A quick note: I’ve recently consolidated my two newsletters—Learn with Mike and Learning Percussion—into a single publication with two sections.

Essays explores interdisciplinary learning, creativity, and artistic development. Practice Lab (formerly the Learning Percussion newsletter) explores practical practice strategies, musicianship, productivity, advocacy, and life in the practice room.

The ideas in both publications have increasingly overlapped, so bringing them together felt like a natural next step.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing on technique, creativity, learning, and performance, you might also enjoy Practice Lab. But fear not—you can unsubscribe from either section independently.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I take an acute interest in musical learning—and a very, very close interest in my nemesis, the snare drum.

Over the last several years, those interests have become increasingly difficult to separate. And, what began as a project about musical learning gradually became a project about creativity. What began as a project about creativity gradually became a project about practice.

Eventually, it became a snare drum book.

Next month, I’ll be releasing Unsnared Drum Lab, a collection of exercises, experiments, practice strategies, and creative frameworks centered on the snare drum and informed by research into learning, performance psychology, and skill acquisition.

Its central premise is that creativity in the practice room is one of the most effective ways to develop custom-fitting instrumental technique, perform well under pressure, and learn music more efficiently.

The funny thing is that I didn’t set out to write a book about practice at all.

Creativity

The book starts with a question: Are classical music performers creative?

My first introductions to creativity were the works of European masters encountered through museum visits, canonical Western literature, and, somewhat improbably, the sports commentary of John Madden. While I didn’t realize it at the time, I admired his ability to leverage experience and expertise to make unexpected free-associative connections on live national television.

I would never have thought myself able to say anything about musical practice, let alone technique, until I encountered Keith Sawyer’s Learning to See.

In Learning to See, Sawyer examines how creativity is taught at several elite art institutions. He lays out the principles of “learning to see,” the act of seeing an artwork from the creator’s perspective, which is taught through “studio talk,” a guided critical thinking led by a master teacher.

Sawyer didn’t include musicians in his book, and when I asked him about this omission, he said he hadn’t seen much evidence of creativity in the teaching of music performance. In his experience, classical music training was largely about restriction, focused on what not to do. It emphasized fidelity to the score, a narrow range of acceptable interpretations, and deference to tradition and authority.

And to be honest, he has a point. Much of our traditional performance pedagogy prizes precision, control, consistency, and respect for tradition. Even our language leans in that direction: execution, correctness, accuracy. Performing musicians are rarely asked to talk about creativity the way architects, designers, and visual artists are.

Most musicians, however, would answer the question with an emphatic “DUH.”

First, there is tremendous creativity in interpretation. For classical musicians, interpretation is a peak creative skill, involving critical reading of historical texts, understanding of meta-texts around works, strong intuitive instinct, understanding of performance situations, and the ability to bring a communicative work of art to life in real time.

There is also creativity in collaboration, that dynamic process where composers and performers help create new works and bring them to life. Much of my musical education came through working with living composers. As a small example, while studying the performance practice of works by Kagel, Stockhausen, and Lachenmann with Ensemble Modern (watch out, dissertation alert! 🚨), I was struck by how even the most meticulously notated scores left ample room for interpretation and how orally transmitted performance practice permeated even the most prescriptively notated works

The Practice Lab

The closer I looked, the more creativity I found. Yet while reading Sawyer, I realized that I had already been thinking about creativity from a different angle. In fact, I had been working on a book about how musicians leverage creativity to learn, practice, and perform.

I was interested in how intuition—a creative skill, if you ask me—contributes to peak performance and how it can be cultivated through practices drawn from a range of musical and non-musical domains. I wanted to explore how inspiration, research, motor skill acquisition, performance, reflection, and other forms of musical learning are connected. This book was not going to include much material on practicing, as I felt the “inside the practice room” material was well covered by the exploding-at-the-seams field of cognitive neurology.

But my work with composers kept presenting me with problems that my training had not prepared me to solve. I was struggling with how long it took me to learn music and with the gap between practice and performance.

That chasm led me to study how musicians—and experts in other fields—build skills, and why certain forms of practice lead to deep, flexible musicianship while others produce tension, inconsistency, and burnout. And, those “effective” forms of practice are (you guessed it), creative! The musicians who seemed to learn most effectively were constantly generating ideas, creating variations, inventing exercises, seeking feedback, running experiments, and adapting to new situations. They weren’t simply repeating; they were building and refining mental models.

Unsnared Drum Lab

Eventually, these questions led me to obsessively refine a set of ideas and techniques that fundamentally changed the way I practice, teach, and perform. I began forcing improvisation and invention into my practice, withholding repetition, studying motor learning and deliberate practice, and paying closer attention to the habits of master musicians across many genres.

Some of these ideas emerged from my work commissioning and developing new music with New Morse Code. Others grew out of my Unsnared Drum project, where four new snare drum solos challenged me to develop unfamiliar techniques and bring unexpected musical ideas to life. Looking back, I realize that I was gradually building my technique around the music I wanted to play and the way I wanted to play it.

I took these ideas, everything i had learned about musical learning inside the practice room, and my favorite canonical snare drum texts (if there is such a thing), and distilled them into a book called Unsnared Drum Lab: a collection of exercises, experiments, practice strategies, and creative frameworks centered on the snare drum and informed by research into learning, performance psychology, and skill acquisition.

Its thesis is that the best technique is custom-designed, and that creativity is the best way to perform well under pressure, and learn music more effectively and efficiently.

Unsnared Drum Lab is less a method book than an invitation to creative practice. While the exercises are written for snare drum, the book’s larger subject is creative practice itself: experimentation, observation, variation, feedback, invention, and the development of a custom-fitting musical technique.

In that sense, it is a book about creativity masquerading as a snare drum book.

It’s coming out next month in both physical and digital formats, and I look forward to sharing it with you. Stay tuned!

Mike

The editing process itself has been the most illuminating. Aside from exposing my technical inaccuracies as both a writer and music engraver, editing has forced me to think more carefully about analogies, revision, and the strange structural overlap between writing and music-making.

The more I write, the better my percussion playing becomes. Not because writing teaches me how to play paradiddles, but because writing and music-making are learned through remarkably similar processes. Both rely on specificity, revision, style, feedback, experimentation, and structure. Both demand that we clarify our thinking. Both reward careful attention.

Determined to do ANYTHING except work on my book, I updated a post from a few years ago with more recent thoughts on these issues that have continued to tickle my mind through a book project and second book proposal.

What can writing can teach us about becoming better musicians? We start with style.

I. Elements of Style

First, great performances and great writing are specific, transparent, opinionated, and stylistic. Strunk and White, whose Elements of Style is a model of clarity about writing and writing about clarity, agree. (Although, I prefer the illustrated Elements of Style). “The greatest writers…. are effective because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter.” They are “specific, definite, and concrete,” and “place themselves in the background.”

One of my favorite writers is Elmore Leonard, whose character-driven writing leaps off the page with efficiency and color. In Get Shorty, mobster Chili Palmer complains about a missing coat:

Mobster Chili Palmer, frustrated that his beloved coat has been sold, asks the concierge, “well, do you see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, like the one Pacino wore in Serpico? ‘Cause if you don’t you owe me three seventy-nine dollars.”

This is specificity! Not short: “fingertip length.” Not any cut—Al Pacino’s style. Not $400, $379. One paragraph tells us so much about the character. He's deliberate, methodical, thrifty, maybe a little crime-obsessed.

In fact, Travolta only agreed to do the film adaptation of Get Shorty if Leonard’s dialogue, which had been revised for the screen, was restored. (This was the revision: “Where's my coat? You better find it. It cost $400.” That’s as powerful as cream of wheat.)

You know what else is specific and transparent? The first phrase of Leon Fleisher’s recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto:

It’s Beethoven, not Fleisher. But Fleisher is pointing towards the most important ideas. The voicing, carefully regulated, that heavenly scale upward to a held breath. Strunk and White warn that “a single overstatement” can destroy the object of enthusiasm. Great performers understand this instinctively. Interpretation is not decoration layered on top of a piece. It is the careful shaping of attention.

Another set of examples both of Bach’s A Minor English Suite (BWV 807)

Leonhardt pushes and pulls with the rhythmic fabric of the music, but Bach’s counterpoint are crystal clear. It’s music of sentences: rhetorical, concerned with details, a wonderful story.

Here’s a VERY different version. Get ready, A is now 440 hz!

Bach’s counterpoint is invented in front of our eyes. Both have the imprint of Bach’s authorship, those twin virtues of clarity and accuracy.

• Poetic/Conversational

• Impactful/Easy

• Accurate/Free

• Stylistic/textual

These are the binaries that drive great performances and great writing, no?

II. Style Is Not Garnish

Words and sounds both take on this nebulous concept of style. What is style?

A lot of people argue that style is the last step in the creative or recreative process, the peak of a pyramid which includes “must haves” like fundamentals at the bottom. An accent instead of a language.

Style can’t help a bad idea (I had a colleague who complained about our propensity as academics to “polish poop”) but style is not something to be added to the end of your project, “a garnish for the meat of the prose” as Strunk and White say.

Style frames a work within its historical context. Cervantes could not have written Don Quixote without understanding the literary conventions he was satirizing. The style is part of the meaning.

Before learning the first notes of a piece, performers should already have some sense of the sound world, the historical context, etc, the meta-text around the musical text.

Too often musicians begin at the atomic level, examining individual notes before understanding the larger shape they are constructing. We build the Lego bricks first and only later step back to see what we’ve assembled. “The first principle of composition,” Strunk and White argue (well, they don’t really argue so much as intone from on high), is to “foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.” Beginning to learn a piece of music without an idea of where it might go is folly.

Style helps generate that representation. It tells us what kind of rhetoric the music contains, how sharply to articulate ideas, how much weight to give details, how the audience might encounter the work.

III. Analogies as Learning Technology

At this point, it might be clear that music-making and writing are structurally related domains, both involving planning large projects through smaller chunks, experimentation and improvisation, feedback from peers and mentors, revision, exposure to strong exemplars, long incubation periods, the gradual refinement of taste.

More crucially, both are easier to understand through analogy.

Analogies aren’t just for SAT exams! They are so powerful that astronomer Johannes Kepler used them to determine the orbital paths of the planets with great accuracy. Key to analogies is schema abstraction: what Dedre Gentner calls “extracting common systems from representations” in order to promote “the disembodying of subtle and possibly important commonalities.” Analogies help us notice “alienable differences,” becoming aware of contrasts between the two domains through finding high-similarity pairs.

Our brains are great at noticing relationships between systems (writing and practicing, perhaps). If there’s a blank spot or a change in one domain, an adroit analogist can connect another system, using structure-mapping to explain a mystery by comparing it to a pair in an analogous domain.

Analogies are my favorite teaching tool, because they help describe a new concept in terms of an idea they already know, extremely vividly.

• Playing a soft snare drum roll is like going on a first date…

• Practicing snare drum on a practice pad is like singing in the shower (or like the mirrors at H&M)…

• Practicing multiple interpretations of a piece is like being a taxi driver rather than an ant. ⬇️

IV. Ants and Taxi Drivers

As an example, ants learn one specific way to traverse a dangerous journey. One boulder in the way, no more journey.

Taxi drivers, on the other hand, famously know many ways to make a journey, and if something changes, they adjust.

Great interpreters are taxi drivers, taking into account their audience, the physical conditions on stage, the acoustic, their collaborators, making constant adjustments as a matter of course. They pull the levers of style to help a musical work take life in an impactful and meaningful way for a specific audience, in a specific place, at a specific time. They are not reproducing a fixed object; they are navigating with a flexibility that comes from deep structural understanding rather than rigid memorization.

Writing+Music=Sharing

At their best, both writing and performance are forms of advocacy. At their best, both are tools for developing connections, both through the work being shared and, more importantly, through the space the work creates.

And, both rely on skill: clarity, structure, pacing, et al. (none of which are in this newsletter!).

That may be why writing has improved my music-making. Writing forces me to clarify what I value. It exposes weak thinking and sharpens perception. Furthermore, the same habits that improve artistic interpretation (revision, specificity, structural awareness, sensitivity to audience) also improve prose.

In fact, the more carefully we learn to shape language, the more carefully we learn to shape attention and create connections.

Procrastination over: back to the book!

An Additional Thought

Follow rules, or don’t!

Writing prose—just like studying music—can have many rules.  So many rules that they have been subsumed by a style. Just like music making, it’s great to follow rules, but it’s also great NOT to. Hamlet says excess partying is  “a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Ditto “common practice” harmony. The exceptions to these rules of voice-leading, so numerous that Brahms made a notebook of famously good uses of these  ‘mistakes,’ often seem more interesting than the most dogmatic of passages.

• Unsnared Drum Lab, my little book about how percussionists can invent their own exercises for technical development, musical flexibility, fun, and profit (maybe not the last one), is almost done. The thesis is that creativity in the practice room is the best way to develop musically, learn effectively and durably, and perform under pressure. The sub-thesis is that these techniques are available to and essential for those who identify only as performers (not composers)… Looking forward to sharing it in the coming weeks!

• I’ve also been working on a longer tome called A Performer’s Guide to Learning, a method book for performers. In addition to concrete learning strategies for work inside and outside the practice room, I hope to help musicians transform how they learn—integrating research, intuition, reflection, and practice into a single creative process grounded in intuition and curiosity. If you’re a regular reader, I know these themes sound familiar.

NB: You might have noticed that I have shifted to Substack for my occasional writings to better align with my other newsletter, Learning Percussion. Thank you for continuing to read in this publication’s new format!

Learning Communities

Throughout both projects, I’ve been supplementing my historical and musicological frameworks with the tremendous groundswell of primary and secondary source literature in cognitive neuroscience, which has coalesced around best practices for learning, retaining, and deploying skills and information while seeking to explain the mysteries of the human nervous system and its capacity for neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.

It’s gotten to the point where most classical musicians have encountered this scientific literature, most often along the lines of “how to learn faster: and it’s not how you think.” Still, after a few years of bibliographic questing, I’ve been questioning whether cognitive neurology might be over-representing the role of the individual at the expense of communities in learning environments.

Yes, neuroscience has a lot to teach us about learning behaviors, particularly those that might run counter to traditional pedagogy (in fact, one chapter of Unsnared Drum Lab is called “Top Tips for Learning. But much learning is best done in communities. As one colleague told me: “It’s not what’s in the head, but where the head is.” Musical learning in particular is intrinsically tied to multivariate sources of feedback from peers, mentors, teachers, and coaches. Musicians rehearse with others and perform for others; in fact, our mission is to connect people! And what are concerts if not learning communities? In fact, outside classical music, most participatory musical cultures worldwide use music-making to introduce participants to social rules and community history.

And these days, learning communities (at least, that’s what a learning scientist—which I am not—might call them) are more essential than ever. More and more students are engaging with college online, asynchronously, where relationships with peers and professors tend to be hard to come by and require more careful planting, irrigation, and monitoring than in-person relationships. There’s not necessarily the time or capacity to, as my father did at Michigan State University, organize all the students in Spanish language into productions of 17th-century Spanish plays as a way of developing Spanish diction…

The future of learning, one might say, is in learning communities, those dynamic and multi-faceted relationships so essential to learning and so not present in most online and AI-powered educational environments.

FOLC Fest

Musicians have a lot to say about communities and how they are developed and nurtured. As an extension of the desire to bring people together that inspired me to become a musician, I’ve been working in recent years with other artists, scientists, and community organizations to explore how connecting sonically with our environment might foster greater connection and more effective learning.

So, it was not that surprising that I came to present, lanyard at the ready, at ASU’s Future of Learning Community Festival (FOLC Fest!) a few weeks ago, sharing on whether musical and sonic activities can foster community within science classes.

FOLC Fest is difficult to pin down, a mishmash of presentations on course design at scale, AI deployment, and managing the fallout/effects of course design at AI deployment. Alongside presentations on “Designing with Insight: Data, History, and Learning Futures” and “Scaling Quality and Coherence in Course Design,” I felt a little sheepish sharing in our “Building Community Through Collaboration and Shared Learning” cohort.

Inspired by the scientific literature I have been ingesting, I presented on a recent project undertaken with ASU faculty members Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert and Heather Throop to explore whether making field recordings and listening to our natural environment might enable human and environmental connection. Our presentation… did not have the best name…

We worked with two sections of ASU’s “Biology of a Changing World,” a required course for in-person and online Earth and Environmental Science BS majors, and, critically, taught in both in-person and asynchronous online formats.

We designed an activity to ask these questions:

• Can listening to others’ environments foster a sense of community? Can it happen asynchronously? Remotely?

• Can the killer skill of artistic practitioners—creating and using focus—be leveraged to facilitate this connection?

Students made field recordings of a location significant to them and wrote a metacognitive reflection (and AI-proof) assignment. Then, students responded to five recordings made by their classmates, and discussed acoustic/environmental similarities and differences, ecological elements, their susceptibility to human impact, and the importance of preservation.

Here’s a link to a listening room I made for the online class…

Then, we engaged in a little musical creation, inspired by New Morse Code’s The Language of Landscapes project, through which NMC and composer Christopher Stark worked with scientists and humanities scholars to help design community engagement activities which leveraged Chris’ unique approach to situating field recordings in his music in search of community capital. Over a number of years, we did these activities across the country, creating music with everyone from high school orchestras to senior center members to middle school math classes.

In the in-person class, I visited and emulated the kind of work I had done with NMC and Chris, asking students to describe their favorite recordings, and composed, rehearsed, and performed a new work based on a collage of field recordings. For the online class, I created my own musical collage and shared the results with the students. Look out, mediocre content incoming!

Our approach also drew heavily upon my colleague Garth Paine’s Community Environmental Listening program, which has created a number of resources for those interested in sonic ecology and environmental listening.

Most of the time, my measures of the success of community engagement programs have been anecdotal. This time, we were determined to gather some data; another musical engagement with field recordings did something. So, we worked with ASU’s own Chris Mead to design surveys assessing ideas of belonging, community, and connection.

Results

Students did note feeling increased connectivity to their major. That said, our rather indirect line of inquiry resulted in statistically insignificant results about community in general. Crap. Future iterations will more clearly ask whether this assignment facilitated interpersonal connections. Our findings, though, aligned with those of another project with which I was involved last year, SciDance, where we found notable effects of artistic interventions on empathy towards the environment.

But, despite diffuse surveys, we did note some other tag-on benefits of perhaps greater import, particularly to musicians:

Interstitial moments and casual connections matter.

Survey question “What aspects of the class helped you form connections to other students?” elicited very direct responses, heavily centered on activities that allowed students to talk about things other than coursework: a class discord or online discussion board posts, land and groupwork, and the Acoustic Ecology assignment.

Relaxing sounds

The types of sounds that elicited the most responses share acoustic traits associated with relaxation, reduced stress, and positive mood, which students described as “relaxing,” “calming,” or “nostalgic.” These included water sounds, wind/windchimes, crackling fire, and waterfowl (ducks!). Honestly, any recording with an animal in it was highly rated.

Online vs In-Person

Online students put significantly more work into the sonic ecology assignment, working harder to find personally meaningful sites to record, spending more time on quality audio capture, and using more key adjectives in their responses. This could be explained by online students typically being older and more experienced, and by online students actively seeking points of connection with their classmates.

Learning Ecosystems

Why the extra-long pseudo-scientific tangent?

How and with whom we learn is important. We learn effectively and durably by mobilizing best practices for individual neurological empowerment. We learn how to use that information, curate our knowledge, and do so within learning communities.

Musicians are experts in learning communities. Within music schools, these intersecting learning communities are really learning ecosystems, made possible by infinite micro-communities of shared struggle, peer feedback, casual connection, and musical exegesis. Performers need both “locked in a practice room” and “it takes a village” to become skillful, effective, and engaged practitioners and collaborators, and we tend to create interactions that balance these seemingly disparate goals.

That’s what I’ve been transforming my studio class at ASU to balance the kind of Studio Talk and critical thinking that young artists need to hear from a teacher with a robust, dynamic learning community among studio members. My goal is to push back against music schools’ traditionally dogma-forward approach and the “because I said so” school of teaching (balanced with my new, more draconian grading rubrics), and to emphasize the kind of connected learning that pushes students to articulate and embody the utility of their work to their peers, mentors, and the larger world.

I’m with the majority of the presenters at FOLC: I believe it’s possible to develop a learning community and be part of a learning ecosystem in online environments. It just requires a complete rethinking of how the course is made and deployed, and a concerted emphasis on the kind of connection, motivation, shared struggle, and casual connection that those of us who went to music school know so well. And perhaps what we learn from online teaching can make our in-person encounters even better.

The future of learning is learning communities, and musicians have a LOT to say about how to create and foster community.

Ok, back to my snare drum hidey-hole.

Other things I’m liking now.

• In perhaps the most on-brand book I’ve ever read, I just polished off Dennis Duncan’s magnificent “Index, A History of the,” an absolutely riveting history of the index. It’s rich in both tiny trivia and larger ideas about what it means to organize information. Plus, Duncan is an entrancing writer, balancing wit with clarity and focus.

  

• This rad “etc.” from a 1713 royal proclamation. I love this era of abbreviation betwixt “and cetera” and “etc.”

• My new favorite mug

  

What if we devoted some time to understanding why and how our learning works? So, in the spirit of learning about why something works, I wanted to share a recent article I penned for Percussive Notes, the journal/magazine of the Percussive Arts Society. Tasked with writing something for their Professional Development section, I decided to write about the utility of professionalizing ones musical learning, of creating a deliberate and comprehensive creative practice around musical learning.

I wanted to share best practices from a number of disciplines. So, I decided to draw a little slur between “practice room” tips and “professional development” tips. Why? Musicians and creatives today have unprecedented opportunities to develop their skills through easily accessible recordings, digital resources, and direct work with master teachers worldwide. Research in cognitive neurology and performance psychology has revealed powerful strategies for effective learning and performing under pressure. While professional development activities are now common in music curricula, resources connecting professional habits in the practice room to career success remain limited.

My main thesis is that the most potent professional development tool for performing musicians is to become a more effective musical learner. First, I argue that a critical component of professionalism is maximizing efficiency and effectiveness within the practice room through the development and deployment of virtuosic diagnostic ability, aggressive refinement, dynamic organization, and the proactive pursuit of performance without stage fright. When performers commit to the mastery of these skills, they can produce impactful interpretations more reliably and in less time. As a result, a masterful practicer has more time to address the administrative obligations that form a significant part of modern musical professions, or more time to look at art, cook, or otherwise take inspiration from the world around them.

I share ideas and best practices from scientific research and artistic experience around three key theses:

1. Organizing musical practice around how our brains and nervous systems encode, consolidate and retrieve information is central to effective learning.

2. The habits that enable peak performance under pressure are developed through practice and study and are refined through feedback.

3. Planning learning around when, where, and how one learns most effectively is essential.

Second, I share some thoughts for how the skills underpinning peak performance might transfer to professional development activities outside the practice room, asserting that the two domains are mutually reinforcing. The habits of learning are foundational professional skills: instantaneous diagnostic ability supported by rich mental representations, rigorous refinement of a task through deliberate practice, and using data about how one learns to set goals and manage time are supremely transferable to any discipline.

The entire article is available here if you’re interested.

Read it here

Top Tips

Here’s the Tl:DR takeaways, some of the top tips that emerge from a multiplicity of sources. Maybe they apply to your discipline?

• Focusing practice on developing rich mental models provides the highest return on investment in musical development.

• Learning is most durable and flexible when it is most difficult

• Work outside the practice room is essential to effective work inside the practice room

• Separating technical development from repertoire study gets both accomplished faster.

• Peak performance under pressure is supported by frequent feedback and astute response to it

• The importance of generative memory and reflection to solidifying and recalling memories

• Using design thinking to organize learning effectively is key!

Is there a learning technique or source I’m leaving out? Please let me know!

The entire issue has some real page turners, including an update on the 100th anniversary of the Moeller book, a seminal drumming text whose codex of drumming rhythms was caught in an editorial whirlpool

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Happy reading!

Other things I’m liking:

• Another entry in our niche competition field: The World Championship Massage Final:

• This fun map of the Grandes Randonnées, the French national hiking path system. I have NO idea how the numbering system works.

• I’m recently returned from the premiere of Eliza Brown’s The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek, an evening-length work blending field recordings composer Eliza Brown made over a year of visits to Big Walnut Creek with judicious cello and percussion parts. Eliza calls the project "

• The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek is a sound art project that explores the changing sonic ecology of a place,” and it was a joy to help bring this work to life at Depauw University, among a supportive and curious community.

• I’ve been devoting time to my Learning Percussion newsletter, articulating my thoughts on productivity, practicing, and percussion.

• With the end of the semester, I’m reflecting on a school year where I tried to dial in learning outcomes, assessments and rubrics for the study of percussion within a university whose mission is radical inclusivity. This year, we worked on embedding best-practice learning strategies within the percussion percussion studio, focusing on time management, leveraging cognitive neurology for maximal efficiency in the practice room, and diminishing performance anxiety through conscious observation, analysis, and action.

Throughout, though, there has been one constant: Gardeners’ World.

Gardener’s World is a BBC gardening show that has become an obsession. The search to answer why has gotten me thinking about learning, expertise, and seasonality in creative work, and I wanted to share those thoughts.

Gardeners' World has been on since 1968, but has entered my life in recent years. The show airs weekly, with timely information for UK gardeners on that week’s gardening tasks, field trips to gardens across the country and interviews with expert horticulturists and single plants, species. In recent years, the show has shown viewers taking on their own gardening challenges, and offers practical tips for gardeners’ confronting climate change.

The show’s most recent host is Monty Don, the sartorially-enlightened steward of Longmeadow, a multi-acre homestead in Herefordshire that Monty transformed from barren fields to a majestic tour de force of plants, spanning a Cottage Garden, a Jewel Garden, a Paradise Garden, and a Vegetable Garden , a wildlife pond pond, an orchard, a number of yew cones, a writing garden, what seems like several acres of compost, and two beautiful dogs, who do NOT seem that interested in Monty’s Gardening.

Why do I like this show so much? Is it Monty’s winsome, contagious calmness? His arsenal of tools? The dog content? The extremely high-def rendering of plants? The window into the lives of Monty’s team of correspondents? The fact that I don’t know where any of these locations are? The straight-faced deployment of paragraphs of latin plant names? I think it’s because Monty is teaching us something about learning, history, and music. Specifically how we learn, make, and share music.

Developing and Using Expertise

One truism of learning is that strong mental models (the key to expertise, knowledge and skill) developed through active creation, modeling, and tinkering.

On Gardeners’ World, we see elite expertise, wrapped in delightful British obliqueness. Each week viewers are introduced to people who know a LOT about plants. But many of the characters don’t know a lot about a lot of plants. They know a lot about the proclivities and needs of ONE plant: they hold the national collection of Dahlia’s, have raised thousands of lithops, or have cultivated the same species of tree for 50 years. We’re also introduced to gardeners with extreme skill, whose propagation techniques allow for many-fold increase in plant yields. And some gardeners are experts in certain spaces. Monty is exhibit A here: he rarely leaves his beloved Longmeadow, save for exceptional vistas, such as July 8 2021’s visit to the longest herbaceous border in the world (at Kew Gardens)

These gardeners’ accrued experience, knowledge and skill has resulted in tremendously rich mental representations for their specialized plants, gardens, or climates. And, I cannot get enough of Gardeners' World’s hyper specific and not-necessarily-applicable advice. Despite dwelling in the desert, I can now can opine on deadheading Dahlias (do it!), adding grit to compost to facilitate drainage, pruning (roses: prune back hard, hydrangeas: there are two kinds with opposite pruning methods for some reason), encouraging wildlife with judicious creation of ponds (not really possible in AZ), planting espalier trees—45 degrees is the key angle!— and a LOT about grapes and Monty’s obsession with growing them in the UK.

But, what piques my interested the most about Gardeners' World is its focus on how expertise is USED, specifically how strong mental models help gardeners thrive without immediate feedback and adjust their knowledge to their own gardening circumstance.

Right Plant, Right Place

One might think that practitioners of a field with an immense body of historical and biological knowledge—humans have been messing with plants for a long time—would be rigid, erring on the side of established practice.

That is not the case. Even though horticultural enthusiasts know a lot about what should happen with their plants in their gardens, they prioritize what is happening in their gardens, how soil, wind, microclimates, pollinators all impact what they can grow.

Because they are so familiar with their gardens, gardeners are experts in climate change. you can’t grow what you used to, so get over it , and Gardeners' World’s lesson is definitely “get over it” — so many sequences on the show are visiting gardens in an attempt to learn what GB’s changing gardens will be like. At the same time, the expertise of Monty’s cast of rogues allow them to adjust their work from an idealized circumstance to the reality of their own gardens. And sometimes that leads to exceptions.

There’s a real lesson for musicians here. As performers, we strive for dynamic and communicative performances. It’s essential to know something about original performance practice, what Mozart’s music might have sounded like in his lifetime, but it’s our duty as performers to adjust, to bring a piece of music to life in a way that communicates to our own milieu. It’s nice to know that typically plant X needs Y, but perhaps in our community plant X grows the best with Z. Likewise, as a professor coming to the end of a semester, watching Gardeners' World has been a good reminder to teach the students I have, not the students I wish I had. Right Plant Right Place means to address the students we’re working with, not hoping that our cottage garden is suddenly a tropical island.

The Process

“I’ll check back on this every month, and in three years it might be great” is not something a classical musician wants to hear from a teacher or coach. But it’s a best practice in gardening. Plants take time to develop, and doing too much to improve them too quickly actually messes them up, as my over-watered cacti can attest. The best gardeners and musicians fall in love with the process. Does’t this experience rhyme with musical development, where results are often a lagging indicator of work?

But, musicians and gardeners don’t necessarily become more patient. They allow the long-term goals to be led by the joy of day to day learning and discovery. It’s remarkable how much a single garden can change in a month, a week, or even a day. And that measuring of short-term, small-scale change is essential to the habits of creative practice that we try to active as musicians. It sits somewhere between frustration and joy, between experimentation and systems or habits.

Musicians can take inspiration from Gardeners' World that creative work is also seasonal. We plant the seeds of a project, water them, incubate them, then harvest those ideas before using those ideas to plant new projects. Plants and projects need to incubate, and this incubation period tends to be where the best ‘happy accidents’ happen. One might have multiple projects in seasons at one time, but we can’t rush those seasons, harvesting before the ideas are ready, or planting before the soil has been prepared. (While, with the exception of Concert Season Announcement Season, most musical tasks can be undertaken at any time of the year, so here I’m mostly referring to how how there are times within each project to undertake each task.)

Gardening is seasonal, and this urgency is represented in Monty’s ”Jobs for the Weekend,” which highlights time sensitive tasks for each week of the year. Lest you think musicians have the market cornered on specificity, here are some of my favorite, most #relatable jobs for the weekend :

• Support Autumn-Fruiting Raspberries (2014, episode 16):

• Cut Back Epimediums (2022, episode 4):

• Planting Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii' (2013, episode 18):

• Potting Up Dahlia Tubers in Early Spring (2017, episode 2)

• Lifting and Storing Dahlia Tubers (2021, episode 28)

• Deadheading Dahlias (2020, episode 21)

• Pinching Out Dahlia Tips (2020, episode 8

There are a lot of tips about Dahlias…

Turning the Compost

Working for the habits of creativity rather than the results can lead to some interesting and powerful results.

Each week, Monty broadcasts at least once from his potting shed, where his carefully arranged compost sifters hang like paella pans and his spades are ready to do battle with the toughest leaf mold. By my standards, Monty deploys a LOT of compost while potting, ranging from pure compost to leaf mold to grit, to vermiculite, each carefully shoveled like Garrett’s popcorn into a plastic or terra cotta container to be seeded, labeled, watered in, and left in one of the many germinating spots in Longmeadow.

Obsessions

If you made it this far, you might be like me! I like Gardeners' World for the same reason I like Chef Wang, niche catalogs, and talking to docents at obscure art museums. Nothing is more interesting than someone who is interested in something. And despite his general passion for all plants, Monty displays a supernatural interest in a few unlikely domains of British gardening. They’re worth exploring:

I. Grapes

For as long as I've watched the show, Monty has been trying to grow the perfect grapes. Once in a while, we visit him in his greenhouse, where he carefully, assiduously cultivates bundles fit for Bacchus. He even visits a grape cultivator to pick the perfect species for his future endeavors. He carefully grows the branches around the shape of his greenhouse, and then assiduously prunes both the branches (regular secateurs) and the grapes (I think he’s using a nose hair trimmer for this!?)

II. Bananas

Monty is supernaturally obsessed with bananas, even though they shouldn’t really grow where he lives.

Here, Monty demonstrates how to overwinter bananas, particularly insetti banana. Wait, not the Musa basjoo banana, which you cna leave outside if you build…a fleece Wigwam around it? British gardeners are weird.

It’s a real journey. Monty pulls the root through an Edwardian-era door, eschews the ridiculous number of terra cotta pots behind him to dump the banana roots into a plastic bag filled carefully with a mix of ordinary compost + 50% leaf mold, then endeavors to keep it between 5 and 12 degrees to hibernate it, describing his plan to gradually introduce it to heat until April. He learns from last year’s mistake of leaving the banana in the green house (too warm, banana grew too much) and decides to keep the stub in his tool shed. Just wow.

Other Things I’m Liking

Speaking of Niche Information, I’m liking two insider-focused competitions right now:

Ideal Electrician National Championship

Sponsored by IDEAL tools, the National Electrician Championship asks professional electricians to solve a common problem, live! Here’s an example challenge:

I love watching these pros bend pipes, take notes, eschew the standard operating procedures, and try to use tiny pencils while wearing giant gloves.

Excel World Championships

The Microsoft Excel World Championship challenges competitors to solve unusual data-based problems. “It transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport.” I’m in. One competition was four hours and forty-five minutes long, but I was captivated with how the competitors deployed keyboard shortcuts I never knew existed, filling, slicing and dicing arrays like madmen. I love that they walk in like professional wrestlers.

If you run an incredibly specific competition and would like someone to comment, call me!

Speaking of commentary, one of my favorite parts of the Monty Don experience is his color commentary on his gardening, often offered with extremely specific, #relatable advice advice like “when you’re potting on agapanthus, one needs to remember…” or “the thing about overwintering a mango is that…” I would LOVE a TV show where elite musicians narrate their practice sessions, articulating what they are hearing and how they hope to address their issues, and evaluating recordings of their performances.

This Week in Maps

While perusing Cameron Booth’s Transit Maps store, I came across two maps with similar, unusual takes on distance and time.

This one is from Frankfurt (spelled Frankfort back in 1928), with travel time in hours to a variety of destinations. I love how some locations are “off the map”

And here’s one from Indianapolis in 1907, diagramming passenger rail and interurban streetcars. This map proves that “one fourth the population of the US is within a radius of three hundred miles of Indianapolis.” Woe to those who want to reach St. Louis: you’ve have to transfer in Brazil or Terre Haute. I like the implication that the reader would spin the map around on the table, like the score to Stockhausen’s Refrain.

(I wrote a TL/DR version of this post on my other newsletter, On Learning Percussion. If you have time, I’d love for you to check it out.)

Amidst the end of semester chaos, I found space to enjoy Ken Burn’s new Leonardo Da Vinci documentary (great music Caroline!!!), and was inspired to revisit Leonardo’s notebooks, which are reproduced in full 1990s splendor here. For those interested, here’s a facsimile-maker’s account of the strange journey these documents have taken, and a google arts and culture write up on one of the codices.

A self-described “disciple of experience,” Leonardo’s notes-to-self are masterful analyses of the world around him. He summarizes some new piece of information, articulates it in his own words (often with images), and makes connections, analogizing between disciplines to articulate structural similarities with the goal of increasing his aptitude for understanding the world around him. Leonardo is a master at reflection.

(BTW, Leonardo’s tendency to leave commissions unfinished and rather go deep into “birds” or “how does water work?” resonates)

Reflection involves articulating the specifics of an experience, making thematic observations, and connecting these experiences to broader contexts. It’s a central practice in wiring and rewiring our nervous systems, memorizing and recalling information: to growing intellectually. In fact, one might argue that Learning = Experience + Reflection.

Here, habitual journal-writer Doogie Howser uses reflection to trigger an epiphany.

A few years ago, I wrote a “reflection on reflection,” where I outlined how lived experiences can inform future practices. In the intervening time, I’ve filled in the gaps, thinking about how learning music is a dynamic framework in which reflection is a central activity.

I dove into the ever increasing body of research and writing-about-research on cognitive neurology, which has demonstrated even more clearly the benefits of reflection.

Benefits

In The Musician’s Mind, a quick spin through some of the research into neuroplasticity, Lynne Helding breaks the learning process down into three broad steps: attention, learning, and memory. Throughout, our brains encode, consolidate, store, retrieve, and reconsolidate information.

Reflecting, ideally temporally close to the experience, is a critical to the encoding and consolidation phases of our learning, moving information from short-term to long-term memory, from soft and slippery (the wifi password at that AirBNB) to hard (your phone number).

Reflection also enables more effective storage and retrieval of encoded knowledge, facilitating neurogenesis and neuroplasticity—the two processes through which our brains learn and deploy new skills—by offering desirable difficulties and cognitive interference. Thus, thinking about playing percussion helps generate strong mental models and secures your memories visually, physically, and aurally. Great for combating stage fright!

Finally, reflection helps us reconsolidate information we’ve learned while articulating which learning strategies have worked.

Here are 2 use cases that are front of mind in recent weeks. Perhaps they are of use to non-musicians as well?

1. Metacognitive Exercises: Reflection for Skill-Building and Refinement

But how do you develop the skills of reflection? By thinking about thinking: metacognition. (I haven’t dared to think what thinking about thinking about thinking would be…)

Just as important as the content students learn in a class is the process by which they learn it. Metacognition describes an awareness of this process: the ways we absorb, assimilate, and convey information and participate in knowledge production. Johns Hopkins’ excellent research on the subject argues that the act of reflection—or thinking about thinking—helps students “assess and adapt their facility with the knowledge and skills of a discipline,” making their thinking explicit, and to “transfer their learning to new contexts.” Mini Leonardi!

Here are some sample metacognitive questions that we used in our ASU Percussion Group, with the goal of structuring the development of reflective skills:

• How did you envision, expect, or intend the performance to go? Did the performance go as you intended?

• How much time did you spend:

  • Listening to recordings of repertoire? Studying the score? Marking your part with cues and other logistical information? Practicing your individual part? etc etc

• Based on the information above, what will you do differently in preparing for the next performance? For instance, will you spend more time practicing? More time studying? Less time rehearsing? What questions would you ask the instructor? Be specific.

• What advice would you have for a percussionist joining this ensemble next semester?

Long-Term Epiphanies

These metacognitive exercises can be unfurled over longer time periods. Our students at ASU have all sorts of amazing musical experiences. Some of these take the form of slow, hard earned epiphanies. Others, though, are rapid fire “epoofanies” (a tiny epiphany): a comment in a percussion group coaching, the way a guest artist inflects a melodic line, a composer’s choice of adjective, or the sudden burst of adrenaline from that first perfect four stroke ruff. All in one day! How do we continue to grow when the growing experiences seem to come too quickly to process in the moment? Reflection over the course of a busy semester, perhaps facilitated by metacognitive exercises, and perhaps undertaken (gasp) alone, can help experiences become memories, and help those memories become consolidated and reconsolidated into valuable expertise, without needing to relive the pain of those four stroke ruffs.

2. Distillation: Reflection for Efficient Learning

I taped almost every lesson I took during my undergraduate degree (“nerd!”). Even though I took copious (and, it turns out, illegible) notes during lessons, my written summaries of lesson recordings—typically made the same day or one day after—were more coherent and cogent. The research has supported these conclusions, showing that learning and mastery (which include neurogenesis and neuroplasticity) begin with refined summary and deliberate mental organization of lived experiences. This process fosters thinking in analogies, which empower structural-level analysis, which allows us to learn new material more effectively, and on and on.

Design Thinking

I think of reflection as the long-term form of Design Thinking. When crafting new interpretations or learning new repertoire, prototyping solutions, failing fast, and iterating new ideas, taking some time to create positive friction by slowing down to see what’s working and what’s not is essential.

So what are my reflections on the semester of creative projects? That will have to wait for next time. I’ll discuss how I leverage AI in curriculum development, experimented with memory, and checklisted our work.

Things I’m Liking Right Now

• Just one thing. This amazing transit map. Just wow. #christmasgift

I went live on Instagram. I was hoping this format would allow me to get some ideas across without my typical and lengthy editing process.

Last week, I talked about some of my favorite snare drum method books, and I’m hoping soon to talk about some ways of thinking about technique and mental representations on a number of instruments. If this format is interesting and helpful for you, let me know and I’ll do more.

The inspiration? A visit from author and guitarist Christopher Berg to our ASU Percussion Studio.

Practicing Music by Design

Berg’s book Practicing Music by Design has quickly become an essential part of my pedagogical thought, in addition to showing a path for how musicians typically thought of a performers can infringe on our research-only colleagues (kidding!)

Berg, a terrific guitarist, summarizes and synthesizes what the latest scientific research says about the development of expert performance. He then brings together literature from expert musical performers from the past (Liszt, Galamain, etc), showing how many of their practices align or predate these scientific discoveries. Finally, Berg articulates eight tenets or ideas which appear in both literature on how the brain and body work and the teachings of significant classical musicians.

• A Foundation of Knowledge and Skill

  • Interpretation means nothing if one has no technical framework on their instrument

• Chunking

  • Breaking a task into its component parts for maximal efficiency.

• Mental Work

  • Practicing without one’s instrument is essential

• Slow Practice

  • Duh! But the reasons why might surprise you

• Variety in Repetition

  • Key to avoiding injury, developing myelin, and avoiding performance anxiety

• Continuity

  • Separation of performing time and practicing time: being good in the practice room does not mean being good in the stage

• Phrase Storming

  • Practicing the same materials with a number of different approaches

• Feedback and Self-Criticism

  • In deliberate practice, we speak about feedback from self, peers, and coaches.

Mastering these concepts can, to Berg, “improve one’s mental understanding and perceptions, physical skills, ability to generate and effect artistic ideas, and enhance the relationship among the three.”

Practically, I love this book because of how Berg focuses on the details of practicing rather than the details of repertoire, positing instrument-agnostic ideas for diagnosing and addressing issues in one’s playing. There are so many gems in within, from ideas about the distinction between practicing and practicing performing to ways to subtly challenge long-held dogmas. At the same time, the sub-thesis of Practicing Music by Design is that artists beat psychologists to these ideas, and as such, Berg’s wide-ranging inspiration and frequent digressions to philosophy and history are both apt and resonant.

I also appreciate Berg’s desire for his arguments to be well-documented. Berg noted that while there exist many method books in which the author prescribes an action without saying why it should be done, he wanted his work to have backing beyond his own experience or expertise. As such, he sought out research, made connections, and challenged his own beliefs. He aspired to a WHY-to book, not a HOW-to book. This journey resonated with me, as the notion of using every available learning tool has been on my mind recently; both as a technique for empowering personal musical growth and as a way of making my own work more efficient and flexible.

By the way…

Questions and (Some) Answers

I loved how the practice techniques and learning concepts in Practicing Music by Design are instrument agnostic, and have been fascinated with applying them to percussion, a slippery assortment of instruments and techniques that at times seem aligned and at other times disjunct

As we spoke, a number our students had questions about how exactly one might bring Practicing Music by Design’s tenets to the practice room. How might a musician know which technique to mobilize at each junction of a practice session? Million dollar question!

Berg writes:

Imitation needs no decision-making, and it may seem to be an easy way to approach a new piece, but decision-making itself requires practice. If one is only trying to solve a problem, then the results may be constrained by the definition of the problem. The interpreter, much like an artist facing a blank canvas, must create, articulate, or find the problem to solve. Artistic problems are more discovered than given.

Helpful framing to be sure, but there is relatively little within Practicing Music by Design about how to design a practice session. How does one actually proactively organize their learning and practicing to maximize retention, speed, artistry, and flexibility? This question is front of mind as a I continue my writing and research into musical learning. In most cases, one might say that the diagnostician within us mobilizes physical and sonic parameters of our mental representations to assess an issue and experiment—it’s a combination of deliberate practice and design thinking.

Part of my own book project is to provide some ideas about how the tenets of Practicing Music by Design might be practically applied to both "model" practice sessions (if there is such a thing), as well as the organization of practice. I’m excited to share my research as it trickles.

At the same time, there is space to transpose Berg’s research outside the practice room to show how a foundation of technical skill and phrase storming might be inspired by historical study, thoughts about performance environments, and curation. My hope is that we can use the principles in Berg’s book as the basis for a kind of musical learning which enables powerful advocacy.

Upcoming

• I will soon be releasing remastered recordings of Iannis Xenakis’ Psappha and Tonia Ko’s Blue Skin of the Sea. It’s been wonderful to carry these pieces with me for a number of years, and I love investigating how I’ve learned through both long-term collaboration on a new piece and confronting a masterwork. Plus, I was fortunate to work with Jasmine Parsia on new artwork for the cover:

  

• Next month I’ll be releasing my Unsnared Drum Performer’s Guides, along with some materials about practicing and learning geared towards those piece as well as any new composition. This has been a real labor of love and I’m so excited to share these ideas with the world!

Other Things I’m Liking this Week

• JSTOR Daily

JSTOR, an electronic archive of journal articles from across many academic disciplines, is one of my favorite internet spaces. JSTOR Daily provides curated articles from their deep repository… daily… Nerd out!

• textExpander

It seems simple: type a little bit, get a lot of bit. textExpander allows the user to set shortcuts for commonly typed words, phrases, paragraphs, monographs, etc. I use it to type my name, address, phone number, link to my scheduling page, composer names with acute accents, and dates. ($3.33 per month, but worth it for my carpal tunnels).

• A Trajan war?

In font news, the University of Kansas has ditched their signature Trajan typeface in favor of a more innocuous uniform style.

As far as I know, KU was the only serif-ed sports uniform previously.

In doing so, I’ve been thinking a bit about analogies, a powerful tool in my own learning and teaching. Analogical thinking is so powerful that Johannes Kepler used them to determine with great accuracy the orbital path of the planets. Key to analogies is schema abstraction: what Dedre Gentner calls “extracting common systems from representations” in order to promote “the disembodying of subtle and possibly important commonalities.” Analogies help us notice “alienable differences,” becoming aware of contrasts between two domains through finding high-similarity pairs. Our brains can easily notice relationships between systems. If there’s a blank spot or a change in one domain, an adroit analogist can connect another system, using structure-mapping to explain a mystery by comparing it to a pair in an analogous domain.

For Kepler, analogies were a powerful tool to investigate the unknown: in one example, the orbital speeds and paths of the planets. Kepler analogized that the sun might have a virtus mortix: a light-like power mediated by distance. Planets further from the sun move more slowly because they are further from this vis mortrix, much the way that objects further from a source of light are dimmer. Kepler used this analogy to determine an elliptical orbit path for the planets, eventually arguing that gravity controlled these orbits.

Musicians can use analogies when learning complex new actions by asking how the process at hand might be similar to something they already know.

So, are performers tour guides?

When we analyze and perform music, we’ll be thinking about exceptional performances, the extraordinary power of music.  In order to do so, we need a sense of the ordinary. What, then, are the qualities of a bad tour?

Lack of a Thesis:

Some tours highlight every detail, every building on a college campus or every painting in an art museum.  Others meander meagerly between seemingly randomized waypoints.  You might be excited to visit a Baroque cathedral, but not so excited after an hour-long summary of  every bishop or clergy member buried within.

Isolation/Lack of Connection:

The tour receiver is detached from their tour-mates.  At its worst, this detachment manifests itself not simply as physical separation, but as imagined adversarial relationships.  That man in the black hat: why is he going through the door before me? That women in the sun dress? She’s so close to the tour guide; I wonder if she knows them? That older gentleman? Why is he always answering the guide’s questions? Who does he think he is: some kind of ersatz docent? This feeling of bring left out grows and percolates, dominating your thoughts even as you investigate a wonderfully ornate 16th century clock donated to a royal family to commemorate the birth of some distant relative.

Perhaps the guide misestimates the level of knowledge of the people on the tour, delivering content already known, or material too jargon-filled to be helpful?

Here’s an example of someone being bored out of their mind by a tour guide:

(FWIW, I have hundreds of photos like this: a selfie of someone looking bored while I am assiduously following a museum map…)

Pacing

In 2014, I took a tour in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.  I was excited to be there. I drove to be there, parked in New York to be there.  The main exhibit at the museum was on Italian Futurism, featuring some of my favorite examples of Aeropintura, as well as some wonderful Campari ads.

Our guide: a weaponized PhD candidate in Art History from NYU. We spent the first thirty minutes of the tour hovering over the first painting we saw, a delightfully structured Moholy-Nagy work.  We didn’t even cover the museums’ wonderfully ornate water fountains, the use of triangles in the stairwells, the compellingly alluring factoid that the museum was originally grey, not white. Sigh. I ended up splitting off from my tour compatriots, stomping away to continue on my own.

For context, I am a plaque-reader. I prepare to attend museum by studying the collection.There is nothing more energizing and inspiring to me than someone who is interested in their work. I was a tour guide in college. I love tours.  This was not a great tour.

Apathy

If a tour is a performance, what if the guide doesn’t seem to care about the subject? They mumble, gesture at a particularly nice bit of medieval architecture with the clarity of a wet noodle.  Over time, the group itself becomes disjointed, geographically dispersing, eyes darting to objects which might have headphone icons on their placards, hands unfolding maps they thought unneeded.

Professors know this moment well, the moment at which they have lost the class’ collective energy, lost the thread of the narrative of a lecture, abdicated their responsibility. I feel seen.

Let’s extend the analogy to audio tours. A wonderful idea, but the pacing and engagement is often off.  For some, the audio guide speaks too slowly.  For others, the narrative arc is too prescribed. At times, the isolation of being alone in an audio tour negates the joy of communing with others over great art.  During the peak of the Covid pandemic, many phenomenal musical organizations pivoted to live streaming.  Despite the instant availability of world-class performances I found myself gravitating away from these streams. For me, the joy of a concert is the shared experience, the sense of community created by those in the hall, a perfect tour. If that quality is missing, I’d rather watch a music video.

“Good” Tours

The best tours highlight AND connect locations. They have a thesis which links what is on the tour and explain what is not and why. The best tours connect the audience with the subject matter both physically and intellectually. They facilitate a connection between the tour guide and the tour members. More crucially, they engender a community, comprised of all the people on the tour, either created during the course of the event or a pre-existing group.

The best guides have a knowledge of their community, its needs and desires, how it forms meaning from its experiences and how its history might inform its reception of the tour’s content. Expert guides have a knowledge of what level of subject matter depth is appropriate.

In short, great tours are relational, not transactional.

Great Performances

So, are musical performances tours? The two seem to be “high-similarity pairs,” sharing many common traits.  Both need fundamental knowledge about art and its contexts.  Both incorporate assumptions embedded in the art, and both seek to bring that art to life in a new context for a specific community at a specific time.

A great performance needs to articulate the text of a piece of music in a way that impacts others. But it needs to do so much more.  A performance must use the shared space the music engenders to bind the audience together in a community.  With luck, this community extends beyond the bounds of a concert space, living at least in the memories of those present and at best inspiring future collective action. Judging by the number of museum maps currently stashed in my home, many tours have fulfilled this mission in my life.

That said, because performances are judged on temporally- and culturally-contextualized parameters, there really is no such thing as an objectively great performance. Much the same way that our taste in fashion seems both objective at the time and so delightfully subjective with some distance (looking at you JNCOS!), musical fashion is a tangled knot when viewed with the some time.

There are, though, interpretations which are influential, timely and impactful. I would argue that most, if not all, impactful performances (and tours)  are opinionated.  Thus, informed opinions, manifested as interpretations which bring music to life with an eye towards connection, are the key asset performers must develop. The more opinionated and knowledgable the guide, the more memorable the tour.

• What do we need in order to learn a piece of music? To share it?

• How do we tell that we’ve learned something? When does “know” mean “know”?

• How do we parse information from the past, and to what extent is that information actionable in the present?

I’ve become more convinced that one necessary skill in learning is to be excited by and captivated by details while being able to connect those details to larger cultural ideas around us. I’ve been thinking details and contexts while categorizing and reflecting on my experiences this summer. My goal was to visit old things, newer old things, organized old things.

My newest collection of details. It’s not a map, but a book about a map, the Plano de Teixeira. A classic projection of Madrid from  1656, a print of which I had gifted to him many years ago.  Plano stands out for its detail (wonderful façades) as well as its timeliness—created about a century after Madrid became the Spanish capital, it’s a study in urban development, decay, and structure.

Link to hi-res version

An original engraving and the copper plates used to make it are housed at the Museo de Historia de Madrid, possibly my favorite museum in Madrid: it’s filled with maps. Even the historical paintings are ersatz maps, depicting locations and events in Madrid’s fascinating development. The Teixeira map is also basis for the museum’s greatest piece, a scale model of the city.

By the way, The City of Madrid has put together an impressive collection of historical maps, each of which depicts a rapidly and honestly changing metropolis.

While Cervantes passed away before the Plano de Teixeira, this interactive map is a platform through which to explore locations important in 17th century Madrid.

I remember a class where geographers adjusted the projections of historical maps onto GPS data, allowing us to track the development of city blocks, businesses, and other urban data over hundreds of years.  I was struck at the time by how the newer GPS-based maps seemed to have their own bias.  At least the 16th century map of Antwerp emblazoned with a crest of a cherub firing an arrow at a sea monster isn’t hiding its proclivities.

—

Continuing my summer theme of cryptic shards and isolated fragments, I was overwhelmed by the Musei Capitolini in Rome, which are seemingly 100% fragments. Unlike the Palazzo Massimo, the Capitolini include detritus from around the City, arranged by type, not unlike a trendy outdoor antique store.

Amidst the 4 original “donations” from the Papacy (who wouldn’t want a giant head and a boy investigating a shard in his foot?), I enjoyed the section featuring Roman writing, highlighting everything from gravestones to Roman resumes to mile markers to word games.

Context

In June I wrote that “I believe fragments in context are more powerful than complete works out of context.” This was the case at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Despite my proclivity towards modern art (part of my reason for visiting Barcelona was Moderismo and Miró), the real draw here is the Romanesque. In response to the crumbling condition of many Catalonian romanesque churches and the pillaging of major works of art by collectors operating on behalf of American art museums, these painted murals and retablos were re-repatriated to Barcelona and installed in interior museum spaces designed to model exactly their original location.

In most museums, we come into contact with Medieval paintings, retablos, statues, and artifacts as art, detached from their original context and located within a space designed to showcase them as aesthetic objects. Here, it was stunning to see these works in a space with perspective, depth, texture. Most notably, these are works designed to be looked up to, not into.  The perspective shifts from standing below these works bestows a measure of awe. Negative space was as powerful as the murals themselves, the absence a powerful focusing tool.

Later, I walked down from Montjuïc, passing two temporally linked but geographically disjunct fragments. Poble Espanyol, a “model” Spanish village built for the 1929 World Exposition in Barcelona, now serving as a cultural center and tourist trap. It’s got a “It’s a Small World” feeling to it, a mix of Old Tucson, Colonial Williamsburg, and The Good Place. Here was an example of non-original fragments in non-original locations.

Completing my unasked-for quadrant of original piece/original location, I passed Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition. Mies sets the building as a continuous line, mobilizing marble and travertine to create a space which feels both rigorously enclosed—its aggressive ceiling feels low, and visitors step down into the space—and powerfully open. Unadorned save for Kolbe’s statue “Dawn” in a reflecting pool, Mies’ pavilion was to me a parallel to Barragan’s Cuadra San Cristóbal, a residence with a tremendously overachieving horse stable in Los Clubes northeast of Mexico City. As in the museum’s Romanesque recreations, the negative space focus the mind and eyes.

But, like the Plano de Teixeira, Mies’ pavilion is a fake.  A reconstruction after the original was disassembled in 1930. (By the way, for fellow chair-aholics, this building was the site of the original “Barcelona” chair.)

❓❓

Original fragment/new location, fake fragment/original location: does it matter? Thinking about how these details relate to the larger cultural trends that shape them is a, I would argue, fun brand of amateur art history. It’s also a wonderful way to learn about music. In addition to the usual ideas of what one may learn about from studying contemporaneous art, noticing, categorizing, delighting in, and discussing details, those tiny intentionalities of our world, is effective training for the study of music. It keeps us moving slowly and staying attuned to our senses. We look for the extraordinary in the music we study. To find the extraordinary, one must know the ordinary, and the “ordinary” (the garde of avant-garde) is those slippery cultural norms. In my experience, architecture and visual art are easy prisms through which to think about zeitgeists.

More Representations

A. Later, while reading more about the churches in question (and out of guilt for missing 80% of the museum), I was taken with their website UI:

Speaking of UI, anyone who has ever tried to enter a year a faculty activity online or set up a Canvas site knows how important user interface can and should be. Here’s a fun demonstration.

B. Speaking of UI, anyone who has ever tried to enter a year a faculty activity online or set up a Canvas site knows how important user interface can and should be. Here’s a fun demonstration.

One joy and gift of traveling is to live somewhere, to learn about cultural norms and priorities by spending a bit more extended time in a destination. This leads to a lot of grocery stores, walking around (as fast as possible), museums, and failing at quotidian tasks—I’ll never forget my first experience with a German washing machine. I’ve found that this predilection enhances my ability to articulate ideas of style in music I’m studying, while also honing my ability to notice, parse, and organize the details in music by practicing in the world. After weeks of stimulation and overstimulation (Toledo Cathedral and Sagrada Familia being the main offenders), I’m back from such a trip to Spain and Italy.

It’s not desirable to work against norms, particularly with regard to food, and Spaniards certainly have predilections vis a vis meal timing, construction and judgement. I love eating in Spain, riding the ebullient waves of energy before, during and after meals. However, one detail has always tickled my mind with regard to Spaniards’, and by extension my, criteria for evaluating their cuisine.

It’s sheen-based.

In fact, I would argue the shinier the better.   Based on research conducted from age 2 to the present, I’ve organized Spanish culinary mainstays by level of shininess/deliciousness, drawing upon observations and discussions by natives and courteous foreigners.

Top Tier: Sunglasses Required.  The Tastiest

• Jamón Ibérico: very shiny, radiant, radioactive, reflective, resplendent.

• Jamón Ibérico de Bellota: burnished. Inner luminescence. Confident!

• Queso Manchego: sheen enhanced by its sweat, which glistens at room temperature.

• Other Quesos: your mileage may vary. As observed, best depoyed as a tabla, juxtaposed with something less sun kissed.

• Boquerones: Marinated anchovies.  Scales vibrating with nitid oil. A winner.

• Pimientos de Padrón: Glistening with dew, sheen abetted only by salt crystals.

• Pan con Tomato: probably the most shiny breakfast food, and thus a terrific option to jumpstart the day. Extra points because the process of grating tomatoes unveils a lustrous inner lycopene zone.

• Salmorejo: Andalusian tomato and bread soup saturated with picante olive oil.  I can see my reflection in it.

• Fried eggs: eggs, basted in sparkling oil.  The yolk advances a few Pantone shades towards “sun.” Top-tier, although rarely found on its own, except for:

• Huevos Rotos: Evolution! Fried egg over not-crispy-but-somehow-shiny potatoes.  Wow. Seen in high-concept restaurants and late-night stops.

• Espárragos: asparagus has two personalities. Green: holds oil like a medieval torch waiting to be lit. White: threatening to de-mulsify. A rare vegetable in the upper tier!

• Cochinillo (suckling pig): off the lumens scale. The outside is enbalmed in light, the inside slippery with goo.  Cannot be improved.

Mid-Range: Transitional, Wildcards, B-League

• Bacalao: A fish of many sheens.  Salted and dried —> Brandade —> Croqueta—> Buñuelo—> Cocochas —> suspiciously glowing pinxto. A personal favorite.

• Chorizo: Another spectrum:

  • Fresh chorizo, a Gallego specialty: inner magma.

  • Spicy chorizo: oily exterior at room temperature, the best exemplars barely holding together.

  • Salchichon (dried sausage): why bother? Spaniards generally eschew. Rusty, inconvenient.

  • Morcilla (blood sausage).  Dull (but tasty.)

  • Honorable mention: Sobrasada, a soft-textured sausage from Mallorca. Spreadable, and when topped with honey, glows like my face after visiting the Painted Desert.

Foods Which Make Their Surroundings Shiny

• Croquetas: rough exterior, do not let sit on a sheet of paper lest it dissolve.

• Buñuelos de Bacalao: don’t touch your phone after one of these

• Turrón: another spectrum, this one more complex.

  • Turrón de Alicante: Almonds suspended à la Jurassic Park. Not worth the effort (or dentist bills)

  • Turrones de Jijona: left to its own devices, will ooze.

  • Chocolate Turrón: Meh.  Only edible when exposed to heat.

  • Turrón de Yema Tostada: Now we’re talking! Substitute egg yolks for whites, add a layer of sugar glaze that requires sunglasses to view, allow the interior to achieve saturation. Genius.

• Cocido (stew): shiny things, dull broth.  Edible in winter, when the bright sun is dulled with clouds, the soul darkened by rain, tomatoes turn to potatoes, etc.

• Tortilla: A paradox! Beloved, although dull.  Perhaps a foil, like bread (see below)? At times, the inner-most layer oozes, barely coagulated. In its stable form, imbricated potatoes hold the eggs’ lustor back.

• Ensaladilla Rusa (Russian potato salad): usually seen as a dull lump. I believe it’s capable of capable of luster in the right hands.

• Ensalada de Tomate: the taste of summer, usually with ventresca (tuna belly).  More watery than shiny, but can work in a pinch.

• Paella: challenging and controversial. Acknowledged as delicious, although described by Spaniards as “dry:” Socarrat literally means “singed.” But, an oiliness remains in the mouth. Paella leftovers become progressively more oily, inversely correlated with tortilla.

Dull, Dry

• Jamón Serrano: More satiny than shiny. “It’s fine.”

• Bread and Picos (crackers): Every meal needs a Bud Abbott, a Ringo.  Not shiny, but required. I’m convinced that the crackers serve to reset the taste buds, much like pickled ginger at sushi restaurants. Omnipresent.

• Berejenes (why is the Spanish word for eggplant so unusual?): Palatable generally only via oil-filled cazuela. A wild-card which inspires ordering at a restaurant when it appears.

• Salad: vibrant greens are dull.  Inedible, unnecessary, avoidable. Served without dressing, hinting at their uselessness.

• The Bocadillo: for transitional periods in the day. Lack of shine keeps one focused on work.

Details are indicators of priorities, intentions, and connections. So, what do these details tell us, other than confirming that there are a LOT of olive trees in Spain? While I’m interested in tracing this thread historically (culinary history is fascinating!)

I’m more interested in what I can learn about music through this journey, as it clearly activated the same part of my brain which goes crazy for analysis.

The act of observing and organizing details is critical to our role as interpreters, especially interpreters of such enigmatic and cryptic historical artifacts as musical scores. Building muscle around noticing assumptions via details and connecting those assumptions to larger ideas of style is critical to this endeavor, and is effectively practiced outside of musical domains. For example, let’s say our musical text was the menu of a restaurant. Filtering by shiny might help explain the menu’s organization and give ideas about what an astute diner might order. The knowledge when and how people eat is not as such encoded in most musical texts, and we as performers have to recreate and reimagine those details from other sources and through extrapolation from available information.

It goes without saying that one shouldn’t draw conclusions about an entire culture from one person’s consciously limited experiences in Shine City. But, maybe learning about a localized culture, the unspoken connections that make one place at one time that place and that time can help us build those connections while engaging learning the music of the past.

Other Details

• I’ve been spending time assiduously typing up my notes from over 30 museum visits this summer—I’ll share it via a review and rubric—and am excited for recommendations of others to visit.

• Cheez-Its, a beloved snack food (also kind of shiny?) was created in 1921 as a frugal version of Welsh Rarebit, cheese baked on toast, with the added benefit of the crackers not growing weevils. It has a fascinating history!

Newsletter

This newsletter is taking on some new to me directions, and I’m splitting the content a bit. I’m going to send slightly more frequent ideas about details and learning, and more infrequent deeper dives into interdisciplinary connections.  If you like the longer stories, I’d love it if you subscribed.

I’ve always read from diverse topics, ranging from analytical tracts about supply chains during the Revolutionary war to Elmore Leonard to Murakami to works on the display of statistics. In the past five or six years, though, I’ve read much more from non-musical domains, and have found that the cross pollination induces some fantastic critical, lateral, and creative thinking (see below).

In addition to cookbooks and maps, a stream of other works has emerged within my reading, connected by the desire to connect psychology to biology.  Here are some thoughts on them.

Bibliography:

• Burnett, Bill, and Dave Evans. Designing your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.  New York: Knopf, 2016.

• Epstein, David. Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

• Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York : Pantheon Books, 2012

• Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.  London : Piatkus, 2016.

• Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin, 2009

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Choice is good. More choice is great.  Freedom to choose is terrific.  But is it?  Richard H. Thaler Cass R. Sunstein make the case that humans are predictably irrational.  We know the correct course of action, but frequently ignore the facts in favor short-term interests, cognitive biases, and other irrationalities.  Thus, public and private institutions can preserve our ability to choose while simultaneously affecting behavior through careful choice architecture.

Econ vs. Human

Thaler and Sunstein lay out a conception of humanity as alternating between a rational, self-interested ideal and a biased, short-sighted, easily swayed groupie.  For the former, Thaler and Sunstein use John Stewart Mill’s notion of Homo Economicus: a conception of mankind as rational, self-interested, and utilitarian. Homo Economicus is a contrast to what Thaler and Sunstein dub Humans: those of us afflicted with cognitive biases, irrationalities, and other localized mental hindrances.  (As I’ll discuss later, this duality roughly parallels Jonathan Haidt’s conception of mankind as a fusion of individualists and group opportunists).

While Homo Economicus, what Thaler and Sunstein call Econs, can asses data without emotion, make careful judgements based on available information, and act to promote their self interest, Humans are trapped within their biases.  Mental accounting, framing, anchoring, mapping, availability bias, over confidence, and relatability (among others) make Humans \ irrational, set by our evolution to act via heuristics in the short term.

Whereas Econs utilize reflective systems—where information is assessed without prior biases—humans use automatic systems, an outgrowth of our fight our flight impulses.  One thinks fast, the other slow (that’s a book for another blog post).

Thaler and Sunstein argue that while well-meaning system designers strive to provide maximum choice for their members (ever signed up for a health care plan as a university employee?), maximum choice without transparent and concrete information about each selection does not always benefit those of us with cognitive biases.  I know I, for one, curl into a tiny ball when trying to pick out a completely customized drum set. Choice Architects should instead put system members in a position where they can accurately evaluate their options and make an informed decision in spite of our biases.  In short, we require nudges; small system cues which can highlight better options even when we are impaired by bias and fear.

Thaler and Sunstein apply nudges to situations ranging from health care plans (don’t make the default option no coverage!) to climate change, to cell phone warranties (don’t get them) to urinals (make a target and few people will miss), and to fundraising (apply a “twice as much tomorrow” approach).  While the book tends towards behavioral economics, the authors’ emphasis on the inner conflict between Humans and Econs is a useful lens with which to critique our own decision making both on the individual and systemic level, and to examine the way in which we can acknowledge our biases and embrace out inner Econ.

(Some) Takeaways:

Be aware of your biases!

As a musician, my biases can be a strength.  But off-stage these preconceptions can be problematic. Thaler and Sunstein outline a few which seemed pertinent:

Framing

We react strongly to how a problem is presented to us. Aren’t we more likely to buy insurance against floods than heart attacks?

Anchoring:

How much would you be willing to pay for something if you heard its average price was $400,000, vs $100,000?  By mis-anchoring our decisions, humans can misjudge and misalign priorities.

Nudges and “Anchor Problems”

In Burnett and Evans’ Designing your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life ”anchor” problems are issues where one parameter appears to be both essential and immovable.  “I need a garage, or else everything stinks!”  Burnett and Evans discuss many solutions to reframe and diffuse anchor problems. Perhaps these issues can be positives as Human reactions, rather than Econ reactions. Maybe we all need a little more Econ when faced with intractable life issues: that garage workspace could be a spare bedroom, etc?

Representativeness

When we judge an unknown option, we tend to base our judgment on assumptions which tend to be highly inaccurate.  It’s easy to see this in our judgements of people (“nerd!”), but Nudge made me think of Representativeness with regards to housing, insurance, musical gear, and all sorts of other instances where lack of data causes us to behave…strangely…

Status Quo Bias

Humans seem remarkably content to keep things as they are, even if it contributes to a general worsening of one’s situation.  Defaults are powerful, and if a choice architect can set a positive default option (enrolling in a 401k, or being an organ donor or helping a friend), they should do so. Maybe setting the default credit option to 1 when enrolling in collegiate orchestra would help our credit count?

Happiness

If one’s sense of self worth is based on the opinions of others, one faces a difficult road full of nauseating snaps between the beliefs and priorities of others.  What other people have, do, and say has an outsized impact on Humans, and only with a well-defined sense of self can we maintain our well-being

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explores the seemingly impermeable cultural, political, and social differences which frequently stymie us, arguing that our divisions could be better framed as a differing set of key moral principles.  Could it be that those who espouse a radically conservative agenda are not (as liberals believe) crazy and impossible to comprehend, but rather prioritizing other frameworks of morality?  Haidt builds upon his work in India and his extensive study of American political parties to articulate a set of moral foundations, principles which guide our actions.

While the essential conceit of The Righteous Mind is to explore the moral foundations theory that Haidt claims can explain why we don’t understand one another politically and culturally, I found the more pertinent question of the book: why do humans group together?  What’s the value of joining a group? Why would an Econ display “groupiness” when at our our core we are evolved to behave in our self interest?

Like Thaler and Sunstein, Haidt argues that humans do not consistently function as Homo Economicus, our purely rational selves.  Neither are we consistently reliably Homo heuristicus, Homo reciprocans, Homo sociologicus, or Homo politicus.  Instead, Haidt adopt’s Durkheim’s model of homo duplex, a being which moves between two forms of social consciousness: a lower level framed by self interest and individual attainment, and a higher level where one pursues collective group goals.

Haidt’s conclusion is that human nature is ”90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”  Humanity’s deepest  biological core is individualistic, more concerned with winning than virtue (as in Glaucon and his story of the ring of Gyges).  But, we have a more recent neurological overlay dedicated to “groupish” behavior.  Bees’ competitive impulse is between groups, not between individuals, and Haidt’s research shows that modern humanity is descended from earlier humans “whose groupish minds helped them cohere, cooperate, and outcompete other groups.”  Humanity is selective in how we take part in groups, and our participation in group activity can be an indication of both our selfishness and our desire (also born of evolutionary biology) to have our group advance.

Haidt’s foray into evolutionary history is fascinating and went a long way to convincing me that our human morality has a very clear biological origin.  At the same time, Haidt’s work further elucidates the biological foundations of both Humans and Econs

But, Haidt’s more pertinent innovation is to connect these notions of Econ and Human to evolutionary biology and neurology, to argue that the link between our individualism and group impulse is morality. Moreover, Haidt posits a framework for understanding how and why humans can be selfish AND group based: moral foundations.

The Moral Foundations

The main focus of The Righteous Mind are Haidt’s six moral foundations.  These frameworks help govern our desire to join groups, to engage in selfish or selfless behavior, and to understand one another.  Haidt argues that these foundations are biological, forged from thousands of years of evolutionary “nudges:”

1. Care/harm: Mammalian attachment + ability to feel the pain of others

2. Fairness/cheating: reciprocal altruism, justice, rights, autonomy

3. Loyalty/betrayal: tribalism with shifting coalitions was essential to our development as a species, and seems to be essential for virtues of patriotism, and self-sacrifice for a greater group good.

4. Authority/subversion: Hierarchical social interactions —> leadership, deference to authority, and respect for traditions

5. Sanctity/degradation: Our biological aversion to disgust and contamination becomes notions of living an elevated, less carnal, more noble lifestyle.

6. Liberty/oppression: resentment of the restriction of personal liberty

Why are some people happy in political, social, and economic frameworks that others would consider exploitative, repressive, or unfair? Why do we have so much trouble understanding those with differing political viewpoints? Haidt argues that we all operate under some ratio of the moral foundations, and that these differences result from priorities placed on different moral foundations.

By the way, I have a percussion-centric newsletter…

Read it here

Take Aways: What does this have to do with drums?

Politics

Not surprisingly given his previous writings, Haidt’s work tilts towards the political.  How can liberals understand conservatives?  What are the weaknesses in each side’s political theory, and how might they be explained not as immutable signs of mental instability but by adherence to a different set of moral codes? Haidt argues that much of the gulf between American political parties can be explained by a misalignment between the way liberals and conservatives apply moral foundations to their work. In Haidt’s view, liberals rely predominantly on the Care/Harm foundation, supplemented by the Fairness/Cheating and Liberty/Oppression foundation.  Conservatives, though, tend to use all six moral foundations, leading to some blind spots in the way liberals perceive conservative morality.

In addition to the politics, I found great application in Hadit’s synthesis of Mill, Durkheim, and others in the fields of education, community building, and shared experience.

The Hive:

Why do humans take part in group behavior if it doesn’t immediately benefit us individually? Haidt’s tour of soldiers, college football, church communities, cults, and other groups show us that morality “binds and blinds.” These moral communities are not really centered on their features—college football is not about football—but rather on the feeling of belonging and togetherness that flipping “the Hive Switch” can generate.  A great insight, but I found particular joy in Haidt’s digression to discuss scenarios when one can encounter the Hive rush while alone: in fantastic natural surroundings.

Neo-liberalism in Universities

The expansion of liberal (small L) values in universities seem to be a great idea.  Universities have gone to great lengths to ensure that students from more diverse backgrounds are admitted, that student voices are heard, and that in turn must create a more powerful university system. Haidt’s moral foundations seem to imply that this liberalistic impulse—the desire to highlight care/harm above all else—erodes Authority and Sanctity, both essential to developing strong minds and productive societies.  As someone who wonders why my students don’t listen me or why people don’t seem to trust experts anymore, Haidt’s foundations show the danger of overweighting one moral foundation at the expense of another. Maybe more music students could activate their Authority matrix and listen to their teachers with more alacrity? Or maybe my percussion studio can be more of a hive?

Musical Communities

As musicians, we deal frequently in building community around the work we make, honing connections between composers and performers, performers and audiences, and audiences and communities. Thinking about the moral foundations as modes of interactions and engagement can help us form groups in which empower their members while understanding and celebrating our differences.  Finding that hive feeling is essential to music making, and acknowledging the role morality plays in binding us can help performers and audiences find that community, even while we operate at a distance Maybe we could even nudge group members towards supporting a cause we believe in?

Likewise, the moral foundations can help us as teachers in understanding the priorities of our students.  I used to think about core values as an organizing trope for my work with percussionists, but Haidt’s moral foundations can help explain the types of musical and personal goals we set as teachers and students.

As a teacher, I’ve always thought that I could tailor my message to fit a students’ learning style, but I haven’t considered how my students organize their moral foundations could help me make better connections with them.

I know I draw upon the sanctity/degradation and authority/hierarchy often in my teaching: “you have to play this piece this way because that’s how the composer told me to play it and because I said so.”  At the same time, a strict curriculum might benefit those who value authority, loyalty and fairness, but alienate those who value liberty and personal creativity in their learning.   I’m thinking that a re-evaluation of my moral foundations as a teacher and community leader can help us take on issues of social change more readily.

David Epstein: Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Our world values specialization: we pick a sport at a young age, most college degrees push us towards a narrow specialization, job titles are increasingly specialized (and lengthy).  But is specialization as essential to professional success and personal self-actualization as we are led to believe?

David Epstein draws upon research the biology of learning and case studies of success in a variety of fields to push back against what he calls the Cult of the Head Start, the idea that focusing on a skill or career at an early age is essential to success.

Epstein argues that those with the most success in certain fields tend to be generalists, with a broad array of experience from a variety of domains.  While specialists—broadly construed as those with high domain-specific knowledge but little expertise outside their field—have incredible skill, their narrow band of knowledge can create problems when faced with unfamiliar learning environments.

Wicked and Kind Learning Environments

Epstein argues for the value of specialization by articulating two types of learning environments. In a “kind” learning environment, feedback is immediate.  One knows whether a choice was correct or a move perfectly executed.  There exists a pre-ordained idea that the student strives toward, and other adherents’ previous forays can inform the acolyte’s journey forward.  For example, one can study historical chess matches, learn the pertinent patterns of the game, and receive almost instantaneous feedback on a match well played. Or, one can study the violin, where a teacher can indicate in a lesson what was successful, what failed, and offer guidance down a clear path of technical improvement.  The way is clear, the material vetted, and the didactics are based on the application of patterns and algorithms which have worked in the past.

By contrast, a “wicked” learning environment contains none of these helpful cues.  A decision is made, and no feedback is given.  The problem appears similar to another previous issue, but shares no structural similarities.  What worked in the past doesn’t seem to work now.  Epstein argues that in these wicked learning environments—seen everywhere from investment management to scientific research to contemporary music—the lack of both  immediate feedback and a clear-cut procedure creates pressure for solutions based on experiments rather than experience.

Success in wicked learning environments requires bias free analysis, a broad skill set, a wide and diverse toolkit of problem-solving skills. To Epstein, the so-called “domain specific knowledge” specialists have can be dangerous, because it seems to limit our ability to adapt to new challenges and wicked learning environments.

Specialization

For those of us in academia, specialization is a powerful tool, both in advancing original research, and in creating metrics to measure that research. Silos are meaningful to us, because stye both protect knowledge from short-term fluctuations, but also allow us to build upon previous research without reinventing processes or paradigms.

While Epstein doesn’t negate domain specific knowledge’s power, he argues that taken alone, specialists’ reliance on pattern recognition and previous experiences can make adapting to new problems a severe problem.  Specialists have a tendency to over-rely on familiar solutions and previous experiences.   They assume kind learning environments, drawing conclusions without accumulating data, and they look for solutions from within their domain at the expense of simpler, more elegant solutions from outside their field.  Epstein is right when he argues that  “knowledge is a double-edged sword: it allows you to do certain things, blinds you from other things.”

In his research, Epstein demonstrates time and time again how groups of specialists fail in wicked learning environments, and how teams of people with different backgrounds and more generalized skill sets seem to solve problems with more flexibility and elan.  Why? Generalists are more willing to try “outside-in” thinking, to eschew cognitive bias in their problem solving, and to think of what might work instead of what worked in the past.

Key Conceits and Takeaways

Our Non-Musical Reading Lists

I was enthused reading Range.  I always felt that my propensity to read outside of music was a weakness, a sign that I wasn’t as passionate about music as I could be.  Perhaps thinking a lot outside one’s domain can bring real rewards when returning to your home field?

Nudges and Wicked Learning Environments

In Range, Epstein makes a distinction between “kind” learning environments (where feedback is immediate, and where there exists a set curriculum for developing a skill) and “wicked” learning environments: where feedback on our choices is not immediate, and where there may not exist a set curriculum, methodology, or other way of learning something.  Thaler and Sunstein’s work essentially argues that we need nudges in wicked learning environments, where previous experience does not dictate future success, or where feedback on our choices is not immediate.

Durable and sticky learning is wicked, not kind

Where Range can be a powerful tool for educators is Epstein’s ability to draw a connection between wicked learning environments and what he calls “sticky” learning, knowledge that doesn’t fade quickly. (Think of how easily you can remember a phone number but how quickly you forget as soon as another digit enters the mind).

Specialization and Econs

Specialists tend to exhibit the cognitive biases Thaler and Sunstein attribute to Humans, but they tend to tout them as strengths rather than blind spots.

The Long and Winding Road

Like Haidt, Epstein goes a long way to linking our intuitions and philosophical constructs with human evolution and our biological imperatives.  That said, my largest critique of Epstein’s work is the self-selection is his case studies in winding career paths.

In addition to problem solving, Epstein argues that generalists also tend to have more fulfilling careers because they have a stronger “match quality” with their work: their skills and personalities match perfectly with the challenges and needs of their job.  People who have broad skills often spend a long time developing those skills, and as such have experienced a number of types of work and can choose effectively what suits them .  Generalists tend to take a winding path to their career, going through what Epstein dubs a “sampling period” to discover whether a job or profession is a good fit.  If not, the generalist will proceed to something else. Match quality is greatest with a successful sampling period, and a successful sampling period is precisely that: a length of time (not picking up karate at age 3 and never deviating).  Wicked learning environments can flummox even Econs, so we should have a learning style capable of tackling the most wicked environments, which is formed during a lengthy and fitful sampling period.

This point is clear.  The generalist is a design thinker, a prototyping experimenter who values short term ideas that can succeed or fail quickly. That said,  Epstein’s cherry-picked case studies don’t completely eliminate the existence of Tigers, those who have a passion, hold to it, and change the world around their dreams.

Analogous Thinking and Outside-In Thinking

As someone whose teaching evaluations frequently tout (for positive and negative reasons) my propensity towards analogies, I appreciated Epstein’s Kepler-inspired foray into the power of analogies I problem solving.  Analogies can help us break free from knee-jerk reactions while pushing us to identify structural similarities in problems, not surface similarities.  Analogies help us avoid what Epstein calls “the inside view,” the specialist idea, a framework based entirely on domain-specific knowledge.  If we can think of snare drumming as like cooking an egg, we can go a long way towards more durable problem solving.

Measuring Learning

Epstein argues that many of our methods of measuring learning don’t measure durable learning, and as such we draw the wrong conclusions on the quality of our teaching and the relative import of short-term success in a classroom or professional arena.  We can all do well to prioritize long-term learning, despite the challenges in measuring it.

Range + Design Thinking + Econs

A number of Epstein’s case studies dovetail with the central principals of design thinking. Generalists  tend to be design thinkers: they make short term prototypes, test the results, and move forward.  They also tend to be more Econ than Human—they don’t let past experiences color their future analysis, they are not inhibited by cognitive biases.   Whereas Epstein’s cadre tended to look for short term growth as a measure of personal fulfillment, a pure design thinking approach highlights the experimentation element. That said, a number of key points elide with the main ideas of Design Thinking, including:

• Being a scientist about oneself, making short term experiments instead of not long-term plan

• Working forwards from promising situations instead of backwards from a goal

Range and Deep Work

While this post is far to long to cover my deliberately-paced exploration of Cal Newport’s Deep Work (stay tuned for that!), suffice to say there are many linkages between Newport and Epstein’s work.  Newport argues that the ability to concentrate intensely is a valuable professional skill.  Concentration is a skill that must be trained.  By carving out the ability and time to work deeply and without distractions, we not only become more productive and professionally valuable. We require our brains to get better at concentrating.  Paradoxically, Deep Workers also tend to be generalists, bingers who throw themselves into specific tasks without regard for short-term success. Similarly, the rewiring of our neurological pathways that Deep Work engenders is a firm analog to the “sticky” learning Epstein refers to throughout Range.

The Head-start in Music

Although it may not seem like it from my summary, Epstein does spend significant time discussing music.   In fact, Range is the most articulate critique of Deliberate Practice I’ve encountered thus far.

To Epstein, music is usually the narrative lynchpin for the cult of the head start: focused work on a repetitive task, minimal deviation, and a kind learning environment.  If one starts early enough, the requisite hours of practice can be achieved early enough to have a terrific head start.  Classical musicians work primarily on algorithm: articulating a pattern that has worked in the past, applying previously successful techniques to a problem, and repeating.  This thinking is effective because in classical music, many of the problems are old; repertoire that is pre-existing or is similar in affect or structure to a previous work.  At the same time, classical training has been honed over hundreds of years to create musicians capable of tackling these familiar problems quickly and effectively.  In this world, the primary measure of success is a head start: if the path is clear, leaving earlier makes sense! Thus, Deliberate Practice: a scientific method-inspired reflection technique designed to serve as the apotheosis of this sharpened path.

«But…»

Epstein’s case studies show that head starts tend to evaporate over time, as the match quality of the tortoises overwhelms the narrow skill of the hares.  While these studies ignore the professional durability of a head start in music (more concerts create more concerts, and it’s challenging to break into a musical community when one is older) I do concur that time spend developing problem-solving, critical thinking is more important than algorithms in creating a durable professional career.Epstein argues that learning is more durable and applicable when it occurs through osmosis rather than error correction, although error correction seems to be how we teach classical music.

Epstein corrals a number of studies which seem to suggest that playing many instruments is more effective in developing musical expertise, that early dalliance seems more effective than early focusing.  It seems that picking early and staying focused can create deep but narrow knowledge.  But, isn’t creativity an area where expertise is about the ability to learn new things?

Deliberate Practice and “kind” learning environments

It follows from Epstein’s research that our old friend Deliberate Practice most definitely occurs within “kind“ learning environments.

Reconciling Deliberate Practice, generalization, and Design Thinking

I do believe that deliberate practice and generalization can work hand in hand, but it requires laying off the focused work until the sampling period is complete, and acknowledging that not all musical professions are clear-cut and kind enough to include deliberate practice at all junctures.

Deliberate Practice is essential when the goal is clear, the parameters set. Here, our biases are essential to refinement, and domain specific knowledge is a shortcut to effective practice.  Much of my work, though, involves working collaboratively with composers on first interpretations of new work.  In these more wicked musical learning environments, the lack of a clear-cut precedent frequently short-circuits my training, negating the benefits of Deliberate Practice.  In these situations, where the goal is not clear and experimentation is required before the material is set, Deliberate Practice seems less prescient than design thinking solutions: ideation, short-term PREtotypes, failing fast, and outside-in solutions.  Knowing when to use each type of work is an essential skill, it seems!

Cal Newport: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work was a transformational tome for me.  In fact, I was such an ineffective worker that it took years after the initial recommendation from Matt Barnson to actually read the book.  Deep Work is both a philosophical and pedagogical tract.  It teaches us why focusing deeply is important to our careers, and shows us how to move towards meaningful changes in our work habits.

I’ll save the takeaways for another post.  Suffice to say that generalists are Deep Workers, Deliberate Practice is Deep Work, and if we all had a few more nudges we could eliminate much of the mental pond scum that sullies our thoughts.

Larger Takeaways

Suffice to say, there is a lot to unpack here.  In these works, there exists a common thread of connecting science to psychology, of answering why humans behave the way they do and to what extent our evolution and biology predisposes us towards certain outcomes.  These books also touch the biological conflict between our individualism and our groupish overlays. As humans, we act in our self interest, except when we don’t. Beginning to understanding how and when our group instinct is activated has been transformative in my thinking. Finally, each of these books combines biology, psychology, and physiology to discuss the tools we need to function in our contemporary society, a “wicked” learning environment if there ever was one. Interdisciplinary and intermodal problem-solving, avoiding behavioral biases, setting isolated time to focus, and understanding how morality binds and blinds us can go a long way to activating the best version of ourselves.

I’ve found incredible utility from these books in my percussion playing, teaching, and curating. I’d love to hear from you (if you made it this far) about your takeaways, and recommendations for more books for me to butcher in summary.

We were Under the Tuscan Sun, but also amidst the Etruscan Walls, on the Roman Roads, amongst the Florentine Flags, encircling the Tuscan Chingali with our stomachs, and basically any other preposition a high-school language teacher could think of.

While I’ve been ruminating on the linkages between flags, walls, food, and musical analysis—the topic of my next deep dive—I was swept away in some smaller learning adventures. Here’s what I learned this week:

Fragments

I hovered for many minutes at the Museo Nazionale Romano’s Palazzo Massimo in front of the Fasti Antiates Maiores, a Roman Republican wall calendar created somewhere between 84 and 55 BC, before the Julian calendar was instituted.

Notwithstanding that I believe fragments in context are more powerful than complete works out of context, I was fascinated with the clarity of the time-keeping system.

The columns:

• 13 months (1 is mensis intercalaris, a leap month necessary because the lunar cycle gradually diverges from the seasons

• K, N, and I:  Kalends, 3 principal days each month, following the phases of the moon. (It’s also the root of Calendar)

• Fasti (F, C, N, etc): when public events and judicial activities could occur

• A-H = 8 days indicating market days

Much like the Peutinger Table (the Roman road map I wrote about previously), this calendar is designed for people who are already on the road, those with emic cultural perspectives. By the way, Christians just kept going with this system, albeit with more flirtatious images…

A Question

After a few days binging on Roman marble carvings, one thought: who was carving these things? And what happened to the tablets with typos? I hope a reader can chime in with a more well-researched opinion than I’m capable of.

Art in an age of non-mechanical reproduction

As I mentioned, at times I prefer fragments to entire works. What's more fascinating than a fragment? An exact copy.

In Rome, I was fascinated with Roman reproductions of Greek statues, removed from temples, transposed from bronze to marble, and placed within the homes of socialites, middle-class tradespeople, and leaders looking to up their cultural street cred. In fact, this is how we know Greek culture: through layers upon layers of Roman reproductions. Mechanical reproductions. Maybe the guy carving Tabulae was in on this as well!

These copies got me thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), in which he posits that a work of art’s aura is derived from its (1) authenticity (its uniqueness) and (2) its location, where the piece is intended to be situated both physically and culturally. Despite the ability to perfectly recreate a work of art through mechanical means, a copy can never be “authentic,” because it is by its very nature situated in a different time and space. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai would go further. In "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” he argues that globalization and industrialization has fragmented culture into five interconnected “scapes:” ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes, each of which powerfully crosscuts geography, culture, and ethnicity.

Benjamin does have a point, that mechanical reproduction can void an art work’s “cult” value—its value as being present, not necessarily on public view—because it can place an art work in a public space that allows people with etic perspectives (people not in the original culture). In these cases, the copy is detached from its original perspective, detached from the designs of the creator and from the needs of the “cult,” however one defines it. But, doesn’t each copy create its own authenticity as it is situated in a new culture? I’m sure the NFT community would agree.

The challenge of “original instruments”

What does this have to do with music? For those who work to reproduce music in a time and space different than its creation, or who aspire to create a sound as a composer of the past might have heard it, Benjamin’s point is self-evident, eye-roll worthy. And it’s not new. It’s not enough to study the work of art, of course: we need to examine the world in which the art was created, locating it within a nexus of ‘scapes and intentions and relationships: we need to know something about what was innovative or quotidian, and how the art might have landed or impacted those present at its inception or unveiling. Authentic is in the eye of the beholder though, and those of us that exist in the elusive world of sonic performance know that we must change change change to create the illusion of historical authenticity.

Or, we can copy copy copy, like Picasso and his pigeons or van Gogh and his boots…

Last time I laid out some thoughts on how I would approach the teaching of fluid and flexible musicians. I argued that it makes sense to approach subject matter expertise from the outside in, much the way we market ice cream sizes:

• Gotta have It (12oz): books that speak across domains, books on learning, history, cultural studies, psychology. Least likely to change, but most dynamic in thought. “Senior liberal arts college students elective” zone. This circle is the most important because it subsumes the others

• Love It (8oz): writings on music, texts which speak to the historical periods in which the musician wants to inhabit, or the history which informs the present. Texts on professional development. Susceptible to editing and moderately squirmy in thought, but worthwhile.

• Like it (5oz): domain-specific information about percussion. Most fungible, but the most susceptible to dogma. Must read, but also must critique.

As I mentioned last time, discipline-specific texts often take primacy in graduate comprehensive exams. Yes, percussionists need to know about percussion. But doesn’t learning about music help one contextualize their percussive knowledge?

Despite the fact that this is a “summer” reading list in name only, I’m curious whether studying to be a powerful musician can make one a better human(ist) along the way. With that in mind, let’s move from the “did you know” to the “you should know” circles.

Kind of Big Thoughts

These texts toe the line between helping us learn more broadly, and taking on discipline specific information.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles.

In the 16th and 17th century, a group of Friulian farmers left their earthly bodies, and, armed with fennel fronds, fought off witches and demons intent on destroying their crops. At least, they said they did. The Night Battles examines the inquisitors’ trial of a pair of these benandanti, juxtaposing the farmers’ claims that they were protecting the earth with the inquisitors’ increasing beliefs that the benandanti’s work was itself a kind of heretic sorcery.

What can a book about 16th and 17th century Roman Inquisition trials of witch hunters tell us about music? Much of our work as musicians centers on interpreting musical texts which, as we’ve noted, are inherently incomplete, absent critical information. In these witch trials, missing from the records are the questions the inquisitors asked, leaving us readers to determine the nature of the questioning from the respondents’ answers. This practice is wonderful preparation for the typically one-sided conversations we have with musical scores. At the same time, music’s meaning is locally contextualized, meaning that it’s meaning changes with time. Ginzburg shows with almost laughable specificity how the same story repeated in the same fashion can shift from miraculous rescue to satanic ritual.

Grout, Donald. History of Western Music

I had a teacher once told me that if I could discuss any word written in bold in this book, I would be set as a musicologist. Spoiler, I wasn’t. Reading this book is akin to taking a one semester history of all civilizations, proving to me that sometimes one can be too general! Should a percussionist read the Grout in 2023? Perhaps not, but investigating whether this book has a “vibrant narrative” and whether it explains “what’s important, where it fits, and why it matters” is a “fun” break from snare drumming.

Does the number of editions speak to its longevity, or the obfuscating, difficult to parse narrative? I love history, and my copy is covered with a lot of drool. Actually, maybe we should ditch this one.

Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound

Capturing Sound investigates The Phonograph Effect, the way in which recorded sound changed not only how we listen to music, but how we create it. Recorded music is tangible, invisible, portable, and repeatable. It can transcend temporal and locational specificity, is infinitely repeatable. Millions can hear the exact same recording, and the impact of this Benjaminian mechanical reproduction cannot be overstated. From articulating a theory of increasing string vibrato as a matter of exigency, to exploring the complex world of sampling within DJ culture, Katz highlights how recordings have fundamentally altered our perception of what music can and should be.

In class, Katz would intone that “a recording is a recording and a concert is a concert, and never the twain shall meet,” and this dichotomy has been on my mind since. Capturing Sound has always been a great exemplar for me of how to write wittingly and engagingly about the technical and aesthetic side of music making. In particular, his assignments around comparing recordings of the same piece attuned my ears, sharpened my vocabulary, and enabled me to speak about what exactly constitutes an interpretation. Plus, TAing for Katz’s History of Rock and Roll class was a life highlight…

Poultney, David. Studying Music History

A secret weapon for music students. Poultney posits a parametric approach to the study of music history: analyzing various broad time periods through musicians attention to rhythm, form, melody, color, etc. For those studying for exams, Poultney’s clarity, organization, and surprisingly difficult sample questions are a no-brainer. I remember copying out the charts, and hoping I would never again think of melismatic tremble lines in the Ars Nova.

Dudley, Shannon. Carnival Music in Trinidad

Dudley gives an aesthetic history of calypso, steelband, soca, and other genres active in and around Trinidad. These musics and the instruments that play them are powerfully intertwined with politics and history, and these tensions emerge each year during Carnival. I love how Dudley shows how music can be a tool to teach people how to be members of a community, a carrier of history, a political weapon, and a vehicle for shared identity. At the same time, this music highlights the importance of diasporic music in the Western hemisphere. There are many texts that take on these themes—my argument is that it’s incumbent on us to engage with how music creates and transmits “culture.”

Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise

Those of us in music might accept Ross’s oeuvre as selbstverständlich at this point, but I’d point anyone interested in how to write compellingly about music towards The Rest is Noise. Ross embodies the “disembodied eyeball” approach of the New Yorker’s taste-makers—lucid, cogent, dispassionate depictions not only of music, but of musical events. This is a history of how details and epiphanies in a particularly volatile and uncertain moment, a depiction of how music is both ensconced cultural and moves culture forward. While a little Thomas Mann focused for my own taste, a little obsession never hurt anybody. This is a depiction of the romanticism against which the Darmstadt composers so vociferously rebelled, and as such has a tremendous impact on percussion repertoire. A great read before diving into the nuts and bolts of pataflaflas (this video, by the way, has a LOT to look at in the background, from harshly lit ionian (??) columns to some killer product placement).

ANECDOTE ALERT: I remember Mark Katz introducing Ross for a lecture in Peabody’s musicology colloquium about the role of music in Hitler and Stalin’s regimes. Ross had a tape (!!) of musical examples, and Katz remarked that the lecture itself was a “phonograph effect,” because both Ross and the audience were beholden to the timing and ordering of the recording.

Developing One’s Profession, Like It or Love It

The role of the doctorate in professional and scholarly development has changed fundamentally in the past 10-15 years. In music, academic positions are increasingly rare. (So are positions in orchestras and as concerto soloists, but that’s a topic for someone else’s newsletter).

Within this milieu, I think of the DMA as potentially taking two paths.

1. The doctorate still has value as a credential. For those interested in scholarship, those obsessed with a topic, interested in professional demarcation of some kind, a DMA or PhD is immensely valuable.

2. In an artistic environment where there have never been as many skillful practitioners, percussionists interested in a performance career could think of a DMA as an opportunity to develop a professional portfolio, network, and skillset while receiving both some measure of institutional support and mentorship.

That said, overall DMA programs in general can take broader and more action-oriented notions of professional development. So, some thoughts from the murky field of “professional development”

Forshee, Zane, Christina Manceor and Robin McGinness. The Path to Funding

I can’t be more inspired by the intrepid work of Zane and his team at Peabody: their Breakthrough curriculum is a terrific example of how to integrate “careers” into curricula, and this text is emblematic, covering ideas on generating powerful ideas, engaging communities around those ideas, and finding sustainable funding to create transformative art. It’s tool/skill based, and it’s free!

Burnett, Bill. Designing Your Life

This book was recommended to me by a dear friend, and I’ve found it hilariously catharsis-inducing among my students. Is it written in the style of a self-help book gone amok? Yes. Are the graphics and charts cringe-inducing? Yes. Has it been catharsis-inducing among my students? Also yes.

So often, music school degree pathways negate (actively and/or passively) the notion that creatives have the joy of crafting an artistry and profession that is uniquely their own. Burnett focuses on career discovery, “sampling periods,” dreamed through mind maps, actioned through informational interviews and supported by Design Thinking. Designing Your Life has helped my students conceptualize blended careers (ie not just snare drum (not that there’s anything wrong with that!)) while encouraging them to experiment. It helps answer the WHY and WHAT so necessary in the study of music.

Myles Beeching, Angela. Beyond Talent

A classic, devoted to those pesky professional practices outside the practice palladium. A good resource for crafting powerful materials: CVs (if there are such things…) cover letters, press kits. A great resource for conceptualizing a career in the arts.

Kelsky, Karen. The Professor is In

Wonderfully practical text on taking academic skills into the professional world, covering everything from applying for, receiving, negotiating for, and leaving academic jobs. While the book is ostensively about the planning required to transform a PhD into tenure, I appreciate her realism about academia and the pivotable soft skills humanities scholars develop is poignant and practical.

Baumgardner, Astrid. Creative Success Now

After working with Astrid in and beyond school, I was excited to read her effusive book on how creative abilities can empower professional pathways. In particular, I appreciate her focus on creative skills as professional practices.

I remember the composer Alejandro Viñao talking about Xenakis’ percussion works as falling into two camps: ‘paperback’ and ‘hardcover.’ These are ‘paperbacks’ in physical presentation and spirit, but sometimes one needs that immediacy. Plus, many of these authors have thriving blogs and newsletters, which are a great way to get in touch with more plastic and liquid thoughts than those immortalized in published print.

“Like It:” Books about Percussion

I believe that learning about one’s instrument is facilitated by learning about the world more generally, and about the schemes and tropes of music-making more specifically. The larger circles of context swirling around music have to be a part of what we do in the practice room, as they inform what we do, how we do it, and why. With all that in mind, here are some percussion-specific books. I’m leaving out much with regard to repertoire study and instrumental technique, but I hope to share on those in the future.

Schick, Steven. The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams

A dazzling percussionist whose memory and virtuosity changed our field, Schick is an interpreter, and he is a major figure in what I would call “third generation” percussion performance: positing percussion as an instrument capable not only of execution, but of poetry. his performances are stuff of legend: famously memorized, famously instrument agnostic (he doesn’t care what instrument he plays), famously “so impressive it’s not impressive.” Underlying all is a perceptive and critical mind, and The Percussionist’s Art is an essential guide our instrument through case studies around memory, collaboration, theatricality, and more. In addition, his depiction of percussion history through generations of thought is powerful.

Probably the only book about percussion I would recommend to my father (and I did!).

Beck, John H. Encyclopedia of Percussion

Aiming for encyclopedic knowledge of percussion. Encyclopedia is in the title, folks! Purporting to cover both percussion and concussive instruments, I like that Beck offers not only an alphabetized listing of instruments and discourse around them, but a number of articles covering various percussion topics. Cover art is underwhelming, but we can look beyond that.

Blades, James. Percussion Instruments and Their History.

Classic percussion text covering the history of percussion instruments from Ancient Greece to the present (well, in 1992). Blades was a close collaborator of Benjamin Britten, so the book skews British. I tend to read against the Blades, which omits or essentializes many non-Western cultures, and includes many many many problematic depictions of "primitive musicians.” Through the valiant efforts of Norman Weinberg, the Blades is once again available, in (gasp) digital format!

Hartenberger, Russell (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Percussion

Assembled by famed percussionist Russell Hartenberger, this companion includes chapters from some of our field’s luminaries on a few salient themes of percussion study, from orchestral percussion to instrumental development to composition. In particular, I appreciated the chapters on performance practice, where specificity of thought.

Udow, Michael. Percussion Pedagogy

A massive tome from percussion pedagogy legend Michael Udow, who, from his perch at the University of Michigan, transformed how many of us think about playing an instrument which is really not an instrument at all. You know offers a comprehensive and empathetic approach to the teaching of percussion, of course, but more broadly the teaching of musicianship through percussion. Love the accompanying videos, which are time capsule-worthy.

Siwe, Thomas. Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the 20th Century

Siwe is oft appreciated in the percussion world by virtue of both his textbook for the teaching of percussion methods, typically a required course in Music Education degrees and his massive Percussion Ensemble and Solo Literature compendium. Who better to tie together the disparate threads of percussion history? In Artful Noise, Siwe lays out the phases of the development of notated percussion music in the 20th century, prioritizing style and themes over chronology. The book is compact, and maps pretty well on to a semester-long percussion literature course. Just saying!

Happy reading!!

Here at ASU, we have a number of graduate students preparing for the dreaded Comprehensive Exams. Comp Exams within music are designed to demonstrate expertise, understanding, and creativity of thought in one’s discipline.

There is much to say about how doctorates should change to reflect the state of our professional recontextualizing the experience as less of a credential and more a set of skills, taking on notions of professional development explicitly. But, that’s a tirade for the last 55 seconds of a faculty meeting.

So, when it came time to assign some reading for our intrepid and patient DMA percussionists I ventured a little further afield, watching hours of Reading Rainbow, and generally running way off the rails and communing with my book club of one. Since this newsletter is ostensively about learning through details and context, I thought I’d share what’s running those the narrow rivulets of my mind’s river.

Inverted Circles

A few months ago I posited some circles of context we can take on when learning music:

I thought these were helpful markers in relation to learning a specific piece of music, but they work for learning an instrument more generally:

• Mission Critical: details essential to one’s specialization. Information about a piece of music, performance practice, logistics.

• “You Should Know:” a broader circle of information that situate one’s practice in a variety of contexts.

• “Did You Know:” ability to connect ones specialization to a larger history and cultural context. This can from a distance read as trivia, hence the moniker.

Comp exams, written by specialists for specialists, generally take on the first two circles, sprinkling in a some sweat-inducing forays into “did you know” territory.

Fox or Hedgehog?

Archilochus wrote that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Substantiated by Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, foxes are generalists, hedgehogs specialists. For those of us in academia, specialization is a powerful tool, both in advancing original research, and in creating metrics to measure that research. Silos are meaningful to us, protecting knowledge from short-term fluctuations while driving innovation in thought, as the advances of scholars in their narrow fields of study scaffold larger ideas which enable new patterns of thought within societies.

However, this narrow band of knowledge can create problems when faced with unfamiliar learning environments.

(Plus, when specialists speak to one another, it can feel like this):

In Range, David Epstein argues that those with the most success in certain fields tend to be generalists, with a broad array of experience from a variety of disciplines.  If our goal is to teach musicians to adapt to an ever-changing environment, shouldn’t we train them to be generalists in addition to specialists, to think across disciplines and silos, to create new ideas while also training them to dive deep when required? Can’t we be foxes AND hedgehogs?

Learning

In my music school curriculum, we would endeavor to teach one skill: learning, the most compoundable skill of all, the implicit central thrust of our educational journeys.

• Some essential traits of learning are:

  • Thinking across disciplines, holding conflicting ideas or worldview in one’s mind while synthesizing new ideas.

  • Noticing details in all mediums, analyzing their component parts, and organizing them into larger categories

  • Contextualizing ideas within and outside of a number of systems and patterns of thought while drawing connections between ideas

  • Intrinsic motivation and curiosity.

  • An awareness of the psychology and neuroscience underlying our practice

  • Articulation of these ideas without jargon, pretense, or turgidity (basically the opposite of me)

Michel de Montaigne argues that one should have “a well-made than a well-filled head.” These skills contextualize the study of percussion, and I argue that a shrewd percussionist should begin with them. They facilitate repertoire knowledge by positioning music within larger trends while focusing on special moments in works of art. They contextualize the practice of playing within a larger constellation of musical skills, making our practice time more efficient and effective. They make time in the practice room more effective by harnessing concrete ideas about how our bodies and minds work.

The thread that connects subject matter expertise and broad knowledge? Details.

One Circle to Rule Them All

My new circle, inspired by the typical academic bench mark for taxonomies, ice cream sizes at Cold Stone Creamery.

• Like it (5oz): domain-specific information about percussion. Most fungible, but the most susceptible to dogma. Must read, but also must critique.

• Love It (8oz): writings on music, texts which speak to the historical periods in which the musician wants to inhabit, or the history which informs the present. Texts on professional development. Susceptible to editing and moderately squirmy in thought, but worthwhile.

• Gotta have It (12oz): books that speak across domains, books on learning, history, cultural studies, psychology. Least likely to change, but most dynamic in thought. “Senior liberal arts college students elective” zone. This circle is the most important because it subsumes the others

With that in mind, here’s Part I of my reading list:

Details

Kohlstedt, Kurt, and Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

For years, the 99PI podcast has highlighted the details in our built environment, with Roman Mars’ silky baritone highlighting the intentionality between the myriad “invisible” details in curb cutouts, raccoon-proof trash containers, Euro bills, city flags, oddly sized trains, North Korean architectural proclivities, the sounds phones make. 99PI goes beyond, though, situating these details within larger notions of what our built environment says about who built it.

The 99% Invisible City book takes this focused unfocusedness to cities: exploring the origins and lives of typically anonymous features from fire escapes to drinking fountains. For me, the takeaway is not the specific content, although it’s catnip for me. It’s the way in which Mars and his producer’s work so mirrors great musical analysis. Musicians are in the business of details, noticing and falling in love with tiny moments, seeking to understand and enrich those moments through context and connection-making, and then keeping that detail special while highlighting it in performance (or every day life: I promise you will never look at a trash can the same way ever again). The 99% Invisible City is not about cities: it’s about enthusiasm, and thus is a wonderful manual for those of us working to create frameworks around advocating for our musical passions.

Moore, Rowan. Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture

How does our built environment impact our lives? Moore teases apart the ideology of buildings while situating architecture as a barometer of cultural desires and norms. For musicians, how Moore makes his arguments is most valuable: articulating details, drawing connections with larger trends, and focusing on intention and innovation—small to big! The chapter on Japanese garden design is a great place to start.

Gann, Kyle. Music Downtown

I love a good monograph, but there is no substitute for the liquidity and velocity of journalistic writing. What better to bridge the gap between tomes and newsprint than this dazzling collection of prescient reviews and portraits from Gann, whose regular missives in the Village Voice tell the story of American experimental music in the 1980s and 1990s. While ostensibly reviews, Gann’s synthesis of visceral depictions of events, polemic-level opinions, and large scale thinking charts a path for what music criticism can be. The reviews are never just reviews, and Gann takes every opportunity to go BIG (ever wonder where my preoccupation with details comes from?)

In particular, “Berlitz’s Downtown for Musicians” was influential to me in negotiating how orally transmitted performance practice is essential to experimental music, as well as showing me one can swear in the newspaper.

Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice

Arguing that there’s not much separating “downtown” minimalism from 1970s Disco, Fink argues that music is intrinsically linked to the repetitive industrial techniques, mass-media advertising, and more. Clever and acerbic, Fink’s is a wonderful entry point into how passive cultural norms are embodied in many disciplines, arguing that to understand music, one must understand culture. Repeating Ourselves would be a great companion to Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, which demonstrates how advertising companies appropriated the language of counter-culture

Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture

Come for the ethnographic observations on IRCAM (institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique, the powerful French sound lab) in the 1980s and 1990s. Stay for the pitch-perfect situation of musical postmodernism as needing modernism, and the parallels between the DIY aesthetics and Downtown music. The twist: the very practitioners of the most elite modernist music were moonlighting as DIY DJs!

Taruskin, Richard. Oxford History of Western Music

What would you say to a five volume series about the evolution of western classical music? Yes please! This is more Taruskin’s history than Oxfords, and the famously cantankerous musicology legend Taruskin brings the sass. Don’t let the titles fool you, these are case studies, and T’s “brilliance and delirium” shows (to me, at least) that strong openings and specificity of focus are a powerful way of examining general trends in history. I read this all while on a treadmill at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, so my notes look like the early works of Cy Twombly.

How to Learn

Music teachers are wonderful at describing practice and articulating what constitutes a great performance. Less clear, though, is how we learn. These works have helped break into that black box of learning, clarifying how our brains and bodies acquire new skills and how those practices can be folded into the intuitive study of music.

Epstein, David. Range

Epstein challenges the idea that specialization is essential to success, arguing that generalists with a broad array of experience from a variety of domains tend to have more success in "wicked" learning environments. While Epstein does touch specifically on music, I’ve found the most helpful elements of Range to be Epstein’s synthesis of Design Thinking, Deliberate Practice, Deep Work, and cognitive bias, as well as the idea that a wandering career path (so typical of artists) is a valid and valuable one. I’ve already quoted him once in this post, so I must be serious.

To Epstein, music is usually the narrative lynchpin for the cult of the head start: focused work on a repetitive task, minimal deviation, and a kind learning environment.  If one starts early enough, the requisite hours of practice can be achieved early enough to have a terrific head start.  Classical musicians work primarily on algorithm: articulating a pattern that has worked in the past, applying previously successful techniques to a problem, and repeating.  This thinking is effective because in classical music, many of the problems are old; repertoire that is pre-existing or is similar in affect or structure to a previous work.  At the same time, classical training has been honed over hundreds of years to create musicians capable of tackling these familiar problems quickly and effectively.

Range’s case studies show that head starts tend to evaporate over time, as the match quality of tortoises overwhelms the narrow skill of hares.  While these studies ignore the professional durability of a head start in music (more concerts create more concerts, and it’s challenging to break into a musical community when one is older) I do concur that time spend developing problem-solving, critical thinking is more important than algorithms in creating a durable professional career. Epstein argues that learning is more durable and applicable when it occurs through osmosis rather than error correction, although error correction seems to be how we teach classical music.

Berg, Christopher. Practicing Music by Design

Wonderful book combining recommendations on practicing and learning from historic musical virtuosi with scientific ideas about how humans best learn. While Berg lays out 8 central tenets of practicing, his sub-thesis is that artists beat psychologists to this. Practically, I love this book because of how Berg focuses on the details of practicing, positing instrument-agnostic ideas. For me, I found new practice techniques and the ammunition to challenge long-held dogmas. There’s a lot to say here, particularly around what notions of practicing and “good” performance have to say about musical and cultural priorities throughout history, but at the least Berg’s is a worthy tome for those looking for practical advice on practicing.

Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code

Building upon hard science and his own discoveries visiting “talent hotbeds” (zones where density and flexibility of work ignite exponential grown) around the world, Coyle articulates how practice develops myelin, an insulating layer around nerves which facilitate the transmission of electrical impulses. Myelin facilitates more effective execution of complex tasks and its growth is paramount to peak performance in any field (except maybe the study of myelin). His synthesis of epiphany-based learning often found in high-density environments and the long-term growth facilitated by deliberate practice posits a learning style that can come naturally to musicians—a combination of solitary work and socialized growth. It reads like the DaVinci Code, but who cares?

Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak

An expert in expertise, Ericsson’s is perhaps the most significant text on the practices that enable expert-level performance. Ericsson lays out a framework for Deliberate Practice, purposeful learning with well-defined, specific goals, and clear targets that require sets of small changes adding up to larger change. Deliberate practice requires, produces, and depends on mental representations, “A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about:” a multi-sensory idea of what something is like when it’s “right.” Deliberate practice rewires our brains to facilitate expertise, and the techniques Ericsson discusses demonstrate that how one learns more important than how long one learns for. Sounds pretty helpful!

Newport, Cal. Deep Work

Newport’s work has become an essential element of my pedagogy. I’ve written quite a bit about Deep Work (check it out here), focused, uninterrupted, and productive work on any task which mobiles as much of one’s mental energy as possible, reduces distractions, and enables productivity to compound.  Broadly similar to Deliberate Practice—the scientific method applied to skill development—and flow, that thrillingly elusive balance between challenge and skill, Newport posits Deep Work as a way to help tune out the distractions of contemporary life while training your brain to focus more effectively and powerfully. More importantly for my students, Newport is practical and specific, offering systems, practices, and strategies to enable sustained focus.  Sounds valuable for those training to focus for a living.

Small and Big

As performers, domain-specific information, that mastery of the patterns, schemes, tropes, and mental representations of one’s field, forms our technical and musical framework. At the same time, the utility of this specific information is tied to contemporary society, and thus ebbs and flows. Twenty years ago, memorizing the Library of Congress category numbers and navigating RILM and RIPM were skills of academic apex predators. My percussion students might not ever use their hard-earned bass drum muffling skills, or construct a mounting system that allows a triangle to resonate freely while maintaining adjacency to a woodblock. They need to adapt.

On the other hand, the constant in our educational journeys is the skill of learning itself. Central to the skill of learning is examining an idea from many angles, honing the ability to create flexible systems of thought, examining ideas from a big-picture perspective (disciplinary thinking) and from the level of details, the scales and arpeggios of our world.

Unfortunately, our silos make it near impossible to teach in this way within a university music curriculum. Maybe some day?

Next time: Let’s Get Nerdier, with “Like It” and “Love It” Circles, encompassing reading on music history, percussion, and professional development.

Happy reading!

TL/DR:

1. Empower your musical friends and see where it takes you.

2. Be attached to a process, not an outcome.

3. Collaborate as yourself, not as your discipline .

October 2012: New Morse Code plays Robert’s Patter for our very first concert. We ended up recording Patter with Four/Ten Media, beginning what has been another long-term relationship. Robert also suggested recording three versions of Patter, so we tracked a marimba/piano and marimba/marimba/marimba version.

Summer 2014: We meet in Lake George with the intention of beginning work on a duo.

In developing our repertoire, Hannah and I were interested in works which challenged notions of melody and accompaniment, and consider the two of us on more equal ground. In fact, sometimes composers even write our names on the score instead of instruments.

We asked Robert if his nascent work might incorporate these ideals, to consider our duo as Hannah and Mike, not just cello and percussion. Since I owned a marimba, Robert decided to see what Hannah and I could do on our wooden compatriot. We met in Lake George, and amidst mini-golf, penny arcades and dubious Indian food, we slapped, scraped, rustled, and tapped away.

After a few months, a gift! Out of frustration with this “prepared marimba” project, Robert completed work on 2x2 (now called Unwind) a meditative process-piece. Robert intended for Hannah to play the marimba and vibraphone with me, like a total boss.

We recorded Unwind for our first CD, Simplicity Itself, pairing the piece with a video from amazing artist Hannah Wasileski that emphasized and complemented the forms in the video.

DDB

In the meantime, Unwind took another turn. No longer 2 people 1, we were now headed towards… 2 people 1 CELLO. Enter Simon, a wonderful cello Hannah purchased to avoid our

We spent part of the summer of 2016 workshopping ideas at Avaloch Farm Music Institute for what would become Down Down Baby. Inspired by how his young child engaged with the world, Robert was interested in how Hannah and I might approach the cello with fresh perspective. Enter tapping, rubbing, flicking, plucking, dinging (sorry Simon!). We revised, balancing compositional integrity with (relative) performative feasibility. I build faux kick drums out of Ikea trash cans, Hannah becomes an outstanding percussionist.

January 2017: we record Down Down Baby at Oktaven Audio, releasing the video, filmed in a Philadelphia park by Four/Ten.

Sidebar

I have a philosophy about commissioning new music for percussion. I’m looking for works that are

• Expressive

  • Where the expressive intent of the performer can and/or should be a part of the work’s performance practice. Where a human might be an improvement from a synthesizer.

• Idiomatic

  • Not that the piece is easy to play, but that it could only exist for this instrument, that it takes into account the unique sonic, performative, and theatrical properties of the instrument

• Subversive

  • Finally, I look for works that challenge our conception an instrument, performer, or idiom. Is a snare drum capable of melody? (yes!) Might a marimba be able to make a glissando? (yes!)

These principles have allowed me to avoid micromanaging composers with compositional requests while encouraging collaboration and experimentation.

In addition to these ideas, I was thinking at the time about where my own contributions to our art form might fit. Long one to eschew physical virtuosity, I was looking for repertoire with a sense of poetry, grave, and plasticity, parameters not so common in percussion playing.

The Janky Marimba

In between food comas at Avaloch in 2016, I asked Robert if he might be interested in writing a piece for the marimba which explored a more expressive side of the instrument while adding additional timbres to the marimba. I wanted to explore pathways to the instrument which I felt were under-explored, and had a sense that Robert’s approach to melody and harmony might be a nice fit. And, much more obviously, we had spent many hours gathering sounds of me playing the marimba, which could (I hoped) be easily deployed into a new piece.

We dubbed our experiment the Janky Marimba, since it seemed to fly in the face of everything I had learned about the marimba (it’s not a table!). Hot on the heels of Robert’s terrific Economy of Means, a vibraphone solo commissioned by a large group of percussionists acting as a consortium, we decided to try the same approach with our piece. I wrote a cadre of amazing percussionist whose work I admired, asking if they might be interested in taking part in our quest, and in 2017 the 34 of us were off. We spent more time at Avaloch, creating a lexicon of notation, timbre, and gesture that we thought effectively expanded the sound of the marimba. The piece became very difficult… and I resolved to get my act together.

Along the way, we bring Robert’s music to my students at the University of Kansas, hosting a residency in which we played as much of his extant percussion repertoire as we could take (a lot!).

READY FOR LAUNCH!

After a few years of revisions and back and forth (and practicing!), I premiere Lost in Found at Tribeca New Music. What to pair the piece with? Another summer job-themed work?

We decided to split the show, and I recommended Amanda Gookin and Sam Suggs, who brought some absolutely stunning music, including my favorite, Sam’s Giant Hummingbirds.

In June 2020, I drove to Chicago (bringing my own toilet paper as most rest areas were closed…) to record Lost and Found with Patrick Burns and mega-producer Doug Perkins at Shirk Studios.

In March 2022, I rented a minivan and a marimba, and we laid claim to an empty (we hoped) swimming pool in Philadelphia, taking the plunge with Four/Ten Media, thereby bringing Lost and Found back to conceptual roots.

Reflection

I’ve learned so much from these collaborations, and so much from my performer friends like my amazing duo partner Hannah Collins through these experiences. In fact, most of my performer and composer colleagues work in this fashion, eschewing transactional commissions in favor of more reciprocal relationships. It’s what I love about our contemporary music landscape. Heck, it’s what inspired me to be a musician! I’m especially excited about the trend towards collaborating with one’s entire musical personality, not just the practices and styles we study in our more narrow conservatory training.

Since learning is experience + reflection, time to reflect!

I. Empower your musical friends and see where it takes you.

Approaching new projects with a desire to support your friends is a powerful motivator, and building friendships through music making seems to result in more effective music.

II. Be attached to a process, not an outcome

In 2013, New Morse Code wanted a duo for cello and percussion. In 2018, I premiered a marimba solo, which is…not the same thing. The process though, trying out ideas and seeing where the collaboration goes, is a wonderful luxury. More broadly, this kind of work is more emblematic of what it means to be a percussionist than any single piece. If percussion has a canon, it’s more a practice than a bounded repertoire: a mindset of experimentation, a bias to action, and an emphasis openness to new ideas.

III. Collaborate as yourself, not as your discipline

One of the turning points in our work as New Morse Code was a meeting with composer David Lang. His advice—look for things we can do as people, not just our instruments. Here, our work with Robert was based philosophy. Robert took inspiration from our extant work, our musical sensibilities. We generated and refined material over an extended time frame, and the resulting work represented at least some of our artistic embedded in Robert’s ideas. It wasn’t even a piece for percussion and cello, but Mike and Hannah. This is the ultimate benefit of long-term collaboration: music where advocacy is easy.

III.V?

Along the way, we did unfurl practices of design thinking: prototyping, failing fast, bias to action, radical collaboration. Maybe not on purpose, but it still counts, no?

Next question: WHY does this work? Framing, style, advocacy.

Framing

1. A few weeks ago, I wrote about 3 framing mechanisms when learning a piece of music

   1. Generalized cultural/historical study

   2. Some kind prescriptive instruction (a score)

   3. Orally transmitted performance practice, both active (how people say to play music) and oblique

This collaboration reveals that making music with your friends through long-term collaboration is a powerful way of accomplishing these framing stages of learning.

As I’ve discussed previously, performance practice moves the opposite direction as fine wine with age, becoming rigid, faded, inaccurate—more vinegar than body.

In my case, these composers and I are rough contemporaries—I hope!—sharing at the least similarities born of taking part in a narrow band of overlapping and coexisting cultures. At the same time, while orally transmitted notions of performance practice are notoriously fallible, notions of how to do something from a composer based upon one’s own performance of a work seem to be the least risky situation.

Through long-term collaboration, a performer is also exposed to a composer’s body of work, and not in an Outbreak kind of way. Repertoire exposure leads to framing which leads to performance practice.

Part 1 ✅

Style

Likewise, where better to get insight on style—to me the most important element in developing an interpretation, a learning strategy, a mental representation—than by spending time with the creator of a work?

In my opinion, the details of one’s world are a strong indicator of style. More specifically, how people engage reveals something about one’s intuitions and assumptions. Speaking of intuition (and I am!)…performance practice can and should be centered on intuition. Intuition can be developed and honed through immersion, and there’s no better immersion than friendship. Likewise, having a window into someone’s process can lead to ideas about which parameters of a piece of music are prioritized in a composer’s work, which in turn can/should/maybe could/I think could lead to a hint at what kind of performance could be effective, or at least honest.

Advocacy

Because of this shared journey, advocating for the music of your long-term collaborators is more facile. On the one hand, because these pieces of music are written for me, including my own strengths and weaknesses, there is a sort of implication that I should be empowered to bring to them my full self. More powerfully, these relationships connect the dots between performance, curation, writing, speaking, recording, community building; all the elements of advocacy we aspire to as performers.

A Caveat

Ok, this isn’t to say we should spy on our collaborators, secretly undertaking a participant observation project with each collaboration. My point is more that contemporary music is a great way to sidestep the issues with performance practice we get

Of course, this way of working creates other problems—overly jargon-y practice, closed circles, feelings of moral superiority, maybe some eye-rolling.

I am so delighted to share a new CD release: Lost and Found, a collection of percussion works by longtime collaborator and dear friend Robert Honstein. This record features two recordings with which I’m involved: Down Down Baby, for two musicians playing one cello, recorded with Hannah Collins, and Lost and Found, a large scale work for prepared marimba.

I’ve been working with Robert since 2012, and I’m excited that these recordings capture his music’s virtuosity, whimsy, and expressivity.

This disc was truly a team effort: produced by Doug Perkins, recorded at Oktaven Audio and SHIRK Studios, mastered by Ryan Streber, and with stunning videos by Four/Ten Media, impeccably nostalgic cover art by Laura Grey, and an all-time great, liner note from Doyle Ambrust.

The Deep End

Alongside the immersive and powerful audio, we released a video of the titular Lost and Found, filmed in a swimming pool (empty) by Four/Ten Media.

Lost and Found emerged from experiments with marimba sounds in preparation for a cello/percussion duo which eventually became Down Down Baby. After years of workshopping, yards of foam, and multiple roto-toms sacrificed to the cause, we organized 33 of my amazing colleagues into a consortium and took the plunge (into an empty pool).

Real People, Alive on Stage

Robert’s Down Down Baby is an exemplar of New Morse Code’s philosophy of long-term collaboration. Leveraging musical friendships, we work to develop music which represents Hannah and Mike as musicians, not simply cello and percussion. Sometimes composers (in this case Caroline Shaw) even put our names in the the score.

In Down Down Baby, we sit opposite a single cello, neither string players nor percussionists, and explore with a childish glee. At the same time, DDB was developed over years of worshipping, trading ideas, and revisions, empowering our advocacy while embedding our own musical personalities into the music.

Here’s a short post I wrote in 2016 about our process at Avaloch Farm Music Institute

After years of practice on Simon, Hannah’s “you can touch this cello” instrument, a took to the parks of Philadelphia to play follow the leader:

More Interesting Things

1. Scientists have sequenced Beethoven’s genome using 5 strands of his hair. Undertaken to help determine his cause of death (hearing loss, gastrointestinal issues, and liver disease), I immediately thought of Richard Taruskin’s “Tradition and Authority,” in which he argues that performers who claim interpretive authority based on their pedagogical lineage (”my great great great great grand teacher was Chopin!”) might actually have a more narrow, rigid, and dogmatic mindset. All those who claim to speak directly for the composer,” he notes, are in fact asserting their own authority, even if they do not claim divine inspiration.1” The hair has already debunked a number of people’s supposed relation to Beethoven. Will there be a ripple effect among pianists?

   Read the Study Here

2. Next week I’m going to share a bit of process, breaking down how Robert and I have collaborated over the years.

1: The L

While in Chicago for some New Morse Code time, rehearsal predictably gave way to Wikipedia spirals about the details of our world. One topic of interest: when and how did Chicago’s vaunted L develop and expand? I was surprised and delighted to find this 1915 map of the L system (thanks again, Transit Maps of the World!) in which the lake is…down!

Fascinating it is to think about how this map might challenge one’s notions of geography. That said, this transit map is not as large a conceptual jump as the Peters Projection!

(by the way, “nothing is where you think it is” is also what I say when I play an unfamiliar marimba).

After the epiphany that my “top and bottom attitude” was stifling, I wondered what were the assumptions about the world that were being made then that might have inspired a map like this? What was going on in Chicago, the world of transit, and perhaps the larger world, that would make this non-geographical representation a “good idea?” In this case, perhaps the city was expanding N/S so those longer lines needed more space? or perhaps their signs were oriented in a landscape format? Or maybe something more quotidian, given the challenge of printing and design in 1915. We can assume that these design choices are intentional, to a degree, but teasing out intentionality from a single text is a dangerous practice, a practice with which musicians are all-too-familiar.

I suppose it really doesn’t matter if the red line goes up or right, as long as I know which station is next in each direction, much the same as the Roman maps I shared a few months ago.

Actually, here’s a Manhattan transit map from 1918 (before the IRT/IND/BMT merger) in which south is to the LEFT (bold move, and SORRY Brooklyn!)

2. Say Cheese

A US appeals court ruled that gruyere (pas de accent grave) is a “common” name for cheese and shall not refer to cheese made exclusively in the Gruyère region of Switzerland and France. I cannot imagine a French dairy producer backing down, so I’m sure there will be more appeals here. Meanwhile, the FDA recently ruled that oat, almond, soy, and other non-dairy liquids may continue calling themselves “milk.” After Judge Roger Gregory punningly ruled that “like a fine cheese, this case has matured and is ripe for our review,” the judges wrote that “cheese consumers in the United States understand ‘Gruyere’ to refer to a type of cheese, which renders the term generic.” Regarding “milk,” the FDA argued that "although many plant-based milk alternatives are labeled with names that bear the term "milk"… they do not purport to be nor are they represented as milk.” To wit: “consumers understand plant-based milk alternatives to be different products than milk.”

What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out. Names, like maps, are key components of mental representations, containing connotations, denotations, heuristics, and encoded cultural memory.

(As a side bar, in both cases the judges ruled that the name no longer referred to a specific product because consumers were not behaving that way. Isn't that… the opposite of how the thought process should work?)

3. Nicky and Tacy Hit the Road

Speaking of names, I recently re-watched The Long, Long Trailer, in which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz star as Nicky and Tacy, a definitely-not-Lucy-and-Desi couple that is definitely-Lucy-and-Desi who decide (well, she decides) to eschew a home purchase in favor of a MOBILE home. They choose an apartment of an RV (a 36-foot Redman New Moon) pulled by a delightful 1953 Mercury Monterey convertible, with the intent to tour the Western US on the way to Nicky’s new job as a civil engineer.

You can imagine what happens…

Amidst the hill climbs, parking problems, and the idea that everyone in the film accepts Desi Arnaz as Italian, the details of the movie stuck out to me:

• Gas station attendants

• The price of rent?

• Driving cross country in a three-piece suit and an elegant dress

• The normality of finding nothing open in a small town after dark.

• 35mph = “too fast”

• Traffic cop at intersection not Piazza Venezia: just fine.

But perhaps one detail is more significant, and it’s an omission and assumption: gender norms.

2023 viewers to find Lucy’s (Tacy’s?) antic physicality and penchant for escalating fibs delightful and Desi’s primary-color emotional palette relatable. But, at the time, some argue that I Love Lucy killed precisely because Lucy adhered to post-war gender norms in the US: a stay-at-home wife in a suburban home charged with maintaining the household while the husband worked. Almost every episode’s plot included a quest from Lucy to rebel against the constraints of her role, which begs the question: did viewers empathize with Desi’s quest to ‘splain to his supposedly-subservient wife why her dalliances (usually undertaken to escape the typical roles set out for women) failed? Or did they appreciate the absurdity of these cultural constraints through Lucy’s antics?

For more on unspoken behavioral norms, I recommend Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, in which Frank argues that the advertising industry co-opted and mass-produced “counter culture.” On the way to his thesis, Frank gives one a terrific depiction of “the man in the grey flannel suit,” the standardized American worker bee of the post-war generation.

I didn't notice for years, but I find it helpful to practice this armchair-anthropology on nonmusical topics. Noticing, analyzing, comparing, organizing, and synthesizing outside of one’s “home” domain can be quite powerful.

Just like in music, sometimes what is not said in a text/movie/TV show is more important than what is. Omissions, or rather assumptions, are a strong indicator of norms, and norms are a powerful window into a cultural, personal, musical information: zeitgeist. And we arrive at those norms through details, which enliven a specificity of style, which leading towards powerful interpretations of the art we love.

Other Things

1. Really excited that Robert Honstein’s new CD Lost and Found will be released next week.  It was a joy to work with Robert on two pieces featured on his third disc: Down Down Baby, a tour de force work for cello and two cello operators, and Lost and Found, an alluring work for our beloved “janky marimba.”  Alongside a powerfully mixed and mastered audio recording, we’ll also be releasing a new video of Lost and Found, rounding out a trio of Four/Ten Media productions for the disc.Pre-order it here!

2. I’m so taken with Spektral Quartet’s latest release, Alex Temple’s stunning Behind the Wallpaper, featuring an astonishing Julia Holter. Check it out!

3. On the AI front: Noam Chomsky argues that the ability to make assumptions is what makes humans human. In his eyes, the critical omission of AI is its inability to leverage a moral intelligence, a part of which is making assumptions and omissions (note: paywall)

1. Drumming with Doctors

This week was the final meeting of my Medical Humanities course at Creighton University’s Phoenix Medical Campus. Creighton has a robust Medical Humanities program, where, alongside their medical courses, students take Student Interest Selectives, a collection of short-term seminars on humanities issues intended to contextualize medical study.

Along my path of thinking about what we need in order to learn a piece of music, I’ve been ruminating on music’s power to focus attention and draw connections between people; how music exists of course within cultures, but also takes part in formation of cultures. So, what better topic to take on with the Creighton students than how musical ensembles can hone skills around community-making, community preservation, and community communication? So, as the med students are experimenting on various organs, I experimented on them!

Through our “drumming and public health”  course, we explored how participatory musical cultures bind (or as Jonathan Haidt says, “bind and blind”) their members together in shared experiences; how they embody and articulate cultural knowledge, morality, and norms. How might musical groups—steel bands, Gamelan, marching bands, etc— help one become part of a culture? How might music cultivate a moral imagination which engenders the capacity to appreciate and understand the lived experiences of others? Finally, we drew connections between the mental representations necessary to fit into an interlocking musical texture and the kinds of quick diagnoses medical professionals (hopefully) make.

Along the way, we…drummed… taking on Gahu, a dance-drumming tradition of the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. I didn’t take any pictures because I was too busy drumming.

I love working with these students. They bring such a great perspective to their work. At the same time, they come into the course with a defined cohort, which makes it easier to ask students to take risks. Watching these students dive head first into complex interlocking drumming parts, dynamic songs, and coordination-challenging dancing was so inspiring. I particularly love the “late onset performance anxiety,” a growing fear of public performance that generally sets in about 1 week before our concert.

2. Original Instruments

While sharing recordings of 1930s percussion music in my Percussion Repertoire course, I rediscovered an incredible recording of car brake drums, in this case a Ford Model A or B from the late 1920s.

For percussionists, these are our “Period Instruments:” in the 1930s and 1940s, composers like John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote extensively for brake drums.

Here’s a contemporary brake drum, more of a clank than gooooonggggg.

BTW, this “lesson” is not 5 minutes long.

The instrumentarium for “early” percussion ensemble works (think contemporaries of the Pan American Association of Composers) is both specific and vague.

These older brakes are so much more resonant and clairvoyant than the shrill, anvil-like contemporary instruments that they fundamentally challenge our interpretation of these earlier percussion works. In fact, one might be inclined to substitute a bundt pan for a brake drum, as Canadian super-percussionist Bob Becker argues here. Tin cans—common in Cage’s works—have so fundamentally changed in composition since 1930 that one might be better served by using a beer mini-keg in their stead. The “tom toms” that Cage writes for are Chinese instruments, much more similar in sound to a conga than a contemporary drum set Tom Tom.

For those that are interested, percussionists Thad Anderson and William Winant have been working on the Lou Harrison Percussion Instrument Collection, a set of instruments Harrison owned and used. Now housed at Mills College, these instruments are elucidating vis a vis the sound world of the 1930s and 1940s percussion ensemble.

I love Brake Drum 7!!

These cans, rattles, and pipes are our “period instruments,” the equivalent of a harpsichord or a violin with gut strings.  They give us percussionists vital information about how these pieces might have sounded at the time. While we don’t necessarily need to use these instruments in our performances, they can inform our performance practice by making prescriptive musical notation a bit more sonically descriptive.

3. Original Condiments

Speaking of original “instruments,” one of my favorite social media accounts is Sandwiches of History. In each episode, Barry follows a historical sandwich recipe, tastes the results. “If they have potential,” Barry “plusses them up for the modern palate with modern ingredients:

While I love a Yeast Sandwich, Ham and Anchovy Sandwich, Toast Sandwich, and a Scraped Chicken Sandwich as much as the next person, Barry’s desire to bring these sandwiches to life in a way that’s parsable for a modern eater resonates. Authenticity is terrific, but authentic can be so “othered” that it tastes…bad! I’m not sure musicians need to add sriracha or pickled peppers to every slice of buttered bread, but the notion a recipe as necessarily evolving is certainly of a type with allowing a musical interpretation to evolve.

Actually, the cookbooks themselves are rough equivalents of musical treatises, and what they include (lots of buttered bread, it seems) seem to point towards cultural norms, notions of who cooked what and how. The sandwich seemed to be having a moment in the late 19th century. The books from which Barry draws also indicate contemporary attitudes towards cooking, with recipes that include a lot of space for individual taste and less of the specificity and narrative of contemporary books.

As a sidebar, cookbook titles sure are descriptive…

• The American Woman’s Cook Book (1939)

• Nine Hundred Successful Recipes (1923)

• 1001 Sandwiches (1936)

• Salads and Sandwiches (1917)

• Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1865)

Finally, one pervasive through-line in Sandwiches of History is an uncertainty towards mustard. Mustard seed, powdered mustard, mustard greens, prepared mustard.  Which do they mean?  It seems that cookbook authors’ laissez-faire attitude towards indicating what type of mustard should be used, might indicate, just like Brahms’ hairpins, that “you should know.”

4. Cultural Mayonnaise

When we bind ourselves to others in shared experiences, be they drumming, salvaging car parts or assembling sandwiches, our assumptions are as much a part of the binding (the cultural mayonnaise) as our explicit actions and statements.  These assumptions are a negative space—a shared blindness—and emerge when a cultural artifact is transported to a place, time, or context different from its origin.  The assumptions are more indicative of the culture than the artifacts, or at least more delicious.

We’re working to explore the canon behind the canon, and nowhere is it clearer than in percussion works of the late 1920s and 1930s, whose noisy sound fused a burgeoning interest in non-Western sound with a bracing and aggressive modernism. From 2023, they sound like the cotton gin—remarkable inventions that transformed our world today. But what was in the air, and what was in the pen? What innovations were evolutions, particularly with regard to the increasing use of percussion as a forum for artistic expression? At the same time, apropos previous postings, what of assumptions did these composers make about their performers, audiences, peers?

A few weeks ago, I dove head first into the Pan American Association of Composers, a cabal of Western Hemisphere composers who banded together from 1928-1934 to advocate for the works of Americans as Americans, absent a fealty to the European tradition.

Emerging from Edgard Varèse’s International Composers Guild, the PAAC was spurred on by the increasing national self-awareness, interest in indigenous art, and a general desire to promote NEW things.

The group was spearheaded by composers Henry Cowell and Carlos Chávez in addition to Varèse.

In addition to a life of modernism, Cowell taught a “Music of the World’s Peoples” course after returning from a Fulbright in Berlin through which he worked at the  Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, the (then) pre-eminent archive of non-Western Music. He also innovated in the then-nascent string piano field.

Chávez, though less known today, is a fascinating composer whose works fused pre-Columbian musics with astute modernism.  His work as a conductor and head of the Conservatorio Nacional de Music in Mexico City was responsible for bringing widespread attention to Mexican music, particularly in the energetic days following the 1921 Mexican Revolution. Here he is with Rosa Covarubbias and Frida Kahlo:

After an initial meeting in Steinway Hall (!!!), the PAAC (or super PAAC??) articulated a mission statement:

It is the hope of the association that the performance of North American works in Central and South America and of Central and

South American works in the United States will promote wider mutual appreciation of the music of the different republics of America, and will stimulate composers to make still greater effort toward creating a distinctive music of the Western Hemisphere.

Encouragement may be derived from the fact that whereas a few years ago it would have been impossible to find a sufficient number of American composers with new musical ideals to form such an association, today there is a sizable group of progressive men and women who, although representing many different tendencies, are banded together through serious and sincere interest in furthering all the finest music being written in the Americas1

At the time of its founding the group had quite a roll call:

• Carlos Chavez

• Acario Cotapos

• Henry Cowell

• Ruth Crawford

• E. E. Fabini

• Howard Hanson

• Roy Harris

• Charles Ives

• Colin McPhee

• S. Revueltas

• D. Rudhyar

• Carl Ruggles

• Carlos Salzedo

• William Grant Still

• Edgard Varese

• Adolph Weiss

• Emerson Whith

After a series of concerts in the US, famed conductor Nicholas Slonimsky took the group on the road.  Sort of.  Slonimsky, with the backing of Charles Ives, was dispatched to Europe to “conduct symphonic works by these  American modernists.” Although ‘the currency situation was very favorable to the American dollar,” the concerts were a critical event, although not a successful one.

Wait, there’s MORE. In each case, the PAAC wrote descriptions of each work, and they are aggressive and athletic:

• Charles Ives: Three Places in New England

  • Transcendental geography by a Yankee of strange and intense genius.

• Carl Ruggles: Men and Mountains

  • A Brobdingnagian vision inspired by Blake.

• Amadeo Roldán: La Rebambaramba

  • The rhythms and instruments of the Antilles, utilized onomatopoetically by a Cuban symphonist.

• Alejandro Caturla: Bembe

  • Afro-Cuban frenzy, unleashed with a very Parisian savoir-faire, by a young man from Cuba.

These programs were broadly of a type with the late 1920s.  The US was beginning to articulate a position on the world stage, there was a growing nationalism in Western Hemisphere counties, and a unique brand of American music was forming, a “rugged” individualism, a maverick streak, a tendency to go off into the desert making stuff.

I give you: George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique

The piece was written for a film by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, with input from Man Ray. It’s typically performed in a rather tame percussion ensemble version with only a few airplane propellers, but the original version was slightly more…automated?

One Summer, Many Sounds

For a non-musical, non academic but but actually very lurid take on the late 1920s, I returned to Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which sets the stage for a uniquely American America.  Think of what happened in one summer:

• Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs

• Calvin Coolidge chooses not to run

• Lindbergh makes his solo flight

• Sacco and Vanzetti are executed

• “The Jazz Singer” is released

• Ford ceases production of the Model T in favor of the Model A

  • This is an auspicious moment for percussion. Many early works for percussion feature the sound of automobile brake drums. The the Model A and its successor the Model B had fantastic sounding brakes, a ringing, gong-like sonority that is almost impossible to find on contemporary disc brakes.

Bryson’s writing is effervescent and irreverent, and highlights how the US as we exist today was partially a byproduct of the conflicts exacerbated and set into motion in the 1920s: that conflict between isolationism and engagement, the juxtaposition of a provincial history with a growing wealth, political immorality fused with unearned righteousness. A time of progressivism and slumming, Vanderbilts and Vanzetti’s.

These contrasts are to me audible in many of the works of this period: the juxtaposition of incredible wealth of the elite and crushing poverty of the depression, the size of the Western Hemisphere, the increasing noise of urban life, a notable turn from Europe (e.g. calling all sirens and airplane propellers), the increasing speed of information and humans (radios, jets).

Instruments, not Ideas

These lurid and endearing descriptions reminded me of a set of programs from a few early percussion ensemble concerts:

A group headed by John Cage, Lou Harrison and William Russell at Mills College in 1940:

And a show led by Cage at the Cornish school in 1939:

What luck, then when I unearthed a record of these early works, deaccessioned by the Peabody library and accessioned by yours truly in 2005:

In addition to the AMAZING graphic design,  I also love the specificity of the instrument listing under the players.  It shows how the instruments, the *sounds* are the novelty, not just the piece. Also, I wish more programs included a prophetic polemic like Cowell’s.

OK, why is this important?

Broadly speaking, percussion works from this period struggled with form—for many, structuring time without pitch or harmony was a challenge—and so innovative sounds were key.

At the same time, early performers of these works were broadly amateurs. This record came from 1961, when performance practice of these seminal early works had shifted to professional percussionists, not the dancers and book binders of the early days.

I’ve struggled to find space for “early” percussion ensemble works in my teaching.  A little too square, a little too rigid, and a little too… easy (Cage notwithstanding)? Contextualizing these works as part of an era, as experiments on the way to something, not the thing itself, helps explain their provenance while giving us some powerful ideas about how to bring them to life in 2023. And, it gives me an opportunity to listen to some hot jazz, research the Ford Model A, and think about Babe Ruth’s life in the Ansonia Hotel.

I have been focusing more in my teaching and research on starting a learning process from community, how we want something to take shape in the world, how we want it to connect with people, draw people together in a shared space. That perspective can help us research a piece and direct an interpretation in one fluid process.

This little foray into castanets, maracas, bongos, and lions roar’s got me thinking about how to honor this era. Maybe by making something noisy, or starting a Pan Something Association of Something?

Other Comings and Goings

1. So excited to see that DWB (Driving While Black), is receiving some new performances. After a sold out run in Birmingham, I’m enthused about forthcoming productions in Greensboro and Des Moines. Working on this project with Susan, Roberta, Chip, and Hannah was a highlight for me.  More importantly, being able to engage with this issue and hear the extent to which these stories are personal, visceral, and omni-present was a profound experience, and I’m looking forward to see where these go!

2. Reacquainting myself with Hildegaard von Bingen, not as a composer, but as the original INFLUENCER.

3. With all the hubbub about AI writing, I’ve loving Mushtaq Bilal’s eloquent threads on how to leverage to simplify research and academic writing

More information

1. For more on Antheil’s fascinating life, check out Robert Greenberg’s deep dive.

2. A formative influence on my own thinking about this era in American musical history was American Mavericks, a web resource organized by the San Francisco Symphony in 2012. Speaking of digital humanities, the website still exists but is missing some of the more whimsical elements…

3. For more information about the linkages between Cage and Cowell, I recommend Leta E. Miller’s “Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941.”

4. For a terrific analysis of John Cage’s percussion music on the same parameters that Cage prioritized while composing, I love Tom DeLio’s The Amores of John Cage.

5. By the way, for percussionists, Ostinato Pianissimo was commissioned by the Pan-American Association of Composers, and the Chávez Toccata by Cage and Harrison’s ensemble.

• A book/ebook/pamphlet/maybe an essay/probably just a bumper sticker at this point about musical learning

• A digital performer’s guide for Unsnared Drum

• An online class

• Charts… many charts!

  

  

Thus far, I’ve focused on three broad modes of engagement, at least for western music:

1. Generalized cultural/historical study

2. Some kind prescriptive instruction (a score)

3. Orally transmitted performance practice, both active (how people say to play music) and oblique (contemporaneous accounts of “good” and “bad” musicking).

As with any project based on navel-gazing and not playing music with my friends, I began to overthink, pulling at that loose thread of the sweater until the garment unravels to a few key questions:

• How does one explain how to play a piece of music?

• What does one need to know to play a piece of music?

• How does one explain how to do anything?!

• Does it even matter, when culture lives in ephemeral relationships and not in texts?

These questions are how relationships between groups of people are bounded and fluid, how assumptions and intuitions are built, reinforced, and subverted. But, how are those assumptions created? I felt the need to take a stab at it, so I turned—as one does— to Greek Myths.

Culture is (partially) Created through Mythology

If you’re like me, you grew up with Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a market hall of Greek/Roman/Norse myths as told through a number of literary lenses. You might also know these stories art history, astronomy, Freudian psychology, pop culture, or battleship names.

In fact, they’re so classic that I asked ChatGPT to take a break from writing music to summarize them:

1. The myth of Prometheus, who, in a daring act of defiance, stole fire from the gods, gifting it to humanity and bestowing upon them the power to use it for their own benefit.

2. The myth of Pandora, whose curious nature led her to open a forbidden box, releasing all the evils of the world, despite warnings from the gods.

3. The myth of Icarus, who, despite his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun and, as a result, experienced a tragic and untimely death.

4. The myth of Echo and Narcissus, whose fateful love was doomed to an unhappy ending due to Narcissus' vanity and Echo's unrequited love.

5. The myth of Sisyphus, who was cursed to an eternity of rolling a large boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down again, repeating this cycle for eternity.

Needless to say, not exactly an Ovid-level writer…

There are MANY more fun ones, of course which explain why Athenians have small butts to the invention of the lyre to (almost) anything in between. Incredible plot points notwithstanding, there’s something else going on here.

These stories (legends?) explain the the natural phenomena around us, ask where humans are from and where they might be going, and preserve historical ideas and events. The value and longevity of these human-centered (some might say……humanist!) stories is their ability to speak to tropes, ideas that the myths reinforce as “universal” rather than specificity of experience.

Some of these foundational ideas might include:

• Love: loyalty, trust, eternal love, the the challenges therein.

• Heroes: achievements of great people, and how their failures show us that we need to live in a society, not above it.

• The Underworld: rituals of death and dying as natural and normative

• Fate: depictions of right and wrong behavior as a guardrail

While few among us might relate to turning into a swan to seduce someone, we might feel a kinship to needing to double check a loved one is in fact with us during a harrowing journey, or to see the eternal punishment wrought upon those who do the “wrong” thing.

Wait a minute, these are morality codes!

Culture is Solidified through Morality

Greek myths are kind of an oral performance practice for our lives. They bind a culture together while giving indications on both how to enhance that culture while articulating what it means to NOT be part of that culture.

The mechanism? Morality.

A few summers ago I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, a captivating look at the seemingly impermeable cultural, political, and social differences which frequently stymie us. (I actually wrote about it on my blog here) Haidt argues that our divisions could be better framed as a differing set of key moral principles.

The main focus of The Righteous Mind are Haidt’s six moral foundations.  These frameworks help govern our desire to join groups, to engage in selfish or selfless behavior, and to understand one another.  Haidt argues that these foundations are biological, forged from thousands of years of evolutionary “nudges:”

1. Care/harm: Mammalian attachment + ability to feel the pain of others

2. Fairness/cheating: reciprocal altruism, justice, rights, autonomy

3. Loyalty/betrayal: tribalism with shifting coalitions was essential to our development as a species, and seems to be essential for virtues of patriotism, and self-sacrifice for a greater group good.

4. Authority/subversion: Hierarchical social interactions —> leadership, deference to authority, and respect for traditions

5. Sanctity/degradation: Our biological aversion to disgust and contamination becomes notions of living an elevated, less carnal, more noble lifestyle.

6. Liberty/oppression: resentment of the restriction of personal liberty

Why are some people happy in political, social, and economic frameworks that others would consider exploitative, repressive, or unfair? Why do we have so much trouble understanding those with differing political viewpoints? Haidt argues that our differences result from priorities placed on different ratios of moral foundations.

While the essential conceit of The Righteous Mind is to explore the moral foundations theory that Haidt claims can explain why we don’t understand one another politically and culturally, I found the more pertinent question of the book: why do humans group together?  What’s the value of joining a group, and how are those groups maintained and pruned?

1. As musicians, we deal frequently in building community around the work we make, honing connections between composers and performers, performers and audiences, and audiences and communities. Thinking about the moral foundations as modes of interactions and engagement can help us form groups which empower their members while understanding and celebrating our differences.

2. That said, communication in music is often within bounded groups. While participatory musical cultures can be powerful vehicles for enculturation, western classical musical cultures tend to leverage enculturation for the sake of heuristics. If player A and player B have similar cultural assumptions (expectations, norms, boundaries) then exchange can be fast, fluid. But, assumptions are dangerous, and we’ve seen the way that oral performance practice vis a vis western art music can become more recalcitrant and rigid over time.

From a Certain Point of View

How do we we get to know the norms of a culture? An emic approach (from Phonemic) investigates insider information: how members of a culture think, their rules for behavior, their morality, told through the perspective of an insider. An etic viewpoint (careful here) looks to describe and explain cultural practices, rituals, or behaviors from the perspective of an outsider, looking to parameters and frameworks that might not be relevant to cultural insiders. Oof. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but a generalized notion that being an insider within a culture allows for a certain type of interaction, where being an outsider can help elucidate other notions of cultural transmission

Most of the time, we discover the norms of a culture and can flexibly take part through experience. But, what if the culture you are interested in learning about is more behind it, impermeable, or so other that you have no sense of its values, its morality?

Wither Participant Observation.

Observe, Participate

dusted off my copy of James Spradley’s Participant Observation, my entrée to the world of ethnography, last summer while organizing my books, but it wasn’t until this week I made it past this AMAZING cover and revisited the text.

Participant Observation is a manual for ethnographers, an instructional book about getting to know other cultures through that cultures vocabularies, behaviors, and values. I love how Spradley focuses on how learning about a culture on their own terms, divorcing oneself from assumption by following a set of behaviors, his 9 dimensions of descriptive observation, which are designed to remove etic perspectives in favor of the words and behaviors espoused by cultural insiders. From descriptive observations to domain analyses, to taxonomic analyses to highlighting cultural themes, Spradley shows us how to listen to a culture’s vocabulary, to learn how that bounded group makes sense of their world. Sounds pretty helpful at a time when cultural divides are wider than ever.

Just don’t do what I did and do participant observation on your friends and family!

So What?

This semester I’m teaching a course at Creighton University’s medical campus in Phoenix. We’re looking how participatory musical cultures might model collaboration, teamwork, problem-solving, placemaking and cultural participation while preserving vital rituals. We’re also looking at how drumming might cultivate a moral imagination which engenders the capacity to appreciate and understand the lived experiences of others.

In working with my students at Creighton, I begin by showing a video of Ewe Dance-Drumming: footage taken at a funeral where drummers, dancers, and singers more through a permeable environment. It’s clear there are musical and behavioral norms, that the music moves based on certain principles, and that all are participating according to some embodied ideals. Without any sense of how the boundaries of a cultural space are set or the rules of engagement in a physical or musical space, we struggle to make sense of what we’re experiencing. As we develop first an understanding of the details of the interlocking drumming parts, the meaning of the song texts, and a sense of how the dancing is triggered by the drumming, individual actions come into focus, and we (with time and energy) might understand something about how powerful a ritual this event is. Would be better to participate, but that’s week 2!

But performance practice is a kind of culture, no? In order to learn a piece of music, particularly western classical music, one must have some understanding of the culture from which emerged. Even if your goal as a performer is to bring music to life in a different, an awareness of its original situation is critical, both to situate a work’s unique features and to articulate which parameters might be best foregrounded.

One needs an emic perspective in order to transmit, transpose, transmogrify or transport. Anything less would be structural homology, because the past is a foreign country.

Further Reading

1. It’s not really reading, but I’m excited to share news of Robert Honstein’s new album, Lost and Found, available March 24 on New Focus Recordings. The album features two works developed over 10 years of collaboration with Robert: Down Down Baby, for two performers on one cello, and Lost and Found, for prepared marimba. Looking forward to sharing our video of Lost and Found (filmed in an empty swimming pool in Philadelphia) shortly!

Pre-Order Now!

2. For an ethnography that I would classify as a “great read,” check out Georgina Born’s Rationalizing Culture, a fascinating look at the culture around modernism and post-modernism at IRCAM. Definitely on the emic side, and I love how Born defines post-modernism in relation to modernism. Particularly noteworthy is her depiction of the “daytime” and “after hours” activities of IRCAM researchers as correlating strongly with the uptown/downtown dynamic brilliantly depicted in Kyle Gann’s Music Downtown.

3. I just wrote a series of posts for the Percussive Arts Society’s Rhythm! Scene blog about pre-practice work. You can read the first installment here.