Tag: recording

In Search of Robert Palmer

A black and white photo of a Caucasian man with his left arm bent beside his head

It was after midnight, the recording session was in two days, and the AirBnB I had booked wasn’t nearly as close to downtown as it had promised. The last time I came to Ithaca, New York, to look through Robert Palmer’s archive—months ago, just before my first Palmer recording session—I stayed in a nondescript house just next to the Cornell campus, its walls breathing generations of college students. I had easily grabbed my key out of an unlocked mailbox in the entryway.

AirBnB KEY

This place, however, was somewhere in the fields surrounding Ithaca, farm country that betrays nothing of the fabled town just a few miles down the road. I stumbled in the dark trying to find the host’s key using my iPhone flashlight. It wasn’t the first time I wondered what the hell I was doing out here, hours from New York City, upsetting my schedule, eating Burger King and keeping the receipts—for what? To see if such-and-such note had a sharp next to it? Well, yes. And to snoop through his letters.

By 1 a.m. I was in bed, absorbing the soft intrusiveness I always feel when staying in an AirBnB, when I heard a pounding at the door. I thought it might be my imagination until it came again. Pounding. This is how I die, I thought. For Robert Palmer. The pounding came again. I crept to the door. “Yes?” Am I ready to die in Ithaca? A man’s voice answered, saying I had left my rental car’s lights on. I went outside to meet him. He held a can of Bud Light Lime-A-Rita. The car was dark. “I guess they go off automatic,” he said.

Perpetually an underdog, most biographical summaries written during his lifetime acknowledge how seldom Palmer’s music ever saw performance even then, and yet I’m one of a motley crew of artists who have been drawn to his work.

Robert Palmer lived between 1915-2010, mostly in upstate New York. He produced more than 90 works, was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and the first American composer published by Edition Peters, the publisher later associated with John Cage and the most experimental of modernists. His star rose in the 1940s and ’50s after a string of energetic, introspective, “metaphysical” works, as Aaron Copland called them, driven by a strong emotional current and built with complex counterpoint and layers of tight rhythmic structures. Hindemith meets Bartók meets Brahms meets Lou Harrison meets…

The relative obscurity that followed his promising debut is as puzzling as one wishes to make it. It could be as simple as his reputation soaring just as the focus of contemporary music shifted toward the seductions of serialism, chance, and minimalism, with Palmer eclipsed and his listeners fractured amidst a world of new curiosities. He might never have been as famous as mid-century tonalists such as William Schuman, David Diamond, or Roy Harris (a brief teacher of his), but they all suffered relatively the same fate.

Perpetually an underdog, most biographical summaries written during his lifetime acknowledge how seldom Palmer’s music ever saw performance even then, and yet I’m one of a motley crew of artists who, since the late 1930s, have been drawn to his work. Pianist John Kirkpatrick, himself skyrocketing to fame after premiering Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata, became a kind of pen pal, coach, and the first real ambassador of Palmer’s music, to whom the earliest scores are all dedicated. Palmer, at the time, was an Eastman School of Music graduate and grocery store clerk.  Copland included him on his famed 1948 list of seven composers who were “the best we have to offer,” which also included Cage, Lukas Foss, and Leonard Bernstein. Elliott Carter called Palmer’s music “firm and definite; its dissonance resembles that of younger Europeans whom we never hear in this country,” while describing its “impressive seriousness and great musicality.” Yvar Mikhashoff, a pianist equally at home with the pioneers of American music as he was with David Lang, recorded and commissioned Palmer, while Palmer’s piano music was also performed by classically-bent virtuosos like William Kapell and Claudio Arrau. Julius Eastman played Palmer’s Three Epigrams on his Town Hall debut (the piece was mentioned in the resulting New York Times review) and later approached pianist Joseph Kubera to play his Sonata for Two Pianos. “Robert Palmer’s the man,” Joe remembers him saying. Kyle Gann blogged about him in 2014, and one year later Steven Stucky wrote a memorial in his honor on this very website.

I first heard Robert Palmer’s music as a teenager on a scratchy live recording … I would dance to this piece in front of the mirror as if singing into a hairbrush.

I first heard Robert Palmer’s music as a teenager on a scratchy live recording by the aforementioned William Kapell, the first pianist I ever fell in love with, playing the Toccata Ostinato (1945). I would dance to this piece in front of the mirror as if singing into a hairbrush. Despite the poor sound quality, the subdued applause, and an electrifying but imperfect performance that ended with an exasperated cluster across the keys—and how I hoped that the score called for such an ending (it doesn’t)—I was hooked. Long before finding a score required but a few clicks, I hunted for months, and when the music finally appeared in the mail, I already felt like a detective discovering clues. It turns out that Palmer had dedicated the piece to Kapell before the pianist’s tragic death in a plane crash. I later discovered that he played it perhaps only twice, including that recorded performance. It looked fiendish to play. I didn’t touch it for years.

When I decided to finally hunker down and learn the Toccata, it was to serve as an encore for an otherwise meditative recital program. People would approach me after the concert wanting to know nothing about the proper program, but only about Palmer, my encore. Realizing I had nothing to tell them, I started to scratch around for even the most basic information. So began the trip down the rabbit hole that found me, years later, in a bed somewhere outside Ithaca as a stranger pounded on the front door with a Lime-a-Rita.

I scoured the internet for Palmer paraphernalia. He wasn’t unpublished, after all, and several scores remain in print by Presser, Peer, and Peters. But many scores—including some of the most interesting—are out of print or were never published at all. I later discovered in his letters that Palmer attempted to publish his sublime Second Piano Sonata, composed in the mid-1940s, as late as the 1980s, with no luck. It’s a masterpiece, and as of this writing remains in his own hand in the Cornell manuscripts archive.

I ordered whatever works I could find online and began having others scanned from Cornell. Each one seemed like a revelation, some incredible secret that I had personally discovered (of course I hadn’t) and was eager to share. These pieces, as I saw it, should have been part of the core American piano repertory. The music was as difficult as it was exhilarating to play. I would fall back from the piano after certain pieces laughing, sweating and exhausted, like stumbling off of a roller coaster. After others I’d sit in stunned silence, my eyes welling and my heart aching. I could already tell that the payoff in learning this music would be worth the work, and started programming Palmer’s music whenever I could. Realizing that so little had been recorded, I also started thinking about making an album, though like most of my big ideas, I didn’t know how or where to start.

In 2015 I visited Yale to sift through Palmer’s materials in John Kirkpatrick’s archive. In his letters to Kirkpatrick, I met a man who, sentence to sentence, swung from insecure to confident, pious to prideful, who would confess his demons as much as guard them. He scorned allies, Copland and Carter in particular, for their so-called “decadent” tastes, all too ready to burn important bridges on artistic principle. He casually mentioned in one letter that the military had permanently disqualified him from service “for psychological reasons,” and in the same breath reported that this would free him up creatively for the coming year. That, along with his vague, coded language about intimacy and a kind of crippling shyness has led at least one researcher (in a book about Kirkpatrick, as it were) to queer Palmer. Looking through the same letters and many more, and being quite familiar with the closet myself, I’m not totally convinced. Still, it came as a relief when Palmer’s stoic facade, which seemed so unlike his heart-on-his-sleeve, red-blooded music, began to melt. Suddenly the music, and my attraction to it (and to him), made a little more sense.

But I still couldn’t figure him out nor ascertain why his work vanished from concert halls. Should Palmer have better networked his way into history? Is that a thing? Or was he just happy enough teaching at Cornell, in the country’s first PhD composition program, which he indeed had created? It’s a life that satisfied him, after all—“I liked teaching!” he said in a late interview—even if it was a life that may not have satisfied others. Copland wrote, “Too much of [Palmer’s] energy has gone into his teaching… but teaching is a familiar disease of the American composer.”

Or perhaps he was just too scattered and immature for the limelight, destined “to be permanently a child,” as he phrased it in one anguished letter. (This, too, has been read as a code for queer.) Kirkpatrick, in a conspicuously missing letter, had apparently challenged him on his decision to marry so young. Palmer wrote back, “I hope you will be more specific in exactly how… I am young for 24. It will help me to help myself, and I am the only one who can help.” For Palmer, self-betterment and musical perfection seemed to go hand in hand. He did mature and did change, at least stylistically, perhaps to the disappointment of others. Many, including myself, have sensed that the breathless momentum and passion of his music, the quality that attracted such early attention, began to cool as he, well… grew up. I read several letters in which performers pined for the old days when Palmer’s music came out as a flood of notes, impulsive and intense, with hardly a rest. Did he feel like he “overshared” in his earlier works, and thus distanced himself in later ones? Did he feel the intellectual heat from his contemporaries, a self-imposed pressure to “smarten up” music that, I assure you, was already tied in intellectual pretzels? Or did his style… simply change? We all change! And sometimes audiences drift.

Eventually I approached a record label about Robert Palmer. There was no strategy to my label choice; I simply knew the name. They said yes, and I was elated. I filled out a grant application and the label applied for it on our behalf. We got the grant, and I was elated again. The label, however, also required a “sponsorship fee”—not unusual in classical music. I’d heard about this from other artists but naively thought it couldn’t possibly apply to my Palmer project. It did, and the grant funds didn’t even cover that cost, leaving me with less-than-zero to pay for the actual recording. Whenever anyone asked, I’d say the Palmer album was stalled. In truth, I considered it dead.

A couple years went by when one Sunday evening I volunteered to turn pages for Joseph Kubera, now a friend, at a private New World Records pre-recording concert. Paul Tai, the director of the label, asked about the state of the Palmer project, which I had told him about in its earliest days. I explained the situation, knowing by now that New World would have been the perfect home for the album. “Ask them to release the project,” he suggested, regarding the original label. I laughed at the idea. They’d never go for that, I argued, and besides, the grant funds had surely expired. “Ask your granter to extend the deadline,” he suggested again. He made no promises, and it all seemed quite crazy, but also I had nothing to lose. I reached out and, to my astonishment, both the label and granter agreed to my requests. Once the coast was clear, New World took over. Legendary producer Judith Sherman signed on, and we would record at the American Academy of Arts and Letters with Steinway providing the pianos. My brilliant friend Daniel Johnson would write the liner notes, and in a perfect full-circle moment, Kubera agreed to play the Sonata for Two Pianos that Julius Eastman had once asked to play with him. He used Eastman’s score, his fingerings still penciled in. The album went from doomed to best-case scenario.

By summer 2018, I had the program learned for what would be the first of two recording sessions—the second taking place in the fall—and went to Ithaca to finally visit the Palmer archive.

Palmer materials

I hadn’t sat with Palmer’s actual papers since my visit to Yale three years earlier. It was worth the drive, the overnight stay, the upturned schedule, and the loss of practice time, because where else could I see that he wanted me to “slam [the] hell out of” that one chord in the First Piano Sonata (1939/40)?

slam the hell out of it

Where else could I see Ned Rorem’s West Village address scrawled on a program at the Tanglewood premiere of Peter Grimes?

Ned Rorem notes

Where else could I feverishly snap pictures of scores that exist, as of this writing, only in that archive, or see Palmer’s self-penned autobiography?

Palmer's self-penned autobiography

I slowly drove by what was once his humble home, where he had lived since moving to Ithaca in the early 1940s. I wondered if the people inside knew a composer once lived there, one of Copland’s “best we have to offer.”

Palmer's house

I met his old friends, folks who still called him Bob. “This guy’s recording Bob’s music!” said one of them to a co-worker. I met his daughter and son-in-law, and listened to their stories—like the time Palmer accidentally received a royalty check for the other, “Addicted to Love” Robert Palmer. He was furious, they said, but couldn’t have been surprised to see the royalties this other Palmer earned. Despite apparent urgings, the composer Robert Palmer resisted adding his middle name to separate himself from the pop star. “He hated his middle name,” his daughter told me, and I recalled seeing in the archive that Palmer had crossed a line through his middle name when editing an encyclopedia entry that included it, just as his Wikipedia entry currently does.

Palmer has remained to me throughout this process a kind of mystery, and I’ve tried to strike a balance between respectful and nosey when it comes to fleshing out the man.

A week later I was sitting at a grand piano on the darkened stage at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the first morning of the first recording session of the first-ever album devoted solely to Palmer’s piano works. Judy’s voice came through a speaker a few feet from the piano. “Ready when you are!” It was a long way from dancing in front of the mirror to Toccata Ostinato.

RECORDING right here

Palmer has remained to me throughout this process a kind of mystery, and I’ve tried to strike a balance between respectful and nosey when it comes to fleshing out the man. When his daughter and son-in-law met me for smoothies after my first Cornell visit, I confessed that it felt funny talking to her after having spent the afternoon reading the passionate letters her father wrote her mother during their courtship, often marked by his paralyzing loneliness. When she alluded to her father being complicated, I didn’t ask for details, though I recently asked her over email about his favorite Christmas traditions, his favorite restaurant, his politics, his religious beliefs. Did he teach her piano?

But considering the many people I’ve prodded for memories, few say very much, maybe because Palmer himself didn’t say very much. “He was quiet till he got going,” clarified his son-in-law, “Then watch out.”

I regret not putting a few follow-up questions to composer Steve Stucky when we met one morning for breakfast to talk about Palmer, about a year before Stucky’s own untimely passing. I wish, just a couple of times, I’d asked, “What do you mean by that?”

I wish when I first heard Palmer’s music as a teenager that I had reached out, instead of functioning under the assumption that all composers were famous and needed no advocates, let alone fan mail. And I’d already learned Toccata Ostinato in 2010, the year Palmer passed away. He had suffered a stroke and couldn’t speak, “but he could still play the piano,” I was told. In my imagination I might have found a way to tell him, in those last years, that I loved his music and would find a way to share it. He might have liked that.

Palmer’s last big project was a Concerto for Two Pianos, Double Strings, Double Percussion and Symphonic Brass. Despite National Endowment for the Arts funding and dreams of a Pulitzer, the project was abandoned in a stack of sketches. But I remember staring at those numbered pages, black with pencil—even a stage scheme—thinking: He’s the only one who knew what this all sounded like.

Palmer Concerto

Part of my impulse to record Palmer’s work, particularly as the new music community challenges itself, rightly, to gaze beyond the white male composer archetype (of which Palmer certainly qualifies) is because the life of Palmer, and fate of Palmer, and the puzzling, inscrutable, what-happened-ness of Palmer, is something every creative person I know wrestles with every day. We rage against our work vanishing in the face of indifference, but mostly feel our way in the dark, finding our AirBnB keys with an iPhone flashlight in the middle of nowhere. Palmer’s story would be a cautionary tale if only we knew what we were cautioning against. Meanwhile, I’m hard-pressed to think of a composer who lived as strongly by his own creative convictions.

The life of Palmer, and fate of Palmer, and the puzzling, inscrutable, what-happened-ness of Palmer, is something every creative person I know wrestles with every day. We rage against our work vanishing in the face of indifference.

Whether our work is well established, gaining attention, facing oblivion, or long forgotten, we in the new music community find ourselves adrift in the same capricious tide of history. Part of our shared role in this community is to show up however we can for each other—to listen, perform, share—even as we all see and do things so differently. I look at Palmer’s life and work and am reminded that an artist’s greatest, and maybe only, power comes in giving shape to the fire inside them and tossing that work, over and over, into the void of the future. Maybe someone will someday be perfectly positioned to catch it. Or maybe not. Maybe the work will spin into the orbit of concert programming, or land on a recording for posterity, or wait for discovery in an archive. Or maybe not. People may listen to my Palmer album—perhaps some teenager will dance to it in front of their mirror like I once did to Kapell—and maybe some of the pieces, still in manuscript, will finally be published. Or maybe not. It could all—even this article—sail completely under the radar, as his work has for so long.

But just as Palmer created work nevertheless, we create work nevertheless—all of us giving shape to that fire inside us. And this act of creation, this calling, this need that exists in the present, far outweighs the promise of our work’s hypothetical future. Showing up, listening, connecting and realizing how alike and fragile we all are, is at least one way we can honor our shared humanity as artists, especially when our lives can feel so isolated, and like one unreasonable creative act after another. I spent more than a decade searching for Robert Palmer and made an album of his music when no one asked for it. But in my mind, I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t imagine being the only one who knew what this all sounded like.


Robert Palmer: Piano Music is available now on New World Records.

The Collaborative Studio: Suggestions for Your Next Recording Project

So far throughout this series on the recording studio and the collaboration within, I have provided a primer on what producers are and what they do, my process of producing non-classical music, how classical music production differs from non-classical, and ways in which classical music production could evolve with contemporary composition trends. For this last post, I’d like to offer up five suggestions for those who may be new to the studio experience—either as a producer or performer—or for those who would like to take their future projects in a new, collaborative direction.

Communicate

A point that deserves to be reiterated is the importance of communication in creating a healthy and successful collaborative environment. This means talking through ideas, providing feedback, asking questions, as well as being an active listener. Communication is a two-way channel. Not only is it important for you—whether you are the producer or the artist—to communicate your thoughts, but it is equally important to listen to others involved. As the producer, this is crucial for creating a strong working relationship. I have been in sessions where the producer only gave orders and hardly listened to the artist’s ideas. It creates a bitter relationship and a hostile environment in which no creative process could ever be fruitful.

From the producer’s perspective, listening to the artists you are working with will give you a better understanding of what it is they are trying to achieve. If you are working with musicians who are not as familiar with studio processes, their ideas may not work out the way they are imagining. However, listen to their ideas to help them achieve the end goal they are envisioning. For performers, it is important to go into a project understanding that the producer is there to help you achieve the best outcome possible. Listening to your producer and offering feedback only strengthens the project and deepens your understanding of what is possible in the studio.

Trust your team (i.e. don’t take your engineer for granted)

Part of the communication process I listed is to ask questions. What I mean by this is that, specifically as a producer, you should not feel like you need to have all of the answers. In a studio session, you are collaborating with a team of professionals. Whether it be performers, songwriters, or engineers, each person has a wealth of knowledge to contribute that you may or may not have. Take advantage of these resources and ask questions. Every composer knows how important it is to consult with performers about the extensions and limitations of their abilities on an instrument. This is the same for producers; ask questions and learn about fields you may be unfamiliar with. If a performer needs to adjust their tone to better sit in the mix, defer to their expertise on the instrument and ask what options there may be.

On more than one occasion, my engineer has provided invaluable insight that changed the course of the session and created a better end result. There have been times in which I was so focused on the musical material of a song that I wasn’t thinking about the sonic impact of each section. Suggestions about which areas of the sonic spectrum were lacking have pushed me to change the way I approach a section—sometimes by writing new parts to complement existing parts, other times by omitting parts I thought were necessary but realized were just a distraction. All this is to say, never take engineers for granted. They are more valuable than just turning a few knobs and hitting record. Even if they’ve only been in the role of engineer, they’ve been in the room with countless other producers and performers. They may just have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Have a plan (but don’t get too tied to it)

When preparing to produce a project, I always begin well before the first day in the studio. This includes doing research, studying references, studying scores, pre-production, and general conversations with the performers about what it is they are wanting to do stylistically. I always come to the first day of recording with a plan. This plan isn’t always extremely detailed, but it is an aid in organizing the upcoming sessions to ensure that everything gets done in a timely manner. The reason I tend not to prepare an overly detailed itinerary is because these plans almost always change once recording begins. It is valuable to be flexible and not get tied to a set way of doing things. These changes come about once a solid workflow is established and it is evident where the most time will be necessarily spent. However, having the initial plan will help you stay organized once things are set in motion and pieces of the schedule begin to move around. Performers will look to you to lead the way and get things rolling in the studio, and having a strong start sets you up for a successful and organized project. One of the roles of a producer is to maintain organization and keep the artists on track to meet their deadline. Doing your research ahead of time and having a foundational understanding of what the artist is wanting to achieve will keep you from wasting time during the recording process.

From the artist’s side of things, one way to help prepare for your studio sessions is to have at least an initial reference for what you are wanting to achieve sonically. Your references can be a combination of sources and they don’t necessarily need to all be things that you like. Knowing what it is you don’t like is also a helpful resource for the producer and engineer. Having an idea to get the conversation started is a great way to begin the pre-production process.

Push boundaries

One thing that I often see get lost in the studio is the spirit of exploration and experimentation. Of course, time and budget constraints can limit what people will be able to do, but, for those who are willing, the studio is an ideal environment for pushing boundaries. In a studio setting, you have the luxury of being able to hear an idea come to life in real time, and nothing is permanent if you don’t want it to be. As a producer for non-classical artists, I love offering up suggestions that are outside of the box. Sometimes they stick and sometimes they get shot down, but if an idea is easily executable there is no harm in trying something new and seeing what sort of creative impetus spawns from it.

In the previous post, I talked about ways in which contemporary classical production might evolve. Take some of these ideas or come up with your own and try them out. Maybe it won’t work, and that’s okay. I have no shortage of ideas that were left on the studio floor because they just didn’t work out, but there was no harm done. I take those experiences and learn from them. Sometimes I tweak the ideas until they finally do work, and other times I just move on entirely.

Trust yourself

Not only is it important to trust your team, but you must also trust yourself. If you’ve established a solid foundation of communication between all parties, you shouldn’t feel apprehensive about speaking up when something doesn’t sit right with you or you have an alternative idea. In a healthy collaborative setting, respect between all parties should be strong enough to hear out and work through any ideas presented. Ideas will never come to life if they aren’t presented in the first place.

As a performer, being in a studio and surrounded by studio equipment can sometimes be intimidating. We have years of experience as musicians, and all of these experiences are different from one another’s. Studio production teams are small and every person plays an integral role. Your knowledge and strengths make you a unique expert in your field. The engineer will handle the equipment, the producer will take care of organization and management, and the performers will know their instruments better than anyone else in the room. Know your field and know your limitations; you will have a team of people there to fill in any gaps and to support you and the project till the very end.

The Collaborative Studio: The Past, Present, and Future of Classical Music Production

The previous post in this series took a look into my production process for non-classical projects such as rock bands and singer-songwriters. Although my process changes significantly when I produce contemporary classical sessions, there are a few core philosophical similarities in how I approach a classical project. For this post, I want to walk through what changes, what is similar, and in what ways contemporary classical production can evolve.

The starkest difference between the two worlds of producing independent artists versus contemporary classical is the inclusion of a composer and a written score. When working with independent artists, you are usually working directly with the songwriter, and there is flexibility for changes. This flexibility doesn’t generally exist for classical music, so the focus then shifts almost entirely to the performance.

In classical recordings, there is an emphasis placed on producing a flawless performance with technical facility becoming the focal point of the recording. However, the inability to alter the content of a piece does not mean that production must solely focus on playing the right notes at the right time. During a recent project I was producing, the performer and I had an in-depth discussion about one piece that didn’t quite feel as satisfying as it could have. The performer was executing it flawlessly as written, but it took a deeper dive into the music to understand the best way to portray the work emotionally. Certain rhythms were flexible enough to be interpreted differently, and phrasing was altered to imbue a sense of drama that was previously lacking.

This is a drawback of working from a score; the details aren’t always as clear as they could be on the page. In these situations, a producer should assist in providing direction for the performers. As a composer myself, I can confidently say that scores often times fall short, and using your musical instincts can clear up any insecurities a performer may have about what’s written. It’s much like a performer coaching an ensemble, you dig deeper than what is on the page to understand what the piece is and where it is going. Not to mention that studio time is not free (nor cheap), so decisions need to be made as quickly and confidently as possible.

Good producers will do their homework for an upcoming project. Score study is only one aspect of preparation for classical music recording sessions. Other ways to prepare for a session could involve researching instruments that you have less experience with to gain a basic understanding of how they produce sound. This is a necessary practice for composers. Without an understanding of how an instrument works, a composer cannot effectively compose idiomatically. Producers can use this same knowledge—in dialogue with the performers—to make suggestions, coach, or troubleshoot sonically problematic passages.

Preparation should also involve researching the performers you will be working with, which will provide insight into how those performers sound and what they are capable of. When producing a classical project, I spend a lot of time listening to recordings. I listen to any previous or live recordings by the performers as well as other recordings in the same field, e.g. string quartets, solo flute, solo violin, etc. When listening to other performers’ recordings, I’m not as interested in the performance as I am interested in how the music impacts me when I listen to it. If I really enjoy listening to a record, I will deconstruct the production of the record. Or, transversely, if I don’t like how a particular record sounds, I will know what it is I want to avoid as I prepare for the upcoming project.

Instead of the recording acting as an archival document, it can become an expansion of the music itself.

One of my first memories of working with a producer was at a pre-production meeting where the producer asked me what records I was listening to at the moment and what I really liked about them. At the time, this idea of taking ideas for the sonic imprint of my own record from other records I loved had never crossed my mind. This is now a consistent practice for me. Any time I begin working with new artists, one of the first things I ask is about which records comparable to their own work do they enjoy listening to. This frame of reference provides a tangible source to study for the producer so that they can confidently execute stylistic choices that are in line with what the performers prefer but may not know how to articulate.

Listening through recordings from previous decades, the production style of classical music has only very recently begun to change. The biggest differences over the years have been the improvement of recording technology which produced higher quality recordings. For the most part, producing classical music has been as much about capturing the space as the performance itself. However, when you look at the history of pop or rock music, the production quickly moved away from capturing a sonically accurate live performance recording, and instead creating a unique aural experience on record that, in some ways, intends to replicate the live image but utilizes recording techniques that isolate instruments and add an immediacy to the sonic landscape. Music listeners never think twice about this approach. You hear a band on record and when you see them live you usually never think about how different the sonic experience is. Whereas, with classical recordings, what you hear on the recording can sound almost identical to what you would hear live if you were to witness the performance in the same space.

The idea of creating a unique aural experience on record that differs from a live performance without changing the content of the music itself is an exciting notion both from the perspective of a composer and a producer. Instead of the recording acting as an archival document, it can become an expansion of the music itself. On record, you can provide a unique look into a piece of music that can’t be replicated live, especially in the present day where most people listen to music through headphones.

There is a growing trend among contemporary composers of creating works that ignore the arbitrary boundaries of genre. These works—such as Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered and Gemma Peacocke’s upcoming record, Waves & Lines—are ideal canvasses for modern production techniques, and a glimpse into what the future of contemporary classical production could be. The isolation and immediacy of the instruments in these recordings and the liberal exploration of the stereo field leaves behind the fixed spatial recordings of past classical recordings. Listeners are able to aurally navigate dense instrumental textures as if they were a part of the ensemble. The intimacy of this type of production also creates an emotional relationship to the music, much like the way a pop singer’s voice is recorded to hear every nuance of sound created. For as much as classical music harps on the emotion and drama embedded in works, it could benefit from this type of intimate production style.

My final installment in this series on the potential of the collaborative studio will offer up some suggestions for taking full advantage of your studio project and how to be a better collaborator with the rest of your production team. Every studio experience is a learning opportunity, and with the right positive mental attitude, everyone involved can benefit and learn in different ways.

The Collaborative Studio: A Look into the Process of Producing Non-Classical Music

My first venture into producing was with a Texas punk rock band whose main songwriter is one of my closest friends. The relationship we had was the perfect foundation for me to explore and sculpt my voice as a producer. I had done much work as a songwriter and a composer, but producing required me to give up creative control to respect someone else’s artistry. Not every project can be with your best friends, but it is important to create some sort of relationship with the artists you work with. Let them know that you are as invested as they are in their work.

When I sign on to a non-classical project as the producer, it is important for me to know how involved the artist wants me to be. Each project requires a different process based on what the artist is comfortable with or what they are hoping to achieve. Often I’ll try to be as involved in the pre-production process as I am in the studio. What this means is that before a band or artist enters the studio to record I am collaborating with them, helping them to mold the material that they have into the best possible version of itself. My background as a songwriter makes me an effective collaborator early on in the process, and these qualities are further augmented by the knowledge and skills I gained through my formal education as a musician.

My college education provided me with practical skills to complement the songwriting craft that I had developed prior to music school. Being able to analyze and understand form and theory helps to eliminate a lot of the time-consuming trial and error I underwent as a young musician. Although the school I attended only ever applied critical thinking toward works in the classical canon, I kept an eager interest in applying this knowledge to the non-classical styles that I loved. During undergrad I was still working toward becoming a better songwriter, so I used the analysis techniques I had learned in school to analyze my favorite records in order to better understand what made them so special to me. Analyzing non-classical music gave me another set of tools that I would be able to use as a producer when needing to fortify or expand a song that didn’t quite feel complete yet.

Studying composition taught me how to reconceptualize material that isn’t working in its current context. This technique has been invaluable to me as a producer.

In addition to the general music curriculum, my composition studies also provided me with a unique perspective on music and its materials. As a teenager, I had discarded countless songs because of mental roadblocks and I hadn’t developed ways to get past this. Studying composition taught me how to reconceptualize material that isn’t working in its current context. This technique has been invaluable to me as a producer. Not only has it saved songs from being discarded entirely, but it has taken perfectly “okay” songs to another level without sacrificing the artist’s intent. The material being reframed is still unique to the artist, and nothing gets changed without the consent of its creator. None of what I do as a producer revolves around me and my creative ability. Rather, I am using that ability to enhance what an artist has provided me to work with. The ability to perceive the material in new contexts is merely a way of seeing the true potential of what an artist has created.

Maybe my favorite aspect of being a producer is how similar it is to being a good teacher, whether it be in composition, violin, etc. The goal of being a producer or a teacher isn’t to create carbon copies of yourself or your tastes. Instead, you work harder to help artists or your students achieve (or sometimes to develop) their visions. It’s a more involved and difficult process than it would be to just change everything until you’re satisfied, but the end result is a product that is a true representation of someone other than yourself. It is a work that, as a producer, you helped to develop in order to fulfill another person’s vision, and that is a unique type of satisfaction.

Once I am in the studio with a band or an artist, things start to move quickly and it becomes necessary to focus both on the minor musical details as well as the broader picture of what the project is intended to be. Organizational skills, time management, and the ability to provide constructive feedback all come into play in a studio session. Not only am I monitoring the recording process, but I am also making decisions regarding where the most time will be spent, understanding how each part will sonically fit into the whole, and coaching performers when it is needed. It’s important to remember that each of these tasks involves a conversation—whether it be with your artists or your engineer—and the more you communicate, the more efficient your process will become.

When monitoring the recording process, there are two primary goals in mind. Capturing a technically proficient take and capturing the right performance. Music is an emotional force regardless of the genre you are working in, and it is important to portray that emotion in the performance. With indie artists or bands this is most evident in the vocals, which is why vocal tracking is one of the most involved processes. A singer may nail a passage technically, but if the performance doesn’t portray the right mood, it does nothing to serve the song. This is where a bit of coaching may be required, but just because a performer is being coached does not imply incompetence. It is simply the benefit of having an outside perspective weigh in on the effectiveness of a performance. Perhaps instrumental performers can relate to this type of coaching the most. Even though you may not always be coaching on the same instruments, a good coach understands how to articulate a mood or a character in the music so that any musician can understand. This ability to effectively talk about music is an invaluable skill that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

The final processes that a producer is typically involved in are mixing and mastering. It is not uncommon for your recording engineer to also be your mix engineer, and having developed a strong communicative relationship will make mixing and mastering smooth and stress-free. In the mixing process, the engineer relies on clear and concise directions from both the producer and the performers. There’s no reason you can’t begin communicating with your engineer during the recording process about mix ideas. These ideas can range from topics such as balance between instruments, the use of special effects such as delay, or the overall timbral qualities of a song, e.g. dark, bright, warm, etc. Engineers who know where you intend to go sonically can begin to lay the groundwork before the recording process is finished, which makes mixing easier on everyone.

In the next installment of this series, I will discuss the ways in which classical music production differs from what has been described in this post. Contemporary classical music has continually shown little interest in the boundaries of genres, the next installment will also dive into what this could mean for the future of classical music production and ways in which I believe contemporary classical music can take advantage of what non-classical music has already been doing.

The Collaborative Studio: Roles and Expectations

For many classical/new music projects, the recording process is seen as a conclusion—the culmination of hours of rehearsal and preparation. Instead, your time in the studio can be utilized as another collaborative opportunity to further refine a project and prepare the work for a life both within and beyond a performance. On multiple occasions I have entered a studio feeling fully prepared to record the tracks as I had written and known them for months, only to be enlightened to new possibilities and ideas from a producer or engineer. The recording studio is its own creative space that provides a new perspective not only from the process of recording, but also from the team involved in that process. Taking advantage of this unique environment can be liberating and has the potential to elevate a project to another level that may have been previously unknown.

My background as a musician began like it does for many other people: playing in bands with friends. I was a guitarist in a variety of different rock, metal, and hardcore bands as a teenager, and was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to record three albums with one of those bands. It was then that I had my first experience working with an experienced producer. Over the course of those three albums, I absorbed as much knowledge as I could about the studio experience—everything from workflow, expectations on both the performing and producing end, studio techniques, and any secrets of the trade that I could remember. These experiences stuck with me because I enjoyed the process of working in a studio, although at the time I couldn’t imagine that I would do anything other than write and perform the music. Eventually, in college, I began composing concert music, which provided me not only with a new skill set, but a fresh perspective on music entirely. The communal aspect of music-making disappeared as I continued to compose, but I was suddenly involved in all determinant aspects of how a piece would sound and be performed. These varying experiences would eventually coalesce to inform my role as a producer, a new step in my development as a musician.

The definition of a producer can vary from person to person and for each project, but there is a certain foundational mission that you can expect to be a constant. Producers help artists achieve their vision for their work. They guide the way and keep artists on track and productive while also offering outside opinions—sometimes even providing creative input. While all producers have their own strengths and tendencies that define their production style, a critical attribute of their job is the ability to decenter themselves and put artists first in their decision making.

Andrew Rodriguez in the studio

This decentralization of personal artistry can be difficult, but it has personally transformed my creative process into a much more collaborative effort. When I first began playing music, it was a way to spend time with friends and share something together. Becoming a composer changed all of that, as the creation process became solitary. The primary aspect of producing that drew me in was the ability to collaborate again, yet this time in a supporting role rather than as the central creator. Working as a producer taught me to trust in the people I was collaborating with. This practice bled over into my compositional process and has given me a new sense of comfort in communicating and workshopping ideas with my performers. Just like a performance of a concert work, a studio production involves a team, and clear communication founded on trust is crucial to achieving the desired outcome.

Just like a performance of a concert work, a studio production involves a team, and clear communication founded on trust is crucial to achieving the desired outcome.

In a modern studio session there are three primary roles: the performer, the engineer(s), and the producer. In a best-case scenario, these roles are fulfilled by different people. It has become the norm, however, for one person to embody two of these roles. Often you will find that an engineer will also serve as a producer. This is a stereotypical assumption by the general public, but in the modern age it is not entirely out of line. I can recall my first experience in a professional recording studio and being confused about who the producer was because I was unaware that having a separate engineer was an option. In some cases, performers may even opt to produce the project they are performing in.

One reason, outside of financial limitations, that the producer for a project may also serve as the engineer or even a performer is that an effective producer often has a wealth of experience as an engineer and/or a performer. These varying experiences and skill sets contribute to the producer’s impact in the studio. Having been involved in projects where I wielded dual roles (engineer/producer or performer/producer) I can say that it is not easy. Although there are overlapping skills, producing requires the ability to move between perspectives continuously. Performers and engineers have crucial jobs to execute that rely on focus and detail-oriented technical skills. A producer, on the other hand, is constantly switching between focusing on these details and recognizing how the pieces fit into the larger picture of the project. A trusting relationship with a producer can alleviate the pressure of having to focus on all aspects of the process.

Throughout the remainder of this series I will offer up some suggestions on how to be an effective producer and collaborator in the studio for those who may be new to the studio process. I will also be detailing the ways in which my formal music training has informed my production style for non-classical music, as well as how my non-classical background has informed my production of classical music. Working in a studio environment has been one of the most beneficial experiences in my musical development, and I want to encourage musicians to take full advantage of the possibilities of a truly collaborative studio environment.

Sound, Architecture, and Necromancy

From the time I took up the saxophone as a teenager, I have been fascinated by exploring sound in unusual architectural spaces. When I finish playing a note in the Church of San Bartholomeo in southern Italy, notes are sustained by the sanctuary’s pristine reverb, which exaggerates the intensity of selected harmonics and creates the illusion that the size of the saxophone has grown to fill the space. The room performs as we listen to the decaying resonances.

Matera Panorama

Matera Panorama. IMAGE: Neil Leonard

I find architectural spaces by accident, through recommendations from friends, and by searching for sites with peculiar histories. One of the most enticing discoveries happened when I traveled to the city of Matera, in southern Italy, to vacation after working on a sound installation for the 55th Venice Biennial. Matera has been populated since Paleolithic times and, over the ages, homes, churches, and now spas have been carved into the calcareous rock hillside, known as the Sassi di Matera. This cave village was used by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini as the setting for ancient Jerusalem in his masterpiece The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The primeval looking nocturnal skyline of the Sassi flashes on the screen in Metallica’s music video Spit Out the Bone.

Arriving in Matera to enjoy a couple of days as a tourist, I was introduced to caves with ancient frescoes, and a contemporary art space comprising a network of cave galleries. For me, vacation had to wait as impromptu recording in the caves began. The recording site that I was drawn to experiment in was an ancient church, carved in the side of the Sassi, with interconnected rooms were the saxophone could resonate in multiple chambers simultaneously. I used these recordings to start a collaborative piece with Amnon Wolman, Security Vehicles Only, published by XI Records. Productive as the Sassi recordings were, I left Matera wondering what it would have been like if I’d had a week to explore the caves, place mics in multiple chambers, and compose music to highlight the resonances of these spaces.

By contrast, I have walked away from recording in architectural settings, feeling over-prepared and underwhelmed by the building’s resonances. A pilgrimage to the Necromanteion of Ephyra, in Greece, was one such experience. Accompanied by Greek professor and audio engineer Nassos Vynios, I traveled to the Necromanteion hoping to record an acoustical marvel. The original temple, established in 1400 B.C., was a structure used by a Chythonic cult which sought to communicate with their ancestors using what we vaguely understood to be a completely unique acoustical phenomena. In modern times, visitors report hearing disembodied voices on site. Without much more to go on, we obtained the permissions to record at Necromanteion and eventually drove four hours from Athens to Ephyra.

Nekromanteio

Nekromanteio. IMAGE: Neil Leonard

We arrived armed with my saxophone, a 360-degree Ambisonic microphone, and battery-powered Bluetooth speaker to play sine wave sweeps in the space so that we could record their impulse response, or “ring.” Later we would turn these impulse responses into computer-generated reverb simulation. Upon arrival, Spiros Raptis, the custodian filled in more details.

The site is perched on a hill with a panoramic view of wetlands where the three rivers canonically associated with Hades converge, the Acheron (“River of woe”), Pyriphlegethon (“Flaming with fire”), and Cocytus (“River of wailing”). In ancient times, the hill was an island that appeared to rise above the surrounding mist. Originally, the site was dedicated to Gaia (Earth)—a Chthonic, or subterranean, Goddess that required nocturnal ritual sacrifice. Visitors wishing to speak to the dead spent days on a preparatory diet of pork, rye bread, and oysters and consumed narcotic compounds prior to entering the subterranean chamber, later called the Temple of Hades and Persephone. Worshipers came from far and wide, and a complex comprising a cluster of hostels, shopping bazaars, and brothels eventual grew to accommodate them.

In 1958, the Necromanteion was rediscovered by archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris during his search to find a site described in Homer’s Odyssey and Herodotus’s Histories. Dakaris proposed that the subterranean chamber was the setting for Odysseus’s visits to consult the blind seer, Tiresias, who advised him on how to return to his home in Ithaca. It is also speculated that Homer himself visited the Necromanteion.

Nekromanteio

The original subterranean chamber was renovated around 400 B.C. and is now a 50 x 13-foot stone room, flanked by 15 arches carved from porous stone. A recent theory suggests that the renovated chamber might actually have functioned as a cistern or as underground storage for a farmhouse in the Hellenistic period. Panagiotis Karabatsos and Vasilis Zafranas from the Acoustics Laboratory of the Department of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki don’t agree. They studied the space for twelve years and concluded that the Necromanteion was constructed to create an intense psychoacoustic phenomenon, analogous to the anechoic chambers found in modern acoustical laboratories such as Nokia Bell Labs or MIT Lincoln Laboratories in the United States.

Before entry, Spiros warned us that it is difficult to spend more than a few minutes in the chamber without feeling like one is losing their mind. On that note, we unpacked our gear and descended two stories of scaffolding to the chamber. Within minutes, both Nassos and I felt increasingly disoriented. The utter silence, darkness, and sense of being underground induced a mix of nausea, claustrophobia, and maybe even vertigo. I did not hear the reported voices talking to me, but Nassos and I were both eager to escape back to the sunlight, fresh air, and ambient noise above ground as fast as we could.

Post-nausea and doubtful how this experiment would play out, we went back down into the underground chamber. I picked up my saxophone and played, thinking of the pilgrims who visited the site over the years and—to my surprise—I found I could play for thirty minutes without pause. Neither Nassos, Spiros, or myself experience any of the symptoms we suffered at first. Next, we recorded computer-generated sine glissandi, from 20 to 22k hertz. The sine sweeps produced dramatic panning effects as the Necromanteion played ventriloquist, mysteriously displacing the source of the sound.

In much the same way I surveyed Matanzas in the previous blog post, Nassos and I surveyed ancient Greek architectural sites looking for unique acoustical phenomena. We made a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War. In his 42-foot high, cone-shaped tomb, with curved walls resembling half a football, we experienced incredible slap-back delays. We visited the Temple of Apollo in Delphi and saw the Hymn to Apollo, one of the oldest musical scores in Western civilization. We explored the Epidarus Theater, the canonical masterwork of ancient acoustical design often depicted in textbooks on acoustics.

For both of us, the Necromanteion, with its awe-inspiring folkloric history and strange acoustics, was perhaps the most impactful site we experienced. We caught a glimpse of the illusion, created out of terrifying silence, to invoke the world of the dead. It was a space where reverberations and other sonic traces of the world of the living disappear and a world void of light and sound extended infinitely.

Other notable experiments with sound and architecture include recording in the Wright Brother’s Wind Tunnel operated by the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Casa da Música, in Portugal, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In each case, my approach was shaped by both the sound of the space, researching the history of the site, and listening to the local’s perception of the importance of the architecture and social usage of the space.

Graphic Score for 1000 mobile devices in Casa da Música, Portugal. Each square represents a block of 33 mobile devices playing samples of Leonard recorded in the acoustical studies chamber at The Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), Porto, Portugal.

A Holistic Approach to Sound

Depending on who you talk to, “extended techniques” can be a loaded term. To one person, the presence of extended techniques makes a piece of music weird and unlistenable, while to another, their absence would indicate music that is regressive and uninteresting. In either case, ears are closed, and a blanket judgment is being made about the quality of the art using a term that should really only be a quantifier. So, first of all, I’d like to clear away some of the subjective baggage that has built up around extended techniques. The most objective way I can think of to define it is this: an extended technique is any action that produces a result outside the fundamental parameters of sound that an instrument was designed to make. This still leaves some ambiguity as to the designers’ intentions, especially when it comes to an instrument as old as mine, the violin. But it’s clear that on the violin, an execution that causes the string to vibrate with maximum consistency and overtone-rich resonance is the primary function of the instrument, which luthiers have worked very hard to cultivate over the centuries. On the other hand, playing very close to the bridge to create a broken, inconsistent sound that reinforces high overtones, while just as beautiful aesthetically, is one example of the great many techniques that fall outside the instrument’s intended function. This distinction is very important for students, since getting the string to resonate consistently is the most difficult thing to master, and is the foundation of most other physical movements on the instrument.

An extended technique is any action that produces a result outside the fundamental parameters of sound that an instrument was designed to make.

As useful as I’ve found this definition as a player and a teacher, it still sets up a dualism that I find troubling. For one thing, it would seem to support the idea that all sounds outside of the core practice of Western classical music represent an extension of that practice, and not a separate identity. To an extent I agree with this – it is very difficult to understand how to play Lachenmann if you haven’t studied Beethoven, as they are strongly connected along the lineage of German music – but this way of thinking excludes artists who have arrived at novel ways of creating sound along a different trajectory. Furthermore, by lumping an incredibly broad array of musical tools into the single category of extended techniques, the implication is that any given sound outside “normal” playing is a shallow, one-dimensional artifact, rather than a component of one of any number of deep reservoirs of practice that have just as much potential for nuanced human expression as the standard technique of the instrument’s original design.

Maestro-Scroll

IMAGE: Alexander Perrelli and Emma Van Deun

As my own practice on the violin has evolved to a point where the majority of the sounds I make on the instrument could be defined as extended techniques, I wonder if there is a better way to frame instrumental performance practice for the 21st century that, while respecting and continuing traditions, makes room for a deeper engagement with other avenues of expression. I’ve begun to think of this as a holistic approach to sound.

The idea of a holistic approach to sound started to coalesce when I was preparing to record Violin Solos, a series of improvised solo violin pieces for my debut album, Engage (New Focus Recordings, August 3, 2018). I had been working this way for a long time in various contexts, from interpreter to collaborator to improviser, but didn’t have the words for it yet. Planning and practicing for that recording session, and then working to break it all down afterward to write the liner notes for the album, gave me the impetus to look under the hood of my practice and really examine what was happening.

In thinking about my approach to sound, I kept on coming back to the idea of reservoirs. The standard, “romantic” style of violin playing that has been dominant since at least the mid-20th century and that every violin student learns is one reservoir. It utilizes the sounds that the modern violin, paired with the modern bow, were designed to produce – rich and luminous, causing the string to vibrate in a manner that is consistent and sustained. Another, equally deep reservoir encompasses the highly specific timbral study that has been so thoroughly researched by composers like Helmut Lachenmann, Mathias Spahlinger, and many others since (though on a musical level the compositions of Lachenmann and Spahlinger remain deeply connected to the same Germanic tradition that begat “romantic” string playing, on a technical level the sounds represent a radically different engagement with the instrument, requiring an entirely different skill set as a player). Another reservoir is Just Intonation, a practice that has made its way into just about everything that I do. Another might broadly be described as noise-based music. Another that is specific to my individual path would be the sounds and techniques that grew out of collaborative work with my composer colleagues in the Wet Ink Ensemble (Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, and Sam Pluta). Far from a comprehensive list, those are just a few examples of reservoirs that have spoken strongly to me and that I have incorporated into my playing, colored by my unique experiences as a musician. Another violinist would no doubt have some similarities and some differences.

One can dive deeply into any single reservoir and find more than a complete set of tools for musical expression. I think that a piece based completely in scratch tones and pitchless noise has just as much potential to be beautiful as a piece based in fully voiced notes. It’s only a matter of whether it is done well. For me, a mode of personal expression on the violin that feels rich and fulfilling involves drawing from many of these reservoirs and then quickly cutting between them. By engaging with material in this way, the relationship to sound feels less like the ornamentation of a monolithic practice, and more like personal conversations with distinct musical entities.

A mode of personal expression on the violin that feels rich and fulfilling involves drawing from many of these reservoirs and then quickly cutting between them.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Sam Pluta’s writing about his own work, in which he proposes a type of musicmaking where “anything and everything is possible and acceptable at any moment.” It’s an attitude that embraces adventure and innovative modes of expression without demanding an outright rejection of established practices. And it represents a kind of openness to the universe that makes the music of composers like Sam and Anthony Braxton so compelling and inspiring. This isn’t to say “everything is good” – curation and self-criticism must be valued for art to be successful – but that a nondogmatic engagement with sound can yield beautiful results. Never mind whether an artist hails predominantly from one aesthetic camp or another. If there is a sound or gesture that is right for the music, do it.

The music that resonates with me tends to be aesthetically adventurous and open-minded, yet tightly curated. I’ll use a few works that were written for me by some of the Wet Ink composers as examples. Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit, for violin and electronics, lives mostly in a world of carefully sculpted noise, but in rare and special moments, when the music needs it, calls on the violin to produce fully resonant pitched sonorities. Kate Soper’s Cipher, for soprano and violin, winds up traversing an incredibly diverse array of musical terrain, from timbral study to art song to psycho-acoustic phenomena, all in the service of a thoroughly logical exploration of language and meaning. Eric Wubbels’s “the children of fire come looking for fire,” for violin and prepared piano, begins with an extremely long overpressure sound on the violin, setting up expectations in the listener about the style and form of the work, which are then subverted as it is revealed that the scratch tone functions as a metaphorical well of sound from which the rest of the highly articulate and virtuosic materials for the piece are drawn. In the case of each of these works, when you pull back and take in the big picture, musical choices that are unexpected or surprising in the moment work together beautifully in the larger context.

Sam Pluta: Portraits/Self-Portraits, performed by Josh Modney and the Wet Ink Large Ensemble. This work begins with a version of Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit scored for violin and ensemble.

A successful performance of multifaceted music like this demands a fluency of movement between strongly defined sonic identities. Another way of expressing that is that the music demands versatility. The idea of versatility loomed large as the ultimate goal of my classical training, the key to unlocking a successful career as a concert violinist. I agree with that in spirit, except that the traditional conservatory approach defines versatility very narrowly as the ability to play in the styles of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy. The idea is that if you can master the techniques required to play those composers, you can play anything. As a teacher, I still think those things are important. The study of classical music is an excellent way to gain fluency in the sounds that the instrument was designed to make, and fluency in the instrument’s primary functions are critical to artistry. But those sounds represent only a small fraction of the tools necessary to thrive as a 21st-century musician.

The music that resonates with me tends to be aesthetically adventurous and open-minded, yet tightly curated.

As a classically trained violinist, I’d like to propose that we expand our concept of versatility on the instrument. What if a new versatility included improvisation, adventurous reinterpretations of antique music, deep engagement with more recent traditions on the instrument, and collaborations with artists on new compositions, sounds, and techniques? Rather than regarding all sounds as extensions of a single dominant practice, let’s treat the established norms of Western classical music as just one of many reservoirs of musical thought in a holistic approach that values many kinds of expression.

Audio or It Didn’t Happen

This is the first in a short series of essays about how sound is inscribed.

It’s a Friday afternoon and the nearby school kids are playing with such ferocity that it seems possible an enhanced interrogation center has sprung up just two floors down from my office window.

Then a loud bell rings. Its waveforms are so thick it’s as if you can see them floating in the misty San Francisco air. The bell is all stately gravitas. Even if you didn’t know that the nearby school is parochial, you’d sense the bell’s churchly vibe.

And then, suddenly, there is silence: Recess has concluded. The bell has marked a juncture. There was a before and now I’m in the after. It’s not utter silence, not the absence of sound, what I’m experiencing now. It’s the sort of silence that traffic and hallway chatter and a neighbor’s music can still, somehow, collectively suggest as silence when the ear is no longer burdened by hundreds of energized children screaming at one another.

I’m struck by the moment. So, I do something that comes naturally to me when something of sonic interest arises. I tweet about it. I tweet about the transition from chaos to peacefulness, summarizing the tonal shift in just under 140 characters.

Shortly thereafter someone replies to my tweet.

Before paraphrasing the reply, it might be easier to first characterize the incident by employing a comparison. Perhaps you’re familiar with the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen.” It’s a not uncommon response when someone posts—text-only—something of interest that seems to beg visual documentation, like if you run into a celebrity (“Jonny Greenwood was at the music equipment shop!”) or buy something snazzy (“I finally sprang for a sequencer module for my synthesizer”) or do something tawdry (“Judging by the mess, last night’s jam session involved too much bourbon, too little music”).

The “pics or it didn’t happen” response isn’t necessarily a literal encouragement to follow up with a document of evidence. It’s a gentle teasing. It’s a friendly social-network admonition in the form of a rhetorical nudge—though, it’s worth noting, virtually no one who ever says “pics or it didn’t happen” would be unhappy if pics did follow.

As for the response I got to my afternoon tweet—the response I have not infrequently received to such a tweet—it was the audio equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen.” Essentially I was asked: “But did you record it?”

That’s a complicated question to answer, despite the inquiry’s brevity. The simplest answer is: no. No, I didn’t record it, not with an audio recorder. But I did record it, in the sense that my tidy, brief, Twitter-circumscribed description was consciously intended to encapsulate it.

That’s how and why I record sound: by writing it, inscribing it—not so much notating it as noting it, unpacking it, coming to understand how it works by investigating how it works.

The matter comes down in part to what “it” is. Is “it” the bells, or is “it” the sound of the bells through the window, or the sound of the kids, or the way the kids and the bells worked in congress with each other, or how the bells masked the more detailed nature of the kids walking back into school from the playground, or how when the bells ended the remaining low-key urban cacophony was still, in its own way, peculiarly placid. That’s a lot of “it.” There was a lot packed into the period of time that passed.

And then again, how much time had passed, how long of a hypothetical audio recording are we talking about? Sure the transition could be mapped from a few seconds of screaming kids to a few seconds of street noise with the bell sequence in between—maybe a minute total? However, the impact of those kids screaming had built up over the hours prior I’d been seated at my desk working—in fact, as an experience, the impact had built up over the years I’ve sat at that desk in that room listening and not listening.

An audio recording might have given some glimpse into what I’d experienced, but no more and arguably less than what I’d been able to summarize in my description.

bird on a bell

Photo: Luke Barnard

And that’s how and why I record sound: by writing it, inscribing it—not so much notating it as noting it, unpacking it, coming to understand how it works by investigating how it works. I do it a lot, sometimes on Twitter or Facebook, occasionally on Instagram (to caption a photo), sometimes in longer essays or reflections—once as an extended series of mini-essays in which I treated everyday sound as something that one might review, much as one reviews a record or concert. Titled “Listening to Yesterday,” the series ranged from birdsong in a toxic harbor to restaurant kitchen noise to the user interfaces of conference call systems.

As I hoped to express in the slightly longer form of those “Listening to Yesterday” entries, the descriptions of sound in my tweets and my longer-form writing aren’t about description, any more than a record review is about description—well, a good record review. My hope in describing sound is to unpack it. It’s about getting inside the sound, sonically and contextually. The best advice I ever got about reviewing music was to give the reader a suggestion about how to listen to the piece in question, what one might listen for. The same can be said—should be said—about writing about everyday sound. (As I write this I’ve become aware of the fact that I’m writing about the process of describing sound on a social media platform whose name is itself a common instance of onomatopoeia.) Writing differs from sound in key ways. Sound is temporal. Writing, especially pithy writing, can happen in an instant, and yet suggest something of any given length. A tweet of a moment’s sound is both briefer than the occurrence and yet capable of suggesting something altogether longer, even timeless, which is to say something not just about that moment but about similar moments—not just that school day, but many school days at many schools, in and out of the mist, with and without bells, parochial and secular, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Sound is temporal. Writing, especially pithy writing, can happen in an instant, and yet suggest something altogether longer, even timeless.

If anything, to reproduce with a recording rather than a description would fall short of my own goals in several ways.

For one, the recording (I have made them) never sounds like what I heard. The ear doesn’t work that way. The ear hears through things, focuses on things, filters out things. That happens in the world as a mix of brain wiring and personal inclinations. Once reproduced as a recording, those varying degrees of attentiveness are flattened: everything becomes evident relative to its respective volume.

For another, if you listened to the recording, you’d likely not hear what I heard—I heard a pulse, but you hear a beat; I heard something soothing, but you hear something antagonizing; I heard children, but you hear traffic. To share the moment in sonic form is to instantiate a Rashomon, to introduce the opportunity for multiple interpretations. My goal in these moments isn’t, generally speaking, to ask what something is; it’s to say what I think it is—and to ask that you say what you think some other moment of sound is.

Finally, my attentive listening in the day-to-day world is almost always a matter of retrospectively acknowledged reflection. That is to say, it’s a matter of “This is something I just heard, and now I will note it down as a means to capture my sense of it.” I couldn’t have recorded it because I hadn’t become conscious of it until it was happening, perhaps even until after it had happened. The only way I could really accomplish what’s asked when someone says, “Did you record it?” is if I had the sort of technology running that Nagra helped innovate, in which I was always recording everything around me, and then at the end of the day could go back to the tape and locate it.

I don’t do that, because recording everything—putting aside matters of surveillance and ethics—is exactly contrary to the reason I summed up the moment in the first place. I’m not looking to reproduce a generality, to document a public moment; I’m looking to hone a specific experience, a private moment.

Congrats to the 2016 Grammy Award Winners

grammy-2016-sq

grammy 2016

Whether or not you caught the glitz, the glam, and the shade-throwing acceptance speeches during the 2016 Grammy Awards ceremony broadcast last night, you still may have missed out on the jazz and classical awards presented earlier in the day. Stephen Paulus’s Prayers & Remembrances (from Paulus: Far In The Heavens – Reference Recordings) was awarded Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Eighth Blackbird picked up Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for their album Filament (Cedille Records), and The Maria Schneider Orchestra’s The Thompson Fields (ArtistShare) won for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. Judith Sherman was once again recognized as Producer of the Year for her work in the classical genre, which included the recording Ask Your Mama, the winner of Best Engineered Classical Album (Leslie Ann Jones, John Kilgore, Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, and Justin Merrill, engineers; Patricia Sullivan, mastering engineer – Avie Records). Best Musical Theater Album went to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (Atlantic).

For more on these categories and updates on all the awarded artists, see the Grammy website.

Listening to Labor in the “Little Cities of Black Diamonds”

Miners from Congo, Ohio.

Throughout this series of posts, I am presenting portraits of people and places of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds region in Appalachian Ohio. Each post focuses on sounds and how paying attention to them can give insight into issues such as labor, protest, recovery, and social life. Recording and carefully listening to these sounds can also suggest ways of bridging between place and creative sound works.

Well Rocks

Workers throwing limestone rocks down a well, Crooksville, Ohio. Photo by Brian Harnetty

Visiting an Independent Gas and Oil Rig:

“You want to get a badass sound, man? Check this out,” says a young assistant working at a gas and oil well drill site. I am standing next to a small opening in the ground, perhaps a foot across. It is a cold December day, and I join an independent driller and his crew to record them as they work on the well. Two assistants fill up buckets with limestone, and the rocks are slowly thrown down the hole. As the rocks descend hundreds of feet, they bounce randomly off the walls of the well. A few seconds later they begin to hit the bottom, and the sounds that travel back to the surface are sharp, percussive, and reverberate through the long tube of earth. “Sounds like a gun ricochet,” says one of the men. “Yeah, or it’s like water,” the other remarks. To me, it sounds like fireworks coming from the wrong direction, and I note that the sounds of the rocks measure the distance traveled into the ground. They send sound waves down and back up, vibrations that we feel racing back out of the hole. Fortunately, nothing else comes up with the sound. “You better stand away from that hole a little bit,” says the driller, “the sparks going down in there may light some of the gas. It might do that, it might not. I heard it yesterday go ‘Whoom!’ before gas fire shot out…”

Workers throwing limestone rocks down a well before drilling.

This drilling site is in a small clearing in the woods. The rig sits in the middle, a 1956 model that is attached to an old truck from the same year. The rig’s appearance looks as if it couldn’t possibly work. Yet it does, and natural gas powers it from a nearby well. With a long hiss, the air is let out of the line and the motor starts. Gears, wheels, squeaks, and cables all conspire to create lurching rhythmic patterns.

The drilling begins. The drill bit does not rotate; instead, it pounds. The pounding is both heard and felt and, from this point on, shouting is the only way to communicate. Behind the rig’s controls, the driller looks like a conductor of a musical ensemble: his rhythmic movements are in tandem with the motor and his many years of experience make his continual adjustments to the old machinery graceful. There are many levers that he is simultaneously operating, allowing him to add an inch of cable at a time to the drill’s length. In this dangerous and unstable environment, I am reminded that he can’t see what is happening below the surface; he is working by knowledge, touch, and sound. The rhythmic regularity of the pounding sonically connotes his years of experience and his control over the machinery. At the same time, variations in the intense pounding tell him what kind of rock he is drilling through and at what speed.

Later that day, I leave the drill site while the men continue their work. As I walk away, the overwhelming sounds of drilling fade into the distance yet are still throbbing in my ears and stomach.

Joshua “Judd” Matheney, Mine Inspector:

“Could I tell you a little story about that?” asks Joshua “Judd” Matheney on a sound recording from the Little Cities Archive. The recording was made in 1988, and Matheney speaks of his family, childhood, and work as a state mine inspector. The sound and grain of his voice reveal his age and regional accent as he recounts his life, and his descriptions of working in the mines are vivid. For example, the sounds of controlled explosions—what he calls “shooting down a hole”—were frequently heard. Matheney also remarks on his experiences as an inspector and of getting along with men and women working in small family mining operations. Throughout, Matheney’s voice is quietly heard on the cassette tape just slightly before hearing it at full volume, a tape “print-through” that has the ghostly quality of pre-echoing his own voice.

Interview with Judd Matheney. Courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive.

Matheney continues his story, and talks about “sounding” the roof of a mine to check for safety:

I went in a little mine up Pittsburgh Holler one day—couple of men working by themselves. And I looked up at the roof and there was just like a circle around it. …I said, ‘Let me have your pick a moment.’ And, uh, I sounded it with a pick, a customary way of checking the roof. And it sounded a little drummy, and I said, ‘Fellas, I believe that’s dangerous.’ …One of ‘em handed me a pinch bar, and I pinched a little bit, and finally got a pretty solid hole. I chipped in, gave a good pry on it, and there was big circle of slate, at least six foot across, and there was this cone shape. …It would’ve mashed those two men easily. …Of course all men didn’t escape them kind of conditions, many men got tangled up with them and lost their lives.

The “drummy” quality of the roof indicated—to Matheney’s trained ear—an unsafe mine. Hillel Schwartz refers refers to this process of tapping the roof of mines as “jowling,” a term used in the UK and dating back to early coal mining there. Matheney’s ability to sound the mines as well as a lifetime listening to those operating them served as a means of not only maintaining mine safety, but also building long-term rapport with miners.

Miners from Congo, Ohio.

Miners from Congo, Ohio. Photo courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive.

Listening to Labor:

Both of the above examples are brief glimpses into the dominant industry in the Little Cities for nearly two centuries: extracting energy in the form of gas, oil, and coal. As I listen in, I am reminded that the workers listen, too, as part of their jobs. For them, listening becomes seamlessly integrated into their routines and keeps them safe, a sonic tool to discern danger. For my own practice, I listen to these archival and contemporary recordings repeatedly and carefully. David Grubbs suggests this process of repetition reveals facets of recordings that cannot otherwise be heard, and can transform them into musical gestures. I focus on the grain and hiss of the deteriorating archival recordings; the machinery and its interaction with the land; the rhythmic and melodic pacing of the workers’ words; and their stories. I pick up on the overlapping cadences of labor and everyday life, and they seep into my own work as I sample and collage them together.

The recordings make audible an unstable and changing past, as Judd’s voice moves forward to meet us in the present. Observing the independent driller of today shows his struggles to survive amid an uncertain work environment and larger corporations moving in to the area. This in turn points to yet another future iteration of the extraction–boom–bust–destruction cycle. I hear the complex tension between labor and environment unfolding over time, and the arc of people’s lives coming and going. I listen to the voices of these people coming together contrapuntally, and also listen for new voices to break this cycle, opening new ways of thriving in the region that are not bound to extraction alone.