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New York – Memories

My acceptance letter to NYU’s music technology graduate program was one of the most exciting letters I have ever opened. It was a unique program. There were brilliant opportunities for anyone who wanted to get involved and hustle. I was 22 and had never been to New York City. In fact, I’d never lived outside of Ohio. I was in the very small pond that was the Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music. I wrote in a journal at the time that I knew I was going to be testing myself. Looking back on it now, I had no idea what I was talking about.

I got on a train in Cleveland and got off at Penn Station. I had a guitar, a duffel bag, and a suitcase. Somehow, I got a cab and made it to my student apartment on E. 26th St. My apartment was on the 22nd floor where my bedroom, such as it was, looked out on the twin towers.

In a single day my mind was completely blown.

The classes were brilliant. My teachers were all accomplished musicians, scholars, and creators. I was surrounded by art and music. I couldn’t turn my head without seeing something that I’d never seen before. It was a complete and total sensory overload. Within a week of arriving I had scheduled my classes, started school, and found two jobs. Not bad for four days work. Of the memories that come flooding back there is one that stands out above the rest:

I completely lost my ability to write music.

In the comparative safety of my dorm room in the bedroom community outside of Cleveland, I could do almost anything. Sitting down at a baby grand piano in a practice room and pounding out page after page was almost effortless. Even if what came out was garbage, sitting down to start it was easy. Somewhere I had the confidence to know that 90% of what is done is crap and finding the 10% is where the genius of a composer lies. In short, there was no risk involved. But in the center of the world where even homeless guys playing in subways had better chops than I did, the intimidation factor killed any level of confidence I might have had.

There is a powerful energy in New York. Anyone who has spent time there can feel it. It vibrates at the frequency of the soul. Every action comes alive and there is a sense of urgency to even the simplest of tasks. The darker side of that energy is the anxiety. Making rent. Eating more than one meal a day. Being in the right place at the right time. Recognizing opportunities. Not slipping into the realm of prey (on many levels). I wasn’t ready for that – not that there is a way to prepare for it.

All of this was put into relief the first time I visited home after being in the city. I tried to sleep on the couch at my mom’s house but I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. At about 2 AM it dawned on me that it was too quiet. Too. Quiet. To. Sleep. I was hooked on that city buzz and hadn’t yet learned to manage it.

For a year I wrote little to nothing. It felt like so much was completely lost. But in that time, there were so many new things to cram into my head. I wrote software. I learned to create things for the web – the 1995 web. Ya know, before The Web. I met people and listened to music I had never heard before. I read voraciously. After all, what’s cheaper than the library? I lived my life on the streets wandering from gallery to shop to museum to library to concert and back again. I played the part of the tourist on some days and the hardened city dweller on others. I was too poor for the subway so I saw everything on foot. My mind expanded and my world got so much larger.

If I hadn’t gone to NYU I certainly wouldn’t be sitting where I am today. There’s no path to my wife and kids that doesn’t pass through the city. And I don’t think I could have gone to the city at that time without a reason like school to support the effort. I didn’t have the courage for that. It’s impossible to measure what I gained by spending those years there. My work was influenced by people like Robert Rowe and Mark Coniglio in profound ways. Thinking about it excites whatever creative gland in my brain isn’t completely sleep deprived in these early new baby days.

New York City changes a person in a fundamental way. I don’t know how it works when one is older, but at the age of 22 it was like tossing whatever vision I had of myself into a blender and walking away a very different person. I think about my buddy Kevlar who has done essentially the same thing but without the motivation of school and I’m alternately extremely proud and mildly jealous. Experiences like that can’t be recaptured and the effect on one’s work is profound.

Sadly, I haven’t been back since I left in my buddy Chip’s purple truck heading west to Ohio and then on to Minnesota. I was fried when we emerged on the other side of the tunnel. I couldn’t live there anymore, but a good part of me never really left.

Beginning Composition

There has to be something about playing the guitar that brings on a unique state of mind. It cries out for improvisation. It can be rhythmic and driving or melodic and wandering. Not to be a jerk about it, but I never saw anyone improvise on an oboe (not to pick on the oboe, mind you) the way I’ve seen people strum at a guitar. And maybe that’s the key. The guitar is a very democratic instrument. It welcomes all comers. In a couple of days almost anyone can learn three chords. Add in some truth and we get Bob Dylan, right? The point is that it’s a short leap from playing other people’s songs on the guitar to writing original tunes.

I remember when the light bulb went on for me. I was learning “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. I took the picking pattern (which is pure genius) and tried it with some different chords. It sounded cool. But the patterns wasn’t easy, so I changed it up. After an hour or so I had something that could be considered for the category of “song.”

Now I have no idea how the tune actually went but I can bet on the fact that it was in the key of E minor and that somewhere it had a B7 in it. I know that last part because I played it for my guitar teacher and he told me that I’d stumbled onto one of the oldest “rules” of music. Rules? There were rules?

He pulled out some staff paper and started to sketch some triads. He explained some of the basic terms. By the end of 10 minutes, I had I – IV – V – I memorized. I had now unlocked “Wild Thing”, “Louie, Louie”, and most folk and rock tunes. When he added vi I was on fire. The 50s were mine!

When I found out that there were rules for putting these things in order and that Beethoven wasn’t just a master of great ideas but a master of the framework of Western Music ™ I was floored. A huge door was now open and I was staring into the bright light of day.

All of this played into my mother’s plan of training me on the classical guitar quite nicely. The etudes of Fernando Sor became very important to me. I analyzed them (before I knew that I was doing analysis) and tried to recreate them. I dabbled in variations. I made a lot of noise and maybe a little music once in a while. But I practiced and studied them incessantly. Odd stuff for a 13 year old boy to be doing.

The thing about writing music and being a “composer” that set in early was the many toothed beast. Yes, the piano. For a while I honestly didn’t think that I could be a composer without learning to play the piano. Fortunately, my laziness and complete lack of affinity for the instrument changed that. I couldn’t do squat at a keyboard (still can’t) so I made a go of it with paper, my guitar, and my mind’s ear. I lost the fear that I would never do anything of worth because I didn’t play the piano and pushed myself along under the tutelage of my superior teacher.

The rules came slowly to me. Wanting to break or ignore them did not. By the time I got to conservatory I didn’t much care for the idea of learning more rules and practicing them ad nauseum. I was a trial for my theory teachers. I still enjoy the sound of parallel fifths (suck it!) in my chorales. But I had the rules drilled into me and when I broke them I knew it and could point to it. A student that can accomplish that has a place to start.

Once the fire was lit, it was hard to control. Many late nights from that first guitar lesson until I had kids were spent staring at a piece of staff paper or working something out with a piece of notation software. And in those moments when my mind is absorbed in the phrase at hand, there really is nothing better. It’s like most creative endeavors. The state of flow becomes as much a goal as the final product. Being in the moment. Loving the work. Waiting for that moment when the ink is dry and the next sheet of blank paper is put on the table. The beauty of a never ending process.

It’s fun to look back at how it all started. The kernel of so many life decisions held up for inspection. And the wonder that it still drives so much of my thinking. It’s still so present. I’ve been through three lifetimes since I figured out that B7 to Em change. There are so many ways to make music now that didn’t exist then and my excitement for creating has only increased over time.

When this weird tear I’m on is done running its course I’m going to have some things to say about tools. I swore I wouldn’t write about software ever again because it always turns into something ugly for me, but I have a new toy and it has changed the way I create in such a positive way that it’s impossible not to share. More on that soon.

Musical Computers Again

The topic of computers and technology doesn’t ever really leave me alone. It’s what I do and as a result I tend to think about bit boxes and what they can and cannot do to make life easier. They figure in quite prominently in my musical growth and I can’t really discuss all of the things that I have done musically without a little more depth in my analysis.

When I was in graduate school at NYU, I was introduced to a piece of software called MAX. It’s named after Max Matthews and is an environment for musical software development. When I first met the software in 1995 it was still mainly MIDI. As chips got faster and Moore’s law continued to be the rule digital audio and DSP became a key component. But MAX required a Mac and money. I had neither.

And then Miller Puckette got a grant from Intel and made Pure Data. Dr. Puckette was MAX’s father. He’s a freakin’ genius and a huge influence on my thinking. Definitely a god in the pantheon of computer music. His new software ran on this weird Linux thing. So I turned my machine into a dual boot debacle with Red Hat. The pain was severe, so I switched to Debian. I fell in love with all of the things I could do!

There was so much great software. So many tools and utilities for making weird noises. Most of them didn’t work together very well. Almost all of them required different libraries or kernel modules. And all of them took time to learn and master. But I loved every minute of it. Problem solving is an addiction of mine and Free Software fed it. There was always another news group to follow. Another list to read. Another module to compile. So much fiddling and playing that felt like I was doing my work. The ideology of the Free Software community made it feel like what I was doing was really, really important. And it was.

After a while, I decided that I wanted a laptop. I settled on an Apple PowerBook because I knew what was in it. No guessing about commodity parts or weird chipsets. Besides, people had gotten Debian to run on them so I took the plunge. I made it a dual boot with OS X so that I could use things like the wifi chip that didn’t have open source drivers. That should have been a clue. I got everything running but then something happened that I didn’t expect: I couldn’t make it sleep. There was no support in the kernel for sleep. So I had to shut down my laptop every time I closed it or it would chew up battery. One day, I booted back into OS X so I could close the lid. 35 days later I checked my uptime. I’d been in OS X for 35 days.

35 days is a really long time.

It was enough time to learn something about myself. In those 35 days I produced more music than I had in the previous year. All of that work tuning my kernel and apt-getting this and ./configure -ing that hadn’t made any music. It was fun, but it wasn’t The Work. My entire world changed. I understood that the tool wasn’t the important part. The Work was the end.

Since then, I have added two kids to my life. I have added a painful commute. I have subtracted the time that I used to have available to me for fiddling. To balance the equation, I have substituted money for time. And my rule for tools is simpler. Here it is:

If it fails, it doesn’t stay.

This goes for hardware and software. If a piece of hardware fails, it simply goes away. I fired my MacBook after Logic crashed 3 times and lost a great recording (yes, I overloaded the poor beast and replaced it with a MacBook Pro immediately). My wife loves the hand-me-down, but it had to leave me. And the software I use gets fired regularly. If an app fails to launch on my iDevice? It just goes away. No, I won’t send the developer feedback. I paid for something that claims to work, not to be a tester. Does that make me a jerk? No. It makes me a customer. There is a difference.

My tool chain has no room for failure because I don’t have time for failure. There is no luxurious fiddling and messing around. I open a device, launch a program, and work.

It makes me sad that I had to leave the world I enjoyed so dearly. But ideology and money are not as important to me as time. It took me a long time to learn that, but boy am I glad I took the trip.

Learning to Dig Classical Music

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.