Music rant

David Finley, Bruce Baker, GianMarco Beltram, Windi Sebren, and a couple of others, you are exempt from this.

Open letter to the rest of you:

I did not know you liked Prince.

I did not hear from you that David Bowie was the most amazing performed you had ever seen; that the concert of his you saw changed your life.

I did not know that the soundtrack to your life was exclusively written and performed by Merle Haggard.

You never said. I never heard you talking about going out to hear the live music.  I never got to watch the uploaded video of you screaming out the lyrics to your favorite song in a karaoke bar.

I DID watch that kitten video you posted.  It was cute.

But why did you wait until after he died to eulogize Prince?  I started watching the videos, and mercy.  I understand why I was not a fan when I was growing up.  He was too edgy, combining a raw male sexuality with femininity in a way that I did not have any mechanism to interpret.  I enjoyed his music a lot; I know all the lyrics to his popular tunes, and I
loved the sexual innuendoes that pervaded each lyric. I even went to Glam Slam the one time I was in Minneapolis (a friend was a HUGE fan).

But I did not really know about his musicality until you started sharing the videos yesterday.  I missed an opportunity to recognize his genius when he was alive... because you didn't tell me you were a fan. How had I missed this?  Sure, MTV showed the polished videos of Prince back in the 80s, but heck - even the Backstreet Boys had polished videos.

I'm talking about music, because that is a passion of mine, and because after watching the video of his induction into the Hall of Fame, I was just floored.  But for all of the fact that music floats my little red wagon, the same applies to every venue: artists, actors, gem polishers, mimes, flint knappers, all of the people who fill your life with meaning...

Please.  Let's change that.  Tell me who you listen to, who you watch, and where I should go and see the play that changed your life.

Tell me, so that I can glory in their brilliance, revel in their genius, and light up with a new-found gem that I can carry with me. I want to see what changed your life, and maybe have a chance at the same thing. And please, please, please,

Don't wait until they are dead.  Because then it will be too late.

Check Out the Fractals.

We were talking about some pipe dreams each of us has, and a friend of mine met my objection before I had even had a chance to voice it.  "If it takes too long, why not start now? How old will you be in five years if you DON'T follow that dream?"

I provided the obligatory clever retort.  But the sentiment has stuck with me.

How old will I be in five years if I don't do it?

I have mentioned my sister before regarding her learning to play the accordion.  All her life, Caroline has played the long game.  She looks into the distant futures, finds a future she wants, and starts on the intermediate tasks that will get her there.  This is not a new thing with her - I saw her figuring out costs and benefits when she was a baby contemplating taking her first steps.  And then again when she decided to swim.  And then again when she learned to read. 

A couple of months ago, when I was comparing musical notes with her, she told me her goal - she wants to be the 80-year-old lady who plays the accordion. If, as current popular theory states, it requires 10,000 Gladwellian practice hours to achieve mastery over a task, then she will plan on being an expert in 40 years. 

10,000 hours over the course of 40 years is only 250 hours a year.  An average of just over 40 minutes a day.

Very long game.  A friend of mine shared a quote with me this week:

When Pablo Casals (then aged 93) was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, Casals replied, "'I'm beginning to notice some improvement...'

The game is long, but focusing on the game means that you are breaking the process up into bearable units.  Although 10,000 hours seems like an insurmountable summit, 40 minutes is doable.

More important than the bite-sized practice sessions, though, it helps keep expectations in check.  I get discouraged if my banjo playing doesn't improve.  If the lessons I learned yesterday don't stick.  If the song doesn't sound better than it did yesterday.  Or worse still, if it sounds worse.  If my fingers are stiff and don't limber up, if the timing just sounds wrong, if the tune I hear in my head cannot make it out onto the instrument.... I get frustrated and fed up.

Each discouragement means that it is harder to pick up the hated instrument and play for a half hour. (30 minutes a day means it is gonna take me a little longer than Caroline to get to the 10k plateau....)

But what happens when I am not working towards immediate gratification?  What a lift do I get when I know those damned scales are just part of a huge plan to get good?  Practicing those rolls are not an end to themselves, but part of a long-term project to increase strength and flexibility?

As part of my research in my previous life as an archaeologist, I looked at fractals, the self-replicating patterns that repeat at every scale.  It made sense to look at it to study stone tool debris; I can tell you that one small pile of debitage looks almost identical to another (just so you know, that is not enough to write a thesis on...).  But I am beginning to think that maybe my efforts to learn things happen in the same way.



Mandelbrot might have been a math genius, but I
bet he sucked at playing the banjo.

I work on my forward rolls on the banjo.  I see a little bit of improvement.  Not much, just a little bit.  I see this little part of the learning pattern, and I think I know where it is going. And if I look back, I can imagine where I was a week ago.

But at a larger scale, over the past year and a half, I can see the things that I have learned.  And they grow at about the same rate.  My practice and the improvement I have in my ability replicates itself over time.  I get better incrementally.  My breakthroughs are not as amazing as I remembered them to be.  My plateaus not so long. 

Last night I went back to my first banjo instruction book, and was delighted to find that some of the trickier parts of the book were not as tricky any more.  I was able to do even the unfamiliar tunes more quickly.  That I struggled less.

What happens in five years?  How far along will I be? 

Funny thing that I realized, though, is that it is not limited just to my music.  How does playing the long game change my ideas about exercise (instead of getting discouraged that I don't look like Charles Atlas after six months of push-ups)?  How would it change my attitude towards my career advancement?  My furthering of my education?  My work in the community? 

What happens if I take the long view? 

And what fractal in your life would YOU approach differently?

Fighting discouragement

Vignette #1

"I bought a banjo about a year ago.  And I have been working to teach myself how to play for the past year."

"Oh, well, that's good.  I understand it is the easiest instrument to play"

My next door neighbor is not known for his tact.  A concert pianist, he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with music.  It isn't unkindness.  It is just that he has no idea what it is like to struggle to make music.

Or maybe his struggle is simply in another form.

But those words just killed me.  My short fingers do not move quickly.  They do not stretch where they need to go.  They are not nimble, and they do not play the music I hear in my head.

Particularly because I do hear music in my head all the time - I am preternaturally susceptible to the earworm, and I go through my life with my own soundtrack (there is a woman who appears at regular intervals in my life to the theme of the Wicked Witch of the West) - it is a particular struggle when I can't get that music out. 

So I hear the music, and yet I struggle to make the instrument sing the way I hear it in my head.

And to hear a musician so easily dismiss my year of work to gain competence.... it hit harder than just having a bad session.

Vignette #2

My wife opened the kiln.  This firing was particularly slow, so we had been waiting on this moment for three days.  She reached in, and pulled out the tile....

...which was blistered and cracked.  The glaze had simply not adhered to the clay body, and the result looked awful.  This was the second batch she had run with a new clay, and it meant that her work for the past two weeks had been for nothing.

Vignette #3

A co-worker gets turned down for a supervisory job, and is supplanted by someone with less experience.  Five times in a row over three years.

and Vignette #4, and #5, and #6....

Everyone deals with disappointment.  But what do you do when it goes beyond just not getting the gig (or the girl, or the promotion....)

What the difference is, has nothing to do with the disappointment in not succeeding.  That element is in present in any process, and represents a temporary emotional setback. It is the discouragement (dis-cour: literally, losing heart) that really is the danger.  In high school, I read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. I have read it numerous times since, each time getting something different from it.  But I remember particularly his discussion on what he called 'gumption traps'.

Gumption traps, he explained, are the dangerous places in a project where you lose enthusiasm for the project.  And they can be external (where you have a setback) or internal (where you have a hang-up.)

So how do you deal with these traps?  How do you face disappointment without becoming discouraged?

No, seriously.  I am asking.

I am told that taking a break helps.  (Pirsig mentioned that mechanism for dealing with a setback.)This approach helps because it allows the brain to change perspective on the problem. 

Violence also helps.  Well, not exactly, but there is something cathartic about breaking things and using physicality to fight discouragement.  I once used about four days with a sledgehammer to fight off a discouraging setback (fortunately, the concrete sidewalk needed to come out anyway).

What other elements help you? What are your walls?  What happens when you hit your wall, and how do you push through it?

Recital

Kathe and I have been taking music lessons for a month.  I have my banjo; she has a keyboard (although what she really wants is a piano.)

We are adult music students, a bit of a rarity.  And we both are convinced that we can do it, and we devote the time to practice, like we never could (or did) when we were kids. We set aside time, and are very protective of that time, because we have a goal in mind. We want to play.

What we are doing is very different from what kids do when they are given lessons. 

The typical child lesson (I have made some assumptions here) goes something like this: MomnDad decide child progeny (CP) is going to learn an instrument.  They give CP a choice: oboe or saxophone; CP chooses the one CP think is best/coolest/least dorky/easiest-to-hide-in-the-locker-at-school.  (Or, if you have a piano in the house, you get to learn piano).  M&D buy the instrument, and go about finding a suitable tutor.

And when I say ‘suitable’, what I really mean is ‘affordable’.

CP is encouraged to practice, and at the end of the semester/year, is rewarded with an opportunity to dress up and give a concert, that M&D attend.

From CP’s perspective, here is what happens:

M&D: “Do you want to give up the last remaining shred of video game time to practice the tuba, or to practice the piccolo?”

And just like that, CP is suddenly forced to give up a half-hour to an hour of every day to practice an instrument that he does not love, and then spends an additional hour with an adult who gets to be a

Music of the Spheres

My wife and I do not watch "American Idol".  The humiliation of untalented people, looking to parlay their willingness to subject themselves to embarassment into their fifteen minutes of fame, is just not pleasant.  We won't watch.

Interestingly, we live in a society where people are told from early on in life that, if they don't sing well, they shouldn't sing at all.  I have heard the joke a number of times (and repeated it an embarassing number of times, too):

"Who sings that song?"
"It's (insert favorite performer's name)'s song."
"Well, let's keep it that way."

It is a beautiful joke.  It combines insult with humor, and everybody walks away chuckling. But it also creates an environment that is toxic to making music.

The message is pretty clear.  Leave the music-making to the professionals.  Nobody likes hearing amateurish efforts.  We love hearing Beyonce, Bono, Sting, Tricia Earwig, Carrie Overwood, Tailer Swift, Dame Gaga, Ryehanna.... whomever, but we want our professionals to be professionals. Being professional means not singing if you don't have a beautiful voice.  Means not singing once you have become old.  Or, once you become old, make sure that your voice is digitized, so that you sound better than you can produce live.  Lip sync whenever you can get away with it (but it had better be YOUR voice - no Milla Vanila for us, thank you). Perfect the sound before it comes to our ears.

Entertain us.  Do it well.  We can sway, but unless you call for us to shout out the lyrics with you, the performance is a chance for YOU to entertain US.

Your music is art.  And we, the purchasers of that art, will pay and judge and own that art.  But we will not be creators of that art.  We will be connoisseurs. Consumers.  Music will be a commodity, and we will fetishize it and package it, buy and sell it, and own it.

It wasn't always that way. 

agricola, agricolae agricolarum....

I went to my first banjo lesson.  It was terrible.  I was completely out of rhythm, my fingers were stiff and clumsy, I got frustrated and, for the first time since I bought it, I hated that damned banjo.

Afterwards, I got in the car and Kathe, all excited, asked me how it went.

"It was awful," was all I said.

What happened?  Since I have been writing here, it has been "banjo" this, and "music" that.... and suddenly, I just detest the bloody thing?  How is that even possible?

Le ROI Est Mort, Vive Le ROI!

"The problem with music," Adam told me, "is that it is hard to determine the ROI."

I nodded, looking pensive.  He has his acronyms, I have mine.  And if I nod long enough, he will usually catch me up.

I nodded again.  I am pretty sure that he reads me well enough to know that the second nod (especially when I don't jump in with an unnecessary re-statement of what he just said) means that I am hopelessly lost, and need a little hint.

"See, if you can't measure your success in traditional ways," he explained further, "you don't know if your return on investment is a good one."

Got it.  Return On Investment. ROI.

I nodded again.

Excited to learn

I'm not worth it.

It's too much.

I won't make the best use of it.

I'm not ready.


I have mentioned my banjo before (over and over again). My wife bought me a banjo last March. It was too much money, and something that we should not have spent the money on.

To be clear, I do not have a great track record with making good use of musical instruments. I got a guitar for a birthday in my teens, and never learned more than a couple of chords. The dulcimer Dad bought me in 2002 is a beautiful piece of wall art. I borrowed my sister's keyboard, and never really used it.

I have friends and relatives who play instruments. Some of them (Bruce, Caroline, Windi) learned to play as adults. I envy the focus that they bring to the task.

And as much as I liked listening to the banjo, I found it hard to justify buying one for myself. I am a singer.  A singer who suffered through piano lessons in the fourth and fifth grade. I can read music... But have never been able to summon the focus to really learn an instrument.

So the banjo was a bit scary.

It would have been easier if the banjo had cost fifty bucks, was impossible to tune, and had been a funky instrument that didn't follow the rules.  It is easier to justify failure if there are mitigating circumstances.

But Kathe did not allow me that luxury.  If I was going to ignore the banjo in the corner, if I was going to not practice, if I was going to avoid becoming the musician I wanted to be...iIt was not going to be the fault of the instrument.

We did not get a $2,400 instrument.  But we also did not get a garage-sale banjo, either. Even though that was what I was looking for.

I wanted an instrument that I could feel no guilt about not succeeding at playing. What I got was an instrument that I could succeed with.

It is now 9 months later. I have learned my basic four chords, and can play a number of simple tunes (I balked at the "Go tell Aunt Rhody" tunes, and just played the ones I wanted to. After learning the lesson on backward roll associated with that infernal tune, of course). I read the tablature, and play out-of-rhythm versions of a number of tunes that I like.

I even can sing along to my clawhammer efforts, as weak as they are.

It gives me a surprising amount of joy. 

Today I take my first banjo lesson, and I am suitably scared.  I don't know whether I will be able to play the way I want.  I know my hands will shake (one of the main reasons I hated performing on piano when I was a kid.)

But I am going to learn.  I am going to demand a lot from the instructor.  I am going to squeeze every bit of value out of the interaction, or I am going to find a different instructor.

I am excited.

Take that, ego. 

Joy and music

There are moments when you feel your heart is going to burst from happiness.  Last night was just such a moment.

My grand kids, Rémi and Gabi, came in from Dubai. After an exhausting 19 hour flight into Dallas, followed by a nine-hour drive to New Orleans, they finally arrived.

I had been bouncing in my seat all day in anticipation.

They arrived, a little travel worn and obviously weary, but the conversation just flowed.  They loved on my dogs, remarked how small they now seemed (since they last saw our guys, they have adopted two large dogs of their own), and then the magical really started.

Rémi and Gabi are musicians.  They play anything they can get their hands on, and there is almost always an instrument within easy reach (one of the tasks for today will be to go to pick up some drum sticks for Gab, who accidentally left hers behind). Rémi picked up his guitar and started playing riff after riff.  Blues, hard rock, classical guitar... the music just flowed from fingers faster than sight.

Ok, it's true. I am both irritated and jealous.

And then I did something that was outside of my comfort zone.

I picked up my banjo.  And with fat, clumsy fingers, I began to pick. Simple tune, missed notes, out-of-tempo ornamentation.  But I played.

Banj-handling

We have panhandlers on Carrolton Avenue in New Orleans.  It is the source of contention for a lot of us, and it makes us mad, because it is the same group, panhandling every day.  I have written before about homelessness and panhandling and about how I am conflicted by it.

But I think I may have happened upon a solution.

I was driving down Carrolton yesterday, and saw something that made me reach wildly, and mostly unsuccessfully, for my camera.  The picture I took was a blurry shot taken out the back window, and it is not even anything that is terribly out of the ordinary here in New Orleans. It was a guy with a tuba (OK, it was a Sousaphone), and he wasn't playing it, just walking down the street.

"Only too old when you're dead"

When is it too late to start?

"My belief is you're only too old when you're dead."

A friend of mine posted that sentence this weekend, and it just resonated with me.  I have never met Windi.  We are friends of mutual friends on facebook, and admire each other from that distance.   (Well, I can only speak for myself - I admire her...).  As our mutual friend said once, 'Windi is a force of nature - she decides to do something, and throws herself into it with no sense that she is not world class at it.  And pretty soon, she is teaching her flamenco instructor moves.'

Is it any wonder I am a fan?

Windi decided to start learning the fiddle, so that she could play Irish tunes.  Nobody showed her how, she just bought a violin, accessed some online videos and started playing. 

At first, she posted progress online, and her playing was somewhere south of virtuoso.  But I was intrigued, and followed her progress, always looking forward to the next video sample.  It was not long before the tunes were not only recognizable, but even pretty good.

Now, just one year removed from her first sawing of bow and string, she is looking for a band to play with.  I can't wait to hear her first jam session.

________________________________________________________________________________

My sister Caroline picked up the accordion when she was in London a couple of years ago at age 39.  And no, she was not looking to polka or even (sadly) zydeco.  She had in mind the image of the French cafe accordion player.  And for several months, she just played (um) quietly in her apartment in her spare time, teaching herself left fingering and right keyboarding and chord progression, and....

And one day she had her window open and people under her apartment shouted up some encouragement.  She has since played in bars and auditions and teaches herself new songs all the time.

________________________________________________________________________________

What is it that you feel is beyond you?  Sure, high school French was brutal, but you find that you are intrigued by Mandarin Chinese? You have a hidden passion for stargazing, and want to learn astronomy? Or is there a musical instrument that you want to play?

Is it too late? Is it true, that Old Dogs Cannot Learn New Tricks?

Our understanding of neural pathways is based on a use-it-or-lose-it model.  If you have not learned what you need by the time you hit puberty, it is too late.  No late-life prodigies in music.  No second career geniuses in foreign languages.

Linguistics studies particularly point to an early developmental time frame when language acquisition is possible, and anything after that is impacted by the fact that you didn't learn it when you were 5 years old.  The brain wires itself along specific neural pathways, linguists tell us, and re-routing those pathways is almost impossible.

Badgerdoodle.  Absolute poppysmeg.

We rewire neural pathways all the time.  We learn new words, new names, and we stick them in  our memory banks in different ways.  Yes, we adults have established a way of learning and those pathways are entrenched.  That might make it hard to organize that new knowledge.

But we also have experience under our belts on what learning works best for us.

Maybe you are a kinetic learner, and know that you learn best while doing aerobics.  Or you are an auditory learner, and can put things to music to memorize them.  Because you have experience with learning, you can take advantage of what you already know about yourself to make the learning easier.

I am convinced that the main difference between adults and kids is embarassment.  Not that kids are not embarassed by making a mistake in public (I recall a particularly horrifying moment when I was in fourth grade crying while cutting edges off of the paper I was turning in) but that adults encourage the kid when mistakes are being made.  And adults who are motivating themselves see the embarassment as a reason to stop.

But consider this: when you were learning your first language, how many times did your parents have to repeat the following sequence before you got it right?

"Dat gog toy."
"That's right, son.  That's the dog's toy."
"Dat gog toy."
"That's right. That's the dog's toy."

Why would it be any different to learn to speak Basque?  New words, new order, new syntax, new everything.  We are going to mispronounce the words, and use the wrong forms, over and over. We will fail and grit our teeth and try again, and fail again.  Just like when we were kids.  Is it just that we are more hardwired to high expectations?

______________________________________________________________

My friend Adam works in knowledge management, and has been studying how organizations share information. And the change to sharing of information in the corporation requires three things: (check out his blog), motivation, ability, and trigger.

I think that the analogy is pretty apt for use in learning any new task, not just in corporate learning.  We all use these tasks in taking on a new task that we have never done before, whether learning computer coding or making French sauces.  We need the motivation, we need the ability, and we need the trigger.

The motivation is probably the greatest change between learning a new task for a child versus learning a new task for an adult.  Mom made me take piano lessons when I was in second grade.  What was my motivation there?  Was it because I decided I needed to be able to play music? 

Um, no.

But when my wife decides that she wants to learn the piano as an adult, what is her motivation?  No longer is it just a matter of pleasing her mom.  She is her own motivator.

The ability sector is "teaching people how to do things." This is the practice.  The physical repetition of the fingering, repeating the vocalizations until you can make a voiced glottal fricative on command, or the practicing of the steps until the samba is second nature. 

The final piece, as I understand it, is the trigger - the place where we re-create the response.  If you always listen to your Russian conversation tapes in the car on your drive to work, then your Russian is going to be strongest in the car, where the association is strongest (part of the reason that you are suggested to practice taking standardised tests in the room where you will be taking them). 

None of this is beyond the grasp of someone who wants to learn.

Will it be frustrating?  YES.

Will it be vexing? YES. 

Will you get a strange gratification when something makes sense? YES.

And see, that is the beauty of learning anything new - the gratification (elation, even?) of succeeding.  But instead of running to mom to share the success, I get it all to myself.  And then I reinforce it with more work on the ability sector.  And reinforce it again.  And again.... smiling with each repeated success.

 

It is terrifying to jump into something new.  My wife bought me a banjo this year, and I practice every free moment.  But I gotta confess - I am terror-stricken when I think of playing my banjo in front of people.  My hands shake at the best of times, and the thought of adding a little performance anxiety to top it off, well, I am pretty frightened. That embarassment potential is almost reason enough to stop.

 

But maybe all that means is that I need to change the trigger.  Maybe move to a more public place for playing the three songs I currently have in my repertoire.  Stretch my comfort zone to include front porch playing.  Maybe post a short video of Cripple Creek.  Laugh at the mistakes, and know that eventually, that sentence will come out right. 

 

"That's the dog's toy." 

 

______________________________________________________________________________

For those who teach, a nice blog entry from the teacher's perpective can be found here.