Given the recent decline in production, is a year-end reflection warranted? It seems a tad self-indulgent. With so little to bite off—to riff on Shaw, about Henry James—one can become enamored by the sound of one’s own chewing. Should not proportion be considered above all? How can I not be a bit embarrassed, when I look at the “Recent Posts” widget and see “Five Years in the Pit” still on the list? A mere half-dozen new pieces about music; the full version of an already (half-)published piece in The Charnel House, because the journal where it had (half-)appeared kicked the bucket; some fun with site re-design: are these not the hallmarks of decline? The Romans must have been rearranging statues in the emperor’s palace just days before the fall.

I’ve toyed with the idea of making this blog seasonal. Since fall tends to be the heaviest teaching season, and hence the most difficult time to produce new work, it might make sense to do the planting then, and then cultivate and harvest from late winter through summer. A field must lay fallow a time for things to grow again, and that fallow time is deeply productive, even if what is happening isn’t yet visible. But—as my inverted agricultural year suggests—the seasons of the mind are insulated from the weather, and entirely independent of the tilt of the earth (though not of the ear). Better, I think, to let pieces straggle in as they appear, like travelers coming in from a storm, brushing off their coats, stamping their boots.

Not only has production slowed, but reflection comes a month late this year. April is the Pit Stop’s birthday, little as that means measured against eternity. I waited the extra month because I wanted to publish the most recent post, “Elastic,” before calling it a year. This for two reasons. First, since the year started with a longish piece on Ornette Coleman (“Ex Nihilo,” 6.3.15), the two profiles, Ornette and Miles, serve as nice bookends. But the Miles piece also bookends the history of the blog as a whole. Miles was the subject of the second piece I ever posted (not including the blog introduction) way back in 2010 (“Convalescing With Miles,” 4.14.10); and I think that considering these two pieces against each other gives a fair indication of where the blog has gone. This one is a hell of a lot longer—I’m almost embarrassed to say how much. (A note to myself, jotted among my first sketches for the piece: “This is just a tribute, so it doesn’t need to be long!”) “Convalescing With Miles” is impressionistic and personal; “Elastic” puts a greater emphasis on history and analysis. This is not to say that impression and personal narrative/response aren’t part of the new post; they’re still the bricks and mortar of how I approach writing about music. It’s just that they are folded into a piece with a broader scope … even if the seed of it was just to record new impressions of an old, beloved record.

I think the new Miles piece points to something else important, something I’ve mentioned before: that even though I’ve been listening to this album on and off for a quarter of a century, writing about it pushed me to think about it in a new way. It started on a hunch, something that happened in my ear; it turned into a quest, something that happened in language. The quest, in turn, forced me to go back and listen, and listen relentlessly, like I did to Ornette’s late ’50s and early ’60s albums last year. (It was also a great excuse to pick up some Miles records from the ’50s and ’60s I didn’t know.*) Is it silly to think that a music-lover and avocational music-writer needs to find an excuse to listen to Miles Davis? Perhaps. But such is the case. A brief anecdote by way of explanation. As a high school student (zzzzzzzz) I didn’t particularly enjoy English, this despite having had great teachers. I didn’t have the infatuation with Portrait of the Artist budding writers are supposed to (though I did really like the sermons on hell). The early American stuff we did was a painful slog. (“Billy Budd” still is—sorry, Herman, but I’ll take Redburn any day.) Poetry by and large left me cold. Oedipus was eh. Faulkner was just weird. But writing? I loved it. I was reading King, Poe, Barker, Lovecraft. It was only in late college that my eyes were opened to the broader terrain of literature—and this because of my desire to write. Ulysses ripped my head off—I had no idea you could do that with a novel. (I’ll stop there; you can wake up now.) The point is, writing back-doored me into English. And though my roots in music go deeper, I find that writing does the same thing here: it activates me, pushes me to listen more, and more closely, because I want to put my thoughts and impressions together in language. No surprise I added the Jacques Barzun epigraph to my front page (The Rotten Plank) this year. It has been a guiding star since I discovered it. For what I most want is to articulate this thing called music, so as to better understand and appreciate it; and my desire to articulate drives me to listen, annotate, write, and listen again.

In this way—I have argued this before, too—I find that writing about music takes on a life independent of the musical text in which it originated. More: I would argue that it should. There is a point at which listening ends, and revision begins, and through this the ideas begin to reshape themselves, and to coalesce around new ideas that depend, not on the music, but on the ideas themselves, and on the language in which they are enmeshed. Sometimes I do go back and listen to make sure I have not misstated, or gone too far afield, or outright invented—the music is still the text that the writing is ostensibly “about,” that the words are supposed to “reflect.” Other times I don’t bother … or perhaps don’t dare to. By the time the writing has finished creating itself, it must be able to justify itself as a text; it should not need the music to do so. I would rather believe there is something in those brave follies language steers me toward. And I would hardly be the first writer to founder on the shoals of ambition, that darkest of human desires (as the excellent recent horror movie Starry Nights illustrates), sailing my rickety little sloop of musical impressions foolishly onward into this mare ignotum. Such ends hardly matter, measured against the feeling of the wind on my face and the view of the crooked horizon.

I chopped a long footnote out of “Elastic” because it had no platform there, but it does serve as a good concluding example to the foregoing. The following remarkable passage about Miles comes from Whitney Balliett’s The Sound of Surprise (1958). With Davis’s legend secure by the end of the ‘50s, it’s easy to forget there was some ambivalence about his debut, as Balliett reminds us: “His approach consisted of an awkward blotting up of the work of Dizzy Gillespie. He had a shrill, mousy tone, he bungled more notes than not, and he always sounded as if he were playing in a monotone” (127). A decade later, Miles’s evolving technique and approach had gained Balliett’s qualified admiration: “In slow numbers, he often uses a tight, resonant mute and, by playing directly into the microphone, achieves a hollow but penetrating sound, like blowing into the neck of an empty bottle. At the same time, he employs economical, melodic phrases spattered with a good many off notes, which give the effect of his casually twisting the melody—as if it were soft metal—into lumpy, yet graceful, shapes. Davis frequently plays open horn in middle tempos, and the change is startling. Although his tone is still slightly sour, series of fat, delicate phrases seem to round it off. They are reminiscent of a man slowly and rhythmically beating a soft punching bag. Fast numbers appear to unsettle him, for he often relies on a fretwork of empty runs and unsteady spurts into the upper register. But in a medium-tempo blues, say, Davis is capable of creating a pushing, middle-of-the-road lyricism that is a remarkable distillation, rather than a one-two-three outlining of the melodic possibilities; indeed, what comes out of his horn miraculously seems the result of the instantaneous editing of a far more diffuse melodic line being carried on in his head” (127-8).

After six years in The Pit wrestling with all the demons entailed by the phrase writing about music, all I can really do with such a passage is stand back in awe. That last sentence nails something essential about Miles’s whole aesthetic; it is as though the lyricism that precedes it were clearing the brush for this realization. With the exception of Gary Giddins, I can’t think of a writer who even comes close to this. And Balliett and Giddins are as stylistically different as Rollins and Coltrane: one the consummate stylist, sharp, taut, lyrical; the other a polymath and volcano of ideas, his text a dense, allusive tissue. It is remarkable (and a little depressing) to consider the gap that separates them from the “merely” insightful—that is, from all the other great music writers out there. We hear the same thing in music—I’m sure you’ve witnessed this yourself, if you make a habit of going out—when mere talent has the misfortune to share the bandstand with genius. Their work transcends music criticism, as to constitute a wholly separate music. When I read a paragraph like the one above, Miles becomes vestigial, just as, say, Balzac becomes vestigial when I read the work of Roland Barthes. I mean, I could spin that Balliett paragraph on my turntable. I am happy to be excoriated for saying so, to die a martyr’s death for such an outlandish idea. I am sure Giddins would groan, and Balliett turn in his grave, to hear me suggest it. Clearly, it is impossible to conceive of the above passage without Miles—clearly! Impossible! But isn’t this the point of music writing: to create something that doesn’t simply live parasitically on the body of the music, but that can be read, listened to, with a pleasure all its own? That has its own integrity and life and identity and, like a bubble forming on the surface of the sea, eventually floats off, to shimmer in its own beautiful, radiant existence? In the contemplation of beauty we needn’t always scourge ourselves remembering what gave it birth. Just as in my most despairing moments I want to put down my pen and put on a record, so, when I come across a passage like that one, I wonder whether we need music at all, whether words aren’t enough.

*

I can’t end this Piteous reflection without the usual look ahead. As noted in the past, based on my hearing issues, memoir and book review would come to occupy a larger share of the themes on this blog, and so they have. Struggles aside—for that Waksman review (“Dr Heidegger’s Punks,” 4.16.16) there was so much I wanted to say that it became a hydra, and I am a poor substitute for Hercules—you, dear reader, can look forward to more reviews in the coming year.

On a broader scale, the contents of this blog are going to shift, much like those in your overhead bin do during travel. As I finish out my twelfth year at CUNY, I have been granted a sabbatical for lucky year 13. What could be more metal than that? Besides writing as much fiction as I can muster, my plan is to translate, working with my father, a classic Argentine study of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. While I’m engaged in the research and translation work, the blog will become a space to reflect. So, nestled among the usual commentaries and memoirs and strange offerings, expect a combination of personal reflections on Beethoven (under the working title “Letters to Ludwig”) and pieces about the joys and sorrows of translation (no working title as of yet).

Down … down …

* A friend recently asked me why on earth I still buy CDs. He doesn’t even have the technology to play them anymore, as I suspect is true of a lot of people. For a belated response, see the “addendum” I am posting, together with this end-of-year reflection, at the end of “Three-Legged Dogs” (8.21.15).

Dear J.E.,

I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment you made in an email a few months ago. Right before signing off, and after some typically ear-opening remarks about music, you wrote (ahem): “Am I blogging now? Just wanted to share some of what goes on in my head while I listen to music. It would be nice to blog on jazz, but there are so many far more knowledgeable folks out there writing with more depth on the subject.”

I must have suggested to you at some point that you start a blog, and I took the above to be your answer. But—perhaps unjustly—I read something else in those words … something that left me with a strong desire to respond, and in responding, to clarify a little what I’ve been trying to do here. This year’s end-of-year reflection seemed like a good place to do it, especially since this one marks half a decade of activity, and some seventy-five posts about music.

“Why blog?” was the question I asked myself back in 2010, in the Pit Stop’s inaugural post. Some of what I wrote then anticipates what I am thinking now. Here is the most relevant passage: “Why should I [emphasis added] write about music? I’m not a musician, at least not a very good one. Nor am I a music historian or musicologist, so my ability to analyze music and put it into any sort of meaningful context is severely limited. With whom, then, beyond a small circle of friends, would I share my thoughts? […] Enter the blog. The blog seems like an ideal space, to borrow Gunther Schuller’s pun, for musing. In many ways, the blog seems not so different from writing for a circle of friends, even as that circle is necessarily much wider. In a blog I don’t feel like I have the pressure to craft something finished, to speak as an academic from a fortress of authority, to contribute anything to a field. I don’t feel that I have to account for what has already been said about (say) Miles Davis, or Bela Bartok, or Tool. Hell, I don’t even have to have a goddamn thesis if I don’t want to (though I will certainly try, good little academic writer that I am). In fact, a more questioning, probing, personal, intuitive approach might be welcome in such a context, and even more likely to elicit comments and suggestions from the combination of idle browsers and occasional experts who cruise these blogs (this being the CUNY Academic Commons). It might even be that such an approach is warranted for writing about as slippery a fish as music.”

Clearly, I intended to have my cake and eat it too. On the one hand, I would do my best to take this project seriously—and so I have. On the other, the blog would allow me a leeway not granted to academic writing—and so it has. Even more, the last sentence dares to suggest that a lack of expertise, a looseness and multi-prongedness of approach, a somewhat different set of assumptions and expectations, might actually be an advantage for finding ways to speak about what is generally regarded as unspeakable. Alas, precious few experts have braved The Pit to chastise me for such a thought. But more on this presently.

At my orientation in graduate school, the poet Jackie Osherow said something that has stuck with me ever since: grad school was the place where we had the opportunity to test our ideas—you know, the ones we always have flitting around inside our heads, but that often disappear before we can communicate them, or even grasp them. Writing forces us to try to articulate, fail, try again, re-think, re-process, revise. More than recording thought, writing helps create thought in and through the process of articulation. The blog has been wonderful for precisely this reason: it has allowed me the opportunity to work out—to test, in Osherow’s words—ideas about music. The more I write and revise, the more the ideas evolve, resolve themselves, deepen; I am forced to rethink, and re-listen; I become a better thinker and listener in the process.

And yet, we both suggest that blogging is somewhat different from mere writing, because it implies sharing with a broader community. Whatever ideas I am working out, I am working them out before some ill-defined public. Two comments. First, developing a “public” voice has always been part of writing. Writing implies audience and distance, even of the self to the self between two points in time. Second—and this follows from the first: that public, however hazily-imagined or however much a mirage, does serve to raise the bar. Osherow’s words imply as much, for the place where our ideas were to be tested was the graduate-school community. If I’m not crafting something finished, it still has to be finished enough; I have to be prepared to own it, to account for it. I have found that, immediately after I hit the “publish” button on the blog, I go back and edit a piece one last time. It’s that moment you step out of doors and, suddenly, find yourself reflected in the gazes of passers-by. A public, imaginary or no, forces us to perform, to meet expectations, the way any social activity does. Language is one of the chief places that happens.

A blog, then, is the place where you “share what’s going on in your head while [or before, or after] you listen to music,” just like Gary Giddins, or Charles Rosen, or Lester Bangs share what’s going on in theirs.* Yet, the fact that you don’t have Rosen’s or Giddins’s or Bangs’s heads, ears, or words seems to have stopped you from wanting to share what you do have, at least outside of the occasional email. Now is probably a good time to address in greater depth the question of “knowledge,” or expertise, which I take to mean a combination of the technical (harmony, theory) and the historical, combined with either a broad awareness of music, or a deep engagement with one or a few genres.

I don’t mean to sound either glib or arrogant. Or perhaps I do. But … what makes my observations equally valid to Giddins’s, or Rosen’s, or Bangs’s, or yours, is that I had them, and Giddins and Rosen and Bangs (oh my) and you did not. (Or, sometimes, did: e.g., it was thrilling for me to discover that Giddins, too, had something to say about the incredible swing of the second movement of Beethoven’s Opus 111 sonata. Sometimes, the pleasure is in seeing our own thoughts reflected back at us.) Perhaps “equally” is too strong a word, too full of bravado. Or perhaps not. Giddins has doubtless heard much more music than I have—at least, much more jazz. But Giddins’s archaeology of tastes—a term I have used several times over the history of this blog—is utterly different from mine. Ergo, I bring a very different ear to, say, Ornette Coleman than he does. I do not hear Coleman the same way; I would venture to say that we hardly hear the same musician. Not that I don’t have much to learn from his Coleman; I do. Might he have something to learn from mine? And then I bring my Coleman to music Giddins would likely never care to listen to, much less write about. If I can articulate—try to articulate—my Coleman, the way Coleman reverberates not just with the music I have heard, but with my entire cultural formation … who is to say that won’t touch off, in the deep magic of language, reverberations in some other listener, like me, unlike me, about what makes Coleman their Coleman?**

What did the poet who said that Lester Young “plays melodies as if they were dreaming about themselves” know about jazz? Perhaps he knew a great deal. Perhaps he knew next to nothing. Can you tell me how much Lester Young he had heard, or whether he could tell a Texas tenor from a Windy City one, or whether he could spell a B-flat diminished chord? And yet, this line tells me more about Young’s playing than any harmonic analysis I could muddle my way through. It works because it touches off an almost obscene number of cords in my brain; it changes the way I hear Lester Young, and other jazz musicians besides him. The point here is absolutely not to write off theory (about which the little I know, I love), or replace knowledge with some half-baked ideas about poetry. It is rather to expand and diversify and honor the languages we have for touching, for thinking about, for processing music. It’s for phrases, thoughts, sentences like that one—sometimes theoretical (if I can grasp them), sometimes cultural-historical, sometimes metaphorical—that I search in my reading, sifting through hundreds of pages for those nuggets of gold.

And you, my friend? How many jazzheads in their forties listened to Manowar when they were fourteen, and then went on to became acid-addled prog-fusion freaks, and then got into Latin American and Afro-pop, etc., etc.? “Archaeology of tastes” is actually too static a term for the way we listen. I like the image of layering; but since my contention is that all the music from our past continues to influence the way we listen to the music of the present, something more dynamic is called for. Suggestions?

Am I blogging now? Yes, quite clearly I am. I’m never not blogging, in the broadest sense of thinking in words with the intention to revise and share them, and using the internet, when appropriate, as a medium to do so. So, my friend: Listen to the words in your head as much as to the music. Share them. Test them. Remember that our generation, the monstrous afterbirth of the rock-‘n’-roll one, was supposed to be predicated on the idea that we’ve all got something to share. And then along came the internet, one big intellectual mosh pit. Hallelujah! So what are you waiting for?

To the death,

Helldriver

*

As per usual, a few thoughts about the last year’s output, which, like year four’s, was a little scant. No reason to seek forgiveness from the blog-god; blogging has its rhythm, and it appears to mirror that of the Bx19 bus on 145^th Street: three or four in rapid succession, then like forty-five minutes without. Might as well walk. No use complaining, either. It is what it is.

I find myself saying that more the more I age: it is what it is. One thing that does strike me as I look over the last year’s work is how references to aging have come with increasing frequency. I’m not sure what to make of this. Oh, yeah: I’m getting old. That must be it. It is probably also due to my hearing loss/distortion, which has confined my listening for almost two years now to certain genres, instruments, and ranges, and forced me to process other music in new ways, when I can process it at all. My first year out of the city I kept up a blistering schedule of concert-going. But the distance, combined with the hearing problems, put an end to that. Live music has become something I do occasionally instead of twice weekly; I am confined mostly to recordings, or to retrospection and reflection. Locked away like Beethoven in my head, but without the gift of his mental ear, etc., music has become more reminiscence, more language. But then that has been one contention of this blog since its inception: that writing, far from simply being parasitic upon the music, enjoys a certain autonomy. Anyway, I think this is one reason the idea of an archaeology of tastes has remained so attractive: as music becomes more and more a matter of memory, so the different genres and concerts and recordings and listening experiences compact against each other, blend with each other, speak to each other, like the bodies in adjacent graves in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.

Before I sign off from what is already an overlong fifth-year reflection (but hey, five years, woo-hoo, cohetes and pitos), one that threatens to overwhelm rather than supplement the year’s production (it is, after all, a reflection built on top of a reflection, and with only seven or so posts in the interim), I should throw out a line to the other half of this blog, that strange beast entitled The Payphone Project, which, half-asleep and probably a little hungover, I thought up one morning at some city café. I’m coming to feel that, post- the original couple of theoretical posts, the shorter the text, the better; I have even gone back and pruned the later ones; they might need more pruning yet. I do not know what the future of this project is, or whether it has already exhausted itself. I just know that, although it does have a use-by date, it needs a rounder number to feel complete, and, when that number is reached, and the theoretical and aesthetic ends do seem exhausted, I will abandon it to float in cyberspace, blissful, Buddha-like, and return entirely to music, at least until such point as some other fetid idea occurs to me, in some fetid café, on some fetid morning in the fetid, fetid future.

* It seems to me that one hallmark of internet communication has been an evolution toward increasing brevity, informality, and quasi-communality. Maybe the best thing about the advent of social media, just as the movies were maybe the best thing that happened to the novel, is that they allowed blogs to evolve for purposes other than mere news-sharing. For those of us who grew up with and (more important) cling to print media, or to the practices and mindsets of print culture, a blog can be what it was originally marketed to be, i.e., a mechanism for self-publishing … albeit one still hobbled by the habits begotten by the on-line environment.

** And anyway, knowledge and depth come from years of experimentation in the crucible of language. How much of his earlier writing does Giddins disdain? Did you know that Rollins disowns, or at least claims to be disappointed by, almost every solo he’s ever recorded? I’d love to believe that every post, every bit of writing, is a stop along the pilgrimmage toward a mecca of understanding—this no matter how flawed is each bit, no matter how jagged or roundabout the trajectory, and no matter how endlessly deferred the goal. Thought isn’t static; we keep revising it, hopefully, toward some greater depth over the course of our lives, or abandoning it for something else, with that same stupid faith that appears every time the words start flowing, and disappears every time they stop. In the rearview—to be incorrigibly Emersonian about it—maybe it will look like a straight line.

Ah, work, work, work. Groan, expire, reanimate, groan again. The life of a property owner. Pools of blood to be drained and refilled, iron maidens to scour of clotted flesh, eternal fires to stoke and bellow, darkbulbs to change, visitors to mulch, dung to fling. The man-eating hogs have to be slopped, the man-eating cows milked, the coop of the man-eating chickens swept and aired, the seeds of the man-eating plants sown. The vile trees, each and all ceremoniously hugged.

And in the midst of all this spring cleaning, re-no-va-tion!

You’ve probably noticed the rotten plank I’ve laid across the mouth of my pit. Don’t worry—no gag this plank, the pit still sings. But about your fall: it may be inevitable, yes; but once the renovations are complete, my hope is that you will have a choice as to the barbed spikes on which you land. You may, that is, hurtle into one of two nether regions: the Realm of Noise, which contains all materials categorized under “What I’m Listening To”; or the Realm of Silence, which, inaugurated last month, will contain everything associated with The Payphone Project.

Needless to say, the work is dangerous, passers-by hardly protected, “accidents” common.

But how else to fill the pools?

I know what you’re thinking: “You complain about all the work you’ve been doing, but thus far in 2014 you’ve abandoned the pit. You eked out a March post by one day, and on an entirely new theme. What gives? Why have you forsaken us?” Aye, reader. Guilty as charged. I have been pulled hither and yon by one thing or another. A long project, pit-worthy, even pit-relevant, was sent screaming into the world in early March, though I had intended for it to be done by the beginning of the spring semester. Then there was the matter of promotion materials to prepare—what can I say, I’m tired of the first circle, I find the virtuous pagans dull guests and abysmal hosts, all they talk about is living-in-desire-without-hope. Blah, blah, blah. I think I’ve accomplished enough to get bumped down to the fourth, possibly fifth circle—I’d love to work with the wrathful and sullen, knocking them on the heads with a bean-pole while they gargle and stew. I’ve heard tell that a white whale lives in this circle, swimming round and round its Stygian perimeter, and of a man named Ahab (Ay-hab) staked screaming to it; and of one Ethan Brand, who wanders in a vast ellipse, returning as regularly as a comet, where the road to Dis is cobbled with the kiln-cooked hearts of unpardonable sin …

Meantime, my virtuous pagans can muster nothing better than an unpardonable belch. Then they laugh like donkeys. They pick their teeth, too.

And then there is the matter of my hearing, or not hearing (e.g., “Reflections of Orrin,” 10.6.13). This will become a post in itself, eventually, as there is much to be said about it—not to wallow, of course, lest I be hit with my own bean-pole. This doesn’t mean the Realm of Noise will go quiet, though the last few months might suggest as much; but the content will shift somewhat, as it had already started shifting last summer. Concert and set reviews will become more rare, and will probably focus on musical epiphenomena when they do appear. There will be more commentary on readings about music than about music itself. But that’s for the future future; there are at least a dozen posts at various stages of completion to finish and get up, including that ever-belated magnum opus on Domenico Scarlatti, which, with a little diligent work, may finally see the dark of pit this summer.

I can hear enough old music in my head to keep writing until the end of time.

So, as for the desert of the last few months, take heart: the pit is coming a-dead again. As anyone who has kept a blog knows, this blogging thing is not for the sprinter. I was a miler in college—that’s water, not land—so I get pacing, timing, splitting to within a few tenths of a second. And if I ever start to flag, I scroll through some recent posts on Tony’s Thoughts, admire the vastness of his archives, and put my shoulder to the wheel again. (I don’t know what the man eats, but it clearly has fiber, and vitamins to boot.)

As I have contributed less in the last several months, so I’ve surfed the Commons less as well—much to my regret, as the Commons continues to grow, and its musical offerings have expanded. Doing my year-end review provides an excuse to catch up (and spring break gives me a smidge of time to do so). The GC Music Program Community Portal is a go-to site—and when you do go-to, make sure to have a calendar handy, as you will find lectures and conferences and concerts, oh my, more than enough to addle the brain and sully the ear of the most committed CUNY musicophile. Maybe even more exciting is the nascent spinoff Open Music History Project, now in its prodigious infancy, and seeking contributors. Helldriver, whose corpse putrefies before the collective knowledge of CUNY’s music scholars, can never aspire to be more than a reader. But readers have their demands. Let him down, dear scholars, and it will be your flesh he scours from the iron maiden next spring.

Have you seen Dean Reynolds’s series of posts about winter Jazz Fest? A hearty kudos to Dean for busting his hump to finish out those posts with the semester full-on—trust me, I know how hard it is to juggle—and for the insightful comments about the music, musicians, crowds, and venues. I look forward to catching more as he catches more live music in NYC. Besides Reynolds, there are two other ethnomusicology grad-student bloggers, one a writing fellow at Baruch and a horn-player for the Rude Mechanical Orchestra—yes, the groove that has kept your spirit and mine up at any number of protests—the other interrogating the “ethno” in ethnomusicology, among other things, at the wonderful Mu-sing-ing blog (love the story behind the name). A fourth grad student, in theory (not the student; the subject), has posted a series of papers that fly swallow-high over my head. Rounding it all out is the Sonic Cinema course blog, where enrollees post their pre-presentation thoughts on noise and information. Attali’s Noise beckon from my bookshelf. All in all, music writing of all stripes is flourishing on the Commons, making this reader feel at once warm, fuzzy, humbled, and well-fed.

Ach, Helldriver. The least you could do is provide url’s for the above. You could turn them into links, so that people can click on them and be taken to the blogs you mention, and so really do your bit for the Commons community. Your text is a stony, linkless soil. True, vile reader, true. But then I have an argument about hypertext, a perfectly self-serving, self-justifying argument. It goes like this: I am reading on the internet. The paragraph I am reading contains several underlined words or phrases to signify they will link me to another page by clicking on them. They are like whirlpools; my eye is drawn to them, sucked down into them; my finger automatically wanders to the mouse or link, clicks. What becomes of the surrounding text? A channel, a funnel to draw me toward the hypertext, and no more; when I click again, I will no doubt find more hypertext, and so on, and so on. Results: Death of the materiality of the sign. Destruction of the living texture of language. Conditioning to not see the signifier, to move past it rather than examine it, listen to it, celebrate its materiality. We might not call it reading at all: an eye that glides and pokes without ever really looking, a mind that wanders without ever really thinking. Hence my cri de coeur: no hypertext, never, not in the pit, no.*

Well, okay. Here you are: helldriver. Go ahead, click on it. It didn’t work, did it? Frustrated? Try again. Click harder, like you’re speaking to a foreigner as though he were deaf. C’mon, push your finger into the screen—beat that mouse! Working? No? Ha! Ha! Take that, internet! Take that, virtual world!

* And then the specious argument—which I think is passé at this point, since hypertext fiction died the ignoble death it deserved—that such texts allowed the reader to exercise creative authority. Please. It was never anything more than a more sophisticated form of manipulation. Sophisticated is maybe the wrong word; in hindsight, it appears quite crass and mechanical. My understanding is that these texts died in part because of the rise of actually collaborative, evolving texts, such as on Wikipedia and social media sites. This seems logical, and begs a bit more discussion. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes about the way a reader’s eye and mind dip in and out of a text, skipping here and there, though never the same bits twice (hence the pleasure of re-reading). Does hypertext create a particular “grain,” to (mis)appropriate Barthes’s term, in internet reading? Or is it rather a break, one that yanks the reader entirely out of the text? It depends, I guess, on how we define and limit the text: by author, or by reader. In a sense, the reader’s text is a newly-collaborative text created via the circuitous routes of his or her desire. This is marginally more creative than the hypertext fantasies of the ‘90s, since, although the reader doesn’t really contribute, his or her maze is still collectively assembled, and the reader-writer line is culturally more fungible. Anyway. When Helldriver feels snubbed, he writes things like the above.

Time again to wander through the well-stuffed graveyard of my literary ambitions, whistling as I go, bending now and again to re-read inscriptions, I, patriarch of this obscure family of stones, one such yard among many thousands, some long-ago abandoned, some barely able to keep up with their parade of dead, some of a rare gothic beauty, so that, like the Recoleta in Buenos Aires, they draw millions of visitors annually to leave flowers and pinwheels and scrawled messages for the departed. In these graveyards the stones never weather, even the most ancient engravings are still legible, and even the oldest flowers smell as though they had been picked this morning. The pinwheels never fade, though neither do they turn. And the stones cannot be overturned, and the ground neither heaves nor settles, and the graves will not be robbed. If a stone disappears, it takes the whole graveyard with it, and leaves not a trace—for what stone can claim the memory of the vanished yard itself, of a lineage, a house, a clan?

I am patriarch, but also gravedigger and stonecutter. I make memorials; this is my chief occupation. Custody may be shared with Mother Experience, but the stones are all mine. This arrangement pleases me. The children pass away so quickly, you see. But the stones, the stones remain. I find them very companionable. And if the graves are never robbed, there is good reason: there is nothing to steal. These stones are as much cenotaphs as the marble tablets in Whaleman’s Chapel. Says Ishmael to the reader, about the bereaved: “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”

The bodies—the music of experience behind each of these stones—are similarly lost at sea, in depthless Time; they survive only in the inscriptions, in the fantasy the latter create that a body is buried somewhere beneath. Dig as much as you like, your shovel-blade will never strike a coffin’s hull. If indeed Ishmael’s body was “but the lees of [his] better being,” then what price resurrection? Resurrection be d—-d! As for Faith, I’ll put mine in those marble tablets, or rather in the words cut in them. Aye, Helldriver, Ishmael’s happy fate is thine, as it is all of ours: “a stove boat,” says he, “will make me an immortal by brevet … [through] a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.” Faith may be a jackal, but the poor creature starves here—the mere idea of death is not enough to sustain him. It is the inscriptions, only the inscriptions that sustain me; I hope and fear that they are my true substance; my eternity, dear Ishmael—like yours—is anything but speechless!

*

Wandering among the year’s stones, I suppose the first thing to note is that the Pit has diversified—not in theme or purpose, of course, but in style and form. Scott Burnham, in the marvelous final chapter of his 1995 book on Beethoven, calls for rethinking the way academics in particular talk about music.* While I can’t really blame Burnham for my own evolving approach to writing about music, his words do remain a touchstone and an inspiration. (Perhaps professors of music should be more careful what they wish for?) Overall, there is more in the way of creative dialogues with music—more fiction, pastiche, parody—more play—than in the previous two years, though these remain scattered among the more traditional reviews, cultural analyses, personal reflections, and thoughts on pedagogy.

I also wanted to take a moment to clarify one aspect of my process. I’ve noted that I sometimes revise and post older pieces. Now, if an event is involved—usually a concert—there is always a lag between experience and text, usually a few weeks, sometimes more. Sometimes, I work the lag into the piece, as in the year between the show and the post that became “Animistic” (5.18.12). Sometimes, a concert review becomes part of a longer reflection on a genre or band, or I’ll wait a few months and bundle some shorter reviews in a single post. Some pieces, like my by-now-mythical post about Scarlatti, have been in draft form for going on two years; I keep turning back to do more reading and listening; I dread the monstrosity it threatens to become. The point is that I only call attention to something as a revision if it was actually finished and drawer’d before this blog was launched back in 2010.

“Year of the Oh” (3.6.13): In an earlier draft of this post there was more about gender and ethnicity in jazz. A very interesting discussion a couple of weeks back about women in heavy metal prompted me to reflect. If one calls too much attention to an individual musician’s gender (or ethnicity, or whatever), it smacks of tokenism. If one overlooks it, one ignores the very real disparities that still exist, in jazz as much as in other genres. How then to balance drawing gee-whiz attention to (say) gender, and ignoring it entirely? Perhaps I was thinking about this catch-22 when I decided to cut (more likely I was just concerned about length). What makes Oh’s situation particularly interesting is that she is a threefold anomly: in terms of gender, ethnicity, and choice of instrument. I hardly had to face such a dilemma writing about Kazzrie Jaxen (“All That Is Solid,” 12.19.12): disparities notwithstanding, women have been a deep presence in jazz piano since the ‘30s, and Jaxen, bright and wandering star though she is, stands on the shoulders of that tradition, as well as the traditions of classical and avant-garde piano. Anyway, later at the same venue, though not during the same discussion, someone commented that in indie rock, the (electric) bass was one instrument it was “okay for girls to play.” Given Oh’s obvious and deep debt to rock, do we have this obscure rule of music/genre/culture to credit for her evolution into bass-playing bipedalism—and perhaps for the presence of other female bass players in jazz as well?

Reviewing some previous jottings, I actually came across a page of notes I had missed about the Soundscapes Vanguard show. The details are useless now, but the thoughts they prompt about the role of the bass in jazz and other musics might be worth mentioning. Because of its pitch and usual place among the rhythm instruments, the bass is always present, but not always heard—something I alluded to about William Parker’s playing in “Two Free Jazz Epitaphs” (12.7.12). It reminds me of something Tobin, the priest, says to the unnamed “kid” in Blood Meridian: that he’ll know the voice of God has always been present when he stops hearing it.** This is the bass: the Voice that keeps the stars aligned and the planets on their respective axes and orbits, though we only really notice it’s there when things go to hell. It’s the reason Hendrix played so much cleaner with Billy Cox than with Noel Redding: Cox, the Voice, keeps Jimi on the straight and narrow. Redding was but a slovenly demiurge. This is also why a great bass solo is such a show-stopper: if you’re actually going to hear the Voice, you need the quiet of the church; the rest of the music has to stop, or nearly stop, and this creates a space that doesn’t exist for the other soloists—even for a soloist who plays an unaccompanied set. A great bass player knows how to exploit that silence, to frame him or herself in the contours of the sound that precedes and follows.

From reading Charles Rosen’s companion to the Beethoven sonatas, I learned that the beginning of the Opus 2 No. 3, which I noted gave one of the young pianists at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition difficulties (“Closer Than They Appear,” 8.4.12), is “famously awkward to play”—which tells me a little something about the presumed hierarchy of virtuosities. And then just the other day I had the chance to see the marvelous 1998 film about Svatoslav Richter, The Engima, at the Walter Reade. There, Glenn Gould calls Richter “one of the age’s great musical communicators.” Unlike a Paganini or Liszt, who made the act of performing apparent to the listener, Richter used his “enormous personality … as a conduit” between the music and the audience, allowing them to focus on the music itself rather than the performance. This is fairly close to what I was trying to say about the Hungarian pianist Bogdan Dulu in the same post, using Emerson to do so. Emerson or not, I could hardly have said it with anything approaching Gould’s authority … or with that smarmy erudition, in what sounds suspiciously like a ‘30s Hollywood “British” accent.§

Finally, about an old, old post: I was listening to the Eric Dolphy/Booker Little Memorial Album the other day—this is the third installment in the Five Spot recordings, the quintet also featuring Mal Waldron and Eddie Blackwell. Listening to “Booker’s Waltz,” I realized something that had been a bit of a mystery for me when writing about Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” (7.26.10). There, I commented on the enjoyable effect produced when the accent from the drums comes a fraction of a beat before the bass. What I realized from “Booker’s Waltz”—and the same holds true for many if not all jazz waltzes—is that it’s a 2-against-3 rhythm with the two swung.§§ I guess this is what I meant when I said that some of the things that are fascinating and mysterious to a listener may be common practice to the musician.

It’s always fun to make such discoveries oneself, though I confess that, when I started this blog, I had rather hoped its place on the CUNY Commons would mean the occasional itinerant music scholar might wander by, sniff, squat, defecate, and pass on. (“A flatted fifth? Are you sure you don’t mean a flattened fifth? A squashed fifth—like a cockroach?”) Perhaps my good humor constipates them.

As long as we’re talking about graveyards, I should take this opportunity to chisel a line about two Commons yards abandoned or vanished: Footenotes and Librarianship in Lower Manhattan. The latter tossed the occasional asphodel into my Pit; many thanks for the recommendation of Chris McDonald’s book on Rush—it now occupies a happy place on my shelf between Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire and Steve Waksman’s This Ain’t the Summer of Love. I hope the bibliographizing project goes well. As for Footenotes, obviously an enormous hole has opened in the Commons, like those gluttonous sinkholes swallowing homes all over Florida. I hope that with our collective hard work and goodwill we can manage to fill it. I promise to do my part, in the same manner I have always filled such holes: with prayers, slurs, cries, expletives, screams …

* “Rethinking music through the notion of presence and consciousness allows us to disturb the processual, cumulative standpoint to which we have grown so accustomed. If we can thus attenuate the valuation of process, we will be less inclined to read a composer like Schubert as the negative half of a binary opposition, as “process-minus,” or Beethoven simply as “process-plus.” Instead, we will ask why we value the presence of any given music and how we are present in the experience of that music. This is more difficult to do than it may seem, for the attempt to thwart current academic discourse is not to be construed as a refusal to think, in favor of some “be here now” haziness, a “dumbing down” in order to encourage emotional groping—it is rather the challenging business of talking about why music matters to us as something more than the occasion for a specialized branch of academic study. Indeed, this is the most difficult thing to do: although we all understand that music is vitally important to us, we do not yet possess a discourse equal to that understanding.” (Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.) Perhaps “discourse” could be pluralized?

** “When it stops,” said Tobin, “you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. At night, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears the grazing?” “Don’t nobody hear them if they’re asleep,” said the kid. “Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?” “Every man,” said the kid. “Aye,” replied Tobin. “Every man.” (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

§ Or, as I have learned, a “cultivated Canadian accent of half a century ago.” See Mark Kingwell’s wonderful description of Gould’s voice in Extraordinary Canadians (the Gould chapter is currently available on line).

§§ If you tap out a 2-3 polyrhythm and then let your two-hand lag a little, you will hear this. You can work up to this by counting triplets for each three, and then, instead of tapping the two-hand directly between the second and third beats of the three-hand, tap two-thirds of the way through (on beat 3). In other words: ONE two three one two THREE one two three in the left hand, ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three in the right.

I came to the internet because I wished to write deliberately: to drive life into a corner, stun it with a few well-placed hammer blows, slit its throat, hang it from a hook, and gather up its blood in buckets; to slurp the marrow from its split bones, and mill its flesh into language; to prance about wearing nothing but a skin of words, without any neighbors around to point or phone the authorities. So I built my little cabin in this hollow in the CUNY woods, beside not a pond, but a tarn—a bleak, black, stygian tarn, in whose still waters I see my cabin reflected. There are days I step into the tarn, confusing the reflection for the reality. I feel a downward suck, and know the tarn could swallow me in one cold gulp.

No House of Usher mine, though. Slapped together out of old plywood and salvaged pine, my cabin is hardly taller than I, affording me nothing more than an escape from the elements, a space to store my few worldly possessions, and above all, a hiding-place from R.W.—which is to say, from the world.

R.W.! Little did I know by how long He would outlive me. And now I am in hell, and He in some other woody place He no doubt calls heaven, and we never have occasion to see each other anymore. I admit, I do sometimes miss hearing His voice, calling to me—H.D., H.D., come out and walk with me—; and some days, when the wind whistles through the chinks in my record albums, I imagine I can still hear Him. Sometimes I turn up the volume on my headphones, my version of the wax in Odysseus’s crew’s ears, until I have blotted Him out. Other times His voice is irresistible.

Maybe it’s just loneliness.

My cabin may not look like much, but you should see it from the inside: piled high with records, and cassettes, and compact discs, dirt floor to slat roof. They act as second walls, although from the inside it’s easy to believe them the walls themselves. Up, up from my humble headquarters through the stovepipe chimney my little antenna burrows, beaming my signal out to the world, just as the chimney does the smoke from the cooking flesh of my victims. For here in my cabin, I am just one more node in a noisy global conversation.

It’s why I never let R.W. inside: He always thought I lived a Spartan life, dressed in a hair shirt, knelt to pray on broken glass. Had He found out otherwise, He’d no doubt have felt betrayed. And then He never would have invited me over anymore, and I did so like Lidian, her home cooking. One does tire of beans, beans, beans. But R.W. was so easy to fool, I almost felt bad about it. I do love Him; you just need to take Him with a great big grain of salt … which is to say, a grain will not do.

And how would I survive without Him? I am poaching on His signal, His soil. It’s not even password protected. How could it be, with His ridiculous philosophy?

It’s true, I do raise beans and meaty fruits here beside my cabin, in this fetid viper’s nest rank with death, where nothing lives but as the shadow of itself. And so I have learned to content myself with shadow-beans, and shadow-fruits, until I can’t tell the difference anymore: drop the prefix, and one comes to believe Lidian and R.W. are the real shadows. They—the beans and fruits, I mean—come up early as my thoughts; I blood them generously from bucket and trough, coax them along, harvest them when they seem ready, which is about every few weeks, if I am diligent, and not too distracted by the other business of life. As with any noxious swampland, the task of clearing and draining it was difficult; but once your labor has redeemed you, the soil is that much more venemous for it.

Did I mention that the land on which I built my cabin is part of something called “The Commons”? Leave it to R.W. to come up with such an idea. As if it didn’t all belong to Him anyway!

Nor did He ever tire of reminding me that I live on His property. Then again, because I’ve chosen the coldest, darkest corner of these Commons to live, I might as well be the exclusive proprietor—be R.W. Himself! I ask no permission to build, plant, or hunt; I have all the privacy and dominion of a king in his hunting grounds. Visitors are rare—who would want to come to such a dim, dank hollow in such an otherwise beautiful country?

And who are these rare visitors? I don’t really know. They hardly ever come within easy shouting distance—probably they are afraid of breathing the pestilential air, perhaps of contracting some obscure infection, of becoming mere shadows themselves. And then there are the carcasses I leave in a ring about a mile away, as if to suggest a predator of unimaginable voraciousness that had claimed my hollow as its hunting ground. Not surprising, then, that no one has ever approached me while I’m outside … and all the moreso that the occasional few dare to sneak up and slip a note under my door. There is the footloose Mr Foote, an itinerant tinker; he occasionally still braves these cold, swampy lowlands, waves his stick at me from a distance, not menacingly. I, less often, wave back. Sometimes an old friend sneaks through, and finding me occupied—and knowing my feelings about being interrupted in my work—slips a note under my door. Others I see less often, or from a yet-greater distance, or only from behind. Their names escape me, if I ever knew them to begin with.

I myself do get out sometimes—not often enough, perhaps. I may pay a brief visit to Mr Foote, or Mr. Picciano, out tending his garden every day, a better man than I. When I do go out walking, I am always startled by the number of abandoned properties I come across, and by the number of new, as-yet unlived-in homes as well. It makes me wonder why the newcomers don’t simply squat in the existing structures. Not that there is any problem of cluttering here, mind you. These Commons are so extensive there is hardly a place they do not reach—from the brilliant hills of Appalachia, to Scotland, Italy, even China.

But then I remember days out walking with R.W., pointing to a hill in the distance and saying, There? Your property ends there? And He would smile that cryptic smile, and say, No, past that. Just a little ways past that.

There are strangers who pass through the Commons too, of course: the occasional honest traveler, some of whom are not afraid to stop and visit, have a cup of birchbark coffee with me, talk music—all other subjects leave me dumb as a stone. Droves of salesmen, too, lugging about their coffin-heavy suitcases—I chase them away, waving my machete, howling like a berserker. But there are strangers and there are strangers. It took a long time before I realized that some of them were spies, lurkers: Pinkertons of a sort, scabs by any other name. Just the other day, I surprised one peering through the window of my cabin. Unfortunately, while giving chase I stubbed my toe on a bucket of blood, and by the time I was able to recover myself he was long gone. I did, however, find a small bundle of papers that he must have dropped in his flight, which I brought into my cabin and, under the light of the single bare bulb, set to reading. It turned out to be a report of sorts, addressed to one Dick. It read, in part, as follows:

Dear Dick:

Spent another day browsing the CUNY Academic Commons, as per your request, for heretical, satanic, blasphematory, and otherwise morally turpitudinous material. Can confirm your suspicion that the site is a cesspool of sodomite-coddling communists. Social programs, drugs, organic food, bestiality—it’s all here: the whole domino tumble from secular humanism to tax-and-sex slavery, I mean, it’s horrible, Dick, just horrible. Should be a sign that says “Shower After Browsing.” Am more concerned than ever about what our Godfearing young adults are forced to “think critically” about.

Am particularly disgusted by one site, called “Helldriver’s Pit Stop.” You’d think the name would speak for itself, but it’s actually worse. A general tone of mocking the Creator. Seems like the only way author can make a point is by using foul language, or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Author claims atheism, but seems obsessed with religion—you know, the typical secular hypocrisy. And talk about worshipping false idols! […]

It went on like this for another six or so pages.

Luckily, I also found a card among the papers with said Dick’s full name and address. Rest assured I have set about amending the language of the report. Oh, not so much, really—a few corrections here and there … a little more attention to … ahem … word choice. I only wish I could be there to see what happens to my unnamed Pinkerton when the amended report arrives.

*

Ever since reading the comments from two visitors of apparently evangelical orientation on Tony Picciano’s post about Michele Bachman’s gaybashing last July, I’ve wondered to what extent the Commons is trawled for soundbites by the minions of the religious right. It probably should have occurred to me earlier—after all, CUNY is the home of the dreaded Frances Fox Piven, bitch Eve of the American fall, and her imps canker the campuses of Sodomanhattan and the Gomorrahs of the boroughs. Ah, to be an educator in a time when education itself is considered radical! And so I must admit a vague disappointment at not having become (at least to my knowledge) the target of someone’s righteous anger. Why isn’t anyone commenting on my suspect morality? Why isn’t anyone except my neighbor (my actual, physical neighbor) telling me I’m going to hell? Not that I have any interest in seeing the sainted crosshairs around my mugshot. But an outraged comment or two would really be a shot in the arm. It would be a whole lot better than the spam, spam, spam, spam, spam …

Ah, Helldriver, expurgate thyself. The virtually unlimited nature of virtual space hath made a blatherer of thee. Secretly thou cravest the editor’s bridle and crop.

Pray tell, what editor in his or her right mind would allow me to end anything with the sentence “And then I woke up”? Any of you who have not felt such an urge at one time or another, feel free to cast the first stone … but wait until you have your own blog first!

Blather aside, this is supposed to be an end-of-the-second-year roundup (and, very much in the spirit of my namesake, I will allow my two years to bleed into one). Over the last year I didn’t post quite as frequently as I’d have liked—only 15 posts, as compared to 24 the first year. But it would be incorrect to say my output has dwindled, since the average length per post has increased. Conclusion: I humiliate myself less often, but at greater length; where once I apologized for writing 2,500 words, I now gleefully plop down 5,000. To be honest, I didn’t expect to spend a month writing an article-length post about Anthrax. Summer is one thing, but during the school year? O, how I look forward to the next few short-and-sweet posts …

But to the past. Regarding what Brian Foote called the “sartorial duties” of bandleader Ron Carter (“No Tie-Picker He,” 6.20.10): when I saw Carter last fall at the Highline Ballroom, the whole band (he, Mulgrew Miller, and Russell Malone) were wearing matching rainbow ties. Since this was right around when the legislature was set to vote on marriage equality, I took it as a statement. I actually missed the beginning of the set, so for all I know Carter might have mentioned it.

I got a chance to see Fred Hersch’s trio again at the Village Vanguard this February; the last time Hersch played there, I was so moved by the Sunday night set that I was compelled to write about it (“Double Time,” 8.16.11). I must have been trying to reproduce the experience—knowing full well that such experiences are not reproducible—because I chose to go on Sunday again. He played some of the same tunes, including the same encore—yes, the encore I made such a to-do about last August. Overall, though, it was a very different set: low-key, playful without being rambunctious; a winding down of the week’s residency rather than its apotheosis.

As I continue to plow through the BFI anthology Early Cinema, and after listening to John Zorn’s comments in the documentary Put Blood in the Music (which I don’t recommend unless you’re a real big fan of Sonic Youth), I’m almost ready to start thinking about reconsidering some of my points in two separate posts, “On Bands” (8.5.10) and “Silent Movie” (3.25.11). Some of Zorn’s comments focused on the way television, cartoons in particular, have changed the way he (and his generation) think about musical structure. Since this is not a matter of correcting or rethinking a point or two, but of making a whole new argument, my comments will take the shape of a whole new post. By writing this paragraph, I’m sneakily trying to commit myself to get to it before next April.

I’m sure I’ll have things to say about “Glee Metal” (3.17.12), the second of two Tolstoy-length posts about metal, once I’m a little further away from it (besides the amusing fact that Candlebox is playing the Gramercy Theater next month). As for the first (“Burned-over,” 8.3.11), two points. (1) The July 2011 unrest in England—and similar unrest over the previous months in EU stepchildren Spain and Greece—suggest that it was a bit myopic of me to dismiss “defuse anger at the state of things” as a cultural catalyst. My broader point, though, was that rather than making a sweeping gesture at the recession and then pointing a finger at “angry” music, we need to be careful about arguing the connections between history and the evolution of aesthetic forms. In this regard, the recent popularity of ‘80s metal needs to be considered according to a wide range of determinants, many of them purely aesthetic: the dissemination of elements of heavy metal’s musical discourse into a variety of other genres; many young bands’ open admissions of debt to their ‘80s precursors, now lumped together with “classic rock”; the growth of the nostalgia industries, which seem to have moved on to the ‘80s after turning the ‘70s into a stripmined moonscape; and the propensity to read musical kinships through the lenses of irony, kitsch, and retro-. Once we’re done talking about all this, then maybe we can talk about the economy, racism, etc.—but again, specifically (e.g., Scandinavian black metal and right-wing nationalism). (2) My assertion that thrash metal evolved into a more progressive style between its inception and its demise (roughly 1983-1990) needs to be complicated. I think a closer look would reveal various strands of change, from the more progressive to retro-punk, alternative, and industrial, as metal bled into surrounding genres and vice-versa, through the convergence of audiences accommodating themselves to the new, more aggressive sound, and metal growing to accommodate a wider audience. In terms of my point in “Burned-over,” this means that, with Infected Nations, Evile is recapitulating a certain strand of the genre’s evolution, but not the genre as a whole.

Finally, ever since reviewing Best Music Writing 2011 (1.9.12) I’ve wondered whether I wrote a Trojan horse against affirmative action. Not my intention. My point was that it should not be the responsibility of a “best of” anthology to reflect all the nuances of the historical (musical) moment, but rather to showcase as diverse as possible a range of great writing. An anthology’s not a university … Enough! or Too much.

*

I sometimes wonder how the hell I ended up with a doctorate in English. I was never the Smiths-loving high schooler with the soul of a poet. Portrait of the Artist did nothing for me, except for the “horrors of hell” sermons. I don’t think I finished Billy Budd. Bo-ring. Crime and Punishment, what a drag. And all this despite having really great English teachers. (Take heart, all you teachers out there, and remember Helldriver when you are losing patience with your students.) My first two years of college I was a physics major, and I kept on taking science courses as electives after switching majors. But there was something else I was doing the whole time that served as a thread linking everything together, and keel and rudder for wherever I happened to be going. I came to literature through a back door, figuring that if I wanted to write, I should have a better idea about how the craft had been practiced in the past. I had somehow managed to get a B.A. in The Writing Seminars with only three straight-up lit classes under my belt. (Do the seams show? It’s all homespun.)

With music, the story is somewhat different. I grew up with it all around me. But the trajectory has been similar: wanting to write about music has opened doors I would otherwise have been disinclined—whether too scared, lazy, or just too preoccupied with other things—to open. Writes Jacques Barzun: “Perhaps it [music] must be talked about if it is to give its devotees full measure in enjoyment and significance.” Or, perhaps it is the desire to talk about it, to articulate and find meaning in what we hear, that predisposes us to apply our emotional and critical faculties most fully.

Amid the offal and carrion.

I can’t climb out of the pit, but I can climb high enough up the sides to get a pretty good sense of the lay of the land.

Some days I can’t find the sides, so I just jump up as high as I can, like I’m in a crowd watching a parade. Except that I’m alone, and so far as I can remember always have been.

By jumping, I can see for a moment above the perennial mist, around my dim environs. This combination of jumping and climbing allows me to take stock of where I am, what I’ve done; for with darkness, as with light, space is also time, a record, a history of space traversed.

Somewhere in the pit there’s another pit, a deep dark hole to which I find myself irresistibly drawn. There may be several such pits-within-pits; I’m never quite sure what direction I’m going, and so I’m never sure that I haven’t stumbled onto the same one. For all I know, these pits may have their own pits, and so on, mise-en-abyme, as the French say.

All over the pit—I mean my pit, the pit where I live—in every direction, are words, words, words. Piles of them. Warm, rotting heaps of them.

As I happen across them, with my pitchfork I pick up the words, carry them over to a hole, and dump them in.

I spend a lot of time—I spend most of my time—finding and dumping words. Or so it seems. Like space, time is difficult to judge here. But most days it seems like I do pretty much nothing else.

So the words are everywhere, and it seems like no matter how many of them I try to get rid of, there are always more. Sisyphus, you know what I mean, right? And Ixion, you too? (Pablo: thank you for these words; I do not plan on returning them.) Nor does it seem possible to fill the hole, or a hole, any hole, as was my intention when I started this project a year ago, believing (naively, so naively) that if I kept dumping words into them, I would eventually hear them hit bottom, and not long after see a sort of hillock nudging up toward the edge, until in time I could walk over the wordfill where the hole had been, and stamp it down with my feet, and clap my hands, and do a little dance, and clear my throat, and move on.

But the words all disappear without a trace. Sometimes I think I hear a bit of an echo, but probably I’m fooling myself.

And so a sound pines away after an image enamored of itself, the one never able to grasp the other—a myth that captures the essence of the absurdity of this project.

We’re all better off embracing the absurd. So I toil on. Holes must be filled.

*

I think it was some guest on Charlie Rose said, “How do I know what I think until I read what I write?” Writing is a means of coming to know ourselves … and perhaps even more, of creating and re-creating ourselves in the flux of experience. Writing about music is no different in this regard, since by attempting to discover, define, and describe the object, we inevitably loop back to the self. Writing these posts, as I noted at the very beginning of this project, is a means of personal and cultural as well as musical exploration. I’ve tried to keep a balance among the three, and to use each to illuminate the other.

A few themes jump out at me. A big one is music as vehicle for transcendent experience in the secular world. I know, that’s big, cheap, and old, but there it is. I mean, this blog is being written by someone who once asked his parents what the plus signs were on top of all those buildings. Or maybe that was my sister. Same diff. Not much religion going on in my house when I was growing up. Lots of art and music and science and technology. So, music as a way to get in touch with something larger than the self. Nothing supernatural here, just a personal/universal vibe: memory, emotion, community, biology, the intuition of deep structure—you name it.

Second, the idea of excavation, of an archaeology of tastes, is all over these posts. I’m interested in the way the different kinds of music we listen to at different periods of our lives, and then return to, intersect and end up speaking to each other.

If you’ve read more than few posts, you also might have noticed that I tend to write about stuff I really like. I’ve never really enjoyed the nasty broadside. Something about that if-you-don’t-have-something-nice-to-say injunction. Incredible, but even the savage atheist has a rudimentary concept of morality. The internet seems to cultivate the weird sadism behind public stonings. Yes, you’ll find criticism from time to time, always with caveats and qualifications and addenda. But like I said, I’d rather spend time thinking and talking about the music that excites me. If I want to stone something, I’ll bring a bag of rocks down to Trump Tower … or better yet, up to Albany. Now’s the time. Wanna come?

(Sorry about the questions; it occurred to me many months ago that the blog, the internet itself, has murdered rhetorical questions, but foolishly I keep asking them.)

As a relative novice to the blogosphere I am unsure about blog netiquette. I sort of assume it’s the height of rudeness to comment on one’s own post until someone else has done so. Instead, I thought to use this anniversary reflection (a neologism: metablognitive) to post a few addenda and corrections to the year’s work … with more sure to follow next year.

About “Convalescing With Miles” (4.14.10), I think Joshua Redman put something I was trying to say there about Miles better than I ever could: “It’s like you couldn’t have written it better, but you couldn’t have written it” (in The Jazz Ear, p. 131). Only … he said it about Rollins!

About “Bands, Very Large and Very Small” (8.5.10): Here is Whitney Balliett reviewing a big band performance (in New York Notes): “every instrument was essential, the massed sounds proved new melodic and harmonic points, and a majestic aura was achieved” (30). Ouch. That’s a comeuppance if ever there was one. Not the majestic aura so much, but “the massed sounds prov[ing] new melodic and harmonic points.” In case I tried to repress it, the wall of tenors at the recent Brad Meldhau concert really drove the point home.

Regarding “Modern American” (12.2.10): Where to begin with my cringing re-reading of those snotty assertions in the first paragraph of this post? That I went to hear Papo Vasquez a few months back and his decidedly Latin pianist blew me out of the club? That Bebo Valdez plays nothing like his son, and I could listen to him (Bebo) all day? That I put on “Autumn Leaves” on Somethin’ Else the other day for the first time in years, listened to Hank Jones’s patient, mysterious, singing right hand, and thought, “Who needs a left hand?”

I should acknowledge the recognition of the diabolus in musica in “Black Sabbath” (“Deulogy,” 1.4.11) came from a long-ago conversation with the old roommate of a friend of mine, a brilliant, reclusive black-metal fanatic named Ian. For a while I would call up looking for my friend, get Ian on the phone instead, and end up talking to him about All Thing Metal (ATM) for upwards of an hour. (And if you happen to find a stray word of yours worked into the piles around my pit … that means I was listening, note-taking, as Virginia Woolf put it, for some future revision.)

Finally, I am always moved by the spectacle of those deeply appreciating the music they hear, which finds its apotheosis in dance. Conversely, I am probably overly impatient with those who are bored or distracted. (I am probably overly impatient with bored and distracted people in general. I don’t get boredom; I don’t think I’ve ever been bored a moment in my life. I’m sure I’ve feigned it now and again, to fit in.) With regard to “Contrasts” (1.22.11), then, I have been meaning to apologize for some time now—not for the updated version, but for the initial one, which was available for a full week before I thought to edit it. Now, if you knew what the hell I was talking about, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog at all anymore. Which makes this apology, like all apologies, pointless and self-serving. Ah well. All I can do is try to do better, though my moral learning curve always (or rather never) runs up against the asymptote of my ego, as big as the parabolic mirror on Mount Palomar. (Yeah, I know, an asymptote is a line. Whatever.)

I may be evil (after all, “I am man”), but I’m not a bad person, I don’t think. Not that bad, anyway. Like Twain said: Bigger than a breadbasket. Smaller than an elephant.

Some words apply to literally everything.

*

Much to come. Beethoven and Brahms and Bartok and Domenico Scarlatti, a roundup of the spring’s Town Hall concerts, Ornette and Monk, Irene Schweitzer and Branford Marsalis, Django Reinhardt, Evile and Judas Priest, flamenco and salsa. And all these interspersed with comments and reflections on whatever else musical the city happens to throw my way between now and next March in its constant cultural shock-and-awe campaign, some to get posted immediately, some deferred until I have nothing else immediate on my radar, and some to float in limbo …

And, of course, dozens, hundreds of new posts about Rush … but all of them hoarded until December, like every studio does with their Oscar contenders, when I can stand on the landing at the top of that winding staircase and say, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr Foote!” … and then come sashaying down those stairs, and into my second major Academic Commons award.

Hotels on Boardwalk! Champagne with Fay Wray! Right to organize, right to strike!

Some comments on previous posts, together with my finally getting around to reading The Metaphysical Club this summer, prompt the following reflection on writing about music:

That whatever pleasure or profit is to be gained by it arises out of failure. You can never hit the bull’s-eye, the music. (There is no bull’s-eye.) But you have to shoot at it anyway, have to make believe it exists. (The words can help you do this.) You can’t write without it, without making out of that absent center a positive presence. It’s a target, but not a goal, for the writing remains something other. Anyway, the richest place is not in that unreachable center, but in the surroundings.

And after you’ve been shooting for a while, you realize that you’ve never listened quite so closely before.

*

Since this is such a short post, let me take a moment to mention a few recent updates (or lack of them) in the design & function of this blog. (1) I mentioned before that I was going to try to change the comment filter so that I don’t have to pre-approve comments. The site is currently set up so that, once the commenter’s identity has been approved a first time, there is no secondary approval needed. This seems fair, and particularly given how many “comments” are spam about selling shoes or chronic depression, I’ve decided to leave the filter as-is. Please just bear in mind that, if it’s your first time commenting, your comment won’t appear until the next time I visit the site and approve it; and if you don’t say something at least semi-specific (that is, a bit more than “your blog is very interesting” or “this blows”), I’m going to assume it’s spam. (2) I finally figured out what widgets are, and so have redesigned the side column a bit. There is a monthly archive; it seems like there are now enough posts to warrant such a thing. The links section is under construction, so you should see new links and new categories added over the next month or two. (3) As for tags—categories under which I can file certain posts to help the reader navigate the blog—more in a few months, when I figure out how to actually make them appear (if, that is, the design template, which I intend to keep, supports them).

Why blog? I’ve asked myself this question more than once. I’ve started and abandoned a couple of blogs already … if creating the space and then never even posting counts. They’re still floating around cyberspace like the corpses of astronauts. (Apparently cyberspace is littered with such corpses. Not a very encouraging factoid for the novice blogger.)

So maybe the better question is, Why NOT blog? Lack of time, lack of patience for working on the computer. But above all, because I’ve never been one for occasional writing. Blog entries give one the impression (at least the illusion) that they were composed on the spur of the moment, and then just as quickly disseminated. To beat the dead horse: gobs of information, a variety of available perspectives … but little space or time for reflection or synthesis.

So. A few months back I was strung out on some bad medication and pretty much all I could do was lay around and listen to music (boo hoo). I’d always thought that, given the amount of energy and resources I expend on music, I should make more time to write about it. God knows I go out and hear enough of it, living in New York as I do. I treat my iPod like the fetish object that it is. I take time over winter and summer breaks to do some reading, unstructured though it might be, about music. I must have something of it in my blood, too, since my father is a conservatory-trained pianist, and I grew up listening to him play, and to my parents’ robust record collection, which my own penchant for collecting mirrors. And then I did take that lovely Writing About Music course as an undergraduate, and have gone so far as to design my own … but more on this later.

Then again, why should I write about music? I’m not a musician, at least not a very good one. Nor am I a music historian or musicologist, so my ability to analyze music and put it into any sort of meaningful context is severely limited. With whom, then, beyond a small circle of friends, would I share my thoughts?

Enter the blog. The blog seems like an ideal space, to borrow Gunther Schuller’s pun, for musing. In many ways, the blog seems not so different from writing for a circle of friends, even as that circle is necessarily much wider. In a blog I don’t feel like I have the pressure to craft something finished, to speak as an academic from a fortress of authority, to contribute anything to a field. I don’t feel that I have to account for what has already been said about (say) Miles Davis, or Bela Bartok, or Tool. Hell, I don’t even have to have a goddamn thesis if I don’t want to (though I will certainly try, good little academic writer that I am). In fact, a more questioning, probing, personal, intuitive approach might be welcome in such a context, and even more likely to elicit comments and suggestions from the combination of idle browsers and occasional experts who cruise these blogs (this being the CUNY Academic Commons). It might even be that such an approach is warranted for writing about as slippery a fish as music.

All this is not to say I won’t work at crafting what I want to say. I’m a compulsive reviser; any and all worthwhile thoughts generally arise through revision; and so, true to form, I will compose all my entries on Word, and then sit on them for a while before uploading.* Among other things, this means that the title of my blog category—“What I’m Listening To”—is bullshit. A more accurate title would be “What I Was Listening To a Few Weeks Ago.” (The title does preserve the illusion of spontaneity that makes the bloggable blogworthy.)

So. My doctor told me not to make any important decisions while I was strung out on those meds, but I went ahead and decided to start a blog anyway. This means I can always blame the meds if I go ahead and abandon this one, too.

As to what sort of entries I will write: As someone whose understanding and appreciation of music is largely intuitive or emotional rather than analytical, they will quite shamelessly delve into personal narrative—that intimate relationship between music and memory—and the role of music in shaping personal and cultural identity. As such, this blog is partly an exercise in self-examination and cultural analysis (as all personal narrative is). Second, they will rely heavily on those tried-and-true crutches of music writing, image and metaphor. And finally, as someone with an evolving literacy in a variety of musical genres (rock, jazz, classical, flamenco, and Latin), and some familiarity with the persons and recordings who/that have shaped these genres—and as someone with at least the rudiments of music theory haphazardly taught to him in the distant past—I will not shy away from either historical or musicological speculation when it seems warranted. Above all, and whenever possible, I will try to be shamelessly exuberant (for, as Blake said, “exuberance is beauty”), and will occasionally make unwarranted, peurile exclamations of like or dislike for some musician, band, piece, or composer. (This is a blog, after all, no apologies are necessary.) All this to say: Don’t expect very much light from this blog … but do enjoy the heat, while it lasts.

There is a second reason for this blog, really an afterthought, but one which, I hope, will be an added incentive for me to keep it going. A couple of years ago, a colleague and I developed a sophomore-level English elective called Writing About Music. It was inspired by and partly based on a course of the same name I took as an undergraduate. That course was developed and taught by Dr. Jonathan Spitzer at Johns Hopkins; his assistant was an Australian whose full name escapes me (his first name was Greg; in some Borgesian alternate universe he would certainly discover this blog). It was probably my favorite class I took as an undergraduate, and I was happily able to get back in contact with Dr. Spitzer and model our course on an updated version of his, including his marvelously extensive bibliography. Anyway, one way I thought to get students writing about music was to have them keep a listening diary in the form of a blog (in their case, through a Blackboard site); and what better way to encourage students to keep such a diary than through example, for better or worse?