Evidently, for the ninth time, American Idol crowned another karaoke champion last night. In Rupert’s obscene pandering to the masses that he despises, eternally locked in a vicious love/hate cycle with the Lowest Common Denominator, actual musicians were trotted onto the stage, which is meet and proper. As Mike Finnegan says, “A gig is a gig.”
Mike Finnegan on keyboards on American Idol
during Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help From My Friends”
(click to view)
Overture
There are different kinds of music, each kind appealing to certain souls according to their evolution. For instance, children in the street are very pleased when beating the time, because that rhythm has a certain effect upon them.
I was raised by a church pianist and her sister, as far as musical pedigree goes. Mom was the “classical pianist” — i.e. the touch typist who could play whatever spots you stuck in front of her nose on the music stand. Aunt Mary was the “street” pianist, the ”ear” musician, who could fake any song, long before “fakebooks” — which I first discovered on her piano stand many many years later.
I took piano lessons, but finally rebelled against John W. Schaum and my well-meaning piano teachers, and stepped away from the belief system that music consists of spots on pieces of paper, and the almost feral heirarchies of the spots people, from Leonard Bernstein on down.
writing music on paper
Still, I was sucked in again, as I made the (brilliant, as it turns out*) decision to play the viola in fifth grade, having forgotten my drum practice pad for the third Thursday in a row. The Laramie Public Schools offered band and orchestra — in those bygone days of public education in arts –beginning with the fifth grade, as the band and orchestra teachers at the WPA-built Laramie Junior High School — the former Laramie High School before they built the newer one out by La Bonte Park — traveled to the local elementary schools for a one-hour, weekly music lesson.
(*see Second Movement)
I knew piano notation, so that part was easy, after adjusting slightly to simply associate the notes with the “feeling” on the fretboard. I just tossed the do-re-mi stuff out of my head. And I mastered the strange art of clamping a viola body between your chin and neck, and sawing with my rosin’ed horse-hair bow at the (cat gut?) strings. I loved the smell of bow rosin. I still do. It’s a pungeant, sort of woody smell, in the same olfactory family as the smell of linseed oil (which I love as well) but not at all identical.
And, through the end of high school, I would play the vi0la in various school orchestras, ever amazed at the feral nature of required “challenges” for seats in the heirarchy, with violin ferocity displayed in the junior high and high school years, and cello savagery in my last two as an upperclassman.
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First Movement
The best music training that I ever had was first semester Sophomore physics ‘Vibrations and Waves 201.’
It was a required course for the dwindling number of physics majors, which would dwindle to two and then one by the end of the year.
The single most important thing I learned was that any wave form was made up of an “infinite” number of sine waves:
A sine wave.
Yin and Yang expressed over time. I say “infinite” because it’s the infinity of Calculus, which often finds finite “limits” or answers to infinite series over time: That was first year physics.
In other words, the resonance of a violin was a Fourier Series — which are the Calculus equations that would express some infinite series of sine waves that equalled the resonance of a violin, or of a cat’s howl, or a foghorn.
Now, I had a brilliant idea at that point, which was, that if you could hook up a bank of sine wave oscillators, and input the Fourier series, you could probably replicate any resonance known, approximately. I didn’t have the skills to do such a thing, but now Fourier Samplers are standard on high-end synthesizers, so I at least got the notion correct. My inspiration, but somebody else’s perspiration, and I salute whatever physics student figured that one out.
I did invent, however, a magic trick that I use to clear out public restrooms when I want to defecate in relative peace.
You need to be a baritone to do this, generally, but I happened to notice in a particularly echoey public restroom that a certain frequency caused the bathroom stalls to vibrate. Since I knew that it was not the volume, but the FREQUENCY, I could lower my volume to nothing, and if I kept right at the proper frequency, the stalls would vibrate.
This would generally kind of “freak out” anyone entering the public restroom, and I would have my peace. It is exactly the same kind of resonance phenomenon that occurs when an opera soprano breaks a crystal glass with her voice.
I had great fun with my “trick” two weeks ago at Panamint Valley Resort in Death Valley, when I noticed that the dining room had that “bathroom stall” resonance very powerfully, and I could make the room “vibrate” and stop, repeating the process randomly while two sets of elder yuppies ate their lunch in a strange discomfort. It was quietly hilarious, if a bit unfair.
Serves them right for having never taken sophomore first semester vibrations and waves 201.
Resonances can be a form of magic.
But it’s been infinitely more useful to me as a “peace and quiet” generator. I leave it to the curious reader to work out the details in his or her own life experience.
It was all resonances and frequencies, which taught me infinitely more about music than any teacher of spots or technique.
It told me how to create sonic effects, but it did not teach me what music was.
Second Movement
Viola players don’t compete.
Earlier, I said that I made the “brilliant” choice of viola in fifth grade.
“Brilliant” because nobody plays the viola (and it has really crappy parts written for it, for the most part) which means that EVERY orchestra seems to desperately need viola players, and, because the job is so crappy, they even give us our own Clef, to make up for it being so boring. But viola players don’t compete. We are loved simply as fillers of the empty seats.
Here’s the viola clef:
Which elegantly states a fact about the notation. That center “arrow” points to middle “C”. Just as the the treble clef’s stylized “G” circles around the “G” note and bass clef’s colon points to the lower “F” note (the backwards “C” is just a stylized “F”).
The elegance of the clefs is that they show you where one note is and you can figure out where everything else is from there. The treble and bass clefs both “create” a phantom line where middle “C” is, using this note:
but the Viola clef is BUILT around that invisible “C” line, half in each “world” but not really a part of either. One of those cosmic things for viola players to contemplate while counting out a hundred rests or so, which happens too often in orchestral music for violas.
But I was in three separate orchestras in which “challenges” for seats were mandatory through high school. “Challenges” (as all high school band members knew) were where you moved up the orchestral or band pecking order from, say fourth seat flute to third seat flute by “dueling” with the third seat in a musical contest.
My high school girlfriend my senior year was first seat flute (which meant that she was ALSO the drum major for the marching band in football season) and when “challenges” came up, there were no dates or long telephone calls. Instead, she was sequestered away, practicing for the “challenge.”
One month, she lost first seat, and was inconsolable. (* Nor any dates, nor teenage groping that formed an important part of the relationship.) I hated the girl that trounced her.
But, the following month, after a month of fanatical ninja training, she mopped the floor with her rival, and my teenage romantic life resumed.
On the other hand, in all three of those “challenge” orchestras, there were precisely two viola players, and we made, in each case, a solemn pact, that we would trade seats every month, and thus assuage the blood lust of the orchestra teacher, and then kick back and watch the testosterone and proto-feminist estrogen of that generation fly, as the Cello players vied to be the next Pablo Casals. They were pretty good in all three orchestras, too.
There is a natural affinity among the backup players, and viola players were always friends with the upright bass players, as well, as they went their Sisyphean way through school, dragging their giant basses in cases with them.
On one particular orchestral piece in Salina, Kansas that I remember well, my partner viola player and I realized that there was a Coke machine down the hall, and, since we had TWO one hundred measure plus rests in that piece, we would take turns counting out the rests, while one and then the other would sneak down the hall, buy a coke, chug it, and slip back into the dark hinterlands of the orchestra as the teacher/conductor played maestro to the first violin section.
But, not forced to compete myself, I watched the musical challenge game play out as universally as dodgeball in gym. And, no doubt, as pointlessly.
It was a lot of things, but there was one thing that I knew it wasn’t.
It WASN’T music.
In the Indian system of music there are about 500 modes and 300 different rhythms which are used in everyday music. The modes are called Ragas. There are four classes of Ragas. One class has seven notes, as in the natural scale of Western music. Then there are the modes of six notes, omitting one note from the seven-note Raga. That gives quite another effect to the octave, and has a different influence on the human mind. Then there are the Ragas of five notes, omitting two notes from the scale – any two notes. In China they use a scale of four notes, but not in India.
Some say that the origin of the scale of four notes or five notes lies in the natural instinct that man shows in his discovery of instruments. The first instrument was the flute, symbolical of the human voice. It seems natural that man took a piece of reed from the forest and made in the heart of that reed four holes in places where he could easily put the tips of his fingers – the distances of the holes corresponding to the distances between the finger tips – and then one hole below. That made the Raga of five notes.
I should probably go into the whole High Church of the Sacred Spots, and the complex musical language that was derived (mostly from Italian) and the Pianoforte, the “soft-loud” which we now just call the piano. Or the endless scholarship and development of virtuosi in the classical traditions, and the endless cockfighting about whether jazz or rock and roll, or disco, or rap is rotting out the brains of the latest generation’s “our children.” Or the endless, byzantine morass of the modern music “industry” from, say, when music superagent Lew Wasserman’s Music Corporation of America swallowed Universal Studios and made himself a player in the movie game.
But I won’t. It’s there. I been there, done that, seen that, and don’t want to talk about it.
A lot of that isn’t music, either.
Third Movement – Scherzo
I picked up a book one day in the Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles. It was long before anything was termed “New Age,” and The Bodhi Tree Bookstore was tucked into a quiet nook on Melrose Avenue, in West Hollywood and it was a mellow hippie place that just happened to have the best metaphysical collection of books by EVERYONE in Los Angeles. Pre-Shirley MacLaine. Pre “Blue Whale.” Pre remodel. Just the smell of sandalwood and the occasional whiff of patchouli oil.
The book that changed my life in music was smaller than a standard paperback, and thinner than a pencil’s width. It was printed overseas and already a bit faded. It was called simply “Music” by Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi.
Now before you go running for your anti-Jihadist Dhimmi tinfoil hat, understand that the Sufis predate Islam, and that what Khan was writing about was the Vedic, or Hindu philosophy of music. This is not from that book, but gives a flavor [emphasis added]:
Music is a miniature of the harmony of the whole universe, for the harmony of the universe is life itself, and humans, being a miniature of the universe, show harmonious and inharmonious chords in their pulsations, in the beat of their hearts, in their vibration, rhythm and tone. Their health or illness, their joy or discomfort, all show the music or lack of music in their life.
And what does music teach us? Music helps us to train ourselves in harmony, and it is this which is the magic or the secret behind music. When you hear music that you enjoy, it tunes you and puts you in harmony with life. Therefore we need music; we long for music.
excerpted from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Vol II
copyright 1962 Wassenaar Publications, Geneva
I do not ask that you run right out and find a copy. (Although you would never regret it if you did.) You can read the entire book online at The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan. (But, be warned, he’s not exactly a fan of jazz, and the 0nline version seems maddeningly incomplete, as in eliding the culminating half of the story I quote at the end of this piece. Best chapter to start with is The Voice.)
I only bring this up to point out that it changed my way of looking at music.
Prior to that, music was a given. Never to be thought about or questioned, it simply existed. Now, Khan’s analysis made me think about what it was that I was listening to, and why — whether I agreed with him or not. And, for the first time, I had an entirely different cultural perspective on what music might be, via Khan.
What changed was that I learned to listen differently and intentionally. Now, it helped that my Teacher looked at me one day, noticed that I was painfully shy about doing the mantrums that opened our group meditations and said, YOU lead the mantrums.
So, for eight years, I did. And, after not thinking about what I was doing, I began to THINK about what I was doing: listening to ONE note for that long, you begin to learn things. You start hearing things you didn’t hear before.
In parallel, I had played guitar since my junior year in high school — pointedly WITHOUT ever learning how to play sheet music. And, for a time, my second wife and I even had a band, of which she got custody when we divorced.
I played solo starting in 1984, and ran open mics and played acoustic dates until a few years ago, when diabetic neuropathy made it impossible for me to play the guitar. During that time, I developed a style that made extensive use of the natural harmonics of the guitar, use of overtones and harmonics, and beat phenomena to create “ghost” parts. And, when I could no longer play the guitar, I transferred all my guitar music (I’d been composing original material since 1971, when I began) to the piano, where it continues, harmonics and all.
And all that I learned taught me that I had been right: the idea of a “battle of the bands” is monstrously oxymoronic. Music demands cooperation. Conflict and contests demand its opposite. But, since technically proficient noise works just as well as actual “music” in the public arena, generally, nobody seems to notice.
harp-ageddon, evidently
But no one ever remembers that “Battle of the bands” is a marketing technique dreamed up by bar owners to benefit the bar’s cash intake, and not a natural musicians’ preferred means of interaction. Musicians socialize by doing “jam” sessions, at which the point is the exact opposite of the “battle” notion of notation. But music “wars” continue to sell beer and fill bars.
The musician and the music lover become refined and are led on to the higher world of sound. Sufis lose themselves in sound and call it ecstasy, or masti. [...]
Almost all the great musicians in the Orient have become great saints through the power of music. The more recent musicians in India, such as Tansen and Maula Bakhsh, have been great examples of spiritual perfection through music. (Hazrat Inayat Khan)
And I listened to a lot of NON Western music: Persian, Indian and Chinese, and polyrhythms from all over the Middle East and Africa. And I began to sense the many ways that different humans in different times and places had come to the same musical conclusions, and built the same musical instruments. Every world cuisine has a burrito form food; every world music has a sort of violin, a sort of guitar, drums, horns, flutes. Toot, whistle, plunk and boom.
One of my favorite blues pieces of all time is side two, cut two “Masterpieces for the Cheng” by Professor Liang Tsai-Ping and David Mingyh-Yeuh Liang, which I found the back bins of some Boston record store, on the Lyrichord label. It is called “Floating Lotus,” and, according to the notes on the back, an ancient Chinese song in three parts.
But the Cheng (which is called “Guzheng” by Wikipedia) is a stringed instrument something like a zither or a Japanese Koto, which is tuned pentatonically. Plucked with picks that used to be made of ivory or tortoise shell, the tone is remarkably similar, played in certain ways, to the blues, played on guitars, played with picks, and both use pentatonic scales and bending notes. It’s an amazing piece of music, created completely from another culture that eerily mirrors the cross-cultural pollination that created American blues. Some of the notes the Professor hits sound spookily like Jorma Kaukonnen, an American blues guitarist best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.
Guzheng
And, between high school and the present day, I accumulated and listened to literally thousands of record albums (at first) and then CDs and now mp3s of music of all forms.
But, as with the Cheng album, I noticed a funny thing: if it’s REALLY music, if the magic is there, then it doesn’t matter WHAT genre it is expressed in. Otherwise, you pick the non-musical gunk that you most like: rock, rap, jazz, classical, country, tex-mex, gospel, blues, well, you know how many categories the Grammys have to come up with every year. There are nearly as many genres as there are musicians, and the non-musical noise can be quite pleasant if it’s within a genre you enjoy. But that magic? Rare indeed.
Toot, whistle, plunk and boom.
INTERMISSION
Run out, have a coke. The Sympathy Fantastique concludes tomorrow, Berlioz willing.
Courage.
I’m loving it