Lost in Translation

Art is saturated with the life of the artist. Yet unlike the physical body that the art manifests, an essentially timeless medium, the emotional innards fade with time.

To compose art is to condense one’s entire being into a medium, be it sound or canvas, brick wall or thin air. The artist assumes that observers, upon interacting with the medium, will somewhat comprehensively re-expand the work intact. The artist makes an assumption based upon their personal experience that the art itself will represent exactly what it is meant to represent: Soul, Skill, Technique, and Consciousness equally. The assumption is ill-made. 

When an artist and observer share the greatest personal bond the depreciation is minimal. The observer of the art is able to accept, through their sheer connection with the artist, the most complete information possible from the art. This includes the soul and conscience, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. The observer is not actually the artist, and therefore some value is lost in translation. But nominal artistic loss notwithstanding, both the artist and the observer are satisfied with the product which has been translated. The artist feels a small stab of regret to know that even that tiny piece of soul lost would have increased the value of the art’s observation.

As the artist begins to share the work with those who are less akin, the soul of the art itself begins to fade away. From friends, on to acquaintances, through people who know them but whom they do not know personally, and finally to those who know absolutely nothing about the person of the artist; the soul of the work fades into black leaving observers only with the physical body, the medium itself, with which to judge its merits.

The life of the artist ends, along with those who were closest, less close, and foreign to them, leaving only the medium behind to recount that moment in time; the moment, dense and dripping with substance, which had inspired the work. It would be unfair to expect such strangers to recall the holistic structure of the work, and so we compromise: We, and in comparison even the most recognized of connoisseurs, settle on simply staring rather blankly at pretty pictures of landscapes and odd shapes, a canned fugue and printed verse, the technically-perfect pirouette and the crumbling façade. All these intensely personal perspectives through each looking-glass of the ever-tormented public eyes; distorted and vague and incomplete.

The irony is in the tragedy of it all, and the tragedy is ironic. We use art as an expression of ourselves, yet the part of the art which is yourself is the only part which truly depreciates with time; it dies with you and those closest to you, leaving a hollow shell of brute creation in its wake. The artist uses their art to transfer emotions onto the medium which tend to overwhelm the soul: pain, joy, empathy, terror, ecstasy, dread, life and death. It is their desperate attempt to reign upon an unbridled mind. Alas, in a fit of despair, the art will only ever stand in its full value, of its true quality, to that complex consciousness that originally manifested it: the artist.

To Fail is Simply To Succeed Undesirably

You may have heard it before. An inspirational quote that you brush aside as idealistic and corny.

"There is no such thing as a failure. If you fail to do something one way, you succeed in doing it another way."

Now the word failure is kind of curious in the same way that the number zero is curious. They both describe states of non-being. Any mathematician knows that zero is a concept, like infinity, and that it can reasoned with but not explicitly observed. The problem with the word failure is that it is entirely dependent upon its antonym: success.

Success, in verb form, is defined as "achieving a desired outcome". So then we could reasonably say that the opposite of success would be simply the negation: "not achieving a desired outcome."

But you can't really not-achieve something, can you? You can't have zero apples. You can describe your condition as "a state of not possessing apples" but you can't actually have no apples. In other words, you can "not have apples" but you cannot "have no apples."

(These funny little distinctions occur in many situations where you have a negation that depends an occurrence not occurring. Like right and wrong, for example. Something is only right if it is not wrong, and vice versa.)

One literally cannot fail. Instead, we successfully do something that is not desired. Every living moment of our lives is spent doing something, even if that something is sleeping, watching TV, committing a crime, getting stage fright, oversleeping an alarm, etc.

Is it real to say that there is no such thing as failure, or is this simply another way to rearrange and redesign the syntax to reflect more light? In truth it is both, because reality is in the eye of the beholder. As humans we have lots of little ways to weave our perceptions into a unique web which is spun befittingly to our environment, culture, personal limitations, childhood, and just about every event that affects us.

So why is it important to make this distinction at all?

Because it neutralizes events to be on the same plane. When you realize that the dichotomy doesn't exist as you thought it did, you can more easily traverse from the realization of one event to the realization of another, more desirable one.

Of course I will relate this to music, since this is a music blog. Say that I am about to attempt to play a phrase of music. Lying before me, in the seconds that it will take to play the phrase, are literally an infinite number of paths which my life-events might take. A precious few are desired (namely, that I play the phrase and play it in a manner that I deem "successful"), and countless others are undesired (which include all the musical things that could go wrong, as well as a sudden coughing fit of varying lengths, my dog throwing up on my foot and distracting me, an asteroid hitting my house, and everything in between). Each path has a different probability of occurring in those moments, with some of the probabilities much larger than others and some infinitesimally small. They are, however, all instances of something succeeding in happening. It is important to understand that probability of something happening is 1, and it leaves no room for nothing to happen.

Every thing that happens in my day teaches me something. If it is desired I learn how to replicate the experience, and if it is undesired I also learn how to replicate the experience, although in future I might decide not to. Some people when reading this post might think that this concept is indeed true but just not really applicable to the way that we think and live our day-to-day lives. In my experience as both an unhappy and a happy person, I've learned that an unhappy person will tend to scorn the one who preaches kindness and positive thinking, believing that the optimist is jaded and undeserving of the fortune to feel peacefully.

The relaxation of pride and the strength to adapt unequivocally from your undesired successes is freedom of the spirit, and the freedom to weave the web of your life's events into the shape that you want.

Breathing: Positive vs. Negative Space

If you'll allow me a brief foray into visual art technique...I promise it will serve to strengthen a useful metaphorical concept for wind players!

The concept of positive vs. negative space is widely known and used in the visual arts, including media design, photography, and basically anything that you are meant to look at in a scrutinizing manner. We call the positive space the figure and the negative space the ground. If you are not familiar with the concept of negative space, it is briefly and very basically this:

The background of an image that is in focus.


So for a simple example, in the picture below it is very clear what is the positive space (the Ferris Wheel and cabins), and the negative space is a meaningless background (sky and clouds).

A problem occurs when we artfully design the negative space to be more meaningful, and in the very famous example below, what is called a figure-ground reversal occurs, and the negative space may take on meaning to the eye. An interesting note of human limitation: if the reversal is executed perfectly, it can be impossible to see both meanings simultaneously. You may know it is there, but our eyes may only focus on one figure at a time.

Some visual artists have taken the concept to an incredible extreme, creating masterpieces of figure-ground reversal. One of the most famous artists to toy with the notions of physical dimensions and positive-negative space was M.C. Escher.

All this to bring us to the veritable art itself that is breathing technique for wind musicians. Breathing is one of the "ground floor" slabs on which the stability of the entire structural development stands. Breathing is so useful a concept in general musicality that non-wind musicians are often taught to breathe in cooperation with the music they are playing, to bring the concept of a good phrase to the realm of our natural physiology.

So how does this relate to positive and negative space?

For analogical purposes I'll say that both the inhale and exhale actions are our figure in wind playing. They are the positive and purposeful actions that we focus on, and on which we spend hours of practice perfecting. The negative space is everything else that may occur that is not either an inhalation of exhalation. Essentially, the ground in our case is holding our breath, or performing a Valsalva Maneuver (defined as an attempt to force exhalation through a closed airway, like when we "pop" our ears on an airplane).

In the painted picture called A Wind Player Breathing, we have a very strong focus on the nature of the positive space, and unfortunately I think too often do we ignore what might be happening in the cracks of the picture. Little instances of breath-holding and Valsalva are hiding there, contributing meaninglessness to the art that you are trying to create. In most cases, the meaninglessness actually contributes negatively to the picture-painting process.

The act of playing an instrument should be 100% full of the positive breathing actions. We either exhale or we inhale. Either/or is a very important distinction because without it we leave cracks for the negative space to fill. I find that when I pay very careful attention to my breathing I notice tiny moments of something else, and those little moments can be disastrous to a brass player should they occur inopportunely.

I think you'll find that the feeling of breathing with only inhalations and exhalations to be different. It takes some practice to feel natural, but it is an important springboard for the musical development of wind players. 

Time and the Circle

It has been creeping up on me for quite a while now. It was, however, only recently that this instinct found an audible voice and began to apply itself to my playing and teaching regularly. It is the concept of musical time as it relates to the circle.

Regardless of meter, complexity of rhythm, tempo and other extraneous musical parameters, circles find their way into my thoughts when I play. Not present and practiced, but more like the way we think about a memory, with careful and unintentional yet unavoidable avoidance of any true clarity. Circles represent to me wholesomeness, regularity, continuation, and flexibility in the same manner that does the passage of time.

Circles are what makes the wheel, and the wheel moves in a consistent manner according to its external influences, and will, barring some catastrophic interference, change speed in a very predictable manner. If the slope on which the wheel is rolling changes its angle, the wheel will accelerate or decelerate, but only at exactly the rate which corresponds to the forces that presently act upon it. In our physics analogy of the day, these forces are the "gravity" of the music (the baseline tempo which "grounds" us), the "friction" of the medium (the performer and his personal range of difficulties, whether they are breathing, digital dexterity, etc.), and the "slope" of the music (cadential tension is a common cause of "upward slopes", or slowing down, while augmentation of key, musical anxiety, and many other factors could cause a "downward slope", or acceleration). Wheels roll, and given a surface environment of zero friction (which we simulate with a conductor or metronome) will continue onward at a constant speed. In addition, if you were to watch the wheel move in slow-motion, the exact same part of the wheel would make a full rotation at a perfectly regular interval. This is, in full essence, playing with good time.

An ostinato pattern played with perfect groove in the most tailored of pockets will demonstrate what it means to make a circle, or a loop, in music. But even outside of this obvious context, if you listen to a performer playing with perfect "time," you can almost feel the circles inside the sound.

I have been sharing with my students an exercise which I have invented to help fish this concept from the murky mind-waters to our actual senses. I have found categorically that the students with the best sense of rhythm and time are immediately better with the exercise than those with a faltering concept of rhythm. This supports the value of the exercise, and it is simple and as follows:

1) Put a metronome or constant source of tempo on whichever speed you desire

2) Draw circles that repeat themselves once every measure (you decide the time signature). In other words, the pencil or pen reaches the topmost point of the circle at the downbeat of a new measure, but does not hesitate and continues immediately to draw another circle. The pencil does not leave the paper.
3) The point of the exercise is the draw circles in a consistent manner (that is, without speeding up or slowing down the actual drawing of the circle) and that are exactly the same size and same position on the paper.

There are a lot of variations to the exercise that are valuable and eye-opening, in my opinion, so if you try it feel free to be creative. My favorite variations include randomly altering the time signature starting at the top of the circle/measure (this is very difficult to do the first time correctly!), and having someone else steadily change the tempo in a particular direction. Also, leaving just one audible beat per measure is like extra credit and requires really good subdivision.

Finally, I have made a couple of observations when performing and teaching this exercise. One is that circles are a shape that is much more consistent to good time keeping than polygons are (triangles for 3/4, pentagons for 5/4, etc.). Polygons subdivide the measure for you into exact points, and in music we just don't get clear downbeats all the time. (P.S. Writing little marks about the downbeats in your music is a crutch and doesn't help your sight-reading!). In addition, I've noticed that drawing a polygon causes you to hesitate just slightly at the corners of the shape, and consequently have a burst of acceleration directly thereafter. One might say that the circle has no angles and therefore does not support subdivision, however, truthfully a circle has essentially an infinite amount of pivoting points, so the subdivision is the most intense, and will basically be at the highest level that you personally can manage to keep track of.

Try it!

Isomorphism - The Phenomenon of Sound Organization

Yesterday as I was expounding upon my "Master Core Value" from the curriculum, a specific thought occured to me regarding what goes IN to music. We know a lot about what comes out, of course.

The word isomorphism refers to an "information-preserving transformation." Isomorphisms are everywhere in our world, even if you didn't specifically think of them this way. I'll give a very brief example:

Cat.

You read three letters on the screen (which in themselves are an isomorphism for the finger motions which prompted my computer to create them!), and you got a representation of a full and living being. If I asked you to think about a "cat," you would actually reproduce in your head, and from the letters only, what you know to be a cat. Not the letters "cat," but the actually being itself. Isn't it amazing that a cat can be condensed into one word?

Despite the incredible complexity of a living cat and the relative ease of which we are able to condense it, there are others which are far more veiled, far more ethereal. Such is sound organization, or music.

Let's take a composer at random (impossible) here and say Stravinsky. Now, Stravinsky himself, just as a stand-alone human, is already full of information. Then you add on his entire life-story, his parents, his potential pets, his first girlfriend (or boyfriend), the most embarrassing momemnt he has ever had, his favorite food, the most interesting thing he's ever seen, and everything in between and we realize that when Stravinsky or any person gives an output (whether it is thoughts, art, etc), it comes in the shadow of everything that is the person.

Imagine taking all this information, this entirely uncountable collection of events, and condense it into something like a piece of music. There is a lot of pressure involved in creating a compaction of this magnitude! Yet sadly, more often than not when we go to open the condensed-life, we don't extract everything that went in.

There is a general tendency with composers to view them as "names on the page"; unapproachable genius which simply take instruments and sounds and put them together well. But in truth every musical creation is the collection of events and information that went INTO the music, just in a very very compacted form. We complain about a Mahler Symphony being an hour and a half, but given the sheer emotional volume that Mahler experienced in his life, I'd consider his symphonies as a very dense pack of Mahler (albiet a little less dense than most, but who can blame him!).

Every time that I read music, I make an effort to blow it back up into the sheer information-bearing force that it is meant to be. I ask myself, "was that phrase hollow, or was it packed with life?" Whether we realize it fully or not, when we hear a great performance of any music, we find it great simply because it emulated living in some way. We "connect" to a piece of music when it takes our lives and makes a sound of them.

You WILL engage your audience if you create a sound-product that does justice to all the information compacted inside a sound, or a piece of music. Music that lives and feels is the music worth paying for.

"Excuse me, but your happiness was entirely inappropriate."

(Please forgive any perceived haughtiness or preachy-ness; this particular thought-can has been sitting in the fridge for quite a while, and when I went to take it out I dropped it and it rolled around everywhere. I tried tapping the top but to no avail). 

Here is a sad anecdote:

Your partner is opening presents on Christmas day. They have 4 presents to open (of course all of different expense, shape, and meaning to them). Little does your partner know that these four presents are given to them in a specific order because they are all part of one larger gift, which only the final present will reveal.

They open the first present, and it's awesome! Something they've wanted for a long time. They gasp and leap to you in delight, but you only hold up a hand, saying "open the next present please."

Somewhat embarrassed and put-off, albeit still very excited, your partner nevertheless turns to Present No. 2, which is also a beautiful present and very meaningful to them. They begin to exclaim their happiness, but one stern look from you says "I've already told you not to do that."

Present No. 3 is an excellent present indeed, but your partner shows no enthusiasm toward it, instead swallowing their already-reduced exurberance in favor of simply going on to Present No. 4. Present No. 4, in fact, is the best of all, and fully reveals how the four presents were related. You say, "Okay, go ahead and thank me now."

I don't know about you, but that just doesn't seem like the most appropriate way to give to/share something with someone. Yet this is the lost way of our "Concert Etiquette."

Maybe your presents were meant to be viewed ultimately as a whole, but couldn't your partner relive the experience on their own later and recreate the wholesomeness? Would your presents really be ruined irreparably if you were to be thanked for them individually, as well as on the whole?

I've participated in and seen concerts where the audience (or part of it) applauds "inappropriately", and the conductor will actually use his hand to silence them, never acknowledging or accepting the support. I feel like I can't begin to expound on the social ramifications of that action.

Suffice it to say, however, that by forcefully transcending an art that offers so much promise for emotional impact above the heads of the audience which the art proposes to impact in the first place, we succeed only in alienating our own supporters. Prescribing applause to occur when you want it to is a distortion of enthusiasm, and, however subconsciously, IS felt by your audience. You just can't expect to bundle up emotions however you want and expect them to be released perfectly intact at a time that you deem prudent. In addition and needless to say, it also devalues any and all applause you receive, simply because you know it is coming.

People literally scream through entire pop concerts, is that wrong? Maybe it feels good to scream, cheer, and show unbridled enthusiasm. I've never seen Britney Spears or John Mayer or whomever stop everyone and say, "excuse me, but could you wait, I'm trying to do something awesome here."

When a tenor sax player absolutely annihilates some chord changes with improvisational creativity, does it ruin the music that follows to recognize something that you found to be amazing? What if that same sax player were to yell at everyone who is actively supporting his latest piece of impromptu art?

"Classical" music, "Art" music, "Concert" music, any of the various pigeon-holing names we come up with are an endangered species because it is losing relevance, but not to the mind. Our brains have not literally grown new sections in the last 200 years; evolution is much too slow to use that as a justification. Rather, only the social conditions have changed. Just like in evolution however, the ability to adapt is paramount to survival. Everyone can and will enjoy anything that excites them, inspires them, or moves them. Classical music in every way should fulfill those standards, but we refuse to let it change with the times.

If I had a way and a sufficiently powerful platform, I would choose to abolish completely the aspects of Concert Etiquette. I'd choose instead to let the receivers of information be free to express, mirror, and reflect all the surprises, disappointments, thrills, and emotional moments that are contained in the information. It is, after all, the essence of sharing experiences, and I sincerely don't believe that there is much more than that to the Art of Living.

But that's not what it says on the page!

The "ink" on the page should always be taken with a grain of salt.

(Some of you who know me from high school or early undergraduate years might be rolling their eyes right now, but I assure you, it has calmed down a lot)

Never let anybody tell you that what you played is wrong because it "isn't on the page". What is on the page is the composer's symbolic interpretation of the emotional affects that they were trying to portray. This is why dynamics, articulations, and expression markings are so subjective: the marking "forte" for example, may be meant to complement terror, hysteria, exuberance, glory, anxiety, or many other descriptors.

The key then is to understand what the emotions were, and then portray them in whatever manner actually executes the desired effect. If the composer meant "terror" at the time and had written "forte" with accents on every note, but for YOU the most terrifying way of playing the passage is "marcato" at "mezzo-forte," then go ahead! You are serving the composer more by altering the ink to fit the affect then you would be by just blindly following instructions.

P.S. Always be reasonable, and you don't get to decide this in larger ensembles!