Students at the So Percussion Summer Institute getting ready to play Shifty.
Taking Musical Chances
A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing a composition master class at the So Percussion Summer Institute. My piece Shifty was on the repertoire list for the students, and I was asked to come to a rehearsal and talk about it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this. Heading to Princeton on the train, I wasn’t even sure that I still knew what composers talked about, or what performers expected them to say. Lately, when I talk to groups, it’s about musical tools rather than music itself. It’s certainly not about my own music.
I was pleased to find that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. I was even more pleased to find that there’s a veritable army of brilliant, hungry young percussionists out there, full of chops and even more full of great ideas about music.
Mostly, what we talked about was instrumentation. Shifty’s weird, in that the instrumentation is partially left up to the performers. The score calls for each of the four players to build a setup using the following:
- Kick drum, preferably double-headed and muffled very lightly. The tuning and head selection should be appropriate for funk.
- Large tom tom, double headed and tuned just high enough to eliminate wrinkles in the head. The drum should be unmuffled if possible and both heads should be tuned to the same pitch to avoid pitch bends.
- Small drum with short decay and high pitch. (e.g. timbale, bongo, tight snare drum with snares off, small roto-tom, etc.)
- Piece of resonant wood with short decay and higher pitch than the small drum. A woodblock is a possibility, but found objects are encouraged.
- Resonant metal with short decay and complex overtones. (e.g. broken cymbal, brake drum, Englehart Crasher, etc.) Found objects are encouraged.
Three of the five instruments are pretty clearly specified. The last two are not. I thought this was a cool idea in principle, but in practice the instrumentation has become fixed over time, as a result of some sort of unspoken rule that “Thou Shalt Play Shifty the Way So Plays Shifty.” So spent many years playing this piece pretty regularly, often in front of groups of other percussionists. It seems that all of these other groups decided that this was The Right Way. Then a video appeared on YouTube a few years ago showing a So performance of the piece, and this further cemented this idea into law. I’ve never heard another group play it a different way; the resonant wood is always a wood block or plank and the resonant metal is always a brake drum and/or a china.
It works great this way. It’s loud and edgy and people like it because it’s drummers doing what everyone expects them to do – play loud and edgy.
The problem is, if everyone plays it this way, it’s clear that they’re not really following the score.
“Found objects are encouraged.”
Go for it. Get an old car door and a log and see what happens. The only thing that could go wrong is that it will suck, in which case you just try something else.
The So instrumentation is just one interpretation. It’s not the “right” approach. In fact, the only wrong approach is to not think about it. This isn’t a piano sonata (and even if it was, there are tons of ways to play those as well, even though the instrumentation is specified.)
As part of the rehearsal with the students at Princeton, they played it the So way. And it sounded great. Then they played it using a tiny setup (little drums, tiny Chinese woodblocks, splash cymbals, smaller mallets – they affectionately referred to this as “Pocket Shifty.”) And this sounded great too! It was a completely different experience, but one that’s entirely within the parameters of the score.
The moral of the story is, take some chances. Music grows like gardens grow – people have to do the work. If you keep planting the same seeds in the same soil, it eventually becomes barren.
Not even wrong
The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, after reading a “scientific” paper, “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” (“That is not only not right, it’s not even wrong!”)
The phrase “not even wrong” has since come to refer to ideas that are so malformed that they cannot even be assessed.
Here’s an example: you and I can disagree about the composition of the moon. I could argue that the moon is made of green cheese. You could reply that the moon is made of rock. It’s possible that one (or both) of us is wrong, and experiments and observations could resolve this. We can have a legitimate disagreement.
In contrast, imagine that I argued that the moon was made of green cheese and you countered by saying that the moon was made of lamps(|}hamster16z#. One of us (me) could be wrong. But it’s meaningless to say that your statement is “wrong” because your statement is meaningless. We’ve transcended disagreement; we’re not even speaking the same language.
Now, I’ve got lots of opinions about lots of stuff. I’m perfectly happy to argue with people about these opinions. But there are certain things I can’t begin to oppose because they’re not even wrong.
Here are some of those things:
1. The Earth is 6,000 years old.
We can disagree about the existence of a creator God. We can disagree about which God it might be. But we can’t disagree about the accuracy of radiometric dating without disagreeing about fundamental properties of matter. At this point, we would stop speaking the same language.
2. Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.
Not even wrong.
We can disagree about Sarah Palin’s values. We can even disagree about whether or not an educated person who shares those values is qualified to be president. But we can’t disagree about whether or not Sarah Palin is qualified to be president unless the word “qualified” (or, I suppose, “president”) means something different than what we already agree it means.
3. We know the Bible is true because it is the word of God.
This is an example of a logical fallacy known as petitio principii – “begging the question.” To beg the question is to assume as true the thing that you’re trying to prove.
Disputing this claim is not an argument against the existence of God, or even the truthfulness of the Bible. It is entirely possible for the Bible to be true and for it to be the word of God. But it is not even wrong to claim that we know that the Bible is true because it says so. A statement constructed in this way is not an argument. It is meaningless.
4. George W. Bush never lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
On May 23, 2009, George W. Bush gave an interview for Polish television in which he stated the following:
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.
(source)
At the time this statement was made, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already issued a report stating that the found laboratories were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons (source). To date, Bush’s claim has never been retracted or qualified. In fact, the quote’s link above leads directly to Bush’s official web archive.
We can disagree about whether or not the Iraq war was justified. We can even disagree about the broader aims of the war on terror. But we simply can’t disagree about whether the above quote is a lie unless the word “lied” means something different than what we already agree it means.
The point of Wolfgang Pauli’s statement was that disagreements are fine, but that they can’t even exist unless both sides of an argument are at least in the same ballpark.
The problem with a lot of current political discourse is that it doesn’t even rise to the level of discourse. What passes for a “position” is often just incoherent drooling that happens to use some of the same words found in actual ideas. These arguments, and their advocates, are not even wrong.
“Automatic”: a self-generating Live Set
Live comes with lots of crazy devices. One of my favorites is the ancient Vinyl Distortion audio effect. This isn’t because I’m particularly interested in vinyl emulation – if you know my music, you know that it’s squeaky-clean and ultra-digital. I love Vinyl Distortion because of the “Crackle” parameter, which outputs semi-random noise.
The Vinyl Distortion effect - underappreciated and full of awesome
By itself, this noise isn’t necessarily very interesting. But I like to use it to seed other downstream devices. By combining effects that process this noise, I can create endless combinations of material without every having to write a note of music.
(Here’s a secret: I’m really, really lazy. I like having music get made, but I don’t always feel like making it. If I can design tools to make music for me, I get happy.)
I’ve created a Set that uses this type of working process. Download it, open it, and listen. It begins making noodly abstract machine sounds immediately and requires no user interaction.
If you’re part of the Ableton Share beta test, you can grab the Set here:
http://www.ableton.com/documents/10288ec1d39f
If you’re not using Share (but you still have a copy of Ableton Live/Suite 8), you can grab it here:
http://www.dennisdesantis.com/freebies/Automatic.als
Here are some ideas to make this Set your own:
- Turn off the Vinyl Distortion effect and use an open hardware input on your audio interface as the seed. If the input is being fed by nothing, you might need to boost the gain (often by a lot) to get any sound at all.
- Instead of an empty line input, try using a mic. This works particularly well on a laptop, for example.
- Instead of empty or noise sources, try using actual musical material as the seed. Feed clips into the device chain and see what you get.
- Tweak everything. There are lots of parameters to play with and even tiny adjustments can yield a completely different result.
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