Category Archives: creativity - Page 3

Computers

Posted by on April 5, 2011 No comments

The guitar wasn’t my only interest as a kid. When I was in grade school, first or second grade maybe, my dad got a C/PM-80 computer with two (TWO!) 8 ½” floppy disk drives. It sat on top of a file cabinet in the office space of our house. The case was made from a couple of metal boxes that were spray painted dark blue. The machine was glorious. With a couple of Byte magazines and some books I got from the elementary school book fair I went to work learning BASIC. It was an amazing time.

When I wasn’t messing around with my friends all summer long, I was holed up in that room learning to use and write programs. I learned logic. I began to understand syntax. I was figuring out one of the most important lessons of my life: how to teach myself things. It was my dealing with the bit box that led me to the conclusion that I could probably do just about anything with the right book and some spare time. Thirty or so years later it still feels true.

My dad always made sure that we had a computer in the house. Always. He’s a nerd of the first order but more than that he really understood where the world was going and how it was going to get there. He didn’t predict the timing of the explosion of the Internet, but he knew it was coming. That’s a lot more than most could say since most people didn’t know that there was an Internet until it was on the cover of every magazine and newspaper (remember those? So quaint!).

With a simple upgrade came a modem. With a modem came figuring out how to communicate with one of my nerd buddies down the block over a computer. No one would think anything of a 5th grader chatting on a computer today, but back in the early 80s? No one even knew what that meant (unless they’d seen War Games). And for that I am thankful!

The BBS community taught me how to get my hands on software that I didn’t write. I learned to make noises with that little speaker inside of the PC. By the time the SoundBlaster card (yeah, the original with 8 blazing bits of audio fidelity!) came out, I could write some pretty cool software that made music.

The experimentation that was possible with computers held my attention. I understood what could be. I could someday record my guitar onto my computer. But at 11 MB/minute of stereo CD quality audio, that wasn’t going to happen until I was in graduate school. Nonetheless, I watched and waited. I went to NYU where I could get my hands on all of that tasty technology. I was surrounded by people who understood what could be done with those boxes with the blinking lights. It all made sense.

Some of the software that I wrote back then, in 1995, was pretty cool. It was at that moment that the whale of the Internet was breaching into popular consciousness. More and more musicians and composers were trading ideas. Motion capture, interactive environments, and artificial performers were the hot topics. I was in the middle of it. The things I saw and the people I met inspire me to this day. Oh, and all of that Internet nerdery eventually led to full time, gainful employment. A nice side benefit for composers of unpopular music who like to eat and sleep in warm, dry places.

Computer music dominated my life for most of my 20s. I lost track of the guitar for a while. It sat in a spare bedroom waiting for me. I did eventually find my way back, but it took some time to restore a little balance.
Today it’s hard to imagine music without a computer. After all, what is an iPod? What about your music server at home? Or the entire infrastructure of music distribution? Does anyone buy CDs anymore? I haven’t bought one in close to 10 years. And for a creator of music the computer is almost as important as the instrument or voice. These are and have been amazing times with the best stuff still ahead (I think).

Yesterday on my lunch hour I did something incredible. I downloaded an analog synth program to my new iPad. I made a sequence and noodled with some patches. Then I bounced it down and passed it off to another program that allowed me to process it further. An analog synth that would fill the better part of a dining room table and an 8 track recorder now fit in a package that weighs in at just over a pound and is small enough to be held in one hand. Forget the flying cars, this is the future that I ordered!

Learning to Dig Classical Music

Posted by on March 29, 2011 No comments

The guitar lessons that my mom signed me up for, per the terms of The Deal, were explicitly for the “Classical Guitar.” I had no idea what that meant. The fact is, I was not raised in a family that listened to classical music. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I firmly believe that if you haven’t been introduced to “classical music” (a term that I hate dearly and use only because of a shared cultural context – more on that another time) by the age of 10 there just isn’t much hope of getting it ingrained. The only way for an appreciation of traditional western fare to make it into an individual’s heart after that point is via a good teacher. I didn’t have a good teacher. I had an amazing teacher.

I took a little sidebar to look him up on the internet. I can’t find him on Facebook and the one person that I knew we’d have in common seems to have killed her account so I’ll just throw his name out there and hope that he finds me one day as he’s doing a vanity search (which he’d probably never do). Ken Leonard was the perfect person to enter my life at that key juncture. He introduced me to Hunter S. Thomson, Henry Miller, Kate Bush, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and most of the other artists, writers, and musicians who color everything that I love creatively.

Ken started things off slowly. He needed to teach me how to do certain fingerings and so he took a tune by one of my favorite bands, The Police, and arranged it so that I would learn some basic arpeggios. After a few more pop tunes, he showed me what the guitar could do. And that was it. Once I heard some bits from Bach’s lute suite and a couple of Villa-Lobos etudes, I knew that most of what I thought I knew about the guitar and its potential was so naive. It was like skipping from thinking that the world of music could be contained in a single Woody Guthrie song and then hearing King Crimson. My mind was blown open and there really was no going back.

I listened to everything I could get my hands on. I couldn’t really get my head around the orchestra, but I dearly loved opera. And chamber music. The string quartets of Beethoven and Webern. I couldn’t describe what it was that made them stand out, but they did. I had a dozen Segovia cassettes and I would put them on in my room before I went to sleep at night. The music became a part of me.

It was a little surprising to some that I majored in composition when I went off to the conservatory. Not Ken. He knew where it started, in that small room on the second floor at Woodsy’s Music in Kent, Ohio. He smiled when I told him about the theory headaches and how hard ear training was for me. I really wish we hadn’t lost touch, but the years in between were long and unkind. But he was my first music teacher and certainly made the deepest impression on me of anyone outside of my family until my college years.

Going through a box in my closet I found some half-finished manuscripts from over 10 years ago. That was a different person in a different lifetime. But I may dust them off and see if I can do something with them in this life.

Falling In Love

Posted by on March 22, 2011 2 comments

The one part of my PhD that I desperately wanted to finish was the artist’s statement. It’s an essay of sorts that describes why one creates. In a way, it’s a “Why do you exist” sort of exercise. I really, really wanted to do it. I’ve started it a thousand times. It’s difficult. There is so much that goes into why I do what I do and the lengths to which I’ve gone to sustain my creative work. It seems that many of the tough and counterintuitive decisions I’ve made over the last 20 years have all come down to being about my creative work. That’s hard to believe given how destructive some of my choices were. That’s all (mostly) water under the bridge by this point but I do want to take a crack at explaining myself to all seven of my readers (and two of those might be me). My little girl is making sure that this will never be properly edited. Let’s just turn on the fire hose and let it run. Here goes.

I wish I could remember how old I was when I decided that I wanted to take guitar lessons. My parents were savvy and decided to make sure that I had some skin in the game so they told me that they’d go 50/50 on an instrument. I did some shopping around at Woodsy’s Music in Kent, OH and figured out that a starter Yamaha steel string was going to set me back $150. That meant I had to come up with $75. It may as well have been a million, but it was near enough to my birthday that I had a head start. I also had an allowance of sorts and a job helping deliver papers 3 days a week. The icing on the cake was my super secret plan: saving my lunch money.

My buddy Jeremy helped me out by packing an extra sandwich in his lunch. I was making an extra dollar a day every time I didn’t eat lunch and the cash started to pile up. Before too long the glorious day came that I presented my mom with the cash that I had been saving in a coin bank shaped like a Tootsie Roll. She was a little surprised. True to her word, she took me to Woodsy’s that weekend and we bought the guitar and I was signed up for lessons. Classical guitar lessons. She was paying so my dreams of being Andy Summers or The Edge or Jimi Hendrix were on hold – or so it seemed at the time. I was just excited to have the instrument.

We went home and I took it down to the basement. I laid it out on my lap and strummed it in what was an attempt at rhythm. I can still remember it. The open strings rang out and I was struck by the volume of the instrument. It was a spruce top with laminated sides. The finish was glossy and then neck was narrow but chunky. It was a standard issue dreadnought and in the scheme of all of the guitars made in the world thus far it was utterly forgettable. But I fell in love.

The next week I had my first lesson. My teacher, Ken, was brilliant. He started off by getting me hooked. The first tune I learned was “Another Brick In The Wall.” He transposed it to the key of G and taught me different strumming patterns on the simplified chords. I was hooked. I took to it like a fish to water – at least intellectually.

I practiced almost constantly. I would sit in my room alone and strum to myself. I took the chords I learned and arranged them intuitively. Sometimes it sounded OK. But what I learned quickly was that I could make sounds that moved me. I could do something that made me feel very alive and in a way that only an early teenaged boy can understand I felt validated.

When I was introduced the the Frederick Noad book “Solo Guitar Playing” I memorized the exercises I was given weekly as though they were holy texts. In a very real way they became my practice. They were my religion. I intoned them as a way of keeping myself in tact in those horrendous days of adolescence. In the dying days of my parents’ marriage the guitar was my best friend. It didn’t ask any tough questions and always responded to everything that I did regardless of my mood. I could wail on it in anger and it screamed with me. I could touch its strings softly and it would sing me to sleep.

Practicing and lessons were the only non-negotiables in my life. Sports came and went. Drama came and went. Girlfriends came and went. The only real constant in my life was music. More importantly, guitar music.

I have talked with other musicians and heard the stories of how they came to their instruments. Many were forced into lessons (invariably Suzuki violinists (shudder) and pianists) or picked it up and were surprisingly good at it (clarinets and flutes) and just ran with it. I have known a few who shared the passion for their instrument with me and had the almost shamanic attachment that I do. Returning to their instrument daily meant healing and focus. I’ve started to understand that there are many who have a relationship like this with their work. Writers, painters, actors, and creators of all media fall into that trance and experience a renewal. I can’t explain it though I’ve read many books on the topic. I’m not sure that I really want to know what it is about six strings stretched over a piece of wood that excites every fiber of my being. The why doesn’t matter. It’s that it does that counts.

By the time I was 18 it was all over. I was completely in love with the instrument, its repertoire, and its potential. The world of music was starting to open up to me though admittedly through a fairly narrow and highly opinionated lens. My feet were on the path.

something about influences

Posted by on February 28, 2011 No comments

It has taken years for it to sink in, but the pressure of the facts has finally created a gem. It occurred to me the other day as I was preparing playlists for my iPod. The music that I love as a composer and performer is very different from the music that moves me as a listener. Composing and listening are two different things.

This isn’t a particularly great insight. There certainly isn’t anything new there that will change the world, but it has made things a little easier for me in my creative struggle. Like any good artist, I compare myself to my influences. I know that I was taught from the earliest days of my career as a composer that I am not like Beethoven or Mozart. I am mortal. They struggled, yes, but I will struggle more. I will likely never see the world from summits of greatness that they now sit upon, but doesn’t mean I won’t die trying. And in the trying, there is the comparing.

in progress

It’s very hard to write a piece of music and not compare it to something that is near and dear. To wonder to oneself if this string quartet could sit on the same stage with Webern and not be completely forgotten. These thoughts are counterproductive in some ways, but in a more positive sense they can be used for inspiration. More often than not, for me, it comes down to acknowledging that what I do isn’t what my heroes have done. The pieces that made me want to dig in and try my own hand as a musician are only tangentially related to what I produce. Fripp, Villa-Lobos, Hedges, Belew, Miles, Copland, Cage, Brubeck, and Buckley all find places in my daily musical diet but I will never compose anything that could be mistaken for their work. And that’s OK.

This only scratches the surface of my inner monologue these days that is trying desperately to resolve the music of my influences with the music that I create. Or the even stickier problem of how I draw relationships between what I compose, the music that I love as an aural experience, and the music that is intellectually stimulating but less fulfilling as a so-called musical experience.

All of this means that I’m spending more time thinking about music than writing it. That has to change, but the dominant of my life right now has yet to resolve itself into a little girl, so I have other fires to tend.

2010 recap

Posted by on December 31, 2010 No comments

In 2010 I managed to accomplish the following musical tasks:

1. Completed an acoustic guitar.
2. Completed 60% of a second guitar.
3. Released Thought Music.
4. Released Chasing Saturday
5. Collaborated with Astra and Jason on several tunes (in person, even!).
6. Started work on a longer term Cloxco album.

Not. Too. Shabby.

With the impending arrival of a little girl early in 2011, I’m not sure what things will look like, but I’m hoping to do at least as well next year. Big plans include building an electric guitar and composing a couple of serious pieces for the classical guitar. I would also like to release some more of the acoustic noodlings I have been saving and really get the Cloxco project off the ground.

Here’s to getting things done in 2011. Good luck in all of your projects.