Composing Music

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.

The 2.0 Series

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.

This Be a Rockin' Music Blog

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)

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.

Timepiece : Index

I'm delighted to say some people have requested parts and scores for Timepiece and that they've been sent out. Down the road there may be more recorded versions to put up here on the blog, so I'm putting one of those Blogger Gadgets over on the right to enable clicking straight through to this list of the relevant posts, which will be updated as needed.

Here's the audio of the St Clements Wind Ensemble performing it.

Here's the history of the piece.

Here are the performance notes.

Click here for all the posts mentioning the piece.

"Natural"

The first time I can remember associating the word "natural" with making music was back in the 80's when I heard a radio interview with Tony La Russa and he used the word responding to the question of why he thought he was such a successful baseball team manager. He said that he'd never been a natural player, so in order to improve enough to make it in the big leagues, he had to analyze all the facets of the game so that he could figure out how to do things like hit and run bases. That meant he was in a good position to help others play to the best of their ability. 

I immediately had the realization that I was in the same position making music. With the possible exception of rhythm guitar/banjo, I am in no way a "natural" musician. And all the work I've done to improve my skills helps me help others.

The next time I consciously thought about "natural" music makers was reading Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure. I can't remember if he expressly says so, but I came away with the feeling that his method for trumpet/horn players is a rigorous set of exercises embedded in a well thought out philosophy that helps students find their way to playing as if they were a "natural" player.

All of this has come to mind because of this post by Bruce Hembd, where he makes the point that there's nothing "natural" about playing the horn:

Until animals start buzzing their lips in the jungle, I don’t buy the ‘natural’ approach that some teachers tout as a selling point – along with its abstract, pop-psychology terminology. . . 

. . . Playing a brass instrument requires technical knowledge, and mental and physical skill. For some that requires breaking things down and analyzing it to see how it works and all fits together. 

This slightly different usage of "natural" tripped me up the first few times I read the post. I agree with the point being made, but also feel trying to figure out how to get the body to work in the most natural manner possible is the way to go. (Valerie Wells, the horn rep for Jeff's BE method comments approvingly to Bruce's post.)

All of these ideas about "natural" players and how to learn from them raises the issue of our consciousness when playing. Stan Musial didn't go to the plate turning over in his mind all the details needed to hit well, he just hit the ball. Once the rest of us learn from observing naturals, we need to work with what we've learned enough so that we don't need to think about it either - that's what practice is all about. What starts out as conscious thought should over time slip down into more automatic behavior. If we do all that well, an observer should have a difficult time picking out who was originally a "natural" and who wasn't.

Update: I was remiss in not mentioning this post by James Boldin, which I'd read and commented on before making my own post here. Dave Wilken also posted on the subject 

(and included links to some great posts of his touching on the subject), and Julia Rose has a very interesting post responding to Bruce here.

This discussion is one of the reasons I find blogging so beneficial - all these people who really know their subject spending time sharing their knowledge and insights.

Update 2: Want to paste in Julia Rose's response to a comment I left on her post:

I don’t think I’ve changed approaches, but rather I’ve gone back to an approach I used before. Every single success I’ve had in my career (making finals in auditions, competitions, etc.) I attribute to my thinking musically instead of technically when I played. However, when I started running into problems a couple years ago (as everyone eventually does, I think) I began to focus on what I thought was physically going wrong. But there is just too much going on physically for one to think about, at least while playing. I know now that when one runs into problems, one must continue to think musically in order to solve the problem.

Horn Diary

Yesterday was a red letter day in my horn career. The band played for the veterans in the town park and I got a number of compliments on my playing from band members afterwards. I hit all the exposed little solos and flourishes well, and did a creditable job hitting all the off beats. We did three Sousa marches, a medley of God Bless America and America The Beautiful, a medley of all the service songs strung together, and The Star Spangled Banner. Except for dropping down to 2nd horn parts for the off beats in the service medley I played all 1st horn. 

Using a phrase of Jeff Smiley's, last piece of the puzzle to fall into place for me has been holding the horn up off the leg to play it instead of letting it rest on the leg. The middle of my back between the shoulder blades and up to the bottom of my neck is sore, but it's worth it for the way the horn vibrates so much better giving a better tone (and more volume as I'm still the only horn), combined with my having more delicate control of how much pressure I'm exerting on the mouthpiece because of the flexibility getting it up off the leg allows. I also get to move my torso more, which makes everything more fun and less rigid physically and mentally.

All that work this summer on the F horn has a lot to do with this, along with our new band director getting off the sight reading wagon earlier than others have and giving us a set list to be responsible for several weeks before the concert, which really helps remedial players such as myself have a chance to focus on a few pieces to clean up.

The other thing that made yesterday special was a number of veterans coming up to me afterwards, giving me a firm handshake, looking me in the eye, and saying very emotionally how much they appreciated the band's coming out to play. These events are emotive transactions more than performances and that kind of response still sort of amazes me.

In the two year's of blogging post I thanked all the regular reads, and here I want to thank the Regular Reads: Horn again. In the five years I've been playing horn I've not had a single formal lesson. I've picked the brain of brass players and band directors at every chance and used the Farkas book and the Smiley book. But it was the horn bloggers giving so freely of their expertise on those blogs that helped put all that in context and make choices amongst the various ways of approaching the various issues. And it was through blogging I found the Smiley book, which was the single thing that kept me from giving up about a year ago.

Two Years On

Just completed my second year of blogging and taking the opportunity to do the long overdue blog housework of changing Alex Ross back to The Rest Is Noise over on the Regular Reads and adding Dave Wilken's Wilktone to the Regular Reads: Horn. Also changed both blog rolls to most recent post order instead of alphabetical order.

Adding Dave's blog because in between hard core brass and embouchure posts, which will be of little interest to non-brass players, he's been doing some great posting on the basic issue of how it is we teach others to play music.  

Lately I've been doing more commenting on other blogs than posting here, hoping that over time some of those ideas will become clearer to me and I'll say something more definitive here.

I want to thank all the folks over on the regular read lists, as their blogging has given the context and inspiration for my writing here, at least in my mind. With the exceptions of Alex Ross and Opera Chic, I've been lucky enough to be in touch and have wonderful interactions with all of them, either through e-mail or comments and posts going back and forth, or both. Having for years seen people's eyes glaze over, especially when they were music specialists, when hearing I was a music therapist, these conversations have been immensely rewarding both professionally and personally.

Special thanks to Jonathan West for getting Timepiece performed. The connection was via blogging, a benefit I never dreamed of when starting out. I'm now back to composing a little and having a great time.  Were it not for Jonathan's interest and spending the time and energy to get that performance off the ground, I don't think writing new music, as opposed to learning how to arrange music for small ensemble, would have occurred to me. 

Jonathan has sent an mp3 of the (terrific) performance that, in the fullness of time, I want to put to an iMovie, then upload to YouTube, then embed in the blog. 

V.S. Louisiana Sashay

Here's how things look for now. I may well go back and fine tune some of this, but it feels like it's working, and it's gotten to the point where I think it'll be better to take what's been done as the basis for what comes next rather than to keep adding new elements. 

These images are taken from the working file, but I've left out the alto flute staff to reduce clutter (and because I decided to do the piece first without it so it can stand as a duet), doubled the size of the notation to make it legible here on the blog, and tinkered with the layout for the same reason. My preferred format for hard copy scores is legal landscape with notation around 75% of default. That allows me so see whole sections of music like sentences in a book, as opposed to a narrow newspaper column.

Things start out with a harp solo which is answered by a flute solo. It's much easier to have one player start and the other(s) then join in than it is for everyone to start playing in synch right out of the gate. I hadn't fully realized this until now, but I think all of my ensemble pieces have a single player setting the tempo for others to join. There's also the idea of letting each voice be heard on it's own to set the aural table for the audience. 

The harp has a series chords laying out the basic sashay rhythm. The computer playback tempo is 108 for a quarter note. The chords are missing either thirds or fifths to give them that open sounding harmony I like so much and which should sound great on the harp. Only the last chord is an arpeggio so as to emphasize the rhythm. 

The flute solo generally follows the contours of the harp solo, but not quite - that mixing of the expected and the unexpected. Then another, briefer harp solo, and while it's still ringing from the last arpeggio, the flute comes in on a high C on a pickup and then the harp and flute play together with the same rhythm for three measures. I love high soaring melodies.

Then the flute breaks away doing flutey things with the harp playing simple octaves for a bit. One of the things I'm trying to do is avoid letting the harp slip out of the audience's attention because of its doing something repetitive. And in general I try to vary the textures of the sound as much as all the other elements involved. 

The flute motive in measure 21, 22 and 23 is the closest to mimicking a sashay as I've gotten.

Now the flute plays around with the little motive in measure 19

In measure 29 there's a bit of the unison rhythm again, then in 30 the harp breaks out into arpeggios, and they sort of take off on their own for a while. For now measure 35 begins a reprise of the opening harp solo and I'm thinking of having the flute join in to intensify what has already been heard once. I don't do sonata form style development, but I do like to create familiarity with various elements by bringing them back in different ways. 

Music/Mind Training

Many thanks to Pliable for sending along this link to a story on what the neuroscientists have discovered about the brains of some Tibetan Buddhist monks, each of whom had spent anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 hours in meditation before the testing.

. . . first, the monks exhibited a higher ratio of high frequency gamma brainwaves to slower alpha and beta waves during their resting baseline before the experiment began; and when the monks engaged in meditation, this ratio skyrocketed—up to 30 times stronger than that of the non-meditators. In fact, the gamma activity measured in some of the practitioners was the highest ever reported in a non-pathological context. Not only did this suggest that long-term mental training could alter brain activity, it also suggested that compassion might be something that could be cultivated. . . .

. . . In the brains of the meditators, they found larger volumes of gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex and the right hippocampus, areas thought to be implicated in emotion and response control. "It is likely that the observed larger hippocampal volumes may account for meditators' singular abilities and habits to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior," Luders writes.

These data points get at what I was trying to say in this post where I talked about some of the similarities between music training and mind training. If you're going to try to connect with and have an effect (that you want to have, not an unintended one) on audiences with your music making, you need to work on more than simple (no matter how advanced) technique. 

The complication for music makers is that you're not practicing feeling an emotion, but how to project it, which is not the same thing.

Tastemaker

Just want to pull this quote from this post by Pliable:

A number of tastemaker classical blogs picked the story up and ran with it, including Alex Ross via Twitter, Patty at Oboe Insight, James Primosch, Antoine Leboyer and Lyle Sanford.

Getting tagged on to the end of that sentence made my day. The blogosphere is a very interesting neighborhood. 

Cultural Wars

Just want to save this quote from Greg Sandow from this post:

In that essay, you'll find AC's passionate belief that art created in the high-culture realm aspires to transcendence, while things created in the realm of popular culture -- however powerful or affecting they might be -- don't have that aspiration. Thus high and popular culture exist in separate aesthetic realms, with the high-culture realm ranking higher in the all-important hierarchies of life.

He's talking about A C Douglas who's long been one of my regular reads. We'll see if ACD launches one of his salvos in response. Whether or not Greg has correctly stated ACD's position, though, this distinction plays right into a conversation I've been having with Jonathan West down in the comments to this post.

When Jonathan is playing Debussy on the horn and I'm playing Dixieland on the banjo, we're both making music, but in very different ways for very different audiences, and my sense is that figuring out that distinction will help me be a better musician as well as music therapist.

As a side note, I made a comment on Greg's post complimenting him for not falling into the trap so many bloggers do of listening and talking only with those they agree with and dismissing the rest.

Inhabiting Music

Jonathan West left the following comment down on this post:

Being good at sightreading means that when you have to learn a piece thoroughly, you can start from much further forward than you otherwise would. Being good at sightreading means that for relatively easy pieces, you can pay attention to balance, phrasing and expression even in the first rehearsal. Of course, it is possible to treat sightreading as an end in itself - for instance so that you are able to produce a decent performance in a concert even when you join an orchestra only for the final rehearsal on the afternoon of a concert. British professional orchestral musicians are famously good at this, partly because British orchestras are perpetually short of money and therefore rehearsal time. But even here, one can argue that the quality of sightreading makes for a concert which will be enjoyed more by the audience than it would have been otherwise. Of course, there is a degree of inner satisfaction at being able to memorise a piece, memorisation is a tour de force which greatly impresses audiences, and I agree entirely that not being tied to the need to keep the music in sight frees you up for more visual expression as part of the performance. There are occasions when this makes a lot of difference to a performance, and other occasions when it makes little difference. For instance, I doubt that you would find it worthwhile to memorise the horn parts for a band concert. While it might in principle be good to do so, the effort involved would be disproportionate to the effect achieved.

And that reminded me of what Jeffrey Agrell said sometime back in this post:

For some time now I have been convinced of the efficacy of doing a lot of practicing with the eyes closed (with the prominent exception of sight-reading…). In learning a new piece, chop it into small bits, and do 97% of your practicing on it eyes shut. Playing it from memory automatically forces you to a higher level. You have to get past the struggle stage, but you actually acquire facility in the chunk much quicker and better. With eyes open, you still are “processing” the visual material, which slows you down. Your attention is also on the ink, outside what is really happening, both kinesthetically (physically) and aurally, i.e. we’re not really feeling or hearing what is happening. The ink tells us zero about what we just played. By forcing yourself to learn it from memory, you are able to really listen to what is happen and feel the details of what is happening, making it also easier to make an adjustment to do it better the next time.

It's not an either or situation, but as a therapist I tend towards nurturing in clients that feeling Jeffrey is talking about, what I sometimes call "inhabiting the music and letting the music inhabit you". That kind of engagement with music making is where a lot of its therapeutic aspects begin. Once you get that going sight reading can be encouraged, but without that kind of engagement, making music isn't going to be enjoyable enough over the long term for the client to want to continue.

A couple of other points - 1) Jonathan grew up musical, so his experience of making music is very different than that of someone without those blessings of nature and nurture. As a rule, people that fortunate don't need a music therapist (unless they burn out). All music therapy really is is trying to help regular people get a glimpse of what comes naturally to folks like Jonathan. 2) I do memorize my horn parts in band, at least the exposed solos. As Jeffrey says, it's a great way to practice and feel the music as opposed to seeing notes. I do keep my eyes open in rehearsal though ;-)

Timepiece Performances

This past Thursday and Friday the St Clements Wind Ensemble performed at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Here's the set list:

                           PROGRAMME

Sonata in D K 381                   W A Mozart
                                                  arr Michael Round

Nonet Op. 31                            Louis Spohr

               - Interval 15 minutes -

Timepiece, for wind quintet     Lyle Sanford

Wind Quintet (1964)                 Ketil Hvoslef

Serenade No 2 in A,
Op 16                                       Johannes Brahms

Just looking at that induces euphoria and cognitive dissonance in me in about equal measure. 

Jonathan West shepherded the piece to performance and reports it got a good response both evenings. He also says the five players want to polish it up a bit and perform it again sometime, and that other players expressed interest in getting the score and parts to play themselves, both of which are about the best reviews possible for me.

Icing on the cake was hearing that they performed the piece standing, which is something Jeffrey Agrell and I went back and forth on a while back, agreeing that playing standing increases the chances of connecting with an audience. 

In the next month or so it will be two years that I've been keeping this blog. The ways blogging has connected me to the great, wide world keep surprising me. These performances of a piece I wrote 15 years ago would never have happened without the connection to Jonathan via this blog and his. That this is the new normal for youngsters now growing up astounds me.

It looks like there'll be a recording of the performance available on down the line. Maybe when I hear that I'll really believe this has happened. 

Timepiece ~ A Wind Quintet

(proposed program note for Timepiece)

I've been a Registered Music Therapist since 1980 and first got into composing by writing piano pieces for adult beginners more suitable for their larger hands and mature sensibilities than the children's pieces usually on offer. Then over the years I also began to write music for myself and friends to play, mostly involving flute, alto flute, cello and piano.

In 1994 a flute playing friend asked me to write a piece for the wind quintet she'd just joined and I jumped at the chance because that ensemble combines the intimate expressiveness of a small chamber group with such a powerful palette of tonal colors. The title derives from two of the three movements having unusual time signatures, which allows for creating fresh and innovative music while remaining fully in the tonal realm.

A late draft of Timepiece got a small public reading and was never heard again as some members of that quintet moved away and it never reformed. Last year on Jonathan West's horn blog I read of his interest in finding new music and got in touch. On getting a receptive response I sent him the parts to try out, leaving the final editing for live performance in his capable hands. Were it not for the St. Clements Wind Ensemble, this music would still just be some ones and zeros on my computer. I am immensely grateful to them for bringing it to life.

Lyle Sanford
Orange, Virginia

This very exciting. When Jonathan got in touch recently to say the SCWE had rehearsed the piece and decided to perform it, I felt then it was already a success, their liking it enough to keep working on it.

Were there no demands on my time and I could do whatever I wished, I'd spend a lot of time composing. There's nothing quite like creating new music. Always the first time I hear it performed it's a little like dreaming while awake, with my conscious mind getting hints of my unconscious mind encoded in the music. 

More on The Planets

Back a while ago I sent Pliable at On An Overgrown Path a CD of Kyle Gann's The Planets, being very curious as to what he'd think of it. He just got back from traveling and put up this post and Kyle has responded with this one. My previous posts on Kyle are here.

A lot to say about all this, but two things are at the fore. I'm very much on the fringe of both Kyle Gann's and Pliable's worlds, and their knowledge of music is way beyond mine. It's wonderfully validating that Pliable seems in agreement with me as to the importance of The Planets. Just to make another connection, I think what's so important about this music is that it so well meets the needs Greg Sandow blogs about.

The other thing is that the internet still amazes me. Here I am out in rural Virginia, just out the back door from James Madison's Montpelier, on dial-up, helping connect two of the biggest and best music bloggers out there. The geezer in me is floored.

Recorded Music

I keep coming back to the idea that the ability to listen to recorded music is the biggest change to the culture of music making, ever, with all sorts of recognized and unrecognized consequences. 

In this post, Kyle Gann talks about how much he likes recorded music, particularly his own. As usual over there, the comments are great.

In this post, Terry Teachout wonders whether second tier orchestras are needed in the age of the iPod.

In this post, ACD takes issue with Terry in his usual bracing style.

Mirror neurons, and the notion that live music is healthier than recorded, go unmentioned. Part of me thinks most music specialists, whatever the species, tend to go for the abstract elements of music and lose sense of the common touch elements of music making.

Gann on Composition (and blogging)

Kyle Gann has just put up this terrific post on composition. He draws parallels with blogging and says:

The impetus is transformed by the process. In a sense I had something to say and I will have said it, but more accurately, I will have found out by the end of this essay what I think. Which is the value, for me personally, of writing a blog - and would continue to be even were no one reading it.

This little snip resonates with my previous post.

The notes seem to be smarter than me. Thank goodness the purpose of the piece is not to demonstrate to the world how smart its composer is (which strikes me as being the case with some pieces I hear).

Here's the concluding paragraph:

The composer has something to learn from his or her own music just as everyone else does. And while we talk loosely about the composer "writing down the music he hears," I think we do more justice to the complexity and reciprocal value of artistic experience by admitting that the composer is just as subject to his or her materials as anyone else. All praise to the composition - but the composer should be humble.

UPDATE: The first comment under the linked post, by "mclaren" is a good summary of how the left and right brain work when listening to music.

Sandow Seminar

Greg Sandow is one of my "regular reads" and this post is a great example of why that is. His main concern is revitalizing the connection between society and "classical" music. As a music therapist I'm wishing him all success because I feel that on balance, the more people experience live music, the better off they are. 

The reason this post is a good example of what he's up to is that it's mostly written by commenters on his blog. He openly invites and encourages folks to share in the discussion. He's also very good at ignoring bad manners and focussing on the content of what people have to say rather than responding in kind. (This was more of an issue some time ago.) Few blogs have such a great community of commenters with such a wealth of ideas. 

I wanted save a link to this particular post for a couple of reasons. One of the comments is by Jeffrey Agrell, another of my "regular reads". He has a great list of ideas of how to enliven the presentation of music and enhance the connection between the performers and the audience. This aside of his really jumps out, though:

>>>The only ones who don't make it to the concerts are the other music faculty - almost none of them have ever attended one of our concerts (although they all have opinions about it...).<<<

So much of the problem is that many in the classical music establishment feel no need to explore new avenues. I guess the assumption is that what they're doing has worked for generations so there's no need for them to even think about changing. It's a truism in the psych world that you can't fix a problem if you're busy denying it exists.

It was also through this post of Greg's that I found the blog of Erica Sipes. She's a classically trained pianist and cellist. The subhead of her blog says:

MY PASSION IS TO HELP OTHERS IN THE COMMUNITY, YOUNG, OLD, AND EVERYONE IN BETWEEN, FIND RELEVANCE AND JOY IN LEARNING, PERFORMING OR LISTENING TO CLASSICAL MUSIC.

Whereas I'm working more from the angle of helping amateur players (albeit some at a professional skill level) get together in various small ensembles and she's working mostly, though not exclusively, at a professional level, I was delighted to see someone else thinking that part of the answer to what Greg is working on has to be revitalizing live music on the grass roots level.

Pops

Terry Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, is now out and getting rave reviews. Here's a quote of Armstrong's cited in the NYT review I really like:

“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.” This belief in music as a deeply felt and personal expression is one reason Armstrong avoided using musical terminology when speaking about his work and it’s one reason he said that he disliked bop (like other cooler, more modern forms of jazz), complaining that it “doesn’t come from the heart,” that it’s “all just flash.”

Besides writing books, helping create operas, having a regular column or two and keeping up a terrific blog, TT has been good enough to respond to e-mails I've sent him over the years. I really like the way he writes, but am amazed by his productivity.