Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

– Ansel Adams, in a letter to Cedric Wright

Hat tip to Amy Lesko at the Beauty Dialogues

In my last post, I wrote “One of the many interesting things about being alive in this particular day and age is watching the gap between science and spirituality grow smaller.” That seems to be turning into a theme - here are two more articles on the subject that I stumbled upon in the last couple of days:

• this article from the University of Wisconsin-Madison summarizes a study about the effect of meditation on the brain:

[T]he study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

• this article by David Brooks takes a more wide-angle look at trends in neurological research that are pointing to the physiological bases of mystical experience:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.

One of the many interesting things about being alive in this particular day and age is watching the gap between science and spirituality grow smaller. As scientific inquiry begins to probe the nature of the mind and consciousness, it’s starting to stumble upon concepts and ideas that hitherto had only found voice in spiritual teachings, particulary those from the east.

I won’t try to say much more than that, as this video of Jill Bolte Taylor speaking at the TED conference says far more than I ever could - and much more eloquently. Taylor is a neuroanatomist who had the rather startling experience of studying what was happening in her brain while she was having a stroke. It’s about 19 minutes long, and well worth it.

UPDATE: I’ve had to turn on comment moderation for this post due to astroturfing. I have profound respect for Dr. Taylor and her work — I can’t say the same for the marketing folks working for her publisher.

Too good not to share…

If you were to think of the creative process as being akin to athletic training, what might a typical workout routine look like? Robert Genn offers an idea in the latest edition of his Twice Weekly Letter (well worth subscribing to, if you don’t already):

• Find a sanctuary where you can comfortably work.
• Dedicate at least two hours a day to your art.
• Have more than enough equipment and supplies.
• Set short- and long-term goals and keep track of progress.
• Think of your work as exercise, not championship play.
• Explore series development and exhaust personal themes.
• Work alone with the benefit of books and perhaps tapes.
• Replace passive consumption with creative production.
• Use your own intuition and master your technology.
• Feel the joy of personal, self-generated sweat.
• Fall in love with your own working processes.
• Be forever on the lookout for the advent of style.
• Try to be your own person and claim your rights.
• Don’t bother setting yourself up for rejection.
• Don’t swing too wildly and damage the well-being of others.
• Don’t jump into the ring until you’re feeling fit.

Of course, workout routines are not one-size-fits-all, but this strikes me as a pretty good way to start.

I’ve been practicing more classical music lately, specifically the piano music of Maurice Ravel of which I have long been a fan (in fact, it was nearly the topic of my master’s thesis in college). I’ve been starting with Le Tombeau de Couperin and Jeux d’Eau, both of which are probably a bit too ambitious for me at this point (especially the last movement of Tombeau - forget it!), but I’ve been in love with these pieces for years, and it’s nice to finally get my fingers into them and see how they work.

It’s also been very encouraging because up until now, I couldn’t even begin to play these pieces; now I can start to get through them and I’ve been surprised at how quickly I’ve been able to make sense of some passages that seemed impossible at first. The first movement of Tombeau (pictured here) is a good example. I remember taking a look at it some years ago, and I couldn’t make it happen at all, even at a slow tempo. My left hand just wasn’t agile enough to play the 16ths, and the fourth and fifth fingers on my right hand weren’t strong enough to handle the grace notes in the second and fourth bars. Now, it’s challenging but definitely do-able. I’m certain all the work I’ve been doing with Hanon has helped a great deal - the first few exercises focus heavily on building strength in the fourth and fifth fingers (one more vote for Hanon!).

With Jeux d’Eau, the title of this post is especially apropos. There are some passages that are forcing my hand to stretch out farther than I would have thought was reasonable for someone to expect of a pianist. My hands are pretty big, so maybe I’m missing something here. I doubt I’ll be able to get this up to tempo anytime soon, but the sounds and textures of this piece are really amazing, even when played painfully slowly as I currently do, and it’s nice to get an inside look at the guts of something I’ve been listening to and admiring for years.

This is turning out to be a good complement to my Hanon work. It’s getting my fingers into unfamiliar positions, which can only improve strength and agility, and it’s having the effect of making my jazz playing feel easier. After spending a bunch of time trying to execute the notes Msr Ravel wrote, I get to take off the straight jacket and play the notes that I want to play. It’s very freeing.

It’s not clear to me whether this is just a passing phase, or if I’ll continue to delve deeper into the classical realm, but I’m just going with the flow for now. I’ve loved this music for years, so it’s gratifying to know that I might be within reach of actually playing it for myself, and not just listening.

Note: this is part of a series of posts chronicling my efforts to play through Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises. The series begins here.

After a pretty long haul, I’m finished working on exercise #4, and I’m moving on to #5. This is not to say that I can play #4 absolutely perfectly — that’s more of a lifetime goal — but I can play it cleanly enough at the maximum recommended tempo that I think I’m ready for the next challenge.

Besides, I really need to let this one go. #4 leaned heavily a 4-note figure that seemed deliberately to emphasize the weakest fingers in my left hand (the 4th, 5th, and to a lesser extent, 3rd). I sometimes feel like these exercises were written to mess with my own personal deficiencies.

Part of the problem was that when I tried to play that figure, the other fingers in my hand were moving involuntarily in response to the weakness, making the overall motion anything but clean. It was as though my poor, weak 4th and 5th fingers were crying out for assistance, and the other fingers were waving about, trying to assist but unable to reach the area in need. Meanwhile, I could only watch God-like over the whole spectacle and gently remind my thumb and forefinger that the pinky and ring fingers were on their own for this one. There was nothing we could do to help — this was something they had to work out for themselves. Poor things.

It took a lot of focussed, careful work at excruciatingly slow tempos to retrain and strengthen my fingers, but eventually it paid off. There’s still work to be done, of course, but for now, it is enough. And, as Philip Toshio Sudo says in Zen Guitar, we’re only interested in as much technique as we actually need.

And how do you know how much technique you actually need? That’s a difficult one to answer with any sort of conviction, but in this case, I’m saying I’m done because:

• I can play the exercise at the top tempo a few times in a row without missing notes; and,
• I’m not flailing: I can play the exercise at the top tempo and still have control over tone and dynamics

Is it absolutely as clean as it can be? No. Are all of the notes perfectly even? No. Am I going to stop asking myself questions like I’m Donald Rumsfeld anytime soon? I’m not sure. I think the point is that I can play this thing well enough to move on, and my playing is probably better served by my moving on instead of obsessing over the details of the current exercise.

And so, I move on to exercise #5. And what do I find?

Lo and behold: it features the same damn 4-note figure that gave me so much grief in exercise #4.

Like I said, sometimes I feel like these things were written to mess with me personally.

There’s a good discussion going on over at the Propellerheads user forum (it’s password-protected so unfortunately I can’t link to it). It began with one person describing how he was having difficulty completing a piece of music he was working on because he was “obsessing over the tiny details”. The responses varied widely - some argued that when you’re stuck, it’s best to let go and move on; others said that details were the most important part so they must be obsessed over; one person even confessed an inability to complete anything because he gets too hung up on the fine points.

For anyone who’s ever embarked on any kind of creative endeavor, this probably sounds pretty familiar. It points to a fundamental problem that all artists have to grapple with at some point:

How do you know when you’re done?

The fine-tuning process is potentially endless - there’s always something you can tweak - so at what point do you allow yourself to stop?

If you’re working with a deadline, the question gets answered for you. Deadlines can be a real pain in the ass, but in this area they’re a godsend because they give you an out: come hell or high water, you must let go, call it day, and let the piece walk away on its own two feet. That can be uncomfortable, especially if the piece still strikes you as being rough around the edges, but it does release you from the potential black hole of tuning and retuning every last detail. And even if the piece still sucks, you can send some of the blame to the “unreasonable” deadline you were forced to work with (and they’re always unreasonable, aren’t they?).

Without a deadline, it’s up to you to answer the question for yourself, and this is when Perfectionism quietly sneaks in through the back door.

Perfectionism is both beauty and beast. The beauty is that it can help drive you to make your work the very best it can be. The beast is that you can get lost in a sea of details, and either continue working on the same piece for the rest of your life, or admit defeat, drop the piece you’re working on and move on to something else…whereupon you repeat the same pattern and eventually end up with a bunch of work that’s all about 90% complete. Neither is a pretty story.

If we’re honest, I think we’d also have to admit that our flirtations with Perfectionism give us a little bit of an ego boost as well. When Perfectionism is in the room, we get to play the role of the obsessed artiste, refusing to compromise on even the smallest detail of what will surely be our masterpiece. We get to show the depth of our craft by pointing out microscopic details that are not quite right and therefore destroy the integrity of the entire piece. And we get to show our unwavering commitment to our Art by refusing to release our work to the world until it is Absolutely And Completely Perfect. Now, please: leave me to suffer with my work.

It’s a good story, and a fun scenario to act out, but I don’t think it necessarily leads to a healthy and productive process. In truth, I think it’s just our old friend Procrastination, in yet another one of his disguises. And it’s a good one too: as long as we can find things wrong with our work, we have an excuse not to finish anything. (Crafty old bastard…)

So the question remains: how do you know when you’re done? I don’t think there’s a single answer that will be applicable to everyone, but I think the solution lies in finding a healthy relationship with Perfectionism - definitely invite it in, but don’t let it overstay its welcome. To help find the right balance, you might ask yourself a few questions:

• Is this the right time for Perfectionism? It can be a great asset when you’re fine tuning the details, but any sooner than that, it’s probably a liability. When you’re just riffing on some new material, or taking some existing material and giving it some shape, Perfectionism can be a very stifling presence. Best to send it home and tell it to come back later.
• Is the piece still moving forward, or has the law of diminishing returns kicked in? Are you fixing details in one place, only to find flaws elsewhere, and fixing those flaws causes you to find flaws in the area you fixed earlier? Some of this can be productive, but it can quickly degenerate into a Perfectionism feedback loop. If you feel like you’re stuck in a repeating pattern, it might be time to wrap it up and move on, or at the very least, walk away from the piece for a while and come at it with a fresh perspective.
• Is it time for a second opinion? It’s often very useful to have a fellow artist that you trust take a look at what you’re doing and see what he or she thinks. Ideally you want someone who won’t candy-coat their reactions to spare your ego, nor offer mindless criticism to help inflate their own. I’ve sometimes found that I don’t actually need the person to say anything - just having someone else in the room helps open up my perspective on what I’m doing.

It’s a delicate dance: how much is too much? Based on my own experience, I would argue that it’s better to err on the side of too little obsessing rather than too much. I’m sure many would disagree with that, but I’ve found that there is a lot of value in finishing, even if it’s not “perfect”.

Finishing gives you a sense of accomplishment, and I think you’ll find that this bolsters your confidence the next time you sit down to work. The very act of bringing a piece to completion, in whatever state that’s in, teaches you a number of lessons you may not even be aware of. It’s a little mysterious how it works, but finishing one piece makes it a little easier to finish the next one.

When you declare a piece finished, you start to create a little distance. As time goes on, and as your work goes on, those details that you had been obsessing over start to become a little fuzzier, and don’t seem to draw quite as much attention as they used to. This is not to say that you no longer see flaws in your work (just about everyone can find something wrong with something they’ve done) but the incessant buzzing of those flaws fades into overall music of the work as a whole, and they’re no longer the distraction that they once were. When you look back on the piece, months or years later, you get a nice feeling of “I did that,” and you’ve picked up a little more wisdom and a little more confidence that will serve you for as long as you continue making things.

I think that’s a pretty good payoff for simply letting a few details go.

(Note: this post went through numerous drafts and rewrites, and I still feel like there are a lot of things that should be fixed. *sigh*)

Like many musicians with home studios, I’ve gradually been making a shift in recent years to software-based recording tools. Gone are my 8-track reel-to-reel, 16-track mixing console, racks of outboard effects, and various keyboards and sound modules; most of that same functionality is provided by the small laptop computer that I’m typing on right now.

The shift to this new way of working has not been entirely smooth. I’ve spent a good deal of time learning and configuring the new tools to create what (to me) feels like an optimal workflow, and I can’t say I’ve been entirely successful. As much I love the tools that I work with regularly (primarily Ableton Live and Propellerhead Reason), I still find working with them to be a little on the clumsy side.

I had been assuming that the problem was that I wasn’t used to the system, or hadn’t yet discovered the right configuration of the tools I was using. But after reading this white paper from the Project Bar-B-Q group, I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone:

It is the considered opinion of group participants that the instruments and programs for making digital music universally suck.

And that’s the just the opening sentence.

I should point out that the group that produced the white paper are not a bunch of Luddites who can’t handle the fact that the world has changed. The participants of Project Bar-B-Q are “hardware developers, software developers, audio engineers, composers, and tech executives.” In other words: the folks that manufacture and use all this stuff for a living. If they’re having problems, it’s not too surprising that I am too.

In an article accompanying the white paper, Spencer Critchley provides a good illustration of the problem. He’s trying to record a simple song sketch using a drum loop and an electric guitar:

Next, I needed to change the configuration of my digital mixer so I could monitor the prerecorded track while I added the overdubs—one of the most common tasks in any studio. I won’t name the brand of my mixer, but other owners will recognize the following torturous procedure, which is from a cheat sheet I keep handy:

Select Monitor>Source. Choose 1/2. To choose each channel to be monitored, press Param View, then select Shift-FX/Aux Send. Press F1–F4 On/Off. Choose Pre-Fader for channels to be monitored but not sent to Master. Choose Post-Fader for channels to be both monitored and sent to Master. (Turn F1–F4 off to scroll left-right, then back on.) Use the Value Dial to scroll the value in the upper right to 1/2. Use V1–V4 to set the level of the send going to 1/2 (that is, monitor send level). Set faders to Off on channels not to be sent to Master.

…not exactly what you might call “intuitive”.

Thankfully, their brainstorming did not degenerate entirely into an unabashed bitchfest, but instead revealed exactly what the underlying problem is. Most digital instruments, in their assessment, work directly against the idea of flow, a term coined by creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced, according to the article, as “chick-sent-me-HIGH”) has spent his career studying artists and athletes who have experienced what is sometimes called “being in the zone”, and which he calls “flow”. Critchley distills Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of flow to the following six characteristics:

1. You are completely immersed in what you are doing.
2. Concentration is very high.
3. You know what you have to do moment by moment.
4. You have very quick and precise feedback as to how well you are doing.
5. Your abilities are stretched but not overwhelmed by the challenges.
6. You begin to forget all the things that bother you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what is going on. You feel you are a part of something greater and you are just moving along with the logic of the activity.

Point by point, the group was able to correlate the kinds of negative experiences they’ve had with digital instruments as running directly against the the characteristics of flow listed above, and proposed using the concept of flow as an overarching design principle in the creation of new digital instruments. Their argument is fairly compelling, and I think most users of digital gear will find that much of the article has a distinct ring of familiarity.

Whether or not the group’s rallying cry will have any effect on the industry at large remains to be seen, but for my part, I was somewhat relieved to see this being discussed out in the open. I had always had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, but any voices that may have been crying out in protest were hard to hear over the din of the intense hype that usually surrounds the music industry.

Reading the article also had the effect of making me even more appreciative of playing the piano. It’s really nice, I might even say a luxury, to be able to turn off all the gear from time to time, sit down at the keyboard, and just play: no muss, no fuss, and no freakin’ drivers to install. And even if digital instruments never improve in their ability to give the user the experience of flow, I know I can count on my trusty, 88-keyed friend to take me there. That’s something well worth knowing.

For those of you working on your piano playing, here’s something that definitely won’t help: shutting the bathroom door on your right pinky finger.

That seems like it should be obvious, but apparently I needed a reminder…

“Uh-oh - I think these guys are going to overpower us”

I was performing with the Rob Evans Quartet at our usual gig at Rose Pistola. I was in the middle of a solo when I heard Rob say those words as he looked out window. We usually perform next to a wall of windows facing Columbus St. so I looked out to see what he was concerned about. He was right: a brass band was marching down the sidewalk, and they were loud.

It was a small group - a few brass players, two percussionists and some folks holding banners - but certainly enough to drown us out, even through closed windows. But the show, as they say, must go on, so I continued playing even as the sound of brass music was starting to create an Ivesian cacophony.

Fortunately, the lead trumpet player spotted us and quickly figured out what was going on. He hushed up the other players, and even looked a little embarrassed - we waved to let them know all was cool; however, the drummers, who were bringing up the rear, missed the signal and kept playing. As soon as they figured out what was happening, they laughed and changed their beat to sync with ours as they pressed their faces up to the window.

Meanwhile, the brass players were huddled up and I saw that a decision had been made. They gathered up their forces, marched the whole group into the restaurant, and immediately busted into a rousing chorus of “When The Saints Go Marching In” (what else?). We of course started playing along - we couldn’t have overpowered them even if we wanted to, and…well…why would we want to? We played through a couple of choruses (with the obligatory key changes), then the trumpet player gave the signal and the band marched out as quickly as they came in. We played a few more choruses on our own before wrapping it up, then got as strong an ovation as we’ve ever gotten at that gig. The hostess came up to us afterwards and said “the dining room LOVED that!”

It was a short, odd encounter but it was one of those times where I felt very lucky to be a musician. It’s such a privilege to be part of an art form where two completely disparate groups of people can come together and make something happen, completely spontaneously and without a word being spoken. Just a few minutes earlier, during our break between sets, we were talking about Rob’s upcoming trip to Europe, and how he might bring his horn and try to get in on some jam sessions while he’s there. That’s the kind of thing you can do as a musician: a jam can happen with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Music doesn’t suffer from language barriers, if the spirit is willing.

I give huge props to the brass players for initially being senstive enough to quiet down so we could do our thing, but then reading the situation and seizing the opportunity to make something magical happen. I might not have been so bold if I had been them - but I probably will be now if the situation is ever reversed.

I know a couple of piano teachers who poo-poo Hanon altogether. When I told one of them that I was working on it, she looked stunned and said “Why??”. (Anyone who read my first post on the topic may well ask the same question).

She, like many, are of the mind that simply working through books of exercises doesn’t really buy you much. It is better, the thinking goes, to work on actual pieces of music and focus on the technical challenges that present themselves in the context of the music itself. Put another way, any technical challenges worth mastering can be found in the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. Better to spend your time and energy there, since that’s what you want to be playing anyway. We probably won’t be hearing Hanon played at Alice Tully Hall anytime soon.

Plus, playing books of exercises is boring as all hell.

That’s a pretty sound argument, and one that I agree with for the most part. So why then am I bothering with Msr. Hanon and his 60 exercises? For one thing, I’m not playing Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin. Most of the playing that I do is in an improvisational context and that changes the rules of the game a bit.

If you’re going to learn, say, the Waldstein Sonata, you know what you’re in for; you can see exactly what it is your fingers are going to need to do and you can focus your efforts around that and that alone. As an improviser, you don’t have that luxury. When the music is flying along, and you’re responding to what’s happening around you, you don’t have time to stop and think “am I able to play this lick?”. You don’t have time to think at all in fact; if you’re trying to process what you’re about to do through the logical part of your brain, it’s already too late - the moment has passed.

Ideally, you’d have a direct line of communication between what’s happening in the music and what comes through your fingers. As the impulse arises, your fingers would simply execute the idea exactly as it’s coming to you. That’s the ideal, and it’s probably not achievable by most of us mere mortals. What you can do is try to be ready for anything, and the stronger and more versatile your technique, the more likely your brilliant musical idea won’t die a hideous death stumbling and stuttering across the keyboard. Working through Hanon, it seems to me, will help my fingers explore unfamiliar territory, and build up the strength and agility that will take me closer to the ideal.

That’s the intellectual argument at any rate. The truth, I fear, is much more perverse.

I think actually like playing these damn things.

Maybe it’s my Venus in Virgo, or maybe it’s a slight masochistic streak that I’ve not fully met in myself, but I have to admit that I get a kick out of playing those phrases over and over again. I get a slight visceral thrill when I can bump up the metronome a few more notches and start trying to master the exercise at a slightly faster tempo, ever reaching toward the Golden 108 mark. So maybe the real reason that I’m working on Hanon is that I’m just enough of a freak to enjoy doing it, and it feeds some bizarre fetish for executing perfectly even strings of 16th notes that has not yet been recognized in the DSM-IV.

But even behind that, there’s yet another reason to keep going. It’s the best reason of all, and probably the only real reson to bother with any of this.

My playing is improving.

For awhile I thought it might be my imagination, but I think it’s really happening. I sometimes surprise myself at gigs, when a particular riff dashes off my fingers, something I’ve not played before, and something that, if I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have believed that I could do. I’ve even caught the attention of my bandmates when something particularly tasty pops out. As long as I seem to be moving closer to that ideal of pure technique, Msr. Hanon and I will probably enjoy and long and happy relationship. If it’s ever not the case, I’ll drop it like a bad habit and move on.

…until, I suppose, my playing starts to stagnate and I feel like I need to get back to basics again. At which point, I’ll probably start up again.

Oh dear…I believe Msr Hanon has me in his clutches…

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

- Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most charming flowers and fruit that were ever made. That’s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre description of the period. Their creator was faithful not to the tragedy but to the reaction that tragedy kindled in his conscience.

- Odysseus Elytis, translated by Theophanis Stavrou: Books Abroad, Volume 49, no 4, Autumn 1975 [emphasis mine]

I firmly believe that joy is more fertile than pain.

- Maurice Ravel

Thanks to Rob Brezsny for the first two quotes (he’s been on quite a tear lately!).

Ah Hanon.

Mention the name to a pianist and see what kind of reaction you get. Some will
roll their eyes, some will lose all color in the face. Others will run screaming
from the room as images of piano teachers wielding rulers run feverishly through their minds.

“Hanon”, for those unfamiliar with the word, is the common short-hand term for Charles-Louis Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises. Wikipedia describes it as “a compilation of 60 exercises meant to train the pianist in speed, precision, agility, and strength of all of the fingers and flexibility in the wrists.”

Pianists who have actually attempted to play the thing would probably describe it in much stronger language.

At first glance, the exercises seem tame enough. Each consists of a single, short phrase that’s repeated up and down across the keyboard with both hands in unison (this ensures that both hands develop evenly). Msr Hanon recommends starting most of the exercises at 60 beats per minute, then gradually working your way up to 108. How hard could that be?

As always, the devil is in the details.

The exercises are carefully graded and each presents you with a single, specific technical challenge: a solitary nut that your fingers have to crack. Like great games, they’re simple to learn, but fiendishly difficult to master, and getting up to that magical 108 mark, while retaining evenness and precision turns out to be much more of a challenge that you would expect.

I should know. I’ve been at it for awhile now and I’m still on exercise 4.

Only 56 more to go…oy.

I think it’s the dichotomy between simple-to-learn and a-real-bitch-to-master that makes Hanon the bête noire of the piano world. Pianists seem to have a kind of love-hate relationship with it. Most agree that, in the end, the work you have to do is good for the fingers, and pianists are often known to pull their aging copy off the shelf when they feel stuck in their progress and want to get back to basics. At the same time, it can be quite aggravating because the apparent simplicity of the exercises makes you feel like you ought to be able to play them without any trouble, and yet there’s trouble a-plenty when you really dig in. The road block to moving forward is that single challenge that the current exercise presents. If you could just get your fingers to do that one little thing correctly, you could move on. But they don’t - at least not yet - so you slow down and try it again.

And again. And again…

I realize I’m painting a pretty bleak picture, and I admit, at times the pictures does seem pretty bleak. But I know I want to stretch out a bit more in terms of technique, and something about these exercises is damned compelling. For better or for worse, I seem to be on for the ride, so away I go. Watch this space for developments.

All I can say is “word”:

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better.

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

-Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” interview in Le Monde, 1980

Hat tip to Rob Brezsny.

The Audio Engineering Society was camped out at the Moscone Convention Center last week. Since I work just a few blocks from there, and had obtained a free pass (courtesy of the nice folks at Sweetwater), I decided to sneak out of the office for a bit and check out all the latest and greatest in the audio world.

I wandered around on my own for a bit before meeting up with fellow Reasonhead Kurt. Seeing all the new gear was great, but what really seemed to catch our eyes was some of the vintage gear that some of the companies trucked in. Kurt snapped this picture of me with a commemorative Fairlight CMI - each key was signed by one of the artists who used the keyboard in their work. In the pic, I’m hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Lindsay Buckingham and Brian Wilson.

Kurt also got some pictures of an ancient Neve console, but it doesn’t look like he’s posted those yet. I’ll add some links if he does - it was fantastic: no faders, just enormous knobs, dusty tubes, the works.

Update: Kurt has pics of the Neve console and some other groovy gear over at his site.

The legality of abortion continues to be a hot-button topic these days. Activists on either side of this issue rarely see eye to eye on anything, and in the current climate, where most of what is laughingly called political debate can be reduced to “I’m right you’re wrong so shut the hell up”, the conflict between the two sides is more than usually fierce.

I was therefore quite surprised when I learned that there is, in fact, one thing that both sides definitely do agree on: Daniel Edwards’ new sculpture, currently on display at the Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, is a travesty:

Britney Spears will soon be giving birth again in Brooklyn, as a sexy sculpture that has drawn thousands of hate e-mails…The life-size pop princess is naked and pregnant, crouching face-down on a bare-toothed bear rug as the baby’s head appears on the opposite end…

When some bloggers heard about the exhibit “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston” the gallery was inundated with about 3,000 e-mails from around the world in just a week, split between pro-choice and pro-life opinions.

“We also got calls from Tokyo, England, France. Some people are upset that Britney is being used for this subject matter,” said gallery co-owner David Kesting. “Others who are pro-life thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life monument.”

There it is folks: the power of art. What else but art could successfully piss off both sides of an extremely contentious issue? What else could cause such bitter rivals to find common ground (excluding, for the moment, the case of deeply divided religious factions uniting in their hatred of an invading superpower)?

The reactions are interesting, and while we shouldn’t necessarily regard angry emails about a piece of sculpture as reflective of the thinking of an entire movement, they are nonetheless revealing. I find it ironic, for example, that people who describe themselves as “pro-life” would find an image of a woman giving birth “degrading”. Try working that one out - maybe the bearskin rug offends their design sensibilties.

I’m equally amused that pro-choicers would object to someone creating a monument expressing a pro-life view. Just a reminder, kids: the First Amendment applies equally to speech that you don’t happen to agree with.

Even more interesting is that the controversy is not restricted to our domestic debate over abortion. Whatever the cause, the pissing-off has become a world-wide affair, as noted by the gallery owner above, and confirmed by a search on Google news. Somehow, whether it be the use of “Pro-Life” in the title, the image of Britney without the schoolgirl uniform, the questionable choice of throw rugs, or god knows what, this single sculpture has become an international issue.

Part of me finds the whole controversy rather, well, dumb, for lack of a better word; but another part of me thinks that it’s sort of nice that art is still able to get people fired up. We are far from the olden days, when, as the song says, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. In the face of all of the increasingly explicit sex, violence and whatnot that’s just a few remote- or mouse-clicks away, you start to wonder if we’ve become inured to any sort of visceral reaction. Apparently, that’s not the case. Art, it seems, still has the power to offend the public and though it shames me to say it, I have to admit I’m rather pleased, much like the neglected spouse who, in response to their partner’s unexpected jealous rage, wipes away a tear of joy and says “oh honey - you do care after all!”

The problem however is that anytime you have a work that generates this much hype (be it positive or negative), it becomes almost impossible to evaluate it as a work of art on its own terms. It becomes something else - a media story, a conversation starter, a target of scorn - and it’s difficult just to look at it as, in this case, a piece of sculpture. In the many miles of column inches that have been devoted to this piece, there’s one question that rarely gets asked:

Is it any good?

That’s a tough question in any case, as “good” is a slippery concept when applied to art, but it’s probably even harder to evaluate with controversial art. Perhaps a better question is “Does it work?”. Even that one is hard to figure, as the actual intent seems a little unclear to me. The various quotes from Daniel Edwards that I’ve seen about the piece don’t always add up to anything particularly coherent. (I don’t really blame the artist for that - I know from personal experience that one doesn’t always have a good sense of exactly what one’s work is about, especially when it’s brand new; it’s also true that even the most coherent of statements can fall apart with the stroke of the editorial pen).

These questions can really only be answered intelligently by folks living near Brooklyn. They’re the ones who can actually go to the gallery and, with any luck, tune out whatever hype is floating around in the transom of their consciousness, and just look.

Is it any good?

Does it work?

Whatever the answers, artists worldwide can take some comfort knowing that yes, the public is still out there and art can still have an impact.

So stop reading this, and go make something new.