Mind the Gap: August 2008 Archives

I've been overwhelmed by the guilt that the stack of unopened CDs on my desk perpetually induces, and so I've devoted several hours a day this week to spinning discs and reading liner notes. The music has run the gamut from amazing to dull, as have the accompanying texts. Like cleaning out your inbox, however, I'm down to just two or three discs still in their shrink wrap, and I feel much, much better.

In my own recreational listening, I tend to spend little or no time perusing those little booklets, and I've pretty much sworn off writing for them. The first time I tried my hand at it was for a CD of solo violin work performed by Curtis Macomber. It should have been easy--I'm a violinist, I'm a writer--but instead I suffered a minor panic attack the night it was due, mumbling to my roommate, "What do I say? What do I need to tell anyone about this music? They don't need me. They're probably already listening to it! Who needs me blabbing about history and making up descriptions when the music is already filling their head?"

I was thinking about this again today while assembling Ikea furniture, aided by those clever/poetic/maddening (depending on your talents) pictogram instructions. In the international language of line drawing, they try and make the process of transforming a box of boards into functional furniture a little less daunting, offering a suggested route and posting signage where the wrong turns are. They give you an idea, and a piece of your brain has to take that information and translate it into a small set of tasks to complete. I wish I could write about music in a similar way, leaving more room for reader reaction to fill the space so that they are helped along by what I'm saying, yet the experience and the end product are uniquely theirs. I want them to walk away and think: a million people may brush their teeth over a Vättern sink cabinet tonight, but I put this one here together myself.

Suffering from Olympic withdrawal? Counting the minutes till the Democratic convention kick off? Just plain sick of the broken-record rotation of CNN Headline News? Whoever said that news reporting would one day be distilled down to a Twitter message needs to make a lunch date with composer/performer Michael Hearst. He'll raise you one and sing it back to you. His intentionally redundant "Songs for Newsworthy News" project offers subscribers sonically encapsulated reports on items of public interest--generally delivered in 30 seconds or less.

If Hearst's name is news to your ears, you may want to dig around in his archives a bit. He first grabbed my attention when his band, OneRingZero, embraced their lyric-writing handicap and conned a bunch of famous-authors-you-might-recognize-from-B&N-bookshelves into contributing words to the ORZ music catalog. Any fears that he was a one-trick pony were laid to rest with the release of his more-than-just-quirky Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Clearly, Hearst is a composer with a knack for spotting obscure instances of public need. If only the D.O.T. was this efficient at filling them in.

As you may have gathered, I'm sort of a sarcastic person. What can I say? I watched a lot of M*A*S*H as a kid, and it rubbed off. In personal email, this sets up a 21st-century quandary, because you want to make sure people get that your jokes are jokes without tone and facial cues (let's just ignore that if you have to signal your jokes that blatantly, then maybe you shouldn't be writing them). So recently I posed this question: Can a 30-year-old woman legitimately use emoticons to punctuate her emails? Yes, it was a stupid, 1 a.m. kind of discussion point, but Frank's answer raised the bar:

Emoticons are fine for any age especially since their origins significantly predate the rise of the internet, and indeed, the births of everyone on this email chain (myself included): I'm thinking of the development of Concrete Poetry by guys like Emmett Williams in the early '60s who in turn were doing stuff that had already been done by Kenneth Patchen and e.e.cummings, and before them the Dada-ists, and long before them some Medieval monks who created odd conglomerations of text and punctuation in their personal prayer books, but alas I digress...

Thanks, Frank. I'm feeling like less of a philistine already. :)

...when you have stuff like this:

When listening to this music you should keep in mind artists such as Frederic Chopin, Cat Power, Keith Jarrett, Talk Talk, and Chris Whitley -- unless you don't know any [of] them or are not a fan, in which case you should keep in mind Nick Drake, The National, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and other, trendier bands whose music has recently appeared in car commercials.

That said, I am totally holding out for a hero.

But seriously, is trading in category labels for genealogies of influence a practical alternative to the genre tag in an Internet age?

I've never been one to crack a beer and settle into the sofa for an afternoon of sports on T.V., but I've been doing some late-night Olympic viewing. Turns out a colleague of mine at NewMusicBox has been doing a little spectating himself, and he has drawn an interesting parallel between the audience for new music and the audience for the 50 km speed walk. By the end of his post, his basic question is this: Why does the new music community remain so fixated on how to attract a bigger/broader audience? In their off hours, are the speed walkers strategizing how to attract an NFL-sized (or at least Michael Phelps-sized) crowd next season? Randy suspects not; I would tend to agree. I wonder if that's true, or if we're just too far removed from the field. Anyone here involved in an obscure sporting activity with a violently active audience-development branch?

It actually brings me around to another audience-building move that has a lot of currency: attaching the music to some other genre. Classical, indie rock, jazz. Sometimes the relationship is true (and therefore also often successful) but in other cases the association feels like an ill-considered move to grab hold of a life raft filled with someone else's artistic personality and attendant fan base.

True, the music under this poorly-named "new music" umbrella has splintered into quite a few strains in the course of things, and it's time to celebrate that fully--for each to find their own name, their own place. But there's no point in breaking up with new music and then crashing someone else's party. It may be comforting to hang with folks who are already popular. It probably feels great to play for a larger-than-expected fan base. But it's also awful easy to get lost in a strange land and get drowned out in the crowd.

There was an anecdote I heard once, I think it was at the Lincoln Center Festival's Merce Cunningham retrospective six years ago, that put Merce and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg all together in a vehicle crisscrossing the nation. John Cage was driving. This was back in the early days of their careers, when few people were paying attention and even fewer were actually paying serious cash to see their work. Anyway, ever since then I've wondered: Did they end up recognized as great creative minds because they were all friends and moved in the same circles? Or were they friends because they were some of the great creative minds of their time?

From there I wonder about the next generation of remarkable creative artists and the networks they have formed. I look for these people. Has the internet changed any of this at all really? Does virtual connection really hold a candle to real-life feedback?

And then I get to the big question: Would Merce and Co., and by extension any artist, have been able to create as great a body of work as they did without the influence of those working right beside them? Even those with a flaming singular voice may need to feel the warmth of creation around them to do their best work. Maybe those who create great work in isolation would be able to reach even further if pushed by a fellow traveler. We often assume a sort of great man ideal when it comes to creation--yes, plenty of collectives exist and produce, but let's just put that aside for a moment--but what about the surrounding community of creative souls? Where is that van full of art and ideas right now?

Speaking of getting on the bandwagon, Pitchforkmedia.com, a site often driving these conveyances for a significant swath of the nation's music fans, reviews new music this week in the form of new discs from Carl Stone and Elodie Lauten. In your humble opinion, how well did they do? 

I give Mike Powell points for risking mixing entertaining, over-the-top language--i.e. "foofy, inert bullshit peddled by charlatans to suckers who would stoop to intellectualize a rock"--with some universally comprehensible analysis:

Woo Lae Oak is an amnesiac for itself, an ever-renewing blank slate. The problem with assessing records like this is that they rely on the listener's tolerance and imagination, which, comfortingly for all parties involved, nobody has any control over. ...Stone even named the piece after the Chinese restaurant of his choice, a self-effacing gesture that acknowledges peace as marketable chintz-- where other composers might aspire to recreate ancient prayer scrolls, Stone takes refuge in fortune cookies. Even when I can't fully immerse myself in it, I leave with the important lesson that there's no inherent grandeur to size, no necessary seriousness to serenity.

Evocative writing, but it's not telling us what we're used to when it comes to new music record reviews. Are you missing what you're not reading? I like that there's no name-dropping. You don't need to know jack about any other recorded music in this genre to understand what's being discussed. That's not everyone's cup o' tea and sometimes the name-checking is vital to the issue at hand, but after reading this review I've seen the work from a fresh perspective and am excited to hear it again. That means it's done its job as far as I'm concerned.

Are avant-garde music fans too apathetic for the field's own good? (And here I clearly don't mean you, Jim Altieri.) Audience passion for this music clearly must exist--you have to work to access it in real life, whether in concert or on recording, and then work some more (generally speaking) to access it intellectually and emotionally once the music is right there in front of you. But in our fandom, we rarely express our passions out loud for the world to see and hear. Is that a mark of high-art class or intellectual apathy?

I bring this up because just the other evening Darcy and I were discussing the challenges of blogging about new music vs. blogging about, say, the presidential campaigns or the hoo-ha that attends the leaking of a new Nas album. Typically in these cases, an incident is reported and every blogger worth his or her salt weighs in with an opinion, thought, or call to action. Blood pressures rise in tandem and cross-blog dialogue ensues.

In our particular musical pastures, this tends to not happen so much. A small gathering might get riled over the abstract issue of complexity in music, but it's a rare day even in Gotham that we all jump on a bandwagon together. (Anyone ever leaked a Reich album?) I'm not saying it would necessarily do us a great deal of good to emulate the TMZ paparazzi, but it strikes me as a curious MO for people supposedly obsessed with the new that we don't really fixate on the very latest. Maybe we simply can't manage it because each and every one of us is doing something so completely cutting edge that there are few common roads to travel. Or maybe it's that we expend our energy carefully rather than flinging it in what we see all too clearly are worthless pursuits.

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That said, the early music crowd isn't shy about getting tongues wagging. In an article that on quick read seems like it could only have appeared in the pages of The Onion, England's Observer reports startling news of vibrato-lacking performances at this year's Proms:

The chief conductor of one of Germany's most famous orchestras, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, [Sir Roger] Norrington has a history of provoking a passionate and polarised response among audiences. As a vociferous advocate of the controversial 'pure tone' or 'musical authenticity' movement, Norrington believes music should be played on period instruments and often at radically different speeds to the way it is usually heard. But musicians and audiences are now concerned that Norrington has taken his crusade too far. Norrington shocked Prom audiences last week by conducting a vibrato-less rendition of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, a piece written in 1908.