The Last Dollar Spent

People think that the rhythm of life doesn’t include the music, if they think about that at all. One of the things that I thought about, and tested against the times with my ears listening to hear the underlying language of the music, was if there was a pattern to the sound of the music that was considered “hit music”. The notes of a melody are clearly designed to be expressive of the voice and voicing of the singer, but the music that plays behind a vocal, or the music itself if it is a symphony, are played in language as well. Sometimes that language is specific; sometimes that language is musical, built from the accompaniment and the “rules” that go with accompaniment. There are the “theory rules”, which aren’t really rules at all, more like guidelines which help musicians find the muse that was in the writer or to become the muse when they are writing a “response” to a call. When your ear can hear the language, it can start to explore the music, and the intention of the writers. Pieces that are more musical have a hypnotic effect, being tied to a rhythm, but as anyone who has the heard the exploration of rhythm which is in the Japanese Taiko drum or the African chant knows, the timing of a beat is also or can also be a language, so accompaniment of a rhythm can be a language hidden in the music.

The question I started to ask myself is “when do we start speaking English”? I ask this because in some cases I can hear it in the music, but in some cases I don’t hear any language at all. I began asking this question a very long time ago. It was part of hearing symphony also; what about composers who never spoke the language of the people for whom their work is being played? Is the music translated by the score or by the feeling of the translation, or by translation?

A few summers back I went to hear Herbie Hancock & Lang Lang play with the Los Angeles Symphony and I heard a classical piece which I “translated” as being about a certain story – I then found out what conditions that the symphony had been written under. I might have been right about what the composer was “saying”, I had the right story, but it was a story based upon instrumentation, not language, it was based upon the use of instruments in a particular fashion to express a certain emotion and a certain movement of the social culture upon which the piece was a commentary. That was for me a symphony performance that was realized. Even sitting high up in the Hollywood Bowl, I could feel the transcendental emotion of the music as a “hurricane”, which is the emotional goal for most composers.

My question about language came from a disconnection in other cases because the interior language of the music is not in a language that I can hear – and so emotionally, I have difficulty attaching to “that emotion”. So I always wonder, “when are we going to talk in [“ “]?”  The facility to learn to talk in music is ‘someplace in time’, and too often encased in corporate money expectations that limit reaching out.  For years I have heard the same silence about the question, “can we talk about music”? 

I came to believe that part of the equation about language in music is a matter of the education and desire of the musicians. For me, it is a great accomplishment to know how to write transcendental music in your native language, but there comes a time when that is “easy”. When it is easy to play and write with a voice, it is time to study with a voice. That voice is not just the language of the music, both the music language, but also the culture language. We learn to communicate across culture with music through the rhythms and the spoken language voice which we add into the music.

I had a teacher/friend who used to say that when he was travelling he was always silently proud of himself when he was asked if he was from a certain place – a place he might have recently been, where he knew and spoke the native language – and was asked if he was from [“x”] because he had their accent in his attempts to speak locally, even though English was his native language, and the other languages were not. His was an example of someone who knew how to dive into the culture without falling away from his own personality. That he generally looked like Einstein didn’t hurt ….

What is disappointing me more than any temporary state of affairs I might find myself in today, is that while reaching out to find out if I simply missed the educational opportunity or if it was not there, I have seen how wonderfully value creating expanding the reach of music can be, but it’s so sad, because I wonder if it was the last dollar was spent ….

Writing out the whole thing ….

Lately I’ve had some time to really delve deeply into the writing out of the various parts of the Production & Education system that I’ve been building, mostly in my head or as a response to experiences.  I’ve been through almost every level of the crucifixion for the idea that local spirits can come up with  -- I’ve dealt with being accused of not being a musician, of not being a musician with enough interest in certain kinds of music, of not being prepared for the responsibilities of a lifetime commitment, of being “tone-deaf”, of being stupid, of many things, obviously.  What I haven’t had was an opportunity to speak with people who can fix what they think are the problems with my being a “music producer”.

One of the educational lessons I learned when I was teaching myself through reading and interactive media is that there are three levels of direct learning:

1. Present – teacher and learner are physically “together” in a learning session.
2. “Presented” – this might be a live interaction or it might be a delayed prescience, like a video with internet or written, or even telephone follow up. 
3. Written – this is one way communication, where the idea of the teacher is still presented, but there is no way to interact, other than through trial and error of application of what is written. 

Obviously, when you can ask your teacher anything, and get a full response, the environment is conducive to learning.  When there are physical barriers, but there is still interaction, the environment can make corrections for misinterpretations.  When reading material produced by someone else, there is always room for error in how it is interpreted.  I think of these stages as “I’m here”; “I’m going, but I’m still here” [why do I think of Shirley MacClaine when I here that phrase “I’m still here”?]; & “I’m already gone” (but make of it what you will [hope I hear of, and enjoy the interpretations]) . 

Unfortunately, the exercise in writing out the “angles of my production company” is not being done in concert with a mentor, so far anyway.  I know that the ideas that I’ve generated are solid because they are built from the foundations of scholarship and experiences gathered by me from those who have written or “presented” their ideas about what music is, what music production is, how to approach it as an art and as a business, but there are levels of Production which are not so easy to describe and organize in writing.  Some of the problem with “not so easy” is probably erased as soon as the material lands not in the social wasteland of those who are not in a communion relationship, but some of it comes from not being in the field with contemporaries and contemporary teachers who want to share and mold information for the betterment of the craft and the art.  I’ve been writing from the same base perspective on production, and my approach to producing particular music projects, for well over ten years, since I started realizing that I knew enough to trust that my perspective was grounded in the fifteen years of observation of music and art that came before that in the workplace and in educational and corporate environments.  What I mean is that I’ve had to learn from “not music” as much as from music, and the basics of the music production itself haven’t changed much since I became focused on music theory and applying it to the business of music production.  Explaining music theory in “corporate terms” is however a task that can seem never-ending.

Mentors?  Where do they come from, and how do you find one who can actually help you in your musical search?  That question came up in 1997, then it was in a religious and in a business context, but I was already well on the way to understanding what it was specifically I wanted to “teach” in music.  Having been escorted through the maze of the golf industry teaching field, I realized that in the music business, there was probably something similar – where individuals are whisked off to an Elementary School music teaching job, but only if they are “certified”.  There is of course the “way up” through the players school – produce your own work until somebody else asks you to produce for them.  That requires no educational training at all, and is experiential.  The “music people” I was involved with in Los Angeles in the 1980’s probably qualify on this path – they were working  musicians, perhaps well known, perhaps not even regionally known, who were seeking to improve their ability to make a living from music enterprise.  It’s easier to make a living in music if you can get a “gig” anytime you want one, and even better if you know that the venue will make money on the “event”.  And then there are the people who came to music because the Corporation sent them there, and they may or may not know anything about mentoring, or about the musical arts for that matter, but they have their position and they do their best to keep it.  Nobody has the time to take on the outside world ….

When I watched professional tour golfers, I was following them to learn how to see the golf swing.  I made it to the top of the Golf field’s “professional teacher club”, but I was unqualified as a direct teacher because I’d never taught someone else before.  Even the few lessons I’d given were admittedly awful, from my perspective anyway, because I didn’t know how to organize the material so that somebody else understood it, and could use it in a way that might help them to enjoy the venture. 

When I listen to music, I am listening for the lessons also.  Soon after I knew I had to make the switch from “education” – golf as “player” – to music, I realized that in order to really express music “theory” you need to at least have a passing ability to demonstrate the concept on some form of instrumentation.  I began working on guitar in order to improve my bass playing … .  The whole exploration of “guitar application of music theory” was really a venture into the theory of how to “teach” music production.  It isn’t easy to teach production with instrumentation, unless you are the composer, because the artists often are temperamental about what they have created or are trying to create.  There are producer arrangements where the Producer is strictly an  “engineer in charge”, and there are also those situations where the Producer is someone who is like a motion picture film producer to the musicians’ Director.  So having a system of production, and getting it to “paper” is not an easy undertaking.  It is a delicate process because the misinterpretation sends the meaning of the point being written about off course, in a great percentage of cases.  There are so many details.

Even as I started this month re-writing “all the points to here”, I soon realized that what I have is a monster production process.  Perhaps, that is what is necessary to produce “world class music”.  Perhaps that is why I seem to nearly always find the mentor [and employment] hopper empty – pursuit is consumptive.  And just maybe, it is why I hear the sound of the Eagles singing ALREADY GONE while I wonder if hell has frozen over ….

A Classical Note Introduction–“How We Met”

I can remember the image of the classical musicians laughing at me; they were laughing for many reasons. Foremost, they laughed out of fear, fear for me and fear of me. They knew what they had been through to achieve their level of success. They knew all the tricks that they learned by making mistakes. They knew I was likely to make all those mistakes too, if I stayed in pursuit of the dream, the idea, and they drew their laughter out of the many emotions that their frustrations had drawn out of them through the years. They could remember the emotions; it was one of the keys to playing well, knowing what you were supposed to feel when you were playing a piece, and putting all of that feeling into the instrument and making the instrument sound the emanation. They laughed because it is next to impossible to learn how to play like that; to play like that without a mentor is a phenomenon that scares them, because it means more frustration, born of something not obvious or something obvious that maybe they hadn’t thought about or felt. They wanted to be prepared to play, but that is no easy task.

When I told them I was going to compose a symphony, they laughed even harder; it was like a hard rain of a hurricane becoming the band filled wit the most saturation, the saturation that rises from below the ground and goes to the highest storm cloud of the storm.  People don’t write symphonies – they progress through music circles and they wind up with one already written that they piece together out of works they already know.  They looked at me, struggling to remember which key I was in, which note my finger was on, unable to read music at speed, nearly incapable of keeping time on a score sheet, and their laughter, well, even I could understand their voice.

That, was thirty years ago.  Some days these days, I can remember the key, and I can play well enough to demonstrate and hear the idea; but I am still riding against the wind.  I am still riding against the opposition which says “Symphonies are for time; make contemporary music first”.  But maybe that’s all wrong.  Maybe wanting to be a writer, wanting to build a system to create inroads to Education and motivation and music and arts and sciences and broadcasting and the religion of scriptures, all of it reaching out toward enlightenment, toward God is THE SYMPHONY, the sound of the place where we are, and that is the sound which reaches out to time.

I still wondered, would they bother to hear?  Would they bother to notice that my applications say NEED EMPLOYMENT not WANT employment, although want is “in there too”.  I want to work, but they’re not letting me.  I work on my own, I study, I practice, I learn, but the cost is taking my life now, not in some distant future.  The cost has me practicing where I compete with the echo of the airplane that just took off with its four hundred dollar seats, and my five cent bank account.  I don’t have a room where I can hear the notes, the reach of the emotion, the feel changing in response to hitting it wrong, or staying the same when it is right.  I am likely to get pushed around “just one more time” like a junkie on a last ride, an winter is here, although it is nearly 90 degrees outside today, winter is here, because the cold will penetrate my “practice room”, but I will not stop playing until the instrument is taken too, and the cold is snow and the freezing is penetrating the practice room of the downtown parking lot where I am managing to get nearly an hour, maybe two a day instead of the three or four or more [on the subject] that it takes to catch the wind.  I am nearly all caught up with the wind, but the wind does not seem to penetrate the laughter ….