Embodied Remodeling

I've been going through a remodel and subsequent rearranging of lots of the physical components of my everyday life. As I've been using various rooms in new ways, and having regular routines disrupted, new ways of conceptualizing aspects of the music materials project keep floating up. 

The notion of embodied cognition holds that for even our most abstract cognitive processes, there are physical cognates buried within. My suspicion is that the physical rearrangement of my daily life is triggering cognitive rearrangements of various projects at hand.

Pete Seeger Banjo

I've mentioned from time to time playing a banjo and here's a photo of the one I use. It's an old Gibson I got second hand back in 1967 when a freshman at Duke. It's called a "Pete Seeger" model (or "folk banjo" or "long neck banjo") because he's the one that popularized this particular model.

Where the capo is on the third fret is where regular banjos stop. The extra three frets allow for longer strings and a deeper sound when the capo isn't used, which is great for baritones. It's also the case that to make the instrument strong enough for that extra string length, it weighs a ton, but that extra weight adds heft to the sound as well. 

Currently the fifth string has been removed because I'm playing it as if it were a tenor banjo with the Dixieland group and the Kenwood Players. Having that drone just doesn't work with all the jazz chords and the chamber wind ensemble.

One of the glorious things about a banjo is that the bridge is held in place by simple string tension, so it can be placed exactly right so that the first harmonic matches the 12th fret. That, and the fact the bridge is sitting on a drum head that's set in motion when the strings vibrate, is why the banjo "rings".

Of all the instruments I play, the banjo pulls people in the most. There's just something about it people love to hear and to come up and talk about.

New Guitar

I hadn't looked at new guitars for something like 25 years, but here lately have been wanting a steel string acoustic with a microphone inside with the jack for it where the shoulder strap attaches to the back of the instrument.

Turns out there's a new design that wasn't available all those years ago. While built for steel strings (rather than nylon), the strings are further apart than standard steel string guitars, though not quite as far apart as they are on most nylon string classical guitars. The fretboard is also much flatter than a standard steel string, though not perfectly flat like nylon string guitars. In both stores I went to, these newly designed guitars were said to be for "progressive" players.

It's a joy to play and has a robust, bright sound, even without using the onboard mic, but when it's plugged into the sound system, the sound is just about perfect for accompanying the Kenwood Players without having to work so hard for volume.

Because of the spacing of the strings, strumming is a little different and different effects can be had. It really is a hybrid of the classical nylon and the American steel string, and plays in its own way.

Daniel Lanois

Daniel Lanois helped Bob Dylan create Oh, Mercy. They recorded it in a house in the Garden District of New Orleans and captured some of the vibe of The Crescent City. Whenever I listen to the album, it always reminds me of an Allman Brothers concert back in the early 70's I went to down in some warehouse near the river just off the amazingly named Tchopitoulas Street. The music was powerful and energetic, but there were these amazing moments of relaxation, lazy blues licks floating in the humid night. 

The main thing about Oh, Mercy for me, though, is that it's a touchstone for how you produce a CD. There's an amazing sound palette Lanois brings to bear in the arrangements that pull performances out of Dylan that are among my favorites. 

Lanois also writes and performs his own music. This video is of a song he wrote called "The Maker", as performed by Emmylou Harris and Spyboy. He's expanding and playing with the song form just like he does with CD production.

Conducting in a Trance

In this post Joe Horowitz is talking about Leopold Stowkowski. 

A Philadelphia story told by Abram Chasins captures the Stokowski conundrum.
Before a performance, he would secrete himself in his dressing room and do deep-breathing exercises. "If someone said 'Good evening' or merely brushed past him when he was on his way to the stage, he would wheel around and return to his room to restore his former degree of concentration." This could delay a concert by as long as 15 minutes. The gesture was as practical as it was theatrical: Stokowski conducted in a trance.

In Praise of Kyle Gann

Outside of a few favorite Bob Dylan albums and the two or three close listenings to recordings of the performances I give to each of the performances of the  Kenwood Players, I very rarely listen to CD's. My recently purchased Kyle Gann's The Planets is a major exception. In the past several weeks I've listened to it over and over again.

Kyle Gann is some kind of savant masquerading as a musicologist, composer, critic and blogger. I've been following his blog PostClassic for years. He has an astonishing gift for talking about music in such a way as to expand one's notions of what music is and can be. 

He's a big believer in not talking about specific music unless you can hear it, so always has a downloadable example of whatever he's talking about. I'm on rural dial-up, but always take the time to download his examples. 

He's recently come out with a CD release of something he's been working on for years, The Planets for the Relâche ensemble. Turns out he can write music as well as writing about it.

One reason I don't listen to CD's is that after several listenings, most loose their freshness. A frequent finding of the brain researchers is that we want music to go in unexpected directions at least some of the time, and after several listenings to any particular CD, we remember what is does and where it goes, so it becomes less interesting over time. 

The Planets has an accessible surface, but has deep complexity right below the surface, so that upon repeated listenings, there is (so far) always more to be heard, which is very refreshing.

Here is a link to the CD, with links to brief samples. There's lots to say about it, but so far, for me, it's that "new music" I kept seeking but not finding back in the 60's, 70's and 80's. There are all kinds of ways for music to be new and fresh without a lot of the épater le bourgeoisie behaviour that contaminated so much of the music back then. 

Timbre

Timbre and tone are closely related, but not usually thought of as the same thing. When using the word "tone", we're usually referring to a specific instrument and/or player. "Timbre" (which is italicized because it's taken from the French) usually refers to the characteristic sound of a family of instruments, and then further to individual members of a particular family. 

There are the strings, which can be bowed orchestral instruments or guitar, banjos, and mandolins and such which are plucked or strummed. There are the brass instruments, some of which have conical tubing and others with cylindrical tubing. There are the single reeds - the clarinets and the saxophones - and the double reeds - the oboe and bassoon. The percussion family has a wide range of individual members with unique sounds.

One way we identify an instrument's timbre is by what audio people call the envelope of the sound (how the sound starts, sustains and then ends). Strings, brass, reeds and percussion have characteristic ways of creating their sounds that our brains process quickly and easily.

Another way we identify an instrument's timbre is by the nature of the vibration creating the sound. In this animation I linked down in the post on tone, you can add or subtract individual parts of the vibration and thereby change the overall vibration.

We use this way of changing the components of a vibration to alter its sound all the time when we speak. If you sing a long held note on a particular pitch and go through all the vowel sounds while doing so, it's your making subtle changes to the various components of the overall vibration creating the sound that makes "a's" sound like "a's" and "u's" sound like "u's". 

The specifics of what's going on with the components of the overall vibration are explained by something called the harmonic series, which gets pretty mathematical pretty quickly. At some point in the materials, the harmonic series needs to be explained for those interested. My hope is, though, to help people understand the broad outlines of all this well enough to inform their music making, without inducing math phobia.

Music Makers & Brain Function

In just about all of the articles about music and the brain, one of the points being made is that music engages and coordinates activities in multiple areas of the brain. If there is a human activity that uses as many, or more, areas of the brain, it hasn't been mentioned in any of the articles.

One of the underlying principles of music therapy is working to find the best way for each individual to go about learning how to make music and then how to improve their music making. Individuals are going to have variations of strengths and weaknesses (and individual characteristics) in the various areas of the brain involved.

 

The more we learn about these different areas and their involvement in making music, I think it will help us better tailor learning strategies for individuals. The better, and more complete, the evaluation of the client, the more effective the therapist can be. We need to improve our working understanding of what the different parts of the brain are up to and how that plays out in individuals.

Horn Diary

In the past week four horns from the Charlottesville Municipal Band sat in with our community band for two rehearsals and two concerts. I continued to play 2nd horn and sat with 1 and 2 on my left and 3 and 4 on my right. It was even more fun than the last time this happened. 

For one thing, having an idea of what to expect left me in a better position for more critical listening. Before when this happened, experiencing for the first time what being in a horn section sounds like had such a powerful effect, details got lost. I also had more opportunities for conversation and all four of the players were gracious and very informative in their responses, and were very good about letting me look closely at their instruments and mouthpieces.

My main takeaway was just how good they are. I was extremely knowledgeable about the music, having struggled for two months trying to play my part close to adequately. On their first read through they didn't make any real errors, but some of the bits I'd had trouble with weren't as smooth as the rest. What amazed me was how quickly they improved. We went through the program four times, and every time their playing was significantly improved and more musical. For them, the technique is there, it's just a question of mentally inhabiting what the score and the conductor want. Made me realize just how rudimentary my technique is.

What I enjoyed most was hearing them interpret all the expression and articulation markings in the music. Having grown up playing piano I don't fully appreciate what those marks can mean, especially on the horn. I kept having the thought that they were sculpting shapes in the sound of the music. So much of music making is the mental space you have of what's possible, and anything you can do to increase that is beneficial. I may not be able to be as expressive as they are, but hearing what they did shows me the way.

Something else that I kept noticing was a quality to the tone that I'd missed previously. I could hear 1 and 2 a lot better, and 1 had a new instrument and that might be part of it. Words are going to fail me here, but what I heard from time to time was that point midway between brassy and mellow, an amazing urgency within glorious tone. I had an involuntary emotional response to the "call" of the horn. I can't ever remember having such a visceral response to a musical tone quality. 

They all had mouthpieces with nicely rounded rims - none approaching the thinness of the Farkas VDC. One player loaned me a Schilke 31, which is close to a 32, which I think I'm going to get one of. Big cup, large diameter opening, and comfortable rim. 

It still amazes me how unsettled the horn is as a physical instrument. They all had different wraps and ways of draining condensation.

I've seen occasional mentions of a sort of stereotype for horn players - very nice people with a bit of eccentricity thrown in. These four players certainly have the being nice people aspect down - they drove something like a total of 200 miles without remuneration to play with a group far less accomplished than their band. They could not have been more helpful to me with my questions. As to the eccentricity, if that is the case, for me that's not a bug but a feature, being a somewhat biased observer on that issue.

Horn Diary

The intonation issues I wrote about in the last entry had several causes.

One was the position of the right hand. I had decided it was too far out of the horn and ended up having it too far in. To my ear it seems that having the hand too far in affects intonation of the different valve positions differently.

That problem was exacerbated by not using my embouchure well for that final tweak on intonation. A year ago, when I began incorporating Balanced Embouchure principles in my horn practice, I also switched to a different mouthpiece with a thicker, more pillowy, rim. ( A Farkas/Holton MC instead of a VDC.) I was less happy with the tone, as it was brassier, but that's what the band directors seem to want, and it made playing easier.

What it also did was to increase the amount of lips being pressed against the mouthpiece and unable to have an effect on the intonation.

At the same time, I also pushed all the tuning slides all the way in, thinking to reset them over time, but didn't, because just pulling out the primary slides of each horn worked.

So now I'm back to the VDC mouthpiece, all tuning slides pulled out various lengths, and my right hand seems to be in closer to the right place.

For the first time, here in the past six months I can hit the high F with no problem. Before that I could occasionally, but never with both good tone and intonation. The F# and G above that are passable most of the time and the Ab and A are like the F used to be. 

I seem to be in the minority on preferring the less brassy tone of the VDC mouthpiece, but have decided to go with it most of the time as I so much prefer it.

Also have switched back to the normal sitting position for playing the horn. The other one was a bit easier on the back muscles and made it easier to play with the volume needed to make the one horn sound more like a section. Our new director is really working on the band playing with less volume overall, which I'm realizing is one way to improve the tone quality of the group.

Recently my cello and fret-less bass friend Andy was here for an afternoon of music and we recorded some things on the Sony. I was just as close to it as he was, but with the bell pointed away, and even though he was unamplified, the cello is louder in the mix that the horn. With the flute the balance was much better.

Beginner's Mind

Over on the Facebook group for "The Midlife Horn Player", one of the members recently talked about dialing back his practice time from over an hour a day, every day, for five years - to just once a week, and he says his tone has improved nicely. 

This reminded me of a phenomenon I've repeatedly experienced playing various instruments. Because I can't keep up with them all at all times, sometimes there'll be months of inactivity on one before picking it up again. It's often the case that that first playing after a break makes me wonder how I ever gave it up, as the music flows easily and with good tone, sort of a "first, fine careless rapture". Then subsequently all the technique issues creep on back.

Shoshin is a concept in Zen Buddhism that means "beginner's mind". In Wikipedia there's this quote from a master:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

Wikipedia also says this concept ties into authenticity:

The term can be used for any thing or person who is perfectly genuine.

Routine can be immensely helpful in your practice of music making, but falling into mindless ruts is the dark side of that.

More on Tone

Back down on this post on tone, Jonathan West made some excellent comments and then went on to post three times at his blog on tone here, here, and here. 

It's very validating that such a high level player agrees with the notion of the centrality of tone to your music making. A number of other things Jonathan says are grist for future posts. For now, though, a few points.

In lots of ways, making music is an extension and an elaboration of your voice. Just as the tone of your voice conveys the emotional content of your speech, tone is a primal element of your music making. 

One aspect of Jeff Smiley's BE method of helping people find their best embouchure is having them exaggerate various muscle movements so as to better be able to find that nicely working balanced spot between the extremes. Trying to create the infinite variety of your voice tones on your instrument, with lots of exaggeration thrown in, can help you expand the envelope of tonal possibilities and give you an idea of which sorts of tone you'd like to develop to better make the music you want to make.

A great frustration of mine in community band over the years has been that pretty much all the pieces we've worked on tend to sound at least as much like etudes as they do enjoyable music. They offer all sorts of opportunities to work on rhythm, intonation, dynamics and articulation, but tone quality gets left off the list. 

photo - first warm toned sunset we've had in a while. Taken with the new camera.

A Year of The Balanced Embouchure

It's been just over a year now that I got in touch with Jeff Smiley, the trumpet playing originator of The Balanced Embouchure, and he put me in touch with Valerie Wells, who handles the horn side of things. I bought the book and have blogged about it over time (with the tag BE). 

I continue to think Jeff's approach to helping people find their best embouchure is the best approach to music making I've ever come across. From time to time you'll see folks on the web talking about what they think it is, but you can tell they haven't read the book, so seize on a detail without appreciating the full range and scope of the method.

It's easy to understand why this is, because even though I've read the book from cover to cover twice now, whenever I flip through I'll come across a passage that I'd forgotten about or hadn't fully appreciated at the time of reading. Often this is because the passage is so common sensical I assume I already "know" it. Music making includes all kinds of large and small scale mental and physical activities, and knowing about them all isn't enough. You need to be aware of them in real time as you play as well, until they become second nature.

Jeff's book is a terrific aid for gaining those necessary awarenesses, but his method is to help you achieve them in the best way that works for you, not to instill "the right way". As a therapist, I see the way you walk the path towards greater abilities of making music to be more important than the abilities themselves. I think it's also the case that how you go about developing your music making abilities shapes those abilities for better or worse. 

Since I've been working with Jeff's method, my horn playing has been transformed in some deep sense. I've got better range and endurance, but the main thing is I now have a much better "feel" of what's going on with my embouchure. A big part of Balanced Embouchure is how the exercises give your musculature a chance to find its best way of working, a lot of which is happening below the conscious level, which is why it's hard to describe and is so often misunderstood.

For those of us who aren't natural players, Jeff's method helps us find our way towards how we would play if we were natural players. It's that approach of helping people find their own way towards natural music making I'd like to expand into more general aspects of making music.

Music Therapy Roundup

This article in the LA times is a nice roundup of where music therapy stands today. Nothing in it that hasn't been blogged here in greater detail. Just want to cite it as part of the seeming acceleration of music therapy's acceptance as a valid therapeutic modality. 

The one odd thing about the article is the use of the term "registered music therapists", a term which is being dropped in favor of an acronym indicating "board certified" by the national organization. I've stuck with the "registered music therapist" term because that's the credential I worked so hard to get back in 1980. That credential was sufficient to get the contract to work in the public schools in Texas back in the 80's and early 90's. Today it wouldn't be.

Also, my current project of trying to come up with materials for regular folks to use to increase and expand their music making is something of an outlier in the field. Most music therapists are working with clients with some sort of clinical diagnosis. My sense is that there's an unserved population somewhere between the clients of music therapists and the students in music education.

Closed Eye Practicing

Down in the comments of this post, Jeffrey Agrell mentions the benefits of practicing with one's eyes closed. I've often done this working on guitar and my voice (and to pull down all the verses of long Dylan songs), but had never really tried it with the flute or horn. One reason for that being not having lots of stuff memorized for either instrument.

Just now, though, I was working on a flute part for the Presbyterian Ensemble. It has several high E naturals above high C, and those high E's are about the hardest note to play well on a flute. When you use the regular fingering the pitch is very sharp, so I've been trying the trill fingering, which is to finger an A below high C and play the harmonic a fifth above. While easier to play in tune, it's harder to get the note to speak, and I've been struggling with it in this particular piece for several weeks.

The short passages where the high E's appear are easy to memorize and play with my eyes closed. Doing so made it much easier to coordinate the fingering of the keys and the adjustments of the embouchure. With the eyes closed it's much easier to be more fully aware of all the proprioceptive feedback. 

With just this single practice technique added to the mix, that high E is popping out clearly and in tune (mostly).

Music for Parkinson's Disease

This article discusses using music therapy to help people with Parkinson's disease, and then goes on to talk about the importance of music in early education.

. . .“The research points over and over again to that when we use our muscles in a rhythmic fashion, we get stronger muscle contractions. We get more organized and coordinated muscle contractions,” Johnson said. “So, therefore, they can move in smoother trajectory patterns in a more organized, coordinated fashion.”. . .

. . . Those in the field of biomedical research in music contend that much like math and language, music should be a core curriculum due to its benefits for the human brain. . . “Not everybody who has to take math in high school or junior high school ends up becoming a mathematician, but we would still probably all agree that it is good for the brain to learn, to train, to think in numbers and quantities. It’s the same thing with music,” he said.

Researchers' Quotes

This article is covering the same information released recently that was covered in this post, but there are some quotes in it not in the other article. (Emphasis mine)

. . . "Musical experience improves abilities important in daily life," she said. "Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice," Kraus said. . . 

. . . "People's hearing systems are fine-tuned by the experiences they've had with sound throughout their lives. Music training is not only beneficial for processing music stimuli. We've found that years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for language and emotion," Kraus said in prepared remarks. . . . 

 . . .  Kraus said "the very responses that are enhanced in musicians are deficient in clinical populations such as children with developmental dyslexia and autism.". . . 

. . . "Nouns and verbs are very different from tones and chords and harmony, but the parts of the brain that process them overlap," he said.

Brain Waves & Sound Waves

Here's another review of The Music Instinct which has a bit of info I'd not seen before. 

Recent studies by Professor Nina Kraus, a neuroscientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have shown that the electrical activity inside the brain while listening to music closely matches the physical properties of sound waves.

Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.

In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognizable.

She said: "When we play the brainwaves back as sound, although they don't sound exactly like the song, it is pretty similar. It shows that the brain matches the physical properties of sound very closely."

UPDATE - Here's a post on some people turning brain waves into sound waves

Singing "Rewires" Damaged Brain

Here's an article from the BBC on the use of singing to help stroke victims regain speech. Nothing particularly new, just the growing awareness of the benefits of music therapy.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech. If a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead. Most of the connections between brain areas that control movement and those that control hearing are on the left side of the brain. "But there's a sort of corresponding hole on the right side," said Professor Schlaug. "For some reason, it's not as endowed with these connections, so the left side is used much more in speech. "If you damage the left side, the right side has trouble [fulfilling that role]." But as patients learn to put their words to melodies, the crucial connections form on the right side of their brains. 

Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade.

Future Research

This article is an overview of what the folks at McGill University, a (the?) hotbed of music and brain research are up to and where they're headed. I love the last quote:

"Usually in our respective fields, we design a specific experiment to answer a specific question. But our philosophy in creating BRAMS was 'if we build it, they will come.' There are probably questions that the lab will help to answer that we haven't even thought of yet."

Embodied Cognition

Here's a post over on Boing Boing talking about how people who've botoxed their frowns away process emotions differently. This quote from the end of the post is a nice encapsulation of the idea of embodied cognition, which my intuition tells me has to be in some way connected to gesture in music making.

In theoretical terms, the finding supports a psychological hypothesis called "embodied cognition," says Glenberg, now a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. "The idea of embodied cognition is that all our cognitive processes, even those that have been thought of as very abstract, are actually rooted in basic bodily processes of perception, action and emotion."

Temple Grandin

This post is a bit off topic as it's not about music, but if you're a music therapist working with the emotionally disturbed, chances are you're going to run into folks on the autistic spectrum. Here is a very good interview with Temple Grandin. She's done more than anyone else to help us see the world as those with autism see it. Oliver Sacks was the first to write about her and used her phrase, "an anthropologist on Mars" as a title. She went on to write numerous books herself. I read one of the first when it came out many years ago and was astonished by how well she describes autism from the inside. 

One thing she talks about is how she thinks in pictures. Here are the closing paragraphs of the interview:

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

How about meaning, I ask. What's the picture for that word? "Ok, now I'm seeing a mother saying your book helped my kid go to college—that's meaning. Or my kid got a job because of one of your lectures—that's meaning. Or a rancher comes up and says that piece of equipment works really well—that's meaning. Concrete, real stuff. On. The. Ground."

The Music Instinct

Here's a review of a new book out called The Music Instinct by Philip Ball. From what I can tell by the various reviews I've seen, it doesn't contain anything particularly new, but does a good job of presenting an overview of what all the new research is finding. Here are a few snips for the review:

. . . Listening to any kind of music, however, appears to be good for us in the neurological, if not the aesthetic, sense. Studies have found that music lights up not just particular parts of the brain, as in the case of language and other cultural activities, but all of the brain. . .

. . . “When you think about it, it isn’t surprising,” says Ball. “In fact, it’s probably why we listen to music. It engages the emotions, the intellect, language processing centres, and obviously some music engages the body as well. It’s a gymnasium for the mind.” . . .

. . .  “One of the interesting things is that musical training produces an enhancement in the corpus callosum – that’s the bit of the brain that communicates between hemispheres,” says Ball. “I get a bit tired of the popular idea we have of ‘left brain and right brain’ – and I like the fact that music subverts that, because it‘s using both integrated together. It seems that in musicians the two are, literally, more firmly welded together.” . . . 

. . . It has to do with the instantaneous nature of certain musical effects on our brains. . .  “If you look at what’s going on in the brain at that point,” says Ball, “the sensory inputs take a short cut to our emotional centres. And there are good evolutionary reasons that should be so. There have been times in the past where we’ve had to respond at a gut level – straight away, before we have time to really think about what it is that we’re hearing.” . . . 

. . . “But the main thing I wanted to stress is how important music is in the education of the brain, and in education generally. It’s so important for the development of the brain itself, and for the development of sociality, and because it gives us this rich neurological experience. What’s clear from these studies is that music has so many benefits that it needs to be a core part of the educational curriculum – and not an optional extra.” . . .

Educators' Apotheosis

This post of Greg Sandow's reinforces my notion that there's something out of balance in the music educator's world view. I'm going to paste in some snips that give an idea of what he's saying, but this really is one worth reading all the way through. He's talking about two performances had expected to enjoy.

. . . And the results were dismaying. What struck me first was the often perfect execution -- the fine detail, the glowing intonation, the precise ensemble. And I realized, as I listened, that execution ranks very high, among young musicians, as a goal in performance. It has to. Because without it, musicians can't make careers. . . 

. . . I've played, for instance, a Jussi Bjorling recital from the 1950s, released on a CD called Bjorling Rediscovered . . . When I play this, I hear Bjorling's excitement, and his authenticity. My students hear that, by their standards, he's not together with his accompanist. I, too, can hear that this is true, but it doesn't bother me. It bothers the students so much that they don't care about much else. . . 

. . . But what I heard Sunday night from the East Coast Chamber Orchestra was execution coming first, taken so much for granted that nobody, I'm sure, even realized that it came first. And then, as I heard things, expression got added afterward, conceptually, at least (I'm not saying that things happened literally in that order). . . 

. . .  As a result, all the pieces sounded the same. The tone didn't very, the color didn't vary. It was as if the musicians didn't know what the music really was for -- why it had been written, what it felt like to the composer, what it felt like to the composer's original audience, or what it should mean to us now. It was, in some way, only abstractly beautiful, and the emotions applied to it were, similarly, abstract. 

Music and Humor

As an undergraduate back in the 60's taking a course in abnormal psychology I needed a question to study as a project. Being curious as to what exactly laughter and humor were all about, I chose that, only to discover nobody really had much of a clue. The most recent writing on the subject was by Henri Bergson, who was something of a contemporary and an influence on Marcel Proust. There were no modern empirical data to be found.

Turns out the new brain imaging is finally coming up with answers, as outlined in this article which I found via Arts and Letters Daily.

It also turns out music and humor trigger some of the same areas of the brain.

Examining one particular part of the limbic system - the ventral striatum - was especially revealing, as its level of activity corresponded with the perceived funniness of a joke. "It's the same region that is involved in many different types of reward, from drugs, to sex and our favourite music," says Mobbs, now at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK. "Humour thus taps into basic rewards systems that are important to our survival."

Another interesting bit the research has uncovered is how we're all wired differently for humor, much as I suspect we are for our reactions to music.

No two brains are the same, however, and how these differences are reflected in our sense of humour is the subject of much research. Men and women, for example, seem to process jokes slightly differently. . . . Perhaps unsurprisingly, personality also appears to play a key role in humour. Mobbs has shown that people who are classed as extrovert and emotionally stable have increased activity in reward areas of the brain during exposure to funny stimuli. Neurotic people, in contrast, have less of a reward response compared with the average person.

Tone

Organ and electric keyboard players select what tone they want by pulling stops or pushing buttons and then by depressing keys that tone is turned on and off for various pitches. How they go about depressing the keys has no effect on the tone quality. For just about everybody else making music, how they physically go about playing has a lot to do with the quality of the tones they create.

To my mind, your tone is the most primal aspect of your music making. It's how whatever you have to say musically is made manifest in sound. If you play in perfect rhythm with perfect intonation and get all the articulations right, but with a tone that is off-putting, your music will be off-putting as well. In some ways it's similar to the way we tend to form opinions about people by the sounds of their voices.

Good instruments have better tone than not so good instruments, but a good player can usually make a poor instrument sound pretty good, and a poor player can be unable to get good tone out of a great instrument. 

Musical sounds are very complex, and one way of thinking about good tone is that it is a sound which is in tune with itself. A vibrating string or air column is vibrating in many different ways at the same time as the simple animation at this link begins to show. In the real world things are much more complicated as this slow motion video of a bowed string illustrates. It's not humanly possible to physically create a vibration as perfect as the one in the animation, but vibrations creating beautiful tone are closer to that end of the spectrum than the various squeaks, honks and hisses at the other end.

Different tone qualities are called for in different styles of music, and there can be various opinions as to what kind of tone is called for when. All I want to stake out in this post is the fundamental importance of tone in music making and to have this general definition to build on in future posts

Sense of Entitlement

When I worked with emotionally disturbed children and adolescents in the public schools in San Antonio, there was a basic agreement with each student. Their participation in music was completely voluntary on their part. If they chose to participate (which 100% did), my job was to find a way for them to successfully join the music making and their job was to behave with a modicum of good manners, i.e. respect for everyone else in the group. Additionally, though it wasn't a requirement, they helped me set up and break down equipment and get it to and from my car (I worked in various classrooms at various schools over the course of a day). 

In community band there are lots of folks who feel entitled to behave less well than those students in San Antonio. All the directors have asked we not talk during rehearsals, and usually someone is muttering to their neighbor in less than a minute. We use the high school band room and have been asked to leave it as we found it, but lots of people just get up and leave without putting their stand and chair back as it was. For concerts, all the equipment needs to be moved to and from the stage, but there are some members who consistently time their arrival to be after the heavy lifting and who leave before everything is back in place. There are even members who can stand around watching while the band director (always a volunteer) does heavy lifting.

I find this behavior, and the fact it seems to be accepted by all, astonishing. Apparently, by not having participated in high school band I missed some crucial acculturation. The other thing is that as a therapist I'm much more attuned to behaviors than most, but still. I mentioned the talking thing to a cousin who grew up here in the county with me and she was shocked people would act that way.

Control Issues vs. Musical Issues

I often feel like a stranger in a strange land in community concert band. My background as a therapist combined with my not having previously experienced band behaviors often sets me to wondering why things are being done the way both the directors and the members accept as perfectly normal.

What triggers this feeling the most is how directors can turn musical issues into control issues. Sometimes when an individual or section or the band as a whole is not playing something correctly, the director addresses the issue (in voice tone and content) as if the players are misbehaving and need a little of the drill sergeant approach. In some cases it's obvious to me the players don't understand what's wanted and a simple explanation would suffice. In other cases it seems obvious to me the material is too difficult for some of the players and being heavy handed isn't really going to help. Everybody else in the band seems to accept this as normal.

As a therapist I'd prefer explanations of the musical issues and what technique is needed. And if something seems too difficult for the band, present it as a choice. If the group wants to work hard to make something work we can keep at it. If not, we could shift to something more appropriate to the skill levels. Treating adults volunteering to play in a community band as if they were willful children seems odd to me. But again, since everyone else was in a high school band, it's all seen as normal because that apparently the way it's always been.

Elizabethan Music & The Beatles

Here's the transcript of an interview with Tod Machover, one of the heavy hitters at MIT behind the new ways of making music via the electronic gaming portal. Renaissance music has always been a great favorite of mine, more so than a lot of the classical canon. 

But strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I’m exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600’s. And this is music that has attracted me for years, probably ever since I was in high school. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it’s a little bit like the Beatles. It has – I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s English, England has had a lot of really bad periods of music, but it’s had several amazing periods where they’ve found an incredible balance, not just between music that’s a rather complex and also pretty direct. Like the Beatles.

Everybody likes it because the tunes are memorable, I mean, any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away. But if you look at the orchestration and the way the voices blend, and the way the instruments are used, and if you listen carefully to subsidiary voices which are not the main baseline to the main harmony, it’s very, very – I don’t know if complex is the word, but it’s very, very rich; much more than most pop music. So, it’s managed to combine complexity and simplicity in a very special way. And I think it took influences from all around the world. England’s a little isolated, so when it clicks – and Tudor and Elizabethan music like that. It’s extremely calming. I mean, it always takes me to another place, it’s also very, very stable and simple at the same time, you know, there are these melodic lines that do the craziest things. Much more interesting than what people were doing in other countries. And it’s also harmonic. The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans. So, you had these crazy lines colliding against each other whether it’s string music or vocal music. And at the same time, the beautiful chord progressions that are very modern in a lot of ways.

Clientele

The different populations educators and therapists work with have a lot to do with the contrasts between the two. Educators usually have a self selected group that includes people with at least good motivation, and probably some experience as well. It's often the case that educators further winnow that group down (sometimes fairly ruthlessly) to people they choose to work with. And at higher levels, of course, access is by audition only. This creates a closed group that can be taken further and faster than an open admission group.

A possible downside to the closed group is that in exchange for the privilege of admission, members can be subjected to what in other contexts would be viewed as verbal abuse. Just as in an abusive marriage, the person receiving the abuse can elect to stay in the relationship because the pluses outweigh the minuses. The music world abounds in anecdotes of tyrannical teachers and conductors who create tremendously effective ensembles, and whose members share war stories of the abuse and how it was all worth it for the magnificent performances.

A music therapist takes all comers and tries to nurture whatever abilities the client has, helping them experience the joys and benefits of making music. This doesn't mean there's no structure to the process and anything goes, it's just that the well being of the client trumps any particular musical goal. 

Ashley and Ritual

In this post over on Kyle Gann's blog, he pastes in a long passage written by Robert Ashley. Here's a section of that passage:

We have lost the idea of the rituals that remind the people who come that what is happening is only a small part, a "surfacing" of the continuing musicality of everyday life.

Actually, those rituals do not exist, except in television and probably in sports events. Everybody plays baseball or football or basketball or soccer or hockey (or wishes they did or thinks they do) so the game is only a "version" of what is part of your life. You are emotionally in it. That is what I mean by ritual. Everybody does not go around singing Mahler or Ives or Feldman or Palestrina. The music is foreign to you. Interesting, maybe, but foreign, like the gamelan. You are not in it.

The whole point of my project of creating musical materials "for the rest of us" is to enable folks to play music just like the sports Ashley mentions. Right now, most music available is for particular instruments, in particular keys, with particular technique requirements. If music making continues on its current path of more and more specialization, with more and more people having zero experience of making music for themselves, it seems to me a lot will be lost to society at large, and that professional music making might become an increasingly isolated endeavor.

Music Educators

Joining my local community band at age 55 has been my very first exposure to the concert band experience and to what music educators are up to in directing them. My participation has helped me have a fuller appreciation of the differences between music education and music therapy. As I mull possible posts delineating the two, I find myself slipping into framing the issue as if music therapy were better than music education. I know that's not the case, so before saying anything else, want to talk about music education on its own.

For one thing, I simply cannot imagine on a daily basis walking into a room full of dozens of adolescents with noise makers in their hands. Granted, my background includes dealing with emotionally disturbed adolescents both as an attendant/group leader and as a music therapist, and one assumes "normal" adolescents don't present as many behavior problems. But still, my hat is off to anyone undertaking such a daunting task.

Music educators also have to be familiar with all the instruments and how to play them and their myriad idiosyncrasies, along with being able to transpose all kinds of stuff in their head and in general having what I call "theory mind". It's all way beyond me. I was amazed to discover that horn players are expected to be able to transpose in all sorts of ways when sight reading. If I were to devote myself to that and no other musical tasks I might become barely proficient, but it's not playing to my strengths, to say the least.

Music educators also have to be concerned with preparing their best students to be ready for the next level of achievement. If this were not the case, the feeder system would break down and we wouldn't have good numbers of people ready to play at the high level needed for professional organizations. 

On a more general level, educators are tasked with preserving the canon and the playing styles needed to present it as it's meant to be played. Without that, entropy would set in and all kinds of beauty and technique would be lost. There's more to making music than the printed page and music educators have the mission of preserving that which is beyond notation, yet so very crucial to successful presentation of the canon (whether Beethoven or Sousa).

Time Movement

There is a post on this article over on Boing Boing. It's not directly about music, but it's intriguing. Turns out that if you're thinking about the future you tend to lean forward, and that if you're thinking of the past you tend to lean backward.

These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action.

"The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.

Adventures in Music

Here's a link to a series of posts over on Boing Boing, all of which have videos of various kinds of musical performances. The videos were selected and posted by "Guestblogger"  Stephen Worth, the Director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, a museum, library and digital archive devoted to the use of professional artists and students. 

In the concluding post of the series, Worth says, "I'm constantly amazed at the "pop culture amnesia" that seems to be an epidemic today. People have forgotten some of the greatest achievements of mankind... and what have they replaced it with? Infomercials, current events clowns, celebrity gossip and patently phony reality shows."

Return to Macedonia

Yesterday the Kenwood Players went back to Macedonia to provide music for a service conducted by one of our tuba players who is a retired minister. We'd done this previously last August, when we performed some tunes on our own and the church organist played for the congregation when they sang. At that service Crawford mentioned in his sermon an occasion back in Danbury when he heard a Salvation Army group play with a church organ, and how that inspired him to take up the Eb tuba again after decades of not playing.

So this time we played with the organist for the hymns. I printed out for her music in the keys we use, usually a step or two lower than the standard key. The only chance we had to rehearse together was in the half hour before the service.

Musically, there was lots of room for improvement. The biggest issue was that she's used to a slight pause between verses, whereas we keep a strict rhythm. (I used to do it her way, but the players were much more comfortable with the straight turn around, so I've trained myself to do that.) Turns out she's free on Friday afternoons, so the next time we do this we can rehearse together to tighten things up.

What was wonderful was the response of the congregation to our combined instrumental forces. They really sang out, and the blend of their voices and our instruments was a splendid sound. Just like at the caroling event, regular folks really enjoyed the opportunity to sing with some orchestral instruments. For me it was a sort of proof of the concept there is a huge opportunity for introducing more music into the community. All that's lacking is useable music. 

Per usual, I think the players enjoyed the event at least as much as the congregation, if not more. As we're a small ensemble, everyone gets to be heard and make a significant contribution. The alto sax, trombone and trumpet took turns playing the soprano line along with the congregation's singing. The interplay between the instruments and the voices is about the best thing on the CD. 

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.

Bring Em All In

Rob Halligan and Gareth Davies-Jones perform Mike Scott's song "Bring Em All In" which Daniel Levitin gives pride of place as the last song discussed in the final chapter ("Love") of his The World In Six Songs. He says it, "is to my ears among the most perfect love songs ever written".

Here is a YouTube with audio of Mike Scott performing the song himself. And here's another with him performing it live less than a year ago with an Irish fiddle wailing in the background.

It's almost like a mantra with the repetitive rhythms and lyrics, and the idea behind the words suggests the Buddhist prayers for "all sentient beings". Scott has connections to and performs at Findhorn, which I didn't realize was still a going concern.

Besides the song itself, I really like the performance in the embedded video up above. 

* The guitar player gets a groove going immediately and sustains it until the end. His sound with the acoustic guitar with internal mike fed to the monitor speakers in front of him has a great fullness. An electric guitar just wouldn't have that crispness, and without the monitors the sound would be thin. That full sound enhances the immersion in the rhythm.

* The way the guitarist moves, his gestures, gives the music a physical reality. I'll never forget seeing Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review two consecutive nights, in San Antonio and then Austin, back in the mid 70's. Sometimes the way he moved with the music made it seem the music was a force field and it was moving him rather than he creating it.

* The singing is a lot of the time almost conversational, and because it's almost masked by the guitar it "brings in" the listener so as to hear the words.

* The other singer with the egg shaker and box percussion adds a lot to the performance, and the two of them really connect with each other and the audience making that rhythm together. 

* I really like that the only staging is just the various instruments and the mixer, so all the focus is on the music itself. 

* Currently Mike Scott is in Dublin where he's going to present a number of  W. B. Yeats poems he's put to music. I read through the complete Yeats several times as an undergraduate years ago and was entranced. And Celtic music has always been a favorite of mine. So part of why I like this song so much probably has to do with its Celtic feel.

Many thanks to our Vermont readership for finding this video and insisting I take the time for a dial-up download of it.

Guitar Trick

This post over on Horn Matters reminded me I've never posted a guitar trick that's wonderfully helpful when looking at instruments to buy. On lots and lots of guitars in lots of price ranges, the frets are incorrectly placed in relationship to the strings, so you can never really play them in tune. 

First, learn how to make the first harmonic on a string. That means very lightly touching the string at its mid-point and then with the other hand, plucking it halfway between that point and where the string comes over the bridge. Then immediately lift the finger touching the string at the mid-point. Once you get the hang of it it's not hard to do. This sets the string vibrating in halves, with one half going up while the other goes down, and remaining still where your finger was (a node).

A string vibrating in halves sounds the octave, which should match the pitch when the string is fretted on the twelfth fret. If you listen as you go back and forth between pitches of the 1st harmonic and of the twelfth fret and they aren't the same, or at least very, very close, the guitar will never play in tune.

Other factors such as the action (how far the strings are from the fret-board) and the gage of the strings play into this, but will never really correct the problem.

As a rule, the price of the instrument will not tell you how well the frets are placed. This simple test can save you a lot of aggravation, and perhaps money as well.

Hemispheres

This essay in the WSJ begins with a great discussion of the right and left brain. I really like this paragraph:

>>> The neuropsychological evidence shows that the right hemisphere pays wide-open attention to the world, seeing the whole, whereas the left hemisphere is adept at focusing on a detail. New experience, whatever its kind, is better apprehended by the right hemisphere, whereas the predictable is better dealt with by the left. And because the right hemisphere sees things in context, as inseparably interconnected, it recognizes the vast extent of what remains implicit. By contrast, because of its narrow focus, the left hemisphere isolates what it sees, and is relatively blind to things that can be conveyed only indirectly. <<<

The essay is adapted from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, recently published by Yale University Press. After the introductory explanation of the hemispheres, he goes on to put Western Civilization on the couch, talking about how different eras can be explained by how much of either hemisphere was operative in the culture at a given time. 

Such broad generalizations make me a little queazy. Since the 60's I've bought and leafed through innumerable books going on about the power of music and such, with zero empirical foundation, other than the occasional anecdote that fits the argument. Over time I've decided such books and arguments are not helpful to the cause of music therapy, because even though they might contains bits of helpful info and insight, they further the "crackpot" image of the field.

It also seems a little odd that even in an essay as short as this, there's no mention of Julian Jayne's, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Though in a different way, it also puts society as a whole on the couch and expounds on the nature of consciousness. It will be interesting to see if the McGilchrist book will make any impact.