I live in Windsor Terrace, a neighborhood in Brooklyn southwest of Prospect Park.  My neighborhood is lovely – nice, well-kept buildings, lot of families who have lived here a long time (some, including my next door neighbor, for several generations), largely Catholic, Irish, Italian, lots of firefighters, cops…  There are more and more people like me and my wife (or like we were when we moved here 9 years ago – young, just out of college), but still the neighborhood generally retains the character I imagine it’s had for ages.

There are many neighborhood fixtures.  One is Marie.  Marie is (or looks) in at least her mid 80s.  As far as I can tell, she lives alone.  She’s always sitting out on her stoop.  When I pass with my son, who’s almost 10 months old, she can’t get enough of him.  “Aw!”  “Look at ‘im!”  “Ain’t he cute?” “Aw, he’s happy.  He’s smilin’.”  “He’s friendly!” “What’s his name?”  “Ain’t he cute?”  “Lookit ‘im smilin’!” “Oh, he’s a doll.”  She always asks me what his name is, every time we pass.  Sometimes more than once.

Marie is old and weak.  But every day, several times per day, she gets up from her folding chair, descends her stoop, shuffles the block and a half to the corner bodega a few feet at a time, buys a can of soda, and returns.  I’ve taken recently to sitting out on my stoop with Ben (the aforementioned 10-month-old), pointing out cars and dogs and squirrels and birdies and other babies, etc, so I’ve watched Marie do her rounds many times.  The whole trip takes about 20 minutes.  Sometimes she just walks the half block to her corner and stands there, holding onto her neighbor’s iron gate and looking around.  When she does so, she always lingers there several minutes before turning back and returning to her stoop.  I see her there sometimes, and I can’t tell if she’s confused or just taking a breather between laps.  I see her in the bodega sometimes as well.  Akin to her interactions with me, she always has a menagerie of sweet one-liners and rhetorical questions for the bodega owner as she fishes out crumpled dollar bills from the pocket of the black coat she’s always wearing.  There are other people she stops and talks to, too.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with someone, though.

Another fixture in my neighborhood is a middle-aged, chubby, homeless guy with a Keith Hernandez moustache whose name I don’t know.  As homeless people go, this guy seems pretty stable.  He’s been here as long as we have – longer I’m sure.  The only interaction I’ve ever had with him, though I see him all the time, was one horrendously freezing, blustering winter night when I gave him what I figured was enough for him to get a room for the night somewhere.  He looked at the cash, then at me, and said, “Hey, thanks man.  Wow.”  He seemed pretty lucid and with-it.   I’ve never, in 9 years, though I see him most days, given him anything else, spoken to him, or maintained any length of eye contact with him.  It’s just by he sheer number of times I’ve walked past him (pretty much every time I’ve gone to the block near my house with all the shops and the subway stations) that I feel I know anything about him.  I’ve never seen him beg – the money I gave him that night was unsolicited – but I’ve seen him doing odd jobs for people and local businesses, sweeping the sidewalk and that sort of thing.  By far the most common situation in which I encounter him is sitting next to the side door of the bar on the corner, listening to his radio (often a game).

He strikes me as someone who’s sort of “figured out” street living.  He has his possessions, his territory, his routines (eg, I frequently see him having coffee outside the same stationery store).  He’s even got a specific place that he goes and sits and freaks out, which is very orderly, too, in its own way (and not that frequent): talk a bunch, breathe into paper bag, drink a sip from a 16 oz Budweiser, breathe into paper bag, talk a bunch, etc, all while remaining seated, always on the same bench (I’ve witnessed this 4-5 times over the years).  I like to think that if reality were a Mark Twain novel, he’d be called “Homeless Joe”, and he’d have his own sort of eccentric wisdom to impart to unemployed 30-somethings with masters degrees and babies and loans to pay back.  Then I remember that he actually goes minute to minute trying to find things to eat, places to sleep, places to shit, and ways to divert his mind from his unlucky circumstances, and I feel terrible for romanticizing him.

I think of Marie and the mustached homeless man as two of many “loops” that comprise the ambient piece that is my immediate neighborhood.  Lots of more fleeting “musical episodes” happen on the surface, but those two, and many others (upon whom I may expound at a later date), form the static motion against which these are “heard” and understood.

dear all,

it has come to my attention that the URL of an old site of mine, which i canceled the registration for, came to be purchased by a purveyor of some pretty sickening filth.  what’s worse, the URL is a slightly different form of my name.  so now there exists a site with my name as the URL, the content of which is really beyond the pale in its perversion, and i’m certain that if i try to contact the new owner to correct that problem, he’ll gladly offer to sell the domain back to me for the reasonable price of $1287456012394781028734.

the lucky thing is that google searches of my name in its various forms do not return the offending site, and i’ve already contacted and heard back from many of the other sites that had linked to it, and they’ve updated their links to lead here.  and those that i haven’t been able to reach are all blog posts from over 2 years ago, so i’m not too concerned about them getting much traffic.

just a word to the wise: if any of you out there have links to my site from yours, please make sure they link here and only here, lest you inadvertently direct your readers to some exceptionally offensive text and images.

thanks!

Daniel Wolf suggests the possibility of twitter scores.

Very interesting idea. My first crack at it:

FILL IN THE GAP

A good friend of mine (not a musician but an avid music lover and one of the more careful listeners I know) recently wrote me the following e-mail as he was listening to Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata (I’ve edited it slightly for this post):

You could arrange this succession of frequencies over time for cell phone beeps and it would still be aching and melancholy. Even the most virtuosic performer can only make a good piece better or make a shitty piece suck less; the composition is the thing.

I think that it’s true (and not trivial) to say that glucose is sweet because we like glucose, we don’t like glucose because it’s sweet.   In other words, because there is something our body has evolved to need, the sensation of getting that thing has evolved to be pleasurable. My hunch is that if one were raised by wolves from birth, hearing a human baby cry would indicate to that feral person that the baby needed attention.  It’s important to have the idea that sound is a signal of other nearby events ingrained very deeply in our consciousness. As an example, think about how sudden, loud noises are startling: if something big enough to cause that sound is going on nearby, the likelihood that it’s dangerous is high enough that we have evolved a reaction in which we take our attention away from whatever it was we were doing until we are either calmed enough to return to what we were doing or frightened/alerted enough to take action.

Music may in many ways be a way of taking advantage of our built-in tendency to react to sound; at this point, it’s complex and abstract enough to have moved away from being just some atavistic “me scared big thunder” caveman thing (though that’s certainly there in the cannon of the 1812 overture).

So what is the fucking deal with the Moonlight Sonata?  Why in the world am I so sure that this abstract succession of frequencies over time would elicit a strong emotional response even when rendered in simple electronic beeps? This is not to discount the importance of performance; I would probably prefer the sound of a well-played piano to the simple beeps’ sounds whenever given the choice, but the “meaning” of the piece would come through even if crudely played.

I knew I knew the answer to my friend’s question, but it took some thinking to articulate it.  I think I eventually did, though.  Here’s my response:

on “successions of frequencies over time”:

It’s an interesting thought, and I definitely agree with your assessment that the composition is “the thing”, as opposed to the performance.  It seems, though, that you’re going further than that, saying that a shitty arrangement of the sonata (say, for cell phones) will still be transporting, thanks to something inherent in the “succession of frequencies over time”, which brings up the question of just what it is we mean when we refer to “the composition” (or perhaps, what it is about the composition that makes it “the thing”).  Your analysis works reasonably well for classical music of the so-called “common practice era” (roughly 1600-1900), and for much popular music.  Piano pieces can be orchestrated, piano reductions can be made of orchestral pieces, rock and folk songs can be covered, and so on.  With perhaps a little transposition, some slight tempo adjustments, and various practical measures to take into account the idiosyncrasies of the instrument(s) being arranged for (wind players need to breathe, nylon-stringed guitars can’t sustain a pitch, etc), all such compositions are capable of being abstracted as pitch relationships arranged according to time relationships.  Think of a score.  Now take away all the words on the page, leaving just the notes and other markings. Actually, go ahead and get rid of the other markings, as well as the key signatures, and even the clefs, leaving just the noteheads and stems.  What you have left is pitch relationships (intervals) and time relationships (rhythm), capable of being stretched or squeezed to fit any given amount of time, and transposable to any key and/or any octave.  You essentially have a bare-bones standard MIDI file.  And I could be wrong, but I think that’s what you mean by “the thing”.  “The thing” is that about a composition which remains the same no matter the arrangement.  It’s the reason we have Switched-On Bach, orchestral arrangements of Metallica, and this.  Depending how far you’re willing to go, “the composition” is something even less specific than particular time and pitch relationships, which is why different singers sometimes have wildly different interpretations of the same song.  It’s why some arrangements “swing“, and it’s why from time to time you hear minor versions of songs originally written in major. I have some friends who founded a band called alice, and what they do is take popular songs, strip them of everything but the melody & lyrics (even the chords) and create new pieces with them, using their own mood, their own chords, their own instrumentation, their own tempo, their own key, etc.  I don’t think you can rightly call what they do arranging – they go so far in their re-imagining of the song that it becomes something entirely new.  The fact that it has the same melody and lyrics as another song winds up being as incidental as a Mozart string quartet having the same instrumentation and form as one by Haydn.  They’re just parameters which the pieces happen to share, like any others.  In other words, there’s a limit to how much you can distill a composition and still retain its essential qualities.  (I guess homeopathy doesn’t work in music, either.)

But composers don’t write MIDI files.  They write all the stuff on the page (well, at least since the 18th century they do).  As time has gone on, in fact, they’ve written more and more and more stuff on the page, to the point of articulating (and even orchestrating) every part of every note’s spectral envelope (as you might imagine, this led in some cases to fewer notes [yes, that's all 6 movements in 4:12]).  By the mid-20th century, some composers were dispensing with the abstraction (the score) altogether and sculpting sound directly with electronic tape and synthesizers.  In those cases, “the thing” is the whole damn piece.  A version for cell phone just doesn’t make any sense.  But even among composers dedicated to writing instrumental music, there was (and is) a substantial movement shifting its attention away from melody, harmony, and counterpoint (the stuff of MIDI files) and towards timbre and texture.  If you want to re-imagine Ligeti’s Atmospheres, for example, for an ensemble other than full orchestra (good luck with those 55 individual string parts), the last thing you’re going to be thinking about is preserving the precise pitch and rhythm information.  Or, take an earlier piece like Pierrot Lunaire, which does rely for its emotional impact on discrete melodic gestures and has few enough parts that it could more readily be MIDI-fied (more readily, but not readily).  Again, though for different reasons than with Atmospheres, cell phone beeps will not work to convey it.  Even if you take a brilliant performance, replacing the instrumental timbres with cell phones but preserving every other aspect, the piece will be lost because the drama and wonder of the piece is so intrinsically tied up with the distinct sound colors of the instruments it was composed for, particularly the vocal part.  Is it because the succession of frequencies over time is inherently less moving?  Well, maybe it is.  But the piece isn’t.  What does that say about the fidelity of abstraction, at least as we’ve defined it here?  It may be that for some pieces the abstraction is something other than a series of frequencies over time, for example an array of behaviors or a succession of timbres.

on the interplay between music and primitive instincts:

None of this is to dispute your idea that the crudest arrangement of the Moonlight Sonata would still convey something essential about the piece.  I agree, it probably would.  I agree, too, that we have evolutionarily-programmed responses to sound.  However, there’s an inherent disconnect between those two ideas, which goes to the heart of your question: the abstract pitches and rhythms are not the sound of the piece.  The sound involves everything Beethoven put on the page, including the articulations, the note durations, the pedal markings, and the word “Piano” to the left of the grand staff.  The “succession of frequencies over time” is an intellectual abstraction, and does not interface with the “loud thunder me run away” area of our reptilian brains.  It interfaces with the highest-order functions of our human brains, the parts that are in charge of pattern recognition, problem solving, memory, and narrative.  These are of course survival-related as well, but are entirely separate from our fit-to-survive responses to sound.  The reason you would respond to Nokia Beethoven is that music acts on the intellect, and the intellect then in turn acts on the emotions, taking into account all the caveman stuff, but also all our cultural conditioning, our own personal histories, our current state of mind, the whole thing.  Music does not act on the emotions directly, like sound does, but only through the medium of the intellect.  You would prefer the original piano because it conveys more information.  But you still appreciate the cell phone because the abstract pitches and rhythms do convey some.

i love the internet.  i’ve been listening to a lot of new music at home of late, not being able to get out to many concerts with my 5-month old.  i found wnyc2 a month or two ago, which is generally really great, but has its limits in terms of how far out there it will go.  but today i found counterstreamradio.org, and man, is it fabulous!  just as i tuned in, i was treated to the bugallo williams duo recording of nancarrow’s study #44 for player piano, quickly followed by works by dan trueman, elliott sharp, and dave douglas.  so far, the station is very promising, and a great jumping-off point for further exploration on youtube.

during my first semester at msm i took an analysis class with dr. reiko fueting.  it was one of the best classes i’ve ever taken, in any subject.  i just got word he’ll be participating in a new music forum this coming saturday, february 21st, at 7pm, at cafe orwell in brooklyn.

there’ll be a concert as well, with music by dr. fueting, ursula mamlock, paul williams, marlos balter, and victor lowrie.

I read earlier this week that Max Neuhaus passed away.

Last year, when I was working full time at Electronic Music Foundation, I was briefly involved with trying to find a commercial home for Auracle, Max’s online interactive improvisation tool.  Go check it out.  You have to download a plugin called JSyn to make it work, but it’s pretty fun and easy to get started.  I know there are other tools out there like this, but I’m pretty sure Max’s was one of the first.

upcoming event:

when colors blend into sound, a new evening-length dance work by tzveta kassabova, will be premiered in the clarice smith performing arts center at the university of maryland, college park on march 5-7.

i composed a 2-movement sound score for the piece, the movements of which will be sandwiched around a work for 3 percussionists by martin gendelman.

this is the third time i’ve written music for tzveta, who is just a wonderful choreographer and a terrific person.  i have really enjoyed our working relationship so far and i hope it continues into the future.  our previous collaborations are the stairs in my house (2006), and to blue (2007), which was the recipient of a metro dc dance award.

i’ll be heading down to hear it in person on the 7th.