far away - and getting every thing organized, and trying not to look at music YouTubes all day (!) has slowed blogging.

Epigenetics

2012-01-13T09:36:00.003-05:00

I've often thought that where we are in the understanding of neuroscience and genetics will probably turn out to be analogous to where map makers were right after the Americas were discovered. This article linked on Boing Boing reinforces that notion, as it looks like there's more than just nature and nurture affecting who we are.

This post from a year ago talking about talent included this quote from a BBC article:

. . ."Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up.". . .

It turns out things are more complicated than that, and the complication is epigenetics.

. . . epigenetic processes—chemical reactions tied to neither nature nor nurture but representing what researchers have called a "third component." These reactions influence how our genetic code is expressed: how each gene is strengthened or weakened, even turned on or off, to build our bones, brains, and all the other parts of our bodies.

If you think of our DNA as an immense piano keyboard and our genes as keys—each key symbolizing a segment of DNA responsible for a particular note, or trait, and all the keys combining to make us who we are—then epigenetic processes determine when and how each key can be struck, changing the tune being played.

Composing Music

2012-01-12T12:27:00.005-05:00

A while ago I blogged about composing a piece of music because a lot of people seem to think it's a much more mysterious proposition than it really is. The tag for that series of posts is Vermont Song. One of the points made in those posts is that first you set your parameters - things like instruments, pitch set (scale), and meter - and then it's sort of like a game wherein you work to see what you can do musically within those parameters.

So I was delighted to see Kyle Gann say in a recent post:

“if you get an interesting enough scale, you can just explore all the inherent possibilities of that scale, both the ones you built into it and the ones that appear unexpectedly, and the piece practically writes itself.”

I quoted that in a comment and added: "That’s a wonderful way to think about composing – that you’re simply releasing inherent possibilities of a set of parameters – takes the conscious ego right out of the equation."

Kyle was talking specifically about one of his micro-tonal scales (this one has 36 different pitches per octave), but the concept can work for a bundle of parameters, not just one.

The phrase "conscious ego" might be one I start using regularly because it's a handy way of talking about what the lamas call "the self-cherishing ego", as opposed to the "neutral ego". In the case of composition, once you set the parameters, who you are will determine what you find in that space, there's no need to be constantly wondering what it is you want to say.

As I've mentioned before, the first time I hear a piece performed, or the first time I perform it for someone else, there's this amazing feeling of being in a waking dream state that I think is due to hearing how some part of me I'm not conscious of is being expressed.

Performance Diary

2012-01-02T08:40:00.003-05:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've been involved in various performances: horn in concert band; a flute obbligato with the community chorus; flute and alto flute with the Presbyterian Ensemble Christmas morning; guitar, horn and alto flute with the great nieces at the nursing home; and horn with the brass group and a pipe organ at an Episcopal Sunday service yesterday morning.

Something about playing flute or horn with voices really moves me and seems to put me in a much better position to experience flow. I didn't get there this time, but was tantalizingly close. I think it must have to do with my experiencing the intonation and the balance blend with voices as being far more delicate than, say, the concert band. I think that's also why I so enjoy playing alto flute with flute and cello, and playing horn in the brass group - getting that wonderful ensemble feeling seems much more in reach, and that wonderful ensemble feeling is a big (necessary?) part of flow.

Right at the beginning of this series of performances I got the very sad news that someone I've been close to for forty years had passed away. She was a wonderful musician, which always seems to make it worse. So while playing all this wonderful Christmas music, there was this constant undertow of sadness. People didn't seem to really notice a change in my playing, but I sure did. If I were a higher level player, maybe I could have played joyous music more successfully while feeling sad.

The other way not being a high level player came into play was having technique issues to clear away before being able to interpret the music on the various instruments. Were I to give up all instruments but one, I could spend way more time on technique so as to not be caught short when wanting to perform. I really enjoy making music on various instruments, but there's a price to pay in having to drill on the various technique deficiencies that pop up in phrases here and there when prepping for performances.

In several of these performances we used carols I'd transposed down into flat keys some years ago, having added a keyboard book in the new keys for piano/organ, and people really enjoyed our playing and sound, and we really enjoyed playing in the comfort zones of our ranges. It's sort of like the old hymns mentioned in the previous post. Simply putting music in easy to play keys, just like playing music people want to hear, is a very high reward endeavor and I'm sort of baffled more people don't do it.

The Old Hymns

2011-12-04T09:42:00.003-05:00

Having never been a church goer, I never sang any hymns until becoming a hospice volunteer six or seven years ago. When I'm asked to sing hymns, it's nearly always the old hymns, many of which have been dropped from the newer hymnals (and never were in the Episcopal hymnal, with which I had a little experience as a young child).

Some of the hymns I'm talking about are "Sweet Hour of Prayer", "The Old Rugged Cross", "In The Garden", "What A Friend We Have In Jesus", "The Church In The Wildwood", "Trust and Obey", and "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior".

I've put these and others in flat keys for our group, and usually down a step or three to make them easier for people to sing. Every time we do them, a few people come up afterwards and fervently thank us for performing them and telling us they never hear them any more and that they mean a great deal to them.

As a therapist these hymns strike me somewhat as the service tunes and patriotic songs the community band plays on Memorial and Veterans Day. Through a lifetime of association, hearing them triggers an emotional reaction in some audience members that can never be matched by something they've not heard before.

I can understand how church musicians and ministers want to always be exploring new material, but as a therapist these old hymns are a wonderful way to create therapeutic moments for people that grew up with them.

Made In Tibet

2011-12-02T19:49:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Lama Tashi for linking this on Facebook. For the nearly 20 years I've been knowing Tibetans, the news from Tibet has just gotten more and more grim. This example of how they maintain their sprit in the face of all that reminds me of what an astonishing people they are.

Art. Emotion & Technique

2011-12-02T07:59:00.004-05:00

Here's Terry Teachout's almanac entry for today:

"It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman; art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

I think that some art can only be fully apprehended and appreciated by the community of craftsmen. Musicians and composers with "theory mind" can delight in harmonic and rhythmic complexities (which may or may not be manifestations of emotions) unintelligible to regular people. I do agree with the overall point of the quote, though, and think it's a good way of thinking about teaching music - that the emotion is the point of it all, and that technique is how you get there.

Performance Diary

2011-11-24T18:28:00.007-05:00

Thanksgiving is a great day to post on some recent performances by the Kenwood Players. We had four performances in eleven days, a frequency of public performance I'd never previously experienced. One performance was in yet another local country church with glorious acoustics, Waddell Presbyterian over in Rapidan (for those familiar with the area it's the wooden Gothic church right as you go down to the river from the Orange side). Here's a snapshot of the interior:

During the service we did "Sweet Hour of Prayer", "The Old Rugged Cross", and "In the Garden" as instrumentals three times through, me on guitar, Judy on drum, Steve beginning each on trombone and Dick taking the third time through on trumpet, with Bill B and Crawford switching out on the second iteration on sax or Eb tuba. Each and every solo was terrific. Crawford, a retired preacher who'll be 80 next Aprils Fool's Day did a tuba solo on "In the Garden", that to me at least, spoke of a well and fully lived spiritual life.

We got a lot of very nice compliments, but my favorite was from the organist who said afterwards in an almost dazed way, "You all are really good!" It's not unusual for us to get nice comments from other musicians, but the music therapist in me who's never done a lot of straight up performing is always delighted to hear them.

We also did three performances with basically the same set list, for an open house at an assisted living facility, for a fund raising gala for the local art center, and for the entertainment following a harvest dinner at the Presbyterian church in town. Maggie and I did less than ten minutes of flute clarinet, then Dick and Steve did trombone trumpet duets, then Crawford and Bill C on tuba and me on horn joined them for some brass, then I switched to banjo and we did some good time Americana, and then some straight up Dixieland.

I am obviously biased, but my sense is that the good feelings we create as a group making music together are getting transmitted to the audience. People are enjoying the music, but they're also enjoying and sharing our having a good time making the music.

Here's how I put it in a thank you note to the Players: Thanks to each and every one of you for these recent performances and all the past work that laid the groundwork. Both how we make music as a group and how the group makes music in the community is something I've never experienced so fully before. I saw a quote here lately that for a true musician the love of self doesn't get in the way of the love of the music, which is a great way to describe the cooperative spirit needed for our getting the feeling we're expressing in the music.

String Tone

2011-11-17T09:16:00.003-05:00

Here is a terrific post by Elaine Fine, with great illustrations, talking about how various harmonics can create different tone qualities. A snip from the first paragraph:

Violinist-composers tend to load up their music with sixths because the sixth is such a harmonically rich interval. It is simply loaded with overtones, some that can be heard, and some that can't really be heard distinctly. They can be felt though, by the person playing and the people who are listening. It is rare that a microphone can pick up the full array of overtones and difference tones. These are the things that give texture to the music and contribute to the personal quality of an individual player's sound.

A Few Words about Jonathan

2011-11-16T09:47:00.003-05:00

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the name Jonathan West, as I've linked to him from time to time and because he is by far the most frequent commenter. Besides his horn blog, he has another, which began as rationalist and skeptical philosophic musings, but a couple of years back began paying attention to sexual abuse of children in a school in his part of London.

For the whole story you can go there and scroll through the posts. Basically he turned his wonderfully analytical mind to the problem and did what he could to shed light on a situation that, for whatever reason, society tends to turn a blind eye toward whenever it crops up.

Equally importantly, he has maintained a civil tone throughout, even though those running the school cast aspersions on his motives.

Here in the past few weeks the story has been covered by the major papers and the BBC and Jonathan's work has been vindicated and praised, but it was lonely going at the start.

Having worked with children who were victims of abuse, sexual and otherwise, I know that the harm can only be ameliorated, not eliminated. The real way to go is to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that's what Jonathan's work on this issue will mean for any number of children in the future.

Bravo!

Hearing the World Differently?

2011-11-16T09:26:00.007-05:00

Here's a long article on how it is so much modern architecture can seem weird to the layman, the people actually using it. For me it seems a perfect analog to a lot of "modern" music. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “What were the architects thinking?” Have you looked at a supposedly “ecological” industrial-looking building, and questioned how it could be truly ecological? Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? You might be forgiven for thinking “these architects must be blind!” New research shows that in a real sense, you might actually be right.

Environmental psychologists have long known about this widespread and puzzling phenomenon. Laboratory results show conclusively that architects literally see the world differently from non-architects. Not only do architects notice and look for different aspects of the environment than other people; their brains seem to synthesize an understanding of the world that has notable differences from natural reality. Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities.

I've become convinced that most composers of concert band music are really writing for other composers of concert band music more than students and audiences, whether they realize it or not. That also seems true of most of the atonal effusions of academia we got in the 20th century.

From time to time I've used the phrase "theory mind" to describe the type of musician/composer who can tell you instantly that they're hearing an augmented chord with a flat ninth in second inversion. They simply hear and process music differently from regular people. The music they write and play can work for them and others like them, but not for average people.

Here's another paragraph further down in the article:

Our colleague Jaap Dawson recently reinforced this idea in telling us of his teaching experience:
“The unconscious rules us, however hard we try to become conscious of a little bit of our lives. What I’ve also discovered in working with students the last 27 years is that they pick up the design rules of Modernism very quickly—without consulting their own experience of buildings or spaces. And if you look at those rules, then you simply have to conclude something else: in order to follow them, you need to know the normal, vernacular, classical, archetypal language of building. If you know that language, then you simply do its opposite in order to get Modernism. My conclusion: awareness of the timeless language is present in people, but they learn to suppress it. But there’s something underneath groupthink, I think; and that’s a fear of trusting your own experience—in body and soul—of buildings and spaces. Any child trusts that experience.”

Memory and Music

2011-11-16T09:01:00.004-05:00

Here are two articles talking about memory and music.

The first talks about a particular type of memory function that can vary from person to person. Some people can hold more information in their minds at one time than others.

In a series of studies, Hambrick and colleagues found that people with higher levels of working memory capacity outperformed those with lower levels – and even in individuals with extensive experience and knowledge of the task at hand. The studies analyzed complex tasks such as piano sight reading.

“While the specialized knowledge that accumulates through practice is the most important ingredient to reach a very high level of skill, it’s not always sufficient,” said Hambrick, associate professor of psychology. “Working memory capacity can still predict performance in complex domains such as music, chess, science, and maybe even in sports that have a substantial mental component such as golf.”

I was particularly struck by this as music educators always talk about how if you sight read a lot you'll get better, which is certainly true. But it also seems true that it's harder for some than others due to innate brain function, which I've always intuitively felt, but educators never seem to consider. I never push sight reading on clients for whom it's difficult, preferring to focus on what what comes more easily and then building out from that.

The second article (thanks Jonathan!) is about a musician who suffers from amnesia, but can remember music. Here's the line that really caught my attention:

"Musical memory seems to be stored independently, at least partially, of other types of memory," Finke said.

Grimaud Interview

2011-11-10T08:45:00.004-05:00

Alex Ross gave a link to this interview of Hélène Grimaud. It's a fascinating read. Here are a few snips from the article:

“A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear,”

Her albums aren’t merely proficient tours through the repertoire; they are highly personal explorations that can stand out among dozens of rival performances. And in the concert hall Grimaud can offer surprises, something rarely provided by players who have been processed by the conservatory machine.

“By nine, I was already obsessed,” she remembers, in love with “the pure pleasure and evasion of being at that instrument.” But, rather than spending all her time at the keyboard, she did much of her “practicing” in her head. “Some wonderful pianists practice eight hours a day,” she says. “I was never really that person.”

Chopin, a tempestuous pianist himself, was a musician with whom she felt a kinship. Grimaud, who is left-handed, thought that the Classical greats discriminated against players like her. In their music, the left hand was largely devoted to chords, while the right played the melody. “Chopin opened up the piano for the left hand.”

She also exercised her remarkable ability to prepare without actually playing. Mat Hennek, her current partner, remembers that one day, when he and Grimaud were first dating, they went shopping in Philadelphia and then to a Starbucks. At one point, he recalls, “I said to Hélène, ‘Hélène, you have a concert coming. Did you practice?’ And she said, ‘I played the piece two times in my head.’ ”

She presented her program with intense commitment, sustaining a mood from piece to piece, so that the audience felt pulled into a narrative. Levine, at the Gould Foundation, notes that she “seems so absorbed in the music, so attentive. She has that quality—getting back to Gould—of ekstasis.” Grimaud explains, “A concert must be an emotional event, or who needs it? You can just stay home and listen to your favorite recordings.”

Maslow

2011-10-29T13:01:00.002-04:00

Just caught this post over on Musical Assumptions and made the following comment:

Very, very helpful post - Thanks. Came across Maslow for the first time since the 60's when reading up on "flow" and saw where he renamed as "peak experience" what had previously been called "transcendence".

Synchronistically, just this morning had a conversation with a musical friend and we agreed that pure "flow" is in part social - you can't get there by yourself - there have to be other players and/or a live audience. But neither of us are pros, so your idea that it can be achieved in solitary practice could well be the case for high level players.

Terry, Gunther and Walt

2011-10-28T09:26:00.003-04:00

Just want to bookmark this post by Terry Teachout on Gunther Schuller and Fantasia. Schuller's biography looks to be a fascinating read. Here's one thing Terry says:

Mr. Schuller, who turns 86 next month, is a much-admired classical composer and conductor and a distinguished jazz scholar. Before that, he was the principal horn player of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He is the only musician in the world who can claim to have played with Maria Callas, Miles Davis, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Igor Stravinsky and Arturo Toscanini. In "Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty," just out from the University of Rochester Press, he talks about all this and much, much, much more.

Horn Diary

2011-10-28T08:43:00.006-04:00

I've had two very pleasant experiences with the horn within 24 hours of each other earlier this week.

The first was an evening practice session running through all the bits and pieces in my 2nd horn parts for community band. My tuner, which beeps when a correct pitch is played, had been left on and time after time it beeped right after the last note of a phrase was played. After nearly two dozen times I went and turned it off as a distraction, but the feeling of being so well into an intonation groove lasted the whole session.

Then the next afternoon we had a full rehearsal of the brass quintet we've been trying to pull together (two Eb tubas, trombone, horn, trumpet). I've put together an album of Mozart, Corelli, Facoli, Tomkins, Gibbons, Bach and Billings. Over and over again we hit the chords just right and that amazing sound of an in tune brass ensemble filled the room. In my fairly wide experience of music making on various instruments, there's simply nothing like it. The trio of flute, alto flute and cello can be just as good, but in an entirely different way.

The feeling I had was part of what I experienced as a "flow" discussed in this post. I hated it when the pieces came to an end, wanting that feeling and gorgeous sound to go on and on.

Also, I now know I can play the horn in tune with other brass and with voices, and my suspicion is that in band my difficulties are due in part to there not being a clear "slot" for me to fit into. My first band director five or six years ago one time said something like, "You have to be in good tone to be in good tune", and I think that's right. If the tone is not centered in all the instruments playing, the sound mix is contaminated with all sorts of out of tune harmonics. It's also my suspicion that trained educators can hear through that static and divine where the pitch should be, but I really have a difficult time doing so.

Off Topic: Natural Phenomena

2011-10-25T20:05:00.005-04:00

There have been several unusual natural phenomena in my neck of the woods here lately. There was the earthquake, with the epicenter just 17 miles away, followed by numerous aftershocks. Then there was a tornado close enough that I could hear it. It sounded like thunder at a distance, but just kept on longer than any thunder I've ever heard, and only when I checked the weather discovered there'd been a tornado right when I heard the sound.

Then last night during my outside farm chore I looked up and saw the most amazing Northern Lights I've ever seen. Sort of stood there mesmerized for five minutes. There have been photos coming out today, and this is the closest to what I saw. My horizon line was about two thirds the way up from the bottom of this photo, and my view of the lights extended upwards and I could see the trailing off into nothingness of those green streaks. Right when the light show was over, the fog came up like some heavy handed Macbeth production.

It all makes the Buddhist teachings on impermanence come to mind.

Music and Reading

2011-10-22T14:35:00.003-04:00

This article talks about recent research suggesting regular music making can benefit reading skills.

In a new study, found in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, researchers provide a biological basis for how auditory working memory and musical aptitude are intrinsically related to reading ability. . .

. . . Nina Kraus, Ph.D., and her team found that poor readers had reduced neural responses (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds. Furthermore, researchers discovered the ability to hear acoustic sounds correlated with reading ability as well as musical aptitude.

The musical ability test, specifically the rhythm aspect, was also related to reading ability. Similarly a good score on the auditory working memory related to better reading and to the rhythm aspect of musical ability.

Kraus explained, “Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem.

Mitsuko Uchida Quote

2011-10-21T18:19:00.003-04:00

I followed this link from Opera Chic tagging Mitsuko Uchida because, for me, she brings life to Mozart like no one else I've ever heard and I was curious to see what she might say. In the interview at the link she says:

“What truly matters,” she says, summing up, “is that your love of music is stronger than your love of yourself."

I've done some posts on how from a Buddhist perspective your motivation for doing something colors and affects the outcome of the activity, particularly something as expressive as making music. "Your love of yourself" is what the lamas call "the self-cherishing ego" and which they teach can lead you astray. If I'm reading this quote right, she seems to be saying something very similar.

Voice Diary

2011-10-18T17:57:00.004-04:00

One project I've had on the back burner for a couple of years is making a recording for friends of the the Dylan songs I've been singing for over 30 years. There have been several sessions with Dave the former Army Band drummer and Dr. Andy on bass, separately and together, to get a feel for how to do them with a small ensemble as opposed to just me and the guitar.

Here lately I've been doing some test recordings to figure out how to best use the audio equipment to get the best sound on the voice and guitar. Running the sound through the speakers and/or headphones has been a revelation. It's like holding a magnifying glass to both tone and articulation. In a purely acoustic environment the sound of your voice is a blend of bone conduction and what the room sends back, which has the effect of buffering and delaying it for the tiniest bit of time.

Using a nice condenser mic no more that a foot away from the mouth and having that feeding headphones gives the voice a temporal immediacy and a clinical clarity. Small details I never noticed loom large. (Dr. Andy says it's the same for him using headphones with both the cello and the bass.)

One thing that's become particularly apparent is my not articulating clearly throughout a song. Just because I know the words as well as I do from memory doesn't mean someone listening will.

Something else is that the tone of my voice doesn't always sound like I'd imagined it does on some of the songs, and isn't conveying the sense and mood of the song as I intend.

All of which is to say recording yourself is a wonderful aid to learning to make music, and that using headphones while making the music amps up the experience.

One small audio procedure that seems to work well setting volume levels at that sweet spot that's at a high level comfortably short of feedback shriek is paying attention to the EQ settings. With my Mackie mixer there are knobs for high, mid and low EQ and I've been turning up the volume enough to hear a little room noise through the speakers, then dialing back any EQ that creates any sort of hum or white noise, and then turning up the gain. It's dawned on me that feedback shrieks are as much a creature of poor EQ settings as they are of too much volume.

Audio Note

2011-10-09T09:08:00.003-04:00

Our group, the Kenwood Players, had an outdoor performance of Dixieland jazz last weekend at the Gordonsville Street Festival, and I took the full set of audio equipment. Over the past several years, learning how to set it up and get a good sound has been something of a challenge, but I'm making progress.

Last year at this event I pointed to two large keyboard amps (fed by the mixer) straight out from the porch we play on, and there was this weird edge to the sound on the recording, especially the trombone. I decided it was the result of something like an infinite regression like old time barber shop mirrors, with the sound bouncing back and forth across the street. This year I placed the amps so they were at a 45 degree angle to the porch, one pointing up the street and one down, and the sound was much better.

As usual, each tuba had a dynamic mic clipped into its bell, there was a condenser placed near the clarinet and one for me to sing into, a dynamic for Dick to announce songs. A new wrinkle has been clipping a small condenser to the banjo, because its sound is so directional. Having it go through the sound system means I can face any direction I want and everyone can hear it.

The other part of the system was a set of small powered speakers used as monitors, and that worked well. My sense is that besides helping us hear each other better, monitors help round out the sound. I'm used to thinking feedback is always a bad thing because of the howls it can create, but a little feedback, i.e. the sound from the monitors blending into the overall sound, can be a good thing.

But I always forget something. This time I had a knowledgeable music friend there evaluate the balance of the various instruments out front, but I didn't ask the players themselves if they could hear everyone else well, and it turned out the trombone player was too far from the monitors for them to help.

When we first began the wind came up, blowing one music stand over, and creating a low rumble in the mics, even though they all had foam covers. I dialed back the bass EQ on them all and the rumble went away.

The balance on the recording is about as good as we're going to get in a live situation, with the exception of the tenor sax not being strong enough because I forgot to put the vocal mic over next to him when I wasn't singing. I forget that even though the balance of the mix can sound good to me in the middle of everything, the recorder is in a different place in front of us and what it's picking up is a different mix altogether.

One thing I did in preparation for the event was to mark the inputs on the mixer with what was going to go where (there are four inputs with phantom power and trim controls and four 1/4 inch inputs). That meant I could set the EQ for each input ahead of time to best suit each mic, so that at the event only minor fine tuning was needed. All the pans were set right down the middle.

Warming Up

2011-10-07T08:51:00.004-04:00

Until I took up the horn I never gave much thought to warming up. On the piano, guitar, flute and cello I just play a few easy things, more to get my mind focused on the task at hand than to limber muscles. With voice there is always doing things in the middle range before trying to hit high notes, but again, just doing a few easy pieces fits the bill. If the goal is to be a high level player, then things get more complicated, but just playing for enjoyment doesn't need to entail extensive warming up, as long as you pay attention during the beginning of each session.

The horn, though, is a different beast altogether, and not warming up properly can have huge downsides in simply not being able to play well or for very long. This post by James Boldin is a good one on some of the issues of horn warm-up.

Reading and thinking about James's post lead me to remember that the "warm up" for Buddhist spiritual practice, whether attending a dharma talk or a solo meditation, is reviewing and "setting" the motivation. In most of what's been written about musical warm ups, the focus is on the physical aspects. Taking a little time at the beginning of each practice session to think about what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're trying to accomplish it, can be valuable as well.

Physical technique is very important, but there's a lot else involved in making music, and calling some of that to mind at the beginning of each practice session can bring more balance of all the elements to the endeavor.

Composing Music

2011-10-05T23:30:00.006-04:00

One of the projects I set for myself this summer was to write a piece for horn and cello. Didn't happen. I came up with what both Dr. Andy and I thought was a great kernel / introduction in one of those odd time signatures I like so much, but nothing doing. Either those dozen or so bars really don't want to go anywhere, or I wasn't able to figure out how it can happen. So I put it aside and spent a lot of time arranging music for the brass group. But there was this feeling of failure, of a journey not completed, not to mention wondering if the muse had fled.

Then one of my students asked for a piece for her and her sister, flute and trumpet, and I came up with a little duet for them. And when arranging things for the weekly meeting of the brass group I've been doing these little harmonic studies to hear how the various instruments blend from various points in their registers. The point being that setting small goals makes coming up with something much easier.

Another thing that's been going on in the composition realm has been going back to pieces written in the 90's for various combinations of flute, alto flute, keyboard and cello - and trying to get the computer to play them again. There have been any number of upgrades to Finale since then, and it's taken a number of tries to get playback to work, but it finally does.

At any rate, I've had a few listens to those old pieces and it's been great fun, certainly in the psychological sense of being reminded of my state of being back then, along with being reminded that whatever it is I want to do as a composer comes out as a kind of style or sound, something first noted by our Vermont readership / flute player for whom the music was written. Kyle Gann revels in every piece being a totally new departure, and they certainly sound that way. For me, that there's a commonality to my sound over the years is sort of reassuring.

Flute Diary

2011-09-30T21:05:00.006-04:00

This summer I spent a lot of time on the alto flute after something like seven years of hardly touching it and it was great to play it again. I recruited Hayley from the Orange community band to join me and Dr. Andy to work up music I'd arranged back in the 90's for flute, alto flute, and cello, along with some things I'd written for keyboard with those instruments.

Jumping around from instrument over the years has its drawbacks, but there are wonderful advantages as well. All the work with the horn and the regular flute meant I was able to get much better tone and volume on the alto flute than I did in the past. There's also sometimes a complete absence of the hissing, tire leaking air sound that used to be a regular feature.

I think the work with BE, Jeff Smiley's embouchure method for trumpet and horn, helped me better understand the way all the breathing and muscles work together to produce the embouchure, and that the better you "get" that, the easier it is to have a comfortably open throat and jaw, which in turn allows for creating centered, full tone.

With both flute and horn my tendency was to obsess over what the lips were doing. I've never particularly liked buzz words, but that 60's hip term gestalt really fits the bill for explaining the true nature of embouchure. Embouchure is how everything else you're doing manifests in the lips. I realize this is one of those commonplaces of teaching wind instruments, but it's also one of those things where you have to experience what the words are talking about. Just because the words make sense to you doesn't mean you have a full understanding of their import.

The other thing that has struck me (all over again) is what a perfect trio the flute, alto flute and cello make. There's the wonderful balance of treble, midrange and bass sounds, and the flutes have that difference tone ghost of an extra instrument from time to time, and all three are agile instruments.

Horn Diary

2011-09-24T09:27:00.005-04:00

This summer has been the best I've ever had on the horn. During the hiatus of the community band I successfully got back the Farkas Very Deep Cup mouthpiece I started with years ago, but moved away from when I had the embouchure crisis and the callus a while back, when I switched to a Medium Cup and then the Deep Cup for a while. I love the tone of the VDC mouthpiece and that its thin rim allows for so much embouchure movement inside the rim. While it might be marginally better for me to stick with a smaller mouthpiece for band music, and to match the first horn player's tone, I'm going with what I like more in the music I'm doing away from band.

One set of pieces I've been working on are the 12 Duos Mozart wrote for horn. I got the music years ago, but the gauntlet of preparing band music drew me away from it, and it's been wonderful music to come back to. Like some of the Handel pieces, they combine simplicity with musicality, with every note perfectly placed. One thing I've really enjoyed has been the detailed articulation, which seems to be the original intent of Mozart. They're making for great exercises as well as pleasing pieces for both me and the brass group. I'm putting them in keys that allow the trumpet and horn play 1st and 2nd voice up and then horn/trombone and Eb tuba down an octave.

Now that I seem to have some basic horn technique to work with I keep noticing an issue of brain rewiring. Having spent my early years on keyboard, there's the tendency to think of a series of notes as mere switches to be flipped in sequence, but on the horn, more than any other instrument I've ever played, every phrase is more sculptural as it moves from one note to the next, with every note's tone and intensity affecting the next and so on down the line. And I keep being caught off guard by how an interval, of say a fourth, feels different up and down the range of the horn, whereas on the piano it feels the same everywhere.

Something else I've had since I got the horn and got back to this summer are books of the hunting horn calls. I can finally play all the high F's and occasional G's called for. The blend of signaling and music is both fun and interesting. One thing I'm trying to arrange for the brass group is the old hunting song "Do you ken John Peel at the break of day" with some of the hunting calls between the verses.

As for community band, having a 1st horn player has made it a much more pleasant experience in that I'm not in the position of having to play music that's really too hard for me. Not playing the higher note in harmonies is a challenge after years of doing so, as is trying to be in tune with the 1st horn more than the band as a whole. But all of that seems to be coming along, and simply hearing how a good player plays band music is a continuing revelation. It's sort of like a dialect I've never gotten the hang of because I'd never heard it spoken.

Mindfulness and Good Luck

2011-09-17T19:55:00.003-04:00

Here's a brief article on a simple study suggesting that people who consider themselves lucky display more mindfulness than those considering themselves unlucky. It gives a wonderful illustration of how mindfulness can ease problem solving.

Here's the final paragraph:

People who we often consider lucky are more relaxed and open to what's going on around them. They're not focused on a single task, blocking out everything else so much that they miss something important and unexpected. What this experiment demonstrates is that luck may not so much be luck, but whether or not our mindset leaves us open to opportunities we would otherwise miss because we're so absolutely sure of what we want.

That last sentence also gets at why giving some thought to your motivation can be helpful.

Thoughts from Yo-Yo Ma

2011-09-17T11:41:00.003-04:00

This brief article based on an interview with Yo-Yo Ma has some great quotes in it.

Here he's talking about the Kalahari bushmen:

“They do these trance dances that are for spiritual and religious purposes, it’s for medicine, it’s their art form, it’s everything. That matches all I’ve learnt about what music should be or could do.”

In modern life we tend to think of music as something separate unto itself, as opposed to its being a deep experience of our humanity. I'll never forget going to a performance by various African groups and the program talking about how the performers had a hard time just making music to fit an hour or two time slot - they were used to going on for hours and hours.

The following paragraph from the article starts off talking about the work of Demasio and ends up getting close to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the importance of motivation in any endeavor.

I mention Damasio’s insistence, in Descartes’ Error (1994), that the self cannot be meaningfully imagined without being embedded in a body. This must be resonant for a musician? He concurs and suggests that the role of tactility in our mental wellbeing is under-appreciated: “That’s our largest organ.” Ma sees this separation of intellect and mechanism, of the self and the body, as pernicious. “We’ve based our educational system on it. At the music conservatory there’s a focus on the plumbing, not [on the] psychology. It’s about the engineering of sound, how to play accurately. But then, going to university, the music professor would say ‘you can play very well, but why do you want to do it?’ Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.”

Memory, Music & Alzheimer's

2011-09-15T08:45:00.002-04:00

Following links in a story about brain research and Alzheimer's, I found this preview of an article behind a pay wall:

Music is known to aid memory, especially recalling autobiographical information.

For example, people with Alzheimer's disease are better at remembering events from their own past when music is playing in the background. It was less clear whether tunes could also help them learn.

Brandon Ally at Boston University and his team were inspired by the report of a man with Alzheimer's who could recall current events if his daughter sang the news to him to the tune of familiar pop songs. They decided to try it out for themselves.

Since the title of the article is Dementia: Sing me the news, and I'll remember it, the researchers apparently met with some success. This fits with how the neuroscience is telling us music uses various parts of the brain, as opposed to a single one that can get damaged by disease, and that for Alzheimer's patients that can mean using music to enhance memories by pulling together undamaged parts of the brain. I just had never seen anything previous to this about music being used to help lay down new memories for such people, but it makes sense.

Psychoacoustics

2011-09-09T08:31:00.003-04:00

Here's an article in the NYT discussing the latest in simulating the acoustics of a great concert hall in your living room, as well as making hearing aids that do more than simply amplify sound. The word "psychoacoustics" is used to cover not just what the ear hears, but also how the brain interprets that information.

Anyone who has ever tried to mix and master audio for a CD will immediately appreciate this quote:

. . . One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said. . .

. . .“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

Like music therapy and music pedagogy, this is another field where the new neuroscience looks to bring a much deeper understanding to what works and what doesn't.

Performance Diary

2011-09-04T08:07:00.006-04:00

This past Thursday my great nieces and Crawford and Judy and I played down at the Orange nursing home to a mostly wheel chair bound audience. We did the same program we did at Oak Chapel, adding Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, Sweet Hour of Prayer and Down By the Riverside.

I have never received more effusive, heartfelt and sincere thanks from an audience after a performance - ever. While I was packing up and schlepping equipment back to the car they kept rolling up to have a private moment to say just how much the performance had meant to them.

A small part of it has to do with my being down there once a week for years, so there's a nodding acquaintance with most of the residents. What just melted me was that two residents who've suffered strokes and have speech problems, and who normally don't really try to say too much because it's so difficult and frustrating, rolled up and really worked to say thank you.

The main reason for this was that the girls totally peg the cuteness meter. Once the audience realized we were really going to pull this off and successfully play the old hymns that mean so much to them, they slipped into a relaxed state of pleasure. The room just got sweeter and sweeter the more the girls played and sang, and when I got the audience to sing along with us (and most of them knew ALL the verses without hymnals).

Having done music in institutions a lot over the years, I couldn't help notice we pulled a lot of staff into the doorway of the room. The staff at places like that have heard it all, and they're very busy people, but when something special is happening, they notice. When I was leaving, several came out from back offices to say just how much they appreciated our playing.

My main contribution to the event was figuring out what the girls are capable of doing at this point and arranging music to suit. Skylar on trumpet is just starting her second year in band, and just got braces, so her range is Bb below middle C to the Bb an octave above, so mostly everything was either in Bb or Eb to accommodate that, and when it wasn't, she played the drum.

We just worked our way through the books I'd done up for them and did as many iterations of the hymns as we could get away with, with me calling out who took the next time through each time. That gives everything an improvisatory feel as opposed to plodding through a preset program, and it keeps the audience on their toes, so to speak.

Towards the end we had Crawford sing "Good Night, Irene", as the hurricane had just recently passed, and that went down very well as well.

Judy P is the proud owner of a new ukulele with an onboard pickup I can plug straight into an amp. The amplitude of a uke strum is about half that of a guitar, so she can go much faster and throw in delightfully quick syncopations. Makes me realize one reason I so love Judy's drumming is that her background as a strummer so informs it, so it's great to play guitar and banjo with.

Back in this post I talk about what one blogger calls "transmission". And in this post there's talk of transcendence. What keeps coming back to me is that it's the sort of thing that can happen in all sorts of places outside concert halls, but in the era of recorded music and with fewer people playing in small catch as catch can ensembles (which was the norm for human society until the past couple of generations), people seem to have lost touch with that. If I can create some materials that will help facilitate more of this kind of small scale playing, I'll count that as a success.

Nadia Boulanger and the Unconscious

2011-08-29T22:55:00.005-04:00

This woman's name pops up all the time as having been a composition teacher for numerous modern composers, but until this brief article, I had never seen anything about how she taught.

Bearer is also a composer who studied with the French composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. “She was very, very focused on the musician’s mind,” Bearer says. “To study with Boulanger meant that you learned to use those unconscious parts of your mind that respond to music, that dream of music, and you learn to bring them to the conscious state where you could take a pencil and write them down.”

Going through the training with Boulanger, Bearer says, “I can say through personal experience that music does not live in the same part of my brain as my science."

I came across this just after leaving a comment on this post on Julia's Horn Page. She's talking about Jeff Smiley's work (which I most recently posted on here) and says:

As your lips learn to do new things, the things that work better are gradually and unconsciously incorporated into your current embouchure.

Maybe it's my background in the psych field, but I find the astonishing vituperation Jeff's work can bring forth from music educators about as fascinating as the work itself. It's my intuition that it's this opening up to and working with the non-conscious aspects of the mind that's so upsetting. If you're dedicated to reducing the activity of music making to a set of rules and concepts, it seems to me you're setting yourself up to paying more attention to the conscious mind than all the rest of it.

Performance Diary

2011-08-29T07:58:00.006-04:00

Yesterday we performed at the large Presbyterian Church in the town of Orange and last week we performed at the small Macedonia Christian Church down in what my father used to refer to as "the lower part of the county" (it's more coastal plain than piedmont). I don't think we've ever sounded better than the audio at the link for Macedonia from two years ago as it was one of those times when everything sort of magically gelled. These two recent performances were very good, though, and I want to note what went well.

At Macedonia the minister, one of our tuba players, made our music the central feature of the service. We led the singing of the hymns as well as performed some tunes on our own. Crawford specializes in short sermons and services, and in a service of less than 60 minutes, we played for 35 minutes.

Crawford says it's the best he's ever heard that congregation sing, and that was my feeling as well. I've pitched most of the hymns a step or three lower than the hymnals, so they were more in the range of regular people. I led the singing with my voice and the guitar and the players did a marvelous job of supporting the singing, with a different instrument taking the lead for the singing of each verse. On hymns of three verses we added two instrumental iterations between the sung verses and built the mood.

I'd done up a keyboard album of the transposed hymns for the organist and having her play mostly the bass and harmony lines was a real treat, filling out the sound. From past experience I knew that when I faced the congregation, she and the other players can't hear the guitar, so I took an amp and put it back next to them with just enough volume for them to hear it but that I couldn't detect. That worked very well.

We've slowly been working up an improvisatory Dixieland version of The Church in the Wildwood, which is sort of a theme song for that particular church, and that went down very well.

At the Presbyterian Church yesterday we just did music before and after the service with a couple of mostly instrumental hymns during the service. Crawford was still preaching down at Macedonia, so we were down to one tuba, and Bill B our sax player didn't make it due to a freak car/power line pole accident near his house preventing him for getting out.

Before everyone else got there I set up our equipment and sang that long song of Dylan's, Boots of Spanish Leather, from up in the choir loft where we were going to perform. It takes me high and low in my range and is a great workout, both for my voice and for testing acoustics. I figured out the best ways to aim my voice into the wonderful acoustic space, and how much to project it to get just the right amount of reverb.

Once everyone else got there we played right up until the service as people gathered below. At one point we got a nice round of applause (after Just a Closer Walk with Thee) and during the "joys and sorrows" portion of the service one of the members said how wonderful it was to walk into the church with everyone smiling and the music coming down from upstairs.

One thing I've never had happen before is that while I was singing the one verse of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior I did between instrumental iterations, my ears popped twice in that pressure adjusting way they can. The hurricane had passed during the night, so I don't think it was a big pressure change in the environment. I think it was just that I was opening my jaw in that "yawning" way voice teachers talk about and it allowed things to equalize, which in the normal course of things wouldn't have needed to.

Quotes to Save

2011-08-27T09:10:00.003-04:00

A neuroscientist:

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

We listen to the "music" of the brain all the time in the lab. My favorite station is Jazz 88. I cannot help but listen to music the way I analyze large-scale brain activity, searching for the syntactical rules that allow separation of messages and long-term features to be predicted from short time scale interactions. The esthetic features of music emerge from its complexity — a halfway state between trivial predictability and random noise (i.e., pink noise) – just like the complex features of brain dynamics.

Glenn Campbell has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and one of his band members says:

"The style he's been playing does not sit in his memory, it sits in his muscles and his emotions which he will always remember. [It] is quite astonishing to see how deep music sits - it's not just your brain, it's emotions in your flesh and spirit,"

Alex Ross uses the word "gesture" talking about the music of Liszt:

Freire, who has long given life to the old cliché "poet of the piano," has a way of connecting Liszt's gestures so that they form a naturally flowing narrative; you never feel hectored.

Approximation

2011-08-27T08:42:00.003-04:00

One of the ideas I'm working on for the 2.0 series is coming up with a workable definition of what music making is. Defining music itself is a rabbit hole I don't particularly want to fall into, but being able to say what I think music making is about has to be part of the ground plan for any approach to helping people do it.

That definition has to include the idea of approximation. Part of the deep attraction of music making is that you can always get closer and closer to being better able to express yourself musically. If that's not part of your practice of music, burnout becomes probable.

From the fool's gold mouthpiece the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying

What's so recharging about music making is that the more you do it, the more it helps you understand what it is you're trying to express. That other great American poet, T. S. Eliot, in his usual grim way, gets at this issue here:

. . . one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate . . .

It's like blogging. The more I try to say what I think I mean, the better I understand the thoughts beneath the language trying to find a way out. And the same goes for music making, with each approximation getting closer and closer to pure expression, but rarely, if ever, getting there.

Horn Diary

2011-08-27T08:23:00.007-04:00

Community band has been on hiatus since July 4th and I've been having a wonderful time on horn looking at music more to my liking. In particular, I've been working on some arrangements of Corelli, Praetorious, Tomkins and Gibbons pieces, along with some new Bach and Handel, for an ensemble of trumpet, horn, trombone, and two Eb tubas. (To my ear, the two trumpets in the standard brass quintet is at least one too many.)

Since a first horn player showed up in band, I've been working more on the mid range than the high, and using the F horn more than the Bb. The Renaissance and early Baroque music suits me down to the ground and practicing is a joy. It makes perfect sense to me and the path to making it sound good on the horn is clear cut. I have a clear sense of the various ways I might want it to sound. (One of the top three or four comments I get on stuff I write is that is has a Renaissance flavor.)

Me and BE

2011-08-27T08:04:00.002-04:00

"BE" is the short hand label for Jeff Smiley's "The Balanced Embouchure" approach to helping people with trumpet and horn embouchure, of which I'm a big fan and have posted on a number of times over the past couple of years.

James Boldin has just done a post on it and here is part of the comment I put down below it. It's the best brief summary of my response to BE I've come up with so far.

Appreciate the open minded approach to Jeff Smiley’s work. I’ve been watching the debate on this for years, ever since getting his book and using his approach to get through an embouchure crisis that had me thinking about giving up the horn.

My sense of it all is that it can be very helpful for people looking to take a new direction due to the standard approaches not helping whatever issues they might be wanting to work through and who are willing to rebuild from the ground up.

For those for whom the standard approaches are working, though, a major overhaul and starting all over is something of a threatening prospect.

What I most appreciate about Jeff’s approach is that it helped me get a much broader and deeper understanding and feeling for what the embouchure can do and needs to do, and that helped me figure out what I needed to do to get everything working. He gives you the tools, but the responsibility is yours, and that’s a nice fit for how I like to work with people.

The other thing about Jeff’s approach I really like is that it goes well with all the neuroscience coming out saying how making music uses so many different areas of the brain, not all of which are always under our conscious control. His exercises helped me get a better sense of that when it comes to playing the horn.

My guess is that a lot of music educators don’t “get” what he’s up to because it’s so very difficult to look at something differently after a lifetime of building up something has worked for them. Besides, most people in the field are probably “naturals” to one degree or another and can’t really conceive what it’s like for the rest of us who aren’t. I’ll never be a natural horn player, but Jeff’s book helped me understand what that must be like and what I have to do to approximate it.

James says he's going to get the book and try it out. I look forward to his response and maybe talking with him about it. I'm also reminded I printed out Dave Wilken's somewhat riled up take down, with the idea of comparing it to the book the next time I reread it. The thing is that I've been having such a great time on the horn, particularly since my flow experience with the Fauré Requiem, I haven't felt a need for a refresher.

Baroque Oboe

2011-08-18T21:28:00.003-04:00

My oboe friend from conservatory days, Craig Matovitch, just uploaded this little gem.

Down in the comments on his post on Facebook about it he says,

One thing these barogue pieces do is get me very honest with lots of things, tongues, tuning, aspects of expression. Its good therapy.

Performance Pix

2011-08-17T19:05:00.007-04:00

Here are some photos the activity director at Gordon House took of our performance there last Friday, which I posted on here.

In this one, from left to right, is my second cousin Steve, Dick & Maggie S, Crawford H, Bill C and Bill B. The Sony recorder is on the camera tripod in front of Bill C.

Here's a shot of me on banjo and Dave F on trap set on the right side of the flattened semi-circle. Dave is following the music closely because for a couple of numbers it was the first time he'd ever played them with us. Pro level reading skills really do come in handy.

Here's a nice close up of Crawford and the Bills:

That's all the current Kenwood Players except for Judy P who plays percussion for us in church and other settings where a full trap set would be too much.

Cousin Steve (trombone), Dick (trumpet) and Dave (trap set) are pro level players and play in a number of different groups. Steve joined the Fredericksburg Big Band several decades ago and now runs it. They've raised millions of dollars for charity over the years. Dick is a retired army colonel and he and Maggie have lived all over, seemingly starting Dixieland groups wherever they've been. Dave was a drummer in the Army Band.

On a genetic note, Steve and I are second cousins because our grandfathers were brothers. He has several dozen Sanford cousins and I think at least half are very musical. I have just over two dozen Sanford cousins and am the only one doing music, other than one or two who took piano lessons as a child and dropped it.

Another thing to mention, which relates to tone quality is that from time to time in rehearsals and performances, Dick and/or Steve will play with such gorgeous tone it's all I can do not to stop playing and just listen. Hearing such great brass tone up close and personal has been a boon to my horn playing.

Performance Diary

2011-08-14T15:02:00.007-04:00

This past Friday the Kenwood Players performed for an hour over at Gordon House. It was 20 minutes Dixieland (me on banjo), 20 minutes Hank Williams and hymns (me on guitar) and then 20 minutes of Dixieland. Everything went very well.

We were in a flattened semi-circle and left to right it was trombone, trumpet, clarinet, the two Eb tubas, sax (soprano and tenor) trap set and me. Very nice mix on the recorder, except on my vocals. Had it set-up right in front of the tubas with one mic facing the trombone and one the trap set. If I were to crank it higher and stand right in front of it on vocals I think the results would be about the best it can get. The closer it is to the sound, the better it is.

One small note on gesture. A handful of the Dixieland arrangements call for the banjo to go tacet in the last measure or so, and we did one of those pieces. Without thinking I did a sort of flourish on my last strum trying to get it perfectly in the rhythm of the trap set, and seeing that flourish and sensing the end of the piece coming up, a number of people applauded prematurely. I'd mentioned before that I conduct music therapy sessions in part with gesture, just hadn't made the obvious connection to influencing an audience as well.

Something else to note was how well we and the audience connected. Gordon House is an assisted living retirement home, so the residents are the right demographic for old time music. What happened that was so nice is that they picked up on how we josh amongst ourselves between numbers and started making jokes along with us. After we finished a lot of them felt comfortable coming up and speaking to players and there was quite a little confab there for a while.

We're also getting better at being more efficient performers. We performed for 60 minutes and the music only CD runs right at 45 minutes, so for all the talk, we went right from one number to the next and got a lot in. Any more might have stressed embouchures, especially on the Dixieland which is pretty demanding.

Should also mention that Dave F, former Army Band drummer, was able to join us. Having a professional level drummer makes all the difference, especially on the Dixieland. For me it's a treat not to be the sole time keeper on banjo, so I can get a little creative accompanying the other players.

My Core Constituency

2011-08-06T15:52:00.005-04:00

Here are some photos of the rehearsal/warm up for the performance I wrote about in a previous post. These first two show the twelve year olds who started band last September, Skylar on trumpet and Amber on flute, along with the Reverend Crawford Harmon on E flat tuba, who's been playing his instrument a bit longer.

Here's one with me on flute. . .

. . . and on horn, with the six year old Carly in the first pew waiting her turn.

And here's the four year old Calli.

Providing the music for these people to play in this kind of situation is exactly what I'm trying to do when I talk about creating learning materials. What the girls are leaning in band and what's in the hymnals wouldn't work for this, but it's very easy to create arrangements that suit the players and the situation.

Working with the girls once a week this past year has been a wonderful opportunity to figure out what does and doesn't work with beginners, and working with Crawford and the other members of the Friday group, helping them get better use of the skills developed over a lifetime, is just as rewarding.

Many thanks to Crawford's wife Liz who took these pictures, and for using only available light, so there were no irritating flashes. I wasn't even aware she was taking the pictures.

Baroque Gesture

2011-08-04T09:08:00.004-04:00

In this Pliable post about a now deleted CD, he writes:

As Benjamin Schweitzer explains in the CD booklet, "...there is something in the gestures and tonality of [Baroque music], which is closer to modern times than one would assume in the first place".

Given my interest in the gestural component of music I was delighted to see someone actually using the word, particularly in association with Baroque music, as pieces requiring just three or four voices from Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks, A Musical Offering and Anna Magdalena's Notebook have been mainstays of my music making for decades.

Most of my favorite classical music is that written before 1750. It's still connected to people actually dancing, which is where a lot of the gestural component originates. It's also from a time before equal temperament took over and before the various rules and regulations of music writing that brought an end to the simpler, but to my ear very rich, modal harmonies and less uniform metrical structures.

Here's another quote from the same source which I like, because as a music therapist I'm much more interested in how individuals can express themselves than in conforming to the standard practice styles laid down by academics.

'Sound experiments are part of daily life for a baroque orchestra. Because more so than their "modern" cousins, historical instruments offer numerous possibilities for sounds that are equally valid.'

Your Tone Is You

2011-07-31T07:28:00.010-04:00

It's my feeling that tone is the most primal of the elements of music making, just as one's tone of voice is the most primal element of speech.

During my 20's I worked as an attendant and group therapist on locked psychiatric units. My primary responsibility was to insure the physical safety of the patients, which meant closely monitoring the emotional state of patients who might become violent with themselves or others. Over time I learned to pay close attention to tone of voice as an indicator of mood, more so than the verbal content of speech. Listening closely to tone of voice was also very important in understanding what was going on under the surface in group therapy sessions.

The flip side of all that attention paid to the voice tone of others was trying to always insure my own tone of voice was not accelerating a volatile situation, but rather helping to keep things relatively calm.

Those experiences led me to be more conscious of something I think we all do on a mostly unconscious level, i.e. make judgments about the personality and state of mind of others based in part on their tone of voice, and that we use our own tone of voice as an underpinning to expressing ourselves through speech.

It's my idea that when the neuroscience gets sophisticated enough, we'll see that the tone quality of your music springs from, and affects the listener in, deeper and more primal parts of the brain than the rhythm, melody and harmony. When you make music, your tone sets the stage for whatever else you do.

(As a side bar to this discussion, there's the question of the tone of piano players. It would seem that, more than wind and string instruments, the tone of a piano resides more in the piano than the player. That's largely true, but the hammer action means that strings can be hit with different amounts of force and at different rates of acceleration (see correction below), exciting the strings in subtlely different ways. Along with that, high level players can control the dynamics and the temporal sequence of every single note to such a high degree that individual styles can be developed and appreciated.)

UPDATE - Jonathan West corrects me in the comments:

By the way, you're wrong about the piano. By the time the hammer hits the string, it is no longer attached to the key and so it is in free movement and has no acceleration due to the key. Being in free movement, the the sound made by the hammer's action on the string varies from one note to the next solely on the speed with which the hammer hits.

What pianists and others think of as tone on a piano is derived from timing and use of pedals, and also from different degrees of force (and hence loudness) applied to different notes of the same chord. To a great extent, the idea of varied tone on the piano is a cognitive illusion fostered by the player - one which the player himself may be unaware of and honestly believe in.

All of what Jonathan says is very well put, especially that last sentence. During my time as a keyboard major in the late 70's I convinced myself that there was something more than simply the speed of the hammer affecting the tone of the note, and had come up with my faulty explanation involving acceleration. There is the acceleration created by gravity as it works to pull the hammer back to its resting position, but that's a constant rate involving the number 32. So maybe what I'm feeling is how that interplay between gravity and the force of the keystroke allows for super fine tuning of the hammer speed.

Jonathan is also absolutely right to mention pedaling, which I'd not included and which has immense effect on a player's tone. Oftentimes a hammer is hitting a string still vibrating anywhere from a little to a lot from a previous hammer stroke, and pedaling controls the amount of that vibration.

Performance Diary

2011-07-27T08:18:00.005-04:00

This past Sunday I helped my great nieces perform in their little country church (celebrating its 120th year). One 12 yr old started trumpet last September and the other started flute. The 6 yr old and the 4 yr old sang. The Reverend Crawford H from my regular group joined us with his E flat tuba to supply bass line (and because I so enjoyed playing with a group with a 75 yr difference between the oldest and youngest player).

All went well, particularly on our instrumental version of The Church in the Wildwood. The first run through was me playing alto line on flute with the flute playing soprano and Crawford on bass. The second time through I switched to horn on alto line of the chorus while the trumpet played the lead. The third time through was trumpet and flute on lead, horn on alto and tuba on bass.

Perhaps the best thing was that things having gone well, the girls are eager to perform again, so we'll probably take the show on the road to the nursing home before school starts up again.

Two weeks ago I made a CD with them of a complete run through of our performance for them to practice with. They used that CD and were completely comfortable with the sequence of singing and instrumental solos, and the little ones used it to get the words of the songs down.

The practice CD was so successful it makes me think something like that would be really helpful in the materials for learning I'm developing. Unlike a music minus one CD, I talked through who was doing what while playing and singing so that there were plenty of cues to follow. The idea would be to create CDs to jam with more than to play one particular part. That also allows for more than one to play along at the same time.

Revising Compositions

2011-07-22T09:40:00.003-04:00

I've always been hesitant to revise pieces once they've been completed. Part of it has to do with the realization that when writing the piece I was as fully conscious of all the bits of it and what the decisions were to create and join them together as I'll ever be. It's hard to go back and rethink one bit without rethinking it all.

In today's post, Terry Teachout is talking about artistic perfection and has this quote with another take on the issue of revision:

The wisest artists are the ones who finish a new work, walk away and move on to the next project. Whenever a colleague pointed out a "mistake" in one of Dmitri Shostakovich's compositions, he invariably responded, "Oh, I'll fix that in my next piece."

Moving Making Music

2011-07-21T16:54:00.005-04:00

In this post Greg Sandow is talking about the culture of music making in high level orchestras and he tells this anecdote:

After a Berlin Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, I ran into a musician from the New York Philharmonic whom I happened to know. Berlin, I think, is all but universally acknowledged to be the world's beset -- and most inspiring -- orchestra, an institution run by its musicians, who show great commitment and great autonomy while they play, not least in the way they move, putting their entire bodies into every note.

"Did you see that?" the Philharmonic musician asked me, almost levitating (as, I think, we all were, from how wonderfully the musicians played). "Did you see how they move? If I moved like that, I'd be reprimanded."

I play much better standing up, whether guitar and singing or flute or horn. Besides being able to breathe better and more naturally, standing up allows me to move as I play. Working with music therapy groups over the years, and now fronting the Kenwood Players, I don't conduct, but lead through gesture, along with verbal instructions half sung with the music.

When I see players sitting stock still when making music it makes me think the music is too abstract and too far removed from the motions and gestures that make us human. Cerebral music, like say a Bach four part organ fugue, usually doesn't engage me (The Art of the Fugue being a major exception).

On the other hand, I think we've all seen people making music with far more physical gestures than needed, as if those gestures can make up for the lack of technique needed for the music being performed. Like everything else in music, a balance needs to be found.

Early Work History

2011-07-21T11:49:00.005-04:00

During my junior and senior year at Duke I worked as an attendant on the locked psychiatric ward in Duke Hospital. Second semester senior year (1971) I worked there 32 hours a week and then full time that following summer. Duke Hospital was (and remains) the top level referral hospital for a large geographic area, so the docs and nurses were top flight and the patients tended to be difficult cases.

From '71 to '73 I worked as a group therapist at DePaul Hospital (now defunct) which was the old line Catholic mental hospital sitting right on the edge of Audubon park in the Garden District. The unit I worked on there was a locked long term one for adolescents and young adults who received no psycho-tropic medications. It was all talk therapy with their docs, combined with a group therapy session every morning and evening shift. (It was at DePaul I encountered my first "music therapist", albeit without formal credentials.)

From '74 to '76 I worked as an attendant on the locked admit unit of Santa Rosa Hospital (now defunct) at the Medical Center complex in San Antonio.

All that time my music making was mostly recreational folk guitar and singing, with a couple of gigs singing in bars and restaurants.

The point of all this is to explain how where I'm coming from is usually very different than where most music therapists and educators are coming from. In my experience all music therapists and music educators went straight from high school to an undergraduate music degree, their options then being performance, education or therapy. Their background and skill set is heavily weighted towards musical issues and they have to work to acquire the skill set to teach or to be a therapist.

My strong suit is the experience of being a therapist and I've had to struggle to gain the musical skills needed to be an effective music therapist. Because of that I tend to see the elements of music and music making more in the overall realm of what's going on with the person involved, than the purely musical and pedagogical aspects.

Performance Diary

2011-07-10T18:36:00.005-04:00

Back on Saturday 7/2 the Orange Community Band played in a band festival in the pavilion down at the end of the pedestrian mall (formerly Main Street) in Charlottesville, VA. The pavilion is the major outdoor big time venue in Charlottesville and it was a real treat to play in such a well designed, top of the line venue. Ample room on stage and very nice acoustics. The band played well and the audience very receptive.

Then on Sunday 7/3 there was the Picnic in the Park here in Orange out behind the airport. My group opened up with a Dixieland jazz set of about 40 minutes, then the community band played for about 45, then there was a short ceremony (which included my singing the national anthem with the banjo, a tenor sax and an Eb tuba), then a mother and daughters singing group, then my group started with some Americana until the storm came.

For the Dixieland I used a clip-on dynamic mic on the banjo because the sound is so directional. Putting it through the sound system meant everyone could hear it no matter where I was facing.

Also used mics on the tuba, harmonica and the clarinet, all run through the Mackie mixer and out to the two large Peavey keyboard amps, with the control room feed going to a small keyboard amp for our monitor. Then ran a line from the out of the most distant amp to a powered mixer and two speakers set up even further away. We had nice sound coverage throughout the area without it being too loud up front.

The community band apparently played very well. The director and the music educators in the group all talked about how "musically" we played. Here's an excerpt from the director's note to us afterwards:

. . . but once the music 'gets in your blood' it more-or-less begins to take on a life of its own. At that point the conductor becomes far less important as the engine drives itself from within the ensemble. We have to remember, though, that this occurs only when the notes and rhythms are learned and we are no longer bound to the printed page. That's when real music begins...and that's exactly what happened on Sunday night, in particular.

My problem was, as it has been in the past at these events, trying to change mental gears from banjo to horn. With the banjo I just play without thinking, but with the horn it is only with full concentration that I can manage to not embarrass myself. So for the first several numbers my memory is more what I was up to more than how the group sounded.

The Kenwood Players last set started, and then the storm came. Torrential rain and lots of close lightning. We were all safe under the large shelter, but I had to kill the sound system because of blowing rain. Until it was announced that the fireworks were canceled, it was me on banjo, a trumpet, sax, clarinet and tuba in acoustic mode.

My singing was semi-hollerin', but people liked it and we kept everyone occupied during the storm. (Nearer My God to Thee was mentioned several times ;-) Orange being the small town it is, have had several people come up to say they really appreciated our persevering in the face of the storm.

One thing about my singing voice I keep meaning to mention is that I live on a dairy farm and most days spend most of an hour getting cows up out of the field and into the barn. Yelling is involved, but over the years I've worked on being loud and projecting without straining my voice. We're in the piedmont, so there are hills and vales offering great acoustics for testing uses of the voice.

Beauty in the Brain

2011-07-10T08:12:00.003-04:00

Here's one of several articles that have come out on an fMRI study from University College of London. It's very preliminary and may get revised in significant ways, but it makes a great deal of intuitive sense to me that our awareness of beauty can occur in different categories of experience.

They watched where the blood went in the brain when people experienced beauty in both music and visual art. One particular part of the brain responded to both, the medial oribitofrontal cortex (mOFC).

Several studies have linked the mOFC to beauty, but this is a sizeable part of the brain with many roles. It’s also involved in our emotions, our feelings of reward and pleasure, and our ability to make decisions. Nonetheless, Ishizu and Zeki found that one specific area, which they call “field A1” consistently lit up when people experienced beauty.

The images and music were accompanied by changes in other parts of the brain as well, but only the mOFC reacted to beauty in both forms. And the more beautiful the volunteers found their experiences, the more active their mOFCs were. That is not to say that the buzz of neurons in this area produces feelings of beauty; merely that the two go hand-in-hand.

This all made me think of the Golden Mean and proportions and relationships and balance. Beauty seems to reside in the ways various parts of things fit together and relate to one another. In the most beautiful, the various parts can disappear into the whole.

Lineage

2011-07-04T12:22:00.002-04:00

In some recent posts with the 2.0 tag I've been trying to establish a conceptual framework for the deep process of the practice of music making, making connections to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.

In this morning's post Pliable makes the connection of lineage in both the practice of music and the practice of Buddhism. Over and above my never having seen that particular commonality, there's much to think about is the post. On a hectic Independence Day just want to bookmark the post to come back to, probably multiple times.

Among the questions to consider is how Pliable's use of the word "mystical" in the following quote will play with skeptics.

. . . the establishment of a mystical link from the performer forward to his audience and back to the composer . . .

Transcendence

2011-07-01T08:23:00.003-04:00

This post is mostly just to bookmark this post of Pliable's for the little back and forth we had down in the comments. It's helped me at least ask better questions about something that's very difficult to come to grips with, but is a core issue of what music therapy is or can be.

The issue is whether or not one person's transcendent experience listening to music can be compared to another's, particularly if the genres of music are very different. A. C. Douglas, one of my "Regular Reads", maintains that the transcendent experience offered by "high culture" is much superior to that offered by pop culture.

To really answer the question you have to both get inside other people's consciousness and make value judgments about their experiences.

Another thing that comes to mind when talking about a U2 performance versus that of a symphony orchestra is that part of what Bono is up to is a kind of modern shamanism. Which leads to the question of whether someone like Leonard Bernstein was just another kind of shaman. It's easy to make the case that a kind of ritual is involved in both rock and symphonic performances.

And then there's what Stanislav Grof found in his research into psychedelics and transcendent experiences back when that was legal, that the mindset of someone approaching the experience combined with the setting in which it occurs has a lot to do with the outcome.

Back in the 70's when I was getting getting my Registered Music Therapist credential, music therapy was called an "adjunctive therapy". As far as transcendent experiences go, my feeling is that music can be involved in them, but is probably not the single cause when they occur when listening to or making music.

Ride 2 Recovery

2011-06-30T16:46:00.005-04:00

Back on the day after Memorial Day our group performed for an event called "Ride 2 Recovery" for veterans at American Legion Post 320 down in Spotsylvania County, very close the Wilderness battlefield. Bill B our sax player who arranged the performance is a member of the post and has sent along their most recent newsletter. These two pages from that newsletter give a great sense of the event.

I was honored we got to play for this event and thoroughly enjoyed being a part of it.

Recording Yourself

2011-06-29T08:29:00.018-04:00

Listening to recordings of yourself making music is probably the single most effective thing you can do to improve your playing.

The key aspect of mindfulness is experiencing things as they are - not as we want them to be, as we're afraid they might be, as we feel/hope others might be experiencing them, or any of a myriad other distortions our untrained minds can inject into the experience. When we are actually in the process of playing music, there's so much going on in our minds, especially for amateurs, that's it's quite difficult to hear the music as it is.

Listening to a recording is a totally different experience. All the mental/emotional gymnastics have faded and we're left with just the sound of the music as we made it. There's no middle man/teacher trying to explain what it is we're doing, we can hear it ourselves. There's no need to reduce the experience to verbal language, as we can simply hear and react to the music non-verbally as an audience might.

I record all the performances of my group and give CDs to all the players. I and the amateurs of the group have all benefited wonderfully from this. I don't need to tell them what I hear they need to do to improve as they hear it themselves, and the same goes for me.

As a single example, listening to recordings tipped me off to my sometimes more speaking than singing bits and pieces of lyrics instead of singing every syllable of the song. This probably goes back 40 years to my first trying to learn songs by speaking the words in rhythm while strumming the guitar as a preliminary to actually singing the song. Until I started doing all the recording here a few years ago, I was completely unaware of this and would have been dubious of anyone telling me it was the case. Hearing it in the recordings, though, cut right to the root of the problem and has given me much better traction improving as a singer.

Just as cultivating mindfulness of our behaviors in retrospect can lead to more clearly perceiving them in real time, listening to recordings of our playing can help us more accurately hear ourselves in real time and make improvements on the fly, just as high level players do. I used to be astounded by the real time listening skills of band directors, thinking I could never do that as for me it would be a sensory overload. While I'm nowhere near that level, I can now hear better in real time how my group is playing and make adjustments accordingly.

The 2.0 Series

2011-06-23T09:55:00.003-04:00

I've started using the tag "2.0" for a series of posts that may end up as pages of a book on how to go about learning to make music. Over time I'll probably go back and try to tighten up the language and add more to them. They'll all be on topics that need to be covered one way or another, most of which I've been posting on and thinking about over the years.

Currently I'm trying to lay out a general operational, philosophical framework a music therapist might use to best understand what a client wants to do and how to go about helping them succeed.

While I'm blogging about blogging, my recent discovery that I can see what posts are getting hits each day has shown me that on any given day, by far the most hits are due to search engines sending people to a wide variety of older posts. Sometimes I can't even remember the point of the post by just seeing the title. I really like the idea that I'm filling a niche, no matter how tiny it is. I continue to find the internet an astonishing new thing, and can't really imagine how for younger people it's just the way things are.

Motivation

2011-06-23T09:24:00.005-04:00

Along with cultivating mindfulness and working to ameliorate afflictive emotions, a third tool of Buddhist mind training that can offer a helpful way of thinking about how to go about approaching music making is a consideration of your motivation. Why you're doing what you're doing greatly affects the outcome.

I live in central Virginia where horses are one of the major industries and lots of people have them for a variety of reasons. At one extreme there are folks who simply enjoy riding along trails and through woods and fields just for the simple pleasure of riding and being out in nature. At the other extreme there are the horse show people who spend hours and hours and hours teaching their horses how to negotiate a series of jumps and obstacles in a closed ring observed by judges and spectators.

As a music therapist I tend to work more with people wanting to simply make music for the enjoyment of doing so. Music educators tend to work with people who enjoy making music as well, but who also have the motivation to push their skill level higher and higher in a competitive environment.

Establishing early on why it is you want to make music, and then using that insight in how you go about doing it can prevent a lot of needless frustration.

Motivation is also very important in very detailed and specific ways as well. Music is more than just notes on a page. Having a clear idea of what it is you want to express with them will greatly facilitate learning how to play them. The same goes for improvisation - the better idea you have of what you want to express will help you find the music that you'll enjoy making.

Afflictive Emotions

2011-06-17T08:49:00.005-04:00

One of the objects of Buddhist mind training is to identify and work to ameliorate afflictive emotions and their effects. For example, anger can be an intoxicant leading you to behavior you'll later regret.

The first step is to recognize in retrospect that it was the negative emotion which had a hand in creating the behavior. Then in real time you can sort of see it happening but not really be able to immediately alter the behavior. Over time that very recognition reduces the power of the emotion and its effects in that and similar situations. The final stage is realizing in real time you've exchanged the negative emotion with a neutral or positive one, one side effect being you can now clearly see when someone else is falling into the same trap you've worked your way out of.

Music educators work with those for whom music comes easily and have usually passed some sort of audition. Music therapists tend to work with those for whom making music does not come particularly easily, usually due to some non-musical as well as purely musical issues.

Public speaking is a great example of what I'm trying to get at. We can all talk, it's what humans do. But the prospect of speaking in public can bring on such strong afflictive emotions, some people are unable to do so, or do so in ways they never would in a friendly one to one conversation.

There's the specific parallel, in that until the advent of recorded music, being part of music making was a natural human response. Now though, it's thought of more as something only trained people can do.

There's also the larger and more general parallel of recognizing that helping people learn to make music can be a broader endeavor than simply addressing technique issues, and that this is more apt to be the case in those unable to navigate an entry into the educational system.

Musical Entrepreneurship

2011-06-14T11:41:00.002-04:00

This article over on the indispensable Boing Boing talks about how a performer is pre-selling her shows so that she's assured of an audience when she performs. Surely a wave of the future.

What I do know is that I can start my own system. I can use the tools of communication, networking, and technology to help my fan base be part of my art. I pre-sold my album to fund the recording and now I'm pre-selling shows before I even book them so that I can come and play for my fans wherever they want me to play.

An Insight Into Performing

2011-06-14T10:41:00.002-04:00

Here's Terry Teachout's almanac quote from yesterday. It's specifically about poetry, but I think it works as well for making music written by others.

"Poetry does not reason about serious things, it depicts them. When we read and remember it we mold ourselves; when we recite it we share what we have become."

Richard Brookhiser, "Rusher and Poetry" (National Review, May 16, 2011)

Mindfulness in Music Making

2011-06-12T07:35:00.007-04:00

This article from Wired talks about how your mental attitude affects your behavior.

. . .“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,”. . .

. . . To lose confidence in free will seemingly introduced a lag between conscious choice and action. . .

My sense is that studies such as these are so very preliminary that drawing hard conclusions on the specifics can lead you astray, especially on topics as controversial as free will. But I do think that they empirically reinforce the common sense idea that your attitude and general mental state as you go about something like making music is going to affect the outcome.

The neuroscience is telling us that it's the simultaneous coordination of many areas of the brain in music making that makes it such a unique behavior. Maintaining continuous awareness of all that can be tough sledding, and I think the concept of mindfulness as put forward by Tibetan Buddhism can be one very useful way of talking about how to go about it.

A big part of mindfulness is simply observing your thoughts, emotions and behaviors without feeling you're having to make immediate conscious decisions and judgments about everything all the time. In making music this involves being as good a listener as you can be to what you're doing, as well as to those around you if you're in an ensemble. Taking the time to have a better sense of the music as a whole can help you understand what adjustments you want to make on the smaller scale.

One thing about practicing mindfulness is that like anything you practice you can get better over time. One thing which sets high level players apart is their being able to hear and respond to the music they're making both as a whole and in its many parts in real time. For those of us not at that level, understanding that how we're thinking and feeling about making music has a lot to do with how successful we are. It's another way of framing the musicality vs. technique duality.

One thing that can happen as you work with being more mindful is that you become aware that there's more going on in your behavior than you're usually aware of, and that some of it is merely reactive and routinized. A classic example in music making is rushing when playing passages perceived as difficult. Usually it's anxiety kicking in and highjacking the tempo. Coming to realize it's an anxiety issue as much as a technique one is half the battle.

Another point to make about mindfulness in the Tibetan sense is that it has to do with feelings and emotions as well the more rational connotation it has in the West. A Tibetan saying someone has a good mind is like a Westerner saying someone has a good heart. So in music making this means being open to the feeling/emotion content in real time, as well as the technical issues.

My Friday group has both professional level and amateur level players, and all the amateurs have approached me at various times to say they've had more fun and gotten deeper into making music in this group than any other they've ever been in. I think a lot of that has to do with arranging the music to suit their abilities, which allows them to be more mindful the musicality side of things. That means they can lay down a solid framework for the pros to use to take improvisational flight.

A Song For Japan

2011-06-11T07:46:00.001-04:00

Metheny on Improv

2011-06-06T08:25:00.004-04:00

This article in the NYT covers some work of neuroscientists I've already posted on, so I wasn't going to link it until I read this quote from Pat Metheny:

The best musicians are not the best players, they're the best listeners.

To me, there's a world of truth in that. It's so very easy to get so caught up in various technique and performance issues, that it can become sort of a vicious downward spiral leading away from good music making; and mindful listening is what can break that spiral and get the technique back into serving the music rather than itself.

Performance Diary

2011-06-01T10:23:00.008-04:00

Here in the past month or so our group, with varying personnel, has performed for:

A volunteer appreciation luncheon at a local nursing home -

An outdoor butterfly release benefit for Hospice of the Rapidan -

An outdoor rehearsal dinner -

An outdoor fundraiser for UVa Children's Hospital -

A fundraiser for a community 4th of July event -

A dinner given to Wounded Warriors on a stop between their biking from DC to Richmond.

For all these events we were background entertainment during various social and dining activities. One of the things I've learned is that if we get the volume just right, some people can talk and visit while those right next to them can pay attention to us and clap and sing along if they like. It's really more like a music therapist running a group activity than a straight up performance.

The key element to success at all these events was reading the mood of the crowd and choosing tunes and ways of playing them which added to the convivial atmospheres. I did OK with that, but always afterwards thought of ways we could have done better. I'm still a bit unused to performing with a group of talented musicians and tend to get caught up in performing and not paying full attention to the crowd and thinking through what would be the most effective music to play. When it's just me and the guitar I can watch the audience the whole time, with other performers I need to stay connected with them as well, and it's hard for me to do both.

At the Wounded Warriors event yesterday, even though I knew ahead of time it was well over 100 veterans, many with prostheses, who had biked from Washington DC to Fredericksburg on a hot day and were headed to Richmond today, their energy level from being so physically active caught me off guard. We started out with some upbeat songs, and I should have stuck with that. My usual tack of slowing things down a bit after some fast ones didn't work particularly well. Those guys were pumped up, full of camaraderie, and enjoying a meal provided by the American Legion and the slow tune just didn't connect.

If I could somehow maintain better mindfulness, as the Buddhist call it, the performances could be better tweaked moment to moment to be more fully responsive to the audience.

The other thing I noticed was that the high energy of the Wounded Warriors got me to singing with more intensity than I can ever recall in a performance. Part of it was the moving Memorial Day performance by the community band the day before building the mood. But I think most of it was their ruddy complexions, boisterous talk and laughter and the full attention some were paying me as a singer. Haven't listened to the recording yet, so don't know how it sounded, but it felt as though I was making some sort of breakthrough in projecting my emotions via my singing voice. It felt as though my voice was complete with nothing hindering its flow.

Horn Diary

2011-05-31T08:22:00.004-04:00

Yesterday the community band performed at the Memorial Day service in the little park on Main Street in Orange named for Zachary Taylor. The names of those from the county who gave their lives from World War One onward were read out and wreaths laid. The band played well and the event was a success, and a reminder of the interconnectedness of small rural towns.

There was a heat advisory and some of us in the band were sitting directly in the noonday sun. My shirt was soaking wet in just a few moments and I kept telling myself to watch for signs of heat stroke. By the end of the service some clouds came over and a slight breeze stirred.

I was the only horn, so had spent the past couple of weeks re-inhabiting first horn territory and played my parts acceptably well, but the hot sun on my face made my lips and cheeks feel as though I were in the midst of a hot bath. Muscles I never think about went slack and trying to maintain embouchure became a moment to moment chore. I'd never experienced that before, and will be perfectly content not to experience it again. There were no horribly bad notes, just ones that never really quite formed and sounded, and came out as sort of an barely audible mush.

People who've played in bands often mention the issues with playing in cold weather, but it had never occurred to me that extreme heat could have such an effect on my embouchure.

On a different note entirely, have been meaning to mention that besides disagreement in the horn community about any number of issues, they can't even get together on how to oil the instrument. Over the years I've seen various authorities say different things. Way back when I started I read Barry Tuckwell's book and he suggested just buying kerosene at the hardware store and using that, which is what I've done. I pour it through a coffee filter lined funnel from the gallon jug into a small needle nose applicator bottle.

It's thin and in the summer needs to be applied every day. But it works well, and very rarely do I have to pull tuning slides and put it down them. Most of the time under the rotor caps and on the shafts on the other side keeps things nicely lubricated and the action quick and responsive.

This Be a Rockin' Music Blog

2011-05-27T22:55:00.003-04:00

Even though I've been blogging for over two years now, I've just recently discovered the "stats" feature that let's me peek at how people get here to read what posts. Just now was following one of those referrer links and discovered the blog made a list of "50 of the best music blogs out there", which was created by a site called Guide to Art Schools. The title of the page is 50 Rockin' Music Blogs By Real Musicians.

Here's their description of the blog:

Music Therapy: Music has many purposes, one of which lies in its therapeutic nature. On Music Therapy you can explore the workings and benefits of music and music making by referencing an organized archive of links having to do with music therapy. The blog's author is a part-time musician, part-time registered music therapist who has had first hand encounters with music's physical and emotional healing powers.

I'm delighted by being found and recognized, and that someone looked at the blog enough to write such an accurate description of it. Knowing there are some good readers checking in from time to time makes writing posts a fun challenge.

Blogger Issues (again)

2011-05-26T07:48:00.004-04:00

Looks like Jonathan West's problems trying to comment on the post below were the first signs of more Blogger problems. Currently my log ins fail far more often than they work. This a.m. the Blogger people say it's a "known issue" and they're working on it. Looks like a good day to get outside more ;-)

Update - Turns out it was a "corrupt cookie" thing and all you have to do is remove them and let new ones be accepted. I guess it's my age, but the phrase "corrupt cookie" somehow associates in my mind more with comics and cartoons than with computers.

Music and Evolution

2011-05-23T11:53:00.005-04:00

Mark Changizi is an "evolutionary neurobiologist" and has a brand new book out called Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man. Because what he seems to be saying overlaps so nicely with my idea that physical gesture is a primal constituent of music, the book jumps to the top of my to read list.

Here are some excerpts from an interview published in today's WSJ:

. . . My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—"thinks" it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.

The auditory system "thinks" this because music has been "designed" by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move. . .

. . . Just to give one example of a fit between music and movement, consider that when people move faster (i.e., have greater tempo), their Doppler shifts are amplified, and so the difference between the highest (going toward you) pitch and the lowest (going away from you) pitch is greater. If music sounds like moving people, then we expect that faster tempo music should have melodies with a greater pitch range. And, indeed, that's what we found in our data. . . .

. . . Not all music induces dancing. What one wants to explain is why any music should induce this (and yet no other kind of thing induces movement time-locked to it).

If music has come to sound like someone moving in your midst, and probably moving evocatively in some way, then it is not very surprising. Lots of human behaviors are contagious. Dancing amounts to just another case of humans moving in reaction to, or following, the behavior of other humans. . .

Two previous posts on Changizi are here and here. I really think he's on to something, but wonder if he's overstating his case. On down the line, when I've had a chance to actually read the book, will post again.

Update - Jonathan West wanted to make the following comment, but Blogger, which has been more than a little buggy lately, keeps being stuck in "preview" rather than "post", so here is the comment as Jonathan emailed it:

I'm seriously skeptical.

First, the Doppler explanation just doesn't hold water at all. At the speeds unassisted humans move about, doppler effects on sound are all but undetectable to the human ear. That is why the Doppler effect wasn't discovered until the 19th century, when we started having machines (i.e. railroad engines) that could move fast enough for doppler effects to be heard.

Also, the conclusion that faster music has a wider pitch range I would want to examine very closely. What music was chosen in order to make the comparison? How was the sampling scheme set up? What kinds of music were included (or excluded) and why?

It sounds very much as if a superically plausible theory (doppler effect) was dreamt up, and then the data (different kinds of music) cherry-picked to match. Unless you take great care to prevent it, this sort of thing can happen without any intent to deceive anybody.

That there is a link between music and movement is beyond doubt. How much of it is culturally determined and how much is genetic is an interesting question - but I suspect that the answer, when it finally appears, will be to the effect that it is all intertwined to an extent that makes it hard to describe the contributions in terms of proportions.

Critics

2011-05-20T15:00:00.008-04:00

Here's Terry Teachout's almanac quote for the day, which I really like:

"It seems to me that a prig is someone who judges people by his own, rather than by their, standards; criticism only becomes useful when it can show people where their own principles are in conflict."

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People

I'm always amazed by critics whose gigantic egos allow them to think their take on a piece of music is the only one worth having. This quote brought that to mind and takes it another step, that criticism is useful when it helps others deepen their perceptions and thoughts on art.

Whether it's an art or music critic, or a music educator or therapist - I'm immediately suspicious and somewhat put off by anyone saying theirs is the only correct approach.

Update - Jonathan West puts it very, very well in his comment below.

". . . while there are a thousand wrong ways of doing anything in music, there are at least a hundred different right ways."

Empathy and Proprioception

2011-05-17T09:18:00.004-04:00

This article in Forbes (there's an ad that you have to click through) is one of several in the past six months or so talking about research indicating the use of botox can weaken one's empathy for others.

“When the facial muscles are dampened, you get worse in emotion perception, and when when facial muscles are amplified, you get better at emotion perception.” . . .

. . . Taken together, the two studies seem to indicate a direct relationship between ability to express emotion through facial expression, and the ability to experience emotion oneself, or identify it in others.

Seems to me there's probably a connection between this information and the new information on mirror neurons.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . .

In making music, proprioception would seem to be involved as well, as that's the sense that besides telling us how physically accurate we are, it's part of how we can tell whether and how we are gesturally informing the music with emotion.

During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

Flexible Stability vs. Contorted Rigidity

2011-05-07T19:04:00.005-04:00

I had a great back and forth with David Wilken down in the comments on this post of his. The topic was embouchure, but it's my feeling the general concept plays in to music making on all levels. Here's something I said:

The other thing I keep wondering about is your point of the less movement of the embouchure the better. I understand how that really helps cleaner playing. The problem for me that led to an embouchure crisis that nearly had me give up the horn was that I think I got more over into “rigid” rather than “stable”, and that the appropriate supporting musculature and fascia weren’t in place, leading to over stressing some parts of the embouchure and not using others as much as needed (if that makes any sense).

And here's Dave's response:

I understand exactly what you mean here. It’s very common for players to concentrate their effort in areas that aren’t ideal, while letting the muscle groups that should be doing the work be lax. This happens with breathing as well as embouchure. If you look back a few posts I wrote up on a study that used infrared photography to note the areas on trumpet players’ faces that were doing the work while playing. One thing that was noted was that the professionals had a more uniform look compared to each other, whereas the amateurs had their muscular effort all over their face, with a lot more variety.

It's my feeling that this idea of the physical effort being evenly distributed throughout the embouchure applies equally to other areas of music making. One of the constants of my helping people make music on a whole panoply of instruments over the years has been helping them see and hear and feel how they're stressing where they don't need to and not giving full attention to other areas.

So often people starting to play an instrument seem to be contorting themselves in ways they never would in everyday physical endeavors. I think this becomes less immediately apparent as we play our instruments better over time, but needless small rigidities can still lurk just below the surface and hinder us from being as fully expressive as we might be.

Part of my recent "flow" experience was not once experiencing any physical glitches and the horn simply making the sounds I wanted it to. I just thought about the sound I wanted, not about what I needed to do to make it. My sense is that having a flexible stability in physical technique makes that more likely to happen than when you've got some physical contorted rigidities getting between you and the music.

Just as music making and meditation seem to have some overlap in terms of brain function, music making and yoga seem to have some overlap on the physical level.

A Pauky Poem

2011-05-07T14:45:00.003-04:00

Kyle Gann just posted this wonderful poem, which uses the word "pauky", which I'd never before encountered. It means shrewd or cunning, often in a humorous manner. The poem was written about this event. The poem and the brief introduction are in this post of Kyle's.

And speaking of poetry, a Boston poet friend of John Luther Adams, John Shreffler, wrote the following poem in response to JLA’s and my pilgrimage to Concord:

For John Luther Adams

The experience aspires to communion,
But the art is various, so many
Different ways to do it, sometimes you feel
It wrap its arm around you as its other
Hand reaches in and neatly lifts your wallet;
That would be Wagner, while Beethoven and Ives
Storm Heaven, locked in wars into which you’re drafted,
But sometimes, now and then, the artist nods,
Lost in his thought and fumbles with the keys
And turns the pauky lock and opens the door
And inside lie mansions, where the conversation
Is real and equal and, as well, ecstatic
And shimmers like the Northern Lights laid out
In a Heaven into which you’re invited.

Sometime back I posted another poem about poetry itself, wishing there were one as good for music and this poem by John Shreffler makes a good companion to it.

Harmonious Feeling of Oneness

2011-05-04T07:33:00.004-04:00

This BBC article is the first I've seen which talks about how there are apparently two mostly independent neural networks in our brains. The suggestion is that usually one or the other predominates our consciousness, but that, at least in the case of Tibetan Buddhist meditators, the activities of the two networks can be balanced.

He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.

Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators during the study.
The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.

The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down. . .

. . . Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment.

If this hypothesis proves out, it seems to me it could be part of the explanation of the state a music maker can sometimes enter when the ego falls away and the music seems to flow on its own. I've been talking to music friends about this and here's a great note I got from Billy Brockman, a friend I knew as a child and who went on to make a living as an electric guitar player. Billy is now proprietor of Charlottesville Music.

Time would definitely slow down. It gave me the ability to transfer what was in my head (and heart) to my fingers more easily. The ability to "play what you hear." It's analogous to a batter being able to "see the seams rotating" on a fastball. The ball is coming to the plate at 90 mph, but to a hitter "in the zone" the ball appears to be traveling slower.

Brain Plasticity

2011-04-26T08:48:00.003-04:00

This brief article is useful in explaining that the "plasticity" of the brain often mentioned by neuroscientists is more than simply creating new grey matter. It's also the creating of new subnetworks in what's already there.

The new study uses computational methods developed to analyze what the researchers call multilayer networks, in which each layer might represent a network at one snapshot in time, or a different set of connections between the same set of brain regions. These layers are combined into a larger mathematical object, which can contain a potentially huge amount of data and is difficult to analyze. Previous methods could only deal with each layer separately.

"Parts of the brain communicate with one another very strongly, so they form a sort of module of intercommunicating regions of the brain," said first author Danielle S. Bassett, postdoctoral fellow in physics at UC Santa Barbara. "In this way, brain activity can segregate into multiple functional modules. What we wanted to measure is how fluid those modules are."

Bassett explained that there are flexible brain regions with allegiances that change through time. "That flexibility seems to be the factor that predicts learning," said Bassett. "So, if you are very flexible, then you will end up learning better on the second day, and if you are not very flexible, then you learn less."

The central finding that the better the flexibility, the better the learning, might be behind the studies indicating music making is helpful for overall cognition, because music making seems to be all about creating lots of subnetworks throughout the brain.

Flow and Something Else

2011-04-25T09:01:00.009-04:00

In my most recent Horn Diary I mentioned how my playing in the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday induced an altered state during the performance which lasted for hours after the concert. In a comment, Jonathan West pointed out that that state of mind is described by "flow". In a subsequent comment he said that in the hundreds of times he's performed (and he's high level, not an amateur), he's experienced "flow" only a dozen or so times.

Judging one's own mental states is a dicey proposition at best, but my sense is that I've experienced "flow" hundreds of times - practicing, performing, composing, running group music sessions, etc. - so I'm pretty sure there's a semantic issue here.

I've been wandering down the foggy ruins of time trying to think of other times I might have had experiences like the one playing the horn in the Fauré on Palm Sunday, and the only one I can come up with is my having attended a teaching given by H. H. the Dalai Lama and having had the opportunity to shake his hand.

I've also been trying to find words to describe both experiences and have come up with:

Exalted - in a state of extreme happiness, from the Latin exaltere from ex- 'outward, upward' + altus - 'high"

Exultation - show or feel elation or jubilation, esp. as a result of success, from the Latin exsultare, frequentive of exsilire 'leap up' from ex- 'out, upward '+ salire 'to leap'

Individuation - a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious is brought into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination or free association to take some examples) to be assimilated into the whole personality.

I want to take this discussion further in a subsequent post and would welcome any further comments or emails on this subject, and I can't help thinking our Vermont readership might have something interesting to say on all of this.

Limitations and Style

2011-04-25T08:41:00.005-04:00

Here are two quotes that reinforce one another. The first is one of Terry Teachout's regular almanac citations and this one is by Igor Stravinsky:

"My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

The other is a quote from Rosanne Cash from that recent NYT article:

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

A first approximation of the difference between a music educator and a music therapist might be to say that the educator is concerned with the student being able to play in whatever style the composer asks for, while the therapist helps the client find the style most suited to that particular client's personality and abilities.

Horn Diary

2011-04-20T09:38:00.005-04:00

Last Sunday I played horn in a performance of Fauré's Requiem and it went well. While a couple of attacks weren't as clean as they might have been, some notes weren't held as long as they should have been, and some slurs had a bit more color than the score asked for - there were no wrong notes. There's not really that much horn music in the piece, so I'd memorized all the bits and pieces and was able to blend with and help shape the sound of the chorus.

The only other instruments were strings, including harp and piano. I ended up standing behind the chorus with all the other instruments down front. The bell of my horn was pointing right at a corner of the sanctuary, the walls of which are brick and only a couple of feet from the horn. That had the effect of broadcasting the sound throughout the space in a wonderful way. Sort of let the welkin ring.

The other thing about standing behind the chorus was that I felt much freer putting some body english on some of those lovely sighing pianissimos. From years of playing guitar and singing in front of groups, I tend to dance and move with the rhythms, which just looks wrong with something like the Fauré. Being hidden from the audience let me not worry about that.

After the performance I got a number of enthusiastic comments on my playing from some of the best musicians present. I feel I can now lay claim to being an adequate small town amateur horn player.

Part of the reason things went so well was due to my emotional involvement with the piece. Over the past year a number of us have been all up close and personal with death and dying. In particular, the chorus director lost his wife, who was also the best choral accompanist I've ever heard, and though unspoken, this requiem was for her. I was basically in an altered state for the whole performance and for hours afterwards. There was all the busy technical stuff flying though my head, but there were also deep feelings coming up from my heart and finding expression in the sound of the horn. I've never before participated in such high level music with that sort of deep emotional expression. And the thing about the horn is, no other instrument, including my voice, allows me to tap so deeply into that well of what being human is all about.

Neuroscience Roundup

2011-04-19T08:05:00.005-04:00

This long article in the NYT is a nice summary and discussion of things I've already posted on. They even use in the title the "tickle the brain" image I've talked about before. The added value is their having interviewed Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma and Rosanne Cash to get their responses to the data.

I really like this from Ms. Cash:

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

And here's a quote from Dr. Large at FAU on mirror neurons:

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

And here's something I hadn't come across, but surely reinforces my notion of the primal importance of physical gesture in musical communication.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Who's In Charge?

2011-04-16T19:35:00.010-04:00

The elephant in the room, as far as all the new neuroscience is concerned, is that our conscious mind is not fully in charge of our behavior. Here's a paragraph from an article looking at how this new information might change our thinking about legal issues.

The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Freud and Jung may have gotten various details wrong, but they were on the right track with their basic notion that the conscious mind is just one of many players creating our personalities and driving our behavior.

The Buddhist idea of "mind training" is also built in part on the idea that getting our conscious mind more in control of the situation is a tough thing to do, and that having a concept of what you're trying to do and how to go about it can be very helpful.

The previous post on the potentiating nature of dopamine, which can be released during music making, suggests it can be helpful in reinforcing positive aspects of the mind outside direct consciousness while quelling some of the negative stuff rattling around up there.

On a much more specific level, it seems to me that when we're helping someone make music, being open to non-verbal ways of transmitting information is the way to go, because we're probably already doing that whether we're aware of it or not.

More On Dopamine

2011-04-13T10:10:00.005-04:00

This article on dopamine release and addiction makes the point that dopamine does more than simply make you feel better.

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.

In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren't addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They're addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

"People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it's a learning transmitter," says Morikawa. "It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released."

Since listening and making music can release dopamine, something similar is probably happening. One of the first things that popped into my mind when I read this is that it's a possible explanation for people putting up with music educators that get over into what might be considered abusive behavior in other contexts. I've always felt the context in which music is made affects both the music and the musician and that positive rather than negative emotional environments are better, but this article suggests dopamine release may well trump that in some situations. Lots of abusive relationships in which the participants choose to remain are fueled by alcohol.

The positive side of all this is that paying attention to how one helps a client go about learning music making can reinforce positive attitudes and behaviors. It's another way of seeing how music can have beneficial effects on the personality of the music maker.

Music Making and Seniors

2011-04-13T08:57:00.003-04:00

This brief article is about a preliminary study that suggests music making is of cognitive benefit to older people.

. . . Researchers Brenda Hanna-Pladdy and Alicia MacKay at the University of Kansas Medical Center surveyed 70 healthy people aged 60 to 83, giving them a series of neuropsychological tests. Those with at least 10 years of musical experience had “better performance in nonverbal memory… and executive processes” compared to non-musicians, the investigators wrote. . .

. . . It has already been known that “intensive repetitive musical practice can lead to bilateral cortical reorganization,” or wide spread changes in brain wiring, Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay wrote. But it has been unclear, they added, whether musical abilities “transfer to nonmusical cognitive abilities” throughout life.

Sackbut Timbre

2011-04-09T19:04:00.003-04:00

In my last Horn Diary I talked about enjoying blending the sound of the horn with that of a chorus much more than blending it with the sound of a concert band.

In the sackbut entry in Wikipedia there's this about the timbre of that precursor to the trombone:

Mersenne wrote in 1636, "It should be blown by a skillful musician so that it may not imitate the sounds of the trumpet, but rather assimilate itself to the sweetness of the human voice, lest it should emit a warlike rather than a peaceful sound."

Old Dogs & New Tricks

2011-04-07T09:56:00.005-04:00

The problem with old dogs learning new tricks may not be due to brain decrepitude. This brief article outlines a study where adults formed new grey matter over the course of just a few days in response to complex conditioning.

The researchers subjected 19 adult volunteers to a study where colored cards (2 shades of green and 2 blue) were shown to them; each with nonsensical names. The participants were then asked to accept the new words as actual descriptors for the new colors and to memorize them so that they could reply with the correct color name at a later date and to match them when asked. After the conditioning was carried out (over three days with five sessions; total time less than two hours) the subjects all underwent MRI scans, where it was revealed that new grey matter had formed in the left hemisphere of their brains. . .

. . . It appears the key lies in the name differentiation, and how the subjects perceived the colors based on the names they were given; something much deeper than say, asking subjects to simply memorize a list of names. It was a change in perception. This is backed up by the fact that the areas of the brain that grew new matter were parts of the brain known to process color and vision, but more importantly, perception.

My biggest age related issue is my fingers not being as flexible and quickly responsive as I'd like on the flute. Part of that might be that even though I've played the flute and alto flute off and on for years, I've spent a lot more time on the keyboard and guitar and banjo, all of which use the fingers in different ways and I'm having to work at not using them in those ways with the flute, as much as trying to learn the new ways.

Horn Diary

2011-04-05T19:32:00.004-04:00

I'm having the opportunity to play horn for a performance of the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday. We have two violins, two violas, a cello, a string bass and an organ, and, of course, the chorus. The harmonies are wonderful and the writing for the horn brings out the qualities I most love about it.

What I've come to realize is that one reason I so loved playing in the cantata at Christmas was playing horn with voices. Somehow, for me, playing with the chorus feels much more natural than playing in the community band. Maybe it's because I've sung so much and that part of the wonder of the horn is that it's so like the voice. Whatever the reason, blending the sound of the horn with the sound of the chorus is one of the most exhilarating musical experiences I've ever had.

Playing Softly

2011-04-05T19:18:00.003-04:00

With both horn and flute I've lately been working on playing more softly than I ever have before. Very helpfully, James Boldin recently posted on that very subject as regards the horn.

Something that's impressed me is how playing at the softest level possible requires such a different embouchure on both flute and horn, and how that change has deepened my proprioceptive sense of the embouchure. Somehow the delicacy needed reveals the underlying structure of the embouchure in a different light.

Proprioception

2011-04-05T18:39:00.006-04:00

Proprioception is a vital component of music making, but rarely expressly mentioned. Here are some snips from the current Wikipedia entry:

Proprioception . . . from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. . . a . . . distinct sensory modality that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with the required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other. . .

. . . Kinesthesia is another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception, though use of the term "kinesthesia" can place a greater emphasis on motion. Some differentiate the kinesthetic sense from proprioception by excluding the sense of equilibrium or balance from kinesthesia. An inner ear infection, for example, might degrade the sense of balance. This would degrade the proprioceptive sense, but not the kinesthetic sense. The affected individual would be able to walk, but only by using the sense of sight to maintain balance; the person would be unable to walk with eyes closed. . . .

. . .The proprioceptive sense is believed to be composed of information from sensory neurons located in the inner ear (motion and orientation) and in the stretch receptors located in the muscles and the joint-supporting ligaments (stance). There are specific nerve receptors for this form of perception termed "proprioreceptors," just as there are specific receptors for pressure, light, temperature, sound, and other sensory experiences. . . .

. . . Proprioception is what allows someone to learn to walk in complete darkness without losing balance. During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

One thing about music making is that there is really no end to how much we can develop and deepen our ability to do so. Part of that is our becoming more and more proprioceptively aware of how we play our instrument. One reason for this post is for it to be here as foundation for a flute diary post on how an advancement in technique was based on increased proprioceptive awareness in my fingers.

Advances in technique can lead to advances in our more fully inhabiting the music, and our growing interpretive sense can lead to advances in technique. Nurturing that interplay can keep music making fresh and rewarding for a lifetime.

I also have the intuitive sense that there's an overlap between our proprioceptive sense of balance and the ways we can feel "balance" in music making and in music we listen to, particularly in rhythm, but in all the other elements of music as well. How well and in what ways music is "balanced" is sort of a primal gesture to which all the others contribute.

Levitin on Timing and Expression

2011-03-27T22:48:00.006-04:00

In the first of these videos, Daniel Levitin gives an overview of work done in his labs showing that variance from metronomic timing correlates with perceived expression in music. In the second he talks more about the implications of this type of research, name checking Stevie Wonder in the process.

This bit of research may well end up being seen as much of a breakthrough as the recent dopamine study, also out of McGill. They both really get at what's going on with music and emotion, and they each seem to be the first solid, repeatable study that nails down a specific mechanism in the way music works on us.

Music & Parkinson's Disease

2011-03-25T18:53:00.005-04:00

A while back I mentioned a proposed study on whether listening to a classical music concert would have an effect on the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Preliminary results are in and are looking positive. The thinking seems to be that the effect is due to music causing a release of dopamine, low levels of which cause the Parkinson's symptoms.

The study involved three concerts, one by a string quartet, one by a wind quintet and one by a brass quintet. I wish more symphonic organizations would put more effort into chamber music and looking for new ways to serve their communities as the Fort Wayne Philharmonic has done in this case. This post by Jeffrey Agrell touches on classical organizations needing to be more versatile.

Horn Diary

2011-03-24T20:38:00.007-04:00

I've mostly settled into the Farkas Deep Cup mouthpiece. The diameter may be a bit too big for me, but since switching back at the beginning of the year there's been steady improvement in control and endurance from that moment of switching. The improvement has slowed, but I don't think the point of diminishing returns has been reached. I so much prefer the tone of the larger mouthpiece I really want to work as hard as I can to make it work. I'm also getting those unsolicited positive comments on my tone that I used to get when I used the Very Deep Cup mouthpiece those first years, but that dried up when I was on the Medium Cup.

Being a total long term novice at the horn, I'm not sure how best to talk about the tone I'm going for and that various band directors and musical friends, whose advice I value, have complimented. The one thing that has given me more of what I want (outside of mouthpieces) has been playing off the leg. That lets the horn vibrate throughout and fully develop its timbre.

In his book on the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, Christopher Hogwood makes the point that Handel was the first to bring the horn in from the out of doors to play with the instruments of the court. What I love about the horn is that it can have an amazing out of doors sound without having to be brassy.

Two other things that happened back at the beginning of the year were my getting my first lesson ever and a fine player from the Charlottesville Municipal band joining us here in Orange so as to have the opportunity to play first horn.

The lesson went very well in that no horrible technique issues were discovered and that the embouchure I've worked out using BE looks good and sounds good to a regular teacher. Alternate fingerings were demonstrated and more of them made sense to me than when trying them previously over the years. Since I no longer am responsible for first horn parts, I get to spend a lot more time down on the F horn and get to mostly stay away from all the high stuff on the Bb horn.

Playing second horn is an absolute treat. When I was the only one playing off beats I'd always have to drop out a measure every so often to keep from sliding back on the beat. Just having to follow/be with someone else is astonishingly easier. After playing the first horn parts for so long, playing that secondary harmony under the first parts is a much different proposition, but as I get used to it is a lot of fun. Though it's all written out, it's not dissimilar to throwing on a vocal harmony line to someone else's vocal solo.

My biggest problem right now is getting used to the alternate fingerings. Playing the G above middle C on the F horn is much easier than on the Bb side, but it "tastes" very different. Sometimes it feels so different than what I'm used to I think I'm playing the wrong note. On the other hand, using the third finger instead of one and two for the A below middle C has been a revelation - it speaks more easily, and has better tone and intonation. Besides knowing more now than I used to, I think playing off the leg and having a mouthpiece that allows flexibility have really refreshed my playing. There are times it feels as though I have a new instrument.

Feel Success

2011-03-19T10:10:00.003-04:00

Besides the "Regular Read" blogs having to do with music listed over on the right, there are some others I follow, one of which is that of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. As far as I can tell, he's off the scale intelligent, and somehow driven to see things differently than the rest of us. Some posts have ideas over on the weird side of things, others are common sensical, and others are wonderfully "out of the box" thinking and very thought provoking.

In this post, "Happiness Engineering", he lists some of the things he does to make himself happy. One, in particular, caught my attention.

Feel Success - Make it a habit to often do things you do well. It doesn't matter if your best skill is golf or cooking or business or being a parent. Doing one thing well gives your ego some armor to handle all of the little things that don't go quite so well during the week.

That's a cornerstone of my approach to teaching music. My sense is that I spend far more time working with the client helping them "feel success" than music educators do. Rapid technical advancement is not the issue, whereas the client's enjoying making music is. For people not concerned with being first chair or competing with others, but who do want to learn enough to make music in a relaxing and enjoyable manner, that feeling of success sustains engagement and allows for building the motivation to take on more challenging technical issues as time goes on.

I realize educators are dealing with a different population with different natural skill levels and motivations, but one thing I've noticed in community band over the years is that we have never completely "owned" a piece as a group. We've brought pieces close to mastery, but never all the way. Once performed they go away and the sight reading and work on a new set of pieces begins.

Part of the problem is that we have pro level players mixed in with beginners, and from what I can tell, the pro level folks get more attention when it comes to choosing repertoire. Another factor is that pieces arranged for school bands seem to always assume everyone is at the same skill level (which is logical). Then there's what seems to be "string envy" of the arrangers, so often giving the flutes and clarinets these busy string-like parts and very few gorgeous melodic lines in the middle range.

It seems there might be a niche for someone to arrange music for community bands that would balance things more towards a music therapy approach to music making, where "feeling success" would be more of a factor. The problem is you'd need to have a music educator's skill level at arranging, and they're all going to be much more interested in creating music for the educational environment.

Another Music Hormone?

2011-03-18T09:44:00.003-04:00

This article is a brief overview of the work of David Huron.

David Huron has a theory. People who enjoy sorrowful music are experiencing the consoling effects of prolactin, a hormone that is usually associated with pregnancy and lactation but that the body also releases when we’re sad or weeping. People who can’t bear listening to sad music, Huron conjectures, don’t get that prolactin rush when they hear Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings or Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. They just feel blue. . .

. . . This is why, he conjectures, the people who like listening to sad music are getting that shot of prolactin, and the people who hate listening to it aren’t. The study is still in progress. . .

If this hypothesis proves out, it might explain Dave Barry's hilarious antipathy to the music of Barry Manilow, which his wife loves.

. . . Yes, love will make a man do many things. But sometimes a man’s love is sorely tested by a woman. Here I am using the term “a woman” in the sense of “my wife.” Recently, out of the blue, she asked me to do something that was truly repugnant to me, something that violates one of the two fundamental moral principles by which I have lived my life (the other one is, never drink light beer).

She asked me to go to a Barry Manilow concert. . .

Levitin Memories

2011-03-18T09:34:00.005-04:00

With his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel Levitin moved the neuroscience of music out of the labs and into public consciousness. In this column in support of music in the public schools of California he tells the story of how he got started in music in the first place.

We met 20 minutes a week for a year, just the two of us. Mr. Edie taught me how to put the clarinet together and take it apart, how to condition reeds with sandpaper so that they would play more easily, how to clean the instrument. He showed me how to replace worn pads and to adjust the intricate metal key bars. He taught me how to play it too, how to coax a pleasing tone by breathing from my stomach, how to read music and finger the instrument, how to make a heartbreaking vibrato and a playful staccato. And in so doing, he taught me to respect the instrument, to feel a deeper connection with it. . .

. . . We now know through neuroscience research that playing a musical instrument confers a number of advantages to cognitive development, especially in training attentional networks. But it also makes for a lifetime of pleasure and companionship. A child with musical ability is never alone and can engage with many of the greatest minds of all time — Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz. We can make our fingers trace the same positions and patterns Chopin did and come to know a little of what it was like to hear the world as he did.

Live Music in Hospitals

2011-03-13T09:28:00.002-04:00

One of the very first posts on this blog linked a BBC story on how live music was helpful to patients in hospital. Then for the longest time there were no other stories, but now two have popped up. In a Washington Post article discussing music and neuroscience there's mention of live music:

"We have musicians here who play for people who've just come out of surgery - a flautist goes up and plays for them and these patients, who are in tremendous pain, at the end of the playing, they are almost pain-free. Now we know that perhaps dopamine is playing a role."

This article from Pittsburgh talks about a program providing music in public spaces in a hospital.

Performance Diary

2011-03-11T19:06:00.004-05:00

Last Friday the Kenwood Players performed at the old building of the Orange nursing home, where the residents are mostly wheelchair bound, and this afternoon we played at the new building which has more ambulatory residents. As we had our full compliment of players both times - trumpet, clarinet, trombone, tenor sax, two Eb tubas, drums and banjo - we were able to play Dixieland arrangements. Live music can play on the emotions of audiences, but Dixieland is more specific - it makes people happy.

Both audiences moved and tapped and swayed and smiled and were very appreciative with both applause and coming up afterwards and thanking us. I once again had the thought that having been a banjo player in a Dixieland group may well have been the better decision than going into music therapy if simply making people happy was the motivation.

The most striking vignette for me had to do with a wheelchair bound gentleman I've been seeing in the lobby for years on my hospice volunteering visits on Wednesdays. I've always nodded and said hello, and his single response every time has been "Alright, honey!", and that's all I've ever overheard him say to anyone. He appears partially paralyzed on one side, so I've assumed he's a stroke victim. To close things down, we do an "Amazing Grace" sing along before ending with the "The Saints". He sang every word clearly, and in tune, and with great tone and feeling. Amazing grace, indeed.

On the audio front, the rooms are similarly sized, but couldn't be more different acoustically. In the old building there are lots more drapes and thicker carpets. In the new building there's a lower ceiling, bare walls and a little stage right back against a bare wall. I clip a dynamic mic into the bell of each tuba so they can be easily heard without having to work so hard, put a condenser next to the clarinet for the same reason, and have a dynamic mic for Dick the trumpeter to announce the numbers, and another for me to use for vocals. All these mics go to two amps. With all the settings the same, today in the new room we were much too loud until I turned everything down by about half.

Part of the problem is that whenever I ask the group to play up for a sound check, they never get to the volume we get when we really get a groove going. We've talked about it, but somehow we're always louder once we get going, so I've learned to dial back the recording level a bit to adjust for that. It might be that the players somehow think "sound check" is the same thing as "tuning note".

In my experience, most musicians don't really know much about audio. It's rare to find one who knows the difference between a condenser and a dynamic mic. I'm getting better at being a "sound man", but it's been trial and error all the way. At the least, it's been a long time since I set off a feedback shriek.

The one thing that I'm learning that's been helpful is to set things up so that the amps work as monitors for the players as well as reinforcing the sound for the audience. The better players can hear themselves and each other, the better they play.

Even More on the McGill study

2011-03-06T09:22:00.004-05:00

From what I can tell, there have been more articles on that McGill study (previously posted on here and here) than any music neuroscience study to date. Here are two more articles.

This article by Dario Dieguez, Jr, PhD is great for putting the study in context. Here's the first paragraph:

Humans experience pleasure from a variety of stimuli, including food, money, and psychoactive drugs. Such pleasures are largely made possible by a brain chemical called dopamine, which activates what is known as the mesolimbic system — a network of interconnected brain regions that mediate reward. Most often, rewarding stimuli are biologically necessary for survival (such as food), can directly stimulate activity of the mesolimbic system (such as some psychoactive drugs), or are tangible items (such as money). However, humans can experience pleasure from more abstract stimuli, such as art or music, which do not fit into any of these categories. Such stimuli have persisted across countless generations and remain important in daily life today. Interestingly, the experience of pleasure from these abstract stimuli is highly specific to cultural and personal preferences.

And here's his final paragraph. I just wish he'd said more about the "ability of music to modulate emotional states".

This study provides the first direct evidence that pleasure experienced while listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system. This phenomenon may be made possible by the ability of music to modulate emotional states and may help to explain why it has remained so highly valued across generations. “These findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry in the brain,” said Dr. Zatorre. “This study paves the way for future work to examine non-tangible rewards that humans consider rewarding for complex reasons,” he said.

The other article, which is in the Washington Post, reads like a blog post. Here's a bit from the middle of the article.

Indeed, this study fits quite neatly into the growing body of research on music therapy, which has suggests that listening to your favorite aria or pop hit can help you sleep better, lessen the pain associated with surgery or conditions including arthritis and fibromyalgia, decrease stress and improve anxiety and depression, among other health benefits.

Salimpoor stresses that her team's results go a long way toward explaining why other recent studies have shown that music and dance therapy can be incredibly effective for patients with Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by low dopamine levels.

"This is the science behind what we see all the time in practice," agrees Nancy Morgan, director of arts and humanities at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University Hospital, which provides music therapy programs for patients. "We have musicians here who play for people who've just come out of surgery - a flautist goes up and plays for them and these patients, who are in tremendous pain, at the end of the playing, they are almost pain-free. â¦ (sic) Now we know that perhaps dopamine is playing a role."

More On Mirror Neurons

2011-02-27T10:56:00.006-05:00

I'm betting that of all the new information we're getting about how our brains respond to music, what we find out about mirror neurons will be the most helpful in explaining how music can affect us so deeply. It's beginning to look like the ability of music to trigger mirror neurons will be the key to understanding how it can encode emotional content.

Music is a language, but it's much more non-verbal than verbal. For me, when we talk about musicality, we're talking about how music and music makers can suggest to us everything from a marching army to a flirtatious wink, from the movements and gestures of someone deeply sad to the movements and gestures of someone exuberantly joyous. Sometimes emotionally evocative gestures are partly embedded in the physical playing of an instrument, like the harp. More often the gestural communication is in the music itself and is brought out by how it's played. Years ago I came up with the notion that, at least in part, music is gesture made audible, and the neuroscience seems to be suggesting that's the case.

Here are two excerpts from the article mentioned in a previous post. The first talks about mirror neurons and the second alludes to what I've mentioned before, how in the brain it seems almost every function is mediated by others, and nothing is particularly straight forward.

As they expected, the areas of the brain that manage emotions, like the amygdala, lit up for all subjects when the researchers played the expressive version. But, contrary to their expectations, those areas, instead of continuously fluctuating in response to changes in the music, remained relatively constant.

What surprised the scientists was the part of the brain that actually did vary: the mirror neuron system.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . .

. . . Heather Chapin, a doctoral student at the time the study was done who ran the experiments, commented on the difficulty of trying to understand the workings of the brain from the outside: "I'm a black and white kind of girl, and human neuroimaging was much more gray than I was prepared to handle.". . .

Another Testimonial

2011-02-26T13:53:00.004-05:00

This article talks about how music therapy, specifically "neurologic music therapy" (a term I've not seen before) has been part of the wonderful recovery Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seems to be having.

. . . When Miss Giffords mouthed the words of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as her music therapist Maegan Morrow sang the ditty and strummed a guitar, it brought tears to those gathered at her bedside. She has now progressed to sing-alongs of jazz and rock classics such as I Can't Give You Anything But Love and American Pie. . .

. . . Miss Gifford's mother, Gloria, has told friends that her daughter's transformation from a "limp noodle" after the attack owes much to music sessions where family and friends "clap and hoot" as back-up chorus and band. The neurologic music therapy - an integral part of her packed daily routine of physical, occupational and speech therapy - "really flipped the switch" for the congresswoman, Mrs Giffords said. . .

Music Dynamics Lab at FAU

2011-02-25T11:12:00.005-05:00

My Google news aggregation page just pointed me to this article on the "Meaning of Music". It raises a point I want to address in a future post. For now, though, want to post a link to this wonderful Quicktime depiction of the effect of a piece of music on the brain that I found following the link in the article to the Music Dynamics Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Here's a link to their publications.

Oboe Sashay

2011-02-21T12:48:00.004-05:00

This is the audio of my friend Craig Matovich playing Louisiana Sashay. As discussed in this previous post, besides playing the flute part on oboe with a midi version of the harp part, he's added hand percussion and bass.

I knew Craig at Shenandoah Conservatory back from '77 to '80. He, I and Susan were among the handful of students who weren't fresh out of high school and tended to hang together. His oboe sound was amazing and I thought about getting one to try until he took me aside and showed me his reed making room and talked about spending as much time making reeds as practicing. Then and there I decided double reeds were not for me.

Craig went on to teach for a while at Shenandoah. He was also a founding member of Oxymora, a group that was/is sort of over in the Paul Winter Consort neighborhood.

As Craig says, I'm giving away the music to this piece, just asking for, if it gets worked up, an mp3 and maybe some photos of the performers to make a video like this one to have the audio here on the blog to compare and contrast with other versions. Even better would be the performers doing the YouTube themselves as Craig has done so that all I have to do is embed it. (I'm on rural dial-up and uploads take a while.) I can be reached at MusicMakersMusic at aol dot com.

Craig has used the "Louisiana Sashay" title that was on the score I sent him. Carol, the harpist for whom it was written used just "The Sashay" once when referring to it and I liked that. Dr. Andy, a musical companion of over 15 years prefers the working title "Vermont Song". I blogged the composition of this piece in an effort to demystify the composition process, and that was what it was first called. I think all of those titles work and can't settle on one being better than the others.

Narratives and Enactments

2011-02-20T08:12:00.004-05:00

Here a couple of weeks ago Craig, an oboe playing friend from conservatory days, commented on Facebook how much he was enjoying a piece with a 5/4 time signature. I sent him a email talking about how much I enjoy irregular rhythms and included links to The Sashay and Timepiece. He asked for the music to The Sashay (and a midi file, which I had to figure out how to do). He's liking The Sashay enough to work on it and send me mp3 files of each version he's recorded with his oboe, adding some hand percussion, a bass, and tweaking the midi harp playback.

For one thing, he's a wonderful oboeist and I'm having a similar response to the one I had hearing The St Clements Wind Ensemble play Timepiece. Really good players take notes I've written and bring out depths of musicality I simply was unable to even imagine before hearing them.

Another thing that strikes me is that the piece is really holding up with the different instrumentation. I can't wait to compare it to what Susan and Carol do with it, but I'm pretty sure the evoked feelings will be different, though with some overlap. I'm enough of a chauvinist to think two Louisiana ladies with flute and harp are going to excel at evoking the flirtatious movements and banter that was in the back of my mind when I wrote it for them and that I hope is gesturally embedded in the music.

They have also been steered in that direction because of my having long conversations with Susan detailing what I was thinking at various measures along the way. She suggested I do a post of all those mental visuals that helped me compose the music, but I didn't, and Craig's work is helping me understand my reluctance.

Sometime back I linked to a post of Kyle Gann's where he said he thought of his music scores as lines for a play, that different players and groups of players would perform them differently, just as plays are performed/produced differently. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My feeling is that if when composing music I make it coherent enough for me to feel a musical narrative run from measure to measure, then players will be able to sense that narrative in their own way and enact it convincingly, even if their sense of the narrative is different from mine.

And that's what Craig has done. His take on The Sashay is exceptionally dance-like, and I think because of his amazingly textured oboe sound combining with the unusual rhythms there's an Armenian, near Eastern, Scheherazade feel to what he's doing. He keeps sending updated mp3s that clean up various things, but here soon I hope to do one of those simple YouTube embed posts with the audio as it stands now. Then blog readers can decide for themselves whether there's a convincing narrative and what a particular enactment does with it.

One of the things I most enjoyed back when I had the private practice in San Antonio was the yearly recitals with various clients playing various instruments. There were always a few piano players and I always had all of them play one piece in common with the others, along with the things only they were doing. Hearing different players present their individual enactments of the same piece was always a wonderful illustration of just how expressive of our personalities making music can be.

Memory Aids

2011-02-20T07:39:00.005-05:00

Here are two articles having to do with memory. The first concerns a study on older people.

A new study shows that one year of moderate physical exercise can increase the size of the brain's hippocampus in older adults, leading to an improvement in spatial memory. . . .The right hippocampus expanded in the older folks who exercised and shrank in the older folks who did not exercise. If you sit idly your capacity to form memories will decay.

For me, this study's results strengthens my feeling that there are a number of things people can do in their everyday lives that will benefit their music making (for which better memory is an asset). As a music therapist, I feel the reverse is also true, that going about music making in a non-stressed way can be of overall benefit to people in various ways.

In an earlier post I made the point that a basic finding of the new neuroscience research is that within the brain all sorts of functions mediate all sorts of other functions. It's more an ecosystem than a machine. This study suggests that on a much more general level our non-musical behaviors can mediate our musical behaviors.

The second article is about a study indicating taking a test, i.e. working with retrieving information from memory, is better than other study methods.

Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.

This study reminded me of a back and forth I had with Jeffrey Agrell some time ago about the benefits of practicing with the eyes closed. This study suggests that part of the benefit of doing that is that when not looking at the music on the page, you're amping up your retrieval process in the brain, which would be helping you remember how to play that particular passage.

In Praise of Technique

2011-02-13T09:47:00.004-05:00

As a music therapist I tend to let working with clients' musicality lead the work on technique. The idea is that as they become more engaged in music making, the more they'll appreciate how empowering technique can be, and the more motivated they'll be to do the work involved to improve it. Too much technique too soon and you're going to lose a client.

For educators, technique is much more central, and in the last generation or two there's been a huge payoff. In this post Kyle Gann talks about a piece of very difficult music written by John Halle that can only be played these days because the, "rhythmic complexity standards have risen miraculously among the younger generation".

As Kyle always offers audio examples of music he's talking about, there's a link in the post to an mp3 of the first movement of the piece. It's astonishingly beautiful, takes me to places I've never been before, and I can't even begin to get my mind around the technique needed to achieve it.

Antonio Demasio

2011-02-13T09:06:00.005-05:00

This article in the WSJ is a profile of Antonio Demasio, whose 2003 book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain was one of several I read back then, trying to understand all the neuroscience that was coming out. It was obvious something really big was beginning to happen to our understanding of ourselves, but it wasn't particularly clear, to me at least, what the new information meant. The main thing that book and others like it left me with was a much deeper understanding of just how complex and interconnected brain function(s) is/are. So many things are mediated by so many other things.

Here are a few snips from the article (the bolding for emphasis is mine):

. . . He is famous for overturning the notion that emotions have no role in rational thought. Through clinical studies of brain-damaged patients, he discovered that the neural circuits responsible for our feelings also are critical to healthy decision-making and moral reasoning. . .

. . . Gradually, Dr. Damasio and other scientists are identifying some of the brain circuits underlying creative thought. Generally, brain-wave measures show that a sudden insight is the climax of intense brain states below the level of our awareness. It appears to involve more neural cells than methodical reasoning. Our brain may be working hardest when it seems most unfocused. Moreover, studies of neural signals suggest that our brain appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision. Our most creative thoughts may be beyond our conscious control. . .

. . . Moods powerfully bias what people think, remember and perceive. When critical brain regions are injured, the damage can sever links between emotions, memory and reason, crippling our ability to make decisions just as a stroke can rob a patient of sight or the use of an arm. . .

It's my feeling that the points in bold have to be considered in helping people make music, especially those with no experience and for whom it doesn't come easily. Purely rational analysis in the conscious mode is absolutely part of the picture, but there are a lot of other factors that need consideration.

A point that keeps being made by the researchers is that music involves more parts of the brain than anything else we do. When teaching music, we need to involve as much of the brain as we can, not just the conscious rational part that's most amenable to "do this" verbal instructions.