My Core Constituency

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

Here's one with me on flute. . . 

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

And here's the four year old Calli.

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

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

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

Baroque Gesture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Tone Is You

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE - Jonathan West corrects me in the comments:

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

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

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

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

Performance Diary

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

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

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

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

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

Revising Compositions

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

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

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

Moving Making Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Work History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty in the Brain

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

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

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

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

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

Lineage

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

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

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

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

Transcendence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ride 2 Recovery

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

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

Recording Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2.0 Series

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

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

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

Motivation

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

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

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

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

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

Afflictive Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Entrepreneurship

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

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

An Insight Into Performing

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

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

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

Mindfulness in Music Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Song For Japan

Metheny on Improv

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

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

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

Performance Diary

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

A volunteer appreciation luncheon at a local nursing home - 

An outdoor butterfly release benefit for Hospice of the Rapidan -

An outdoor rehearsal dinner -

An outdoor fundraiser for UVa Children's Hospital - 

A fundraiser for a community 4th of July event - 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horn Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Be a Rockin' Music Blog

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.

Music and Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm seriously skeptical.

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

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

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

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

Critics

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

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

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People

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

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

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

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

Empathy and Proprioception

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flexible Stability vs. Contorted Rigidity

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

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

And here's Dave's response:

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

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

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

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

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

A Pauky Poem

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

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

For John Luther Adams

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

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

Harmonious Feeling of Oneness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain Plasticity

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

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

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

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

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

Flow and Something Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limitations and Style

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

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

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

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

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

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

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

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