Tag Archives: school

An Open Letter to Newsweek and TheDailyBeast.com

I really never thought that it would come to this. I have been a subscriber to your magazine for several years now. Each time that I was offered the opportunity to re-subscribe I did so. I’m currently paid up to receive your magazine until May, 2013. So confident was I when I first subscribed to your magazine that I couldn’t think of not being informed and enlightened by your staff’s thoughtful writing.

This isn’t to say that I always understood everything that was presented, for example many of the discussions on the “housing bubble” and other economic and financial issues are hard for me to grasp. The fact that I didn’t understand them certainly wasn’t because those particular articles were poorly written, rather they just lie outside my interests.

I should have seen it coming! This was all foreshadowing so clearly your true objective at Newsweek. To you money is the most important thing in life. It’s worth being worried about, it’s worth living and dying for. Money is a tangible result of hard work and apparently the only thing of any utility in our country.

That conclusion comes from recently reading your chart that so helpfully ranks what you feel to be the “Most Useless College Degrees”, posted to The Daily Beast on April 27, 2011 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-27/useless-college-majors-from-journalism-to-psychology-to-theater/.

Useless.

It’s clear that you feel that there is such a thing as a wasted education. That alone is an extremely dangerous concept. I implore you to consider the implications of stating that any university degree can be deemed useless. Did any of you actually attend university? I can’t understand how a person that has successfully completed a degree program could possibly allow themselves to think this way, let alone publish something as offensive and damaging as this “study”.

My degrees in particular were ranked at number 7. I currently hold several degrees that you consider useless; a Bachelors of Music in Compositon (BMus. Composition), a Masters of Music Theory and Composition (M.M. Theory/Composition) and a Masters of Music Performance in Classical Guitar (M.M. Performance). I am furious to think that anyone would think of these as useless degrees of any rank; enough so to tell you why you are quite wrong. Thoughts such as yours are ultimately contributing to the ruin of this country.

Your “uselessness” is based on only the typical earning potential of the degree and how many jobs are typically available in the given field. This is ridiculous, biased thinking at such a basic level. Music and art are at the forefront (or should be) of any truly free society. By stating that studying music is useless to any measure is allowing the United States to become the lazy, slovenly, money hungry, cultureless society that many in the world already see us as.

According to your findings you would rather have me be unhappy and rich; not serving to attempt to build up our country’s battered and disappearing culture every single day. As musicians that is what we are all currently doing.

Saying that studying music is useless is kowtowing to the idea that our worth as people, and as a country, is almost completely dependent upon our worth in dollars and cents. How much a person earns in a year makes that person of more utility according to you. Though there are, admittedly, philanthropic individuals that spend their money doing things for our country that our government can’t seem to do, there are relatively few of them and literally tens of millions of the rest of us trying to make a difference every day in whatever way that we can.

I don’t even want to get into the studies that prove the usefulness of a well rounded education that includes studies of music and the arts. We have all read them, and we all know that it is one of the things that stands in the way of making the United States one of the truly great nations of the world.

I appreciate the timing of your little publication too. Just as undergraduates around this country are getting ready to step out into the job force; teaching, working and fighting to keep our culture from dying at the hands of close-minded cretins such as yourselves.

Every student that I knew when I was at the university knew that their earning potential would not allow them an extravagant lifestyle. The truly amazing thing about us though is that it doesn’t stop many of us. We know that there are much more important things to live our lives for. Musicians are quite often the butt of jokes regarding pay, where success is ultimately determined by how large a paycheck we can bring in. Vox populi can’t see, and doesn’t want to learn of how useful having hard working, brilliant, non-traditional thinkers such as musicians and artists around truly is. Thanks to you these troglodytes are substantiated in their ignorance.

I suppose that ultimately I am speaking to something you can’t really understand. I’m sorry. I know that all of you have obviously spent your lives doing very important, useful things. Important and expensive things. I only wish that I could have enough confidence and bravado that I could reach out to a nationwide audience and castigate entire groups of hard working people, that do important work, as useless. It’s funny, really, that the classless are attacking those of us that are doing something for reasons other than money. You have managed to make shunning culture seem like the correct, intelligent thing to do. Congratulations. That is really something.

Sarah Palin, undoubtedly one of the most fantastically and unabashedly proud ignoramuses to come into the public sphere in recent times, declared that the Federal Government needed to cut funding to NPR and the NEA because such funding is “frivolous”. It seems that you are at least somewhat in agreement with Her Royal Vapidness. I won’t even get into how cutting funding for those programs would do little to nothing to solve our budget problems. The government sees very little need to support the arts as it is. This, personally, makes me feel unwanted by even my own government. My work isn’t supported by the general population, or by the government, but that does not and should not stop us. Musicians and artists are culture warriors.

I subscribed to your magazine to support an ideal, to support a society where newspapers are going bankrupt and the ability for us as citizens to obtain free, fair and balance news is being challenged every single day. I believed in you. But, seeing as you feel that I am useless, and all of the people that I work with, study with and helped to teach- with all of their research that is being done in the name of music to help enrich our culture- are apparently useless because they are not making enough money, I can believe in you no longer. You, in fact, are beyond useless. What you have done with this pithy “study” (it was hardly a study, just salacious pandering disguised as research and journalism) is hurting the country. Just to be clear, you are hurting the country. I don’t want to have anything to do with any person or entity that so readily disposes of culture.

With this I am asking for a published apology to these concerns as well as my outstanding subscription canceled and the balance returned to me immediately. Considering I don’t have much earning potential, I’m going to need all the help I can get, right?

You can not put a price on culture. I don’t expect you to understand.

 

Note: A signed and dated copy of this letter was mailed to Newsweek via USPS, as well as e-mailed to them.

 

Taking action from far away

Facebook can be just about the most annoying website/application in existence, or so it seems. Every time I log in I am inundated with a myriad of stories of the time wasted by my friends and acquaintances, which magically turns into time wasted for me as I sit for 20 or 30 minutes reading about all the stupid, pointless quizzes, tests and pokes and other mindless garbage that goes on.

Every single day I consider abandoning facebook, just like I did with Myspace. The über-connectivity of the internet gets to be a bit much sometimes, especially for someone like me that finds great enjoyment during weekends spent alone, completely alone, cut off from the world and locked in my room listening to music, reading a book or watching Alton Brown and learning about the history of pasteurization, replete with an actor playing Louis Pasteur.

Then, once in a very great while the hyper-connectivity of it all actually finds a use, and I realize that there is a point to being able to reach out to people for some cause, other than begging you to join their cause (“We want to be teh larg3st groop on teh fac3b00k!!”).

I was looking through my facebook newsfeed and saw that a friend of mine had “attended” an event “An email to help save Gates-Chili’s music” or something to that effect. Seeing as how I grew up in the Gates, NY school district (Gates and Chili are right next to each other, so they share schools), I clicked on the event and read.

The story was nothing new. School district is facing hard times (and aren’t we all these days) and looking for places to cut some money out of the budget. Of course the first thing they look to cut is music. Without going into a crude value-based judgement on what should stay and what should go in this situation I decided that I would immediately write an email, as the group requested, to the address at the top of the page. My letter, that I wrote without much thought, but simply a passionate plea from one music lover/student/active American citizen (a rare breed, indeed) appears below for you:

My name is Adam Shanley. I grew up in Gates. I attended Kindergarten through 4th grade at Neil Armstrong and I still hold fond memories of that institution as shaping me to the person that I am today.

Currently I am finishing up two Masters degrees in Music at SUNY Fredonia, one in Classical Guitar Performance, and one in Music Theory/Composition. I completed my bachelors degree in Music Composition in 2006.

After being in college, and coming into contact with so many people with an astounding array of different backgrounds I have only become stronger in my opinion that music education from an early age has benefits to all involved. I feel so incredibly strongly about this that I have made it my life goal to insist that music education be held in equally high regard with the  sciences and math. Music education and art appreciation go hand in hand, not only forming a more well-rounded person, but it also helps a student to think abstractly.

Mathematics and music have incredible amounts in common. This is so much the case that several universities offer a “Math in Music” course that studies the ratios that are so important to music, tuning systems, the imperfections that arise with each of these tuning systems and all the details that come with it. If mathematics is important for solidifying a skill for abstract thinking because math occurs in everyday life I would have to argue that the same is true for music. Music is not simply “all around us”, but the fact that math exists naturally in the world and humans have been striving to discover all of its intricacies, and music and math share so much in common, wouldn’t it be completely unwise to cutoff this avenue of exploration?

Denying a young adult access to proper music education, especially music theory, would be the equivalent of not teaching algebra in math, or not teaching the periodic table of elements in science. There are so many more reasons to continue teaching music than there are to cease and desist.

Music Technology would be just as big a mistake to get rid of altogether. Allowing students to have access to the programs and tools that are used today in the creation of music, after they have studied the science behind how music is structurally put together (through music theory, history and a general music education) it is of the utmost importance that students are able to create something from that knowledge that they have learned.

Music education should never be thought of as something like a “niche market” that is only valuable to a student that is going to grow up to be a musician. Music education will ultimately strengthen our culture, which is already failing drastically in the world as far as cultural significance goes. Music education would benefit anyone not just as a musician, but as one who appreciates music. A person that learns to appreciate music, and the arts in general will most certainly foster a love for mathematics, the English language, the sciences, art and just being a creative person. Wouldn’t it be absolutely wonderful to have an entire generation of people that are curious about the world?

Imagine a country where people didn’t simply sit down on the couch every day and watch 6 hours of television a night but instead became interested in music or math or science or anything and went out to research anything that they were curious about. Imagine a world where people were driven to life long education because of an instilled interest in the arts and music. Imagine a world where everyone got involved and stood up to make a difference and cared about something deeply and made their voices heard.

It is a fact that music education has all of these benefits and more. Cutting music theory and music technology classes, or any music classes for that matter would ultimately hurt the society that your school should be striving to help flourish.

Adam Shanley

I was informed the next day that this very email, which was not alone – in fact there are emails written by current Eastman School of music faculty and other concerned Gates-Chili alumnus- will be read at a school board meeting in which the fate of the music program will be discussed.

Through the din of useless chatter in the ultra-connected world there is hope that a difference could possibly be made.

DRAM playlist from June

I realized that I only mentioned that I wrote a playlist/blogpost for DRAM (the Directory of Recorded American Music) but I never posted it here. I remembered this when I was asked by them to do another one in October or November. So while I go over there and rifle through all of their recordings trying to figure out what my theme is going to be I have copied and pasted my playlist from June for you to enjoy.

 If you do not have the ability to play these files on the DRAM site (i.e. you are not a student/faculty member at a school that has access) then please let me know. You should still check out their news section, where they keep all the playlists. It is very informative, and there is always something new happening there, as they are pretty much still getting started. They could use the traffic! Support new music!

 

1.)  Charles Ives – “Three Quarter-tone Pieces: III. Chorale” From – The Unknown Ives, Vol. 2NWR80618

This first selection may be familiar to many listeners. I believe that music has the power to change lives, and this piece, in particular, remains very close to me, as it led me to pursue the study of new music, and cemented my interest in new American music in particular. During my second semester as an undergraduate student at SUNY Fredonia, Continuum, a new music ensemble performed. The final pieces on the program were the 3 Quartertone pieces for 2 pianos by Charles Ives.  I sat in awe in the concert hall, hearing sounds that I had never heard before. I still remember that concert every time I listen to this work. Throughout this piece, Ives repeatedly hints at the tune “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)” but never quite brings the quote to fruition, thwarting the completion of the familiar melody with cascading jazz-like melodic lines interspersed with more cerebral, “serious” music.

2.)  Easley Blackwood – “Suite for Guitar in 15-note Equal Tuning, Op. 33: IV. Gigue (Vivo) From – Blackwood: Microtonal CompositionsCDR018

As a guitarist with a strong interest in new music, this piece struck me as particularly intriguing. Blackwood utilizes a new tuning system, but within the form of a Baroque suite, complete with its familiar rhythms and harmonic motion. The resulting work might sound a bit curious, but it remains easily comprehensible, as the swirling arpeggiated passages and steady, strong bass motion make the alternate tuning scheme less foreign to an ear accustomed to standard 12 note, equal temperament tuning. This juxtaposition works quite well, expanding a familiar form with the introduction of a new tuning.

3.)  Annie Gosfield – “Marked by a Hat” From – EGP: Extreme Guitar Project MO157

Gosfield offers a different take on composing for guitar than Blackwood. She creates a microtonal tuning for Marco Capelli’s 10-stringed “Extreme Guitar” that centers on the pitches E, D, and C, and the quarter tones that surround them. One can hear this tuning spelled out at around 1:43, and at times, it might sound as though the guitar has been specially prepared, though it has not. The unorthodox sounds are actually due to the fact that Gosfield wrote the piece solely for open strings. This choice, combined with Capelli’s unique tremolos and picking techniques gives the instrument an altogether different sound, as though it has been prepared. Evocations of Eastern instruments abound, which makes the unorthodox tuning seem entirely appropriate to the ear. While the many different effects comprise different sections in the composition, there is always a strong dance-like rhythmic sense. This recording is featured on Mode Record’s album, “EGP: Extreme Guitar Project” which features several different composers and as many approaches to composing for the guitar.

4.)  Harry Partch – “San Francisco II” From – Enclosure Two: Harry Partch IN401

Somewhere in between folk music, Americana, and classical music lies Harry Partch. Far ahead of his time and with extremely idiosyncratic demands, it is a wonder that he was able to get as much of his music recorded and performed as he did. For that matter, it is a wonder how Partch conceived of his music at all. His experiments in alternate tuning systems and his fascination with Greek mythology led him to invent many new instruments necessary for performing a panoply of works unlike any other composer before or after him. This work utilizes three guitars played with some type of slide, a flute that enters and quickly bends its pitch, and a cello that is playing a perpetual glissando that may create a very uneasy feeling in the listener. Throughout the work, Partch displays his strong ability as a dramatic large-scale composer by marking off sections of extreme drama with a fantastic interplay of instruments.

5.)  Larry Polansky – “Movement for Andrea Smith (My Funny Valentine for Just String Quartet) From – Larry Polansky – Simple Harmonic Motion ART1011

The differences between equal temperament and just intonation can seem slight to modern ears, but this piece makes good use of bringing out the “grind” in the altered tuning. Mr. Polansky utilizes the string quartet in an interesting way here too. Never do the instruments separate as much as one would typically think of in a “string quartet.” Instead, here the four instruments function more as one, creating an amorphous and otherworldly ambient sound sculpture that encapsulates the sonic landscape of the just intonation system, creating a remarkable, solid, unified tone.

6.)  Ben Johnston – “Sonata for Microtonal Piano: Movement II” From – Sound Forms for Piano NWR80203

Like the Ives piece earlier in this playlist, though with only one piano, here Johnston explores microtones on a piano. Unlike the Ives piece, however, this work is in the 12-tone idiom. This second movement in particular is violent in dynamics and rhythm, with the 12 tone compositional technique adding a degree of dissonance to the already harsh sound of the piano. Live performance of this piece is about as rare as they come, so this recording is truly a gem and a gift. Note the reoccurrence of the Ives quote. It appears in the second movement as well as across the entirety of the work. Also effective is the use of extended techniques (i.e. direct play on the strings) that bring out the full array of sounds possible on the instrument, at times evoking the sound of a Japanese Koto. Again, as in the Gosfield, we hear the parallel drawn between altered tunings and Eastern music.

7.)  Ezra Sims – “Concert Piece: Excited” From – Microtonal Music of Ezra Sims CR643

Here we hear the use of microtones in a full ensemble with a computer used to help with the tuning of various chords, as opposed to the solo microtonal works featured earlier in this playlist.  The winds, which make up the majority of the ensemble, are responsible for most of the colorful pitches throughout this work, the microtones from that section of the orchestra heard most clearly. This is the final, fast, movement of Sims’ larger work and I find it simultaneously the most daring use of microtones and the most understated way of incorporating them. It’s daring as it uses an entire orchestra, which is no small feat, yet it remains understated, because this work is not about these “other,” microtonal pitches. Sims simply employs microtones as part of his vocabulary, but not the focus.

8.)  Carter Scholz – “Lattice” From – Carter Scholz – 8 Pieces FP009

This work for electronics is quite different from the others in the list. Similar in effect to the Polansky quartet, this piece has the effect of layers working together to form a single “wall of sound.” The microtones blend in with the total fabric of the work, sometimes causing dissonance and beating against the other layers of sound, and sometimes resulting in a swelled effect pulsating through an ambient space. The resulting timbres feature resonance without any attack preceding it, like the peal of bells, until the lowest octave makes its appearance. In this manner, “Lattice” grows in every dimension throughout its duration, expanding sonically until the end.

9.)  Dean Drummond – “Before the Last Laugh” From – Newband Partch and Drummond IN561

It might seem that microtonal composers start almost completely from scratch, casting off anything and everything of their predecessors, right down to the instruments and notes used to create their works. However, here is a prime example to the contrary. One could say that Drummond picks up where Harry Partch left off, further expanding Harry Partch’s original ideas. Here, Drummond actually utilizes some of Partch’s unique, original instruments, but he has also taken the time to create his own instruments to suit his personal compositional needs. The resultant piece is a combination of alien sounds paired with the familiar. Specifically, Drummond relies heavily on strange percussion and instruments with heavy attacks, while having a flute play much of the prime material. The orchestration in this work is quite colorful and shows off his new instruments well.

10.)  Gloria Coates – “Fragment from Leonardo’s Notebooks, “Fonte di Rimini” From – Gloria Coates NWR80599

The grand drama of this orchestral work begins with sustained string harmonics that quickly grow to a forceful dynamic, the strings consistently demanding the listener’s attention through their incredibly slow and controlled glissandi. The effect created is that of “passing microtones.” It is hard to tell where one pitch ends and another begins, and each infinite pitch seems to be held for so long that one gets disoriented attempting to steady himself on a tonal center. The programmatic insinuations in this piece are endless, bringing to mind bombs dropping or planes cutting across the sky. One may also note that the vocals towards the end of the work, mimicking the string’s glissandi.

My Writing Process

So I decided that something people are always interested in, whether they write music or not, whether they ever care to or not, is the process by which someone creates music.

For as many composers there are out there, there are just as many ways of doing things. There is no right or wrong way, this is art after all. This is a form of expression, our own way of describing the world. I may as well get down to it, I think the way I do things is kinda different and I am still developing in my process.

From very early on I realized that rhythm was the most important element in music, at least to me. I was always a fan of prog-rock, where it is expected that the most complex rhythms and strangest accents are used. That is what those songs are about. The dragons, sorcery and nymphs are secondary. Anyway, the other thing that I find quite important to any piece of music, no matter what the genre is that the form is accessible.

This being said, when I need to start writing a piece of music the first thing that I do is grab my notebook. A simple notebook of lined paper, not manuscript, not yet. In the notebook I start off from the most basic characteristics of the piece and slowly build up from there. I’ll decide how long I want the piece to be, in minutes and seconds, what the piece is going to be scored for and what initial tonal center I am going to begin with.

The decisions for all of these aspects can either be a pretty simple endeavor (“It will be 5 minutes, because 5 minutes seems like a reasonable amount of time for this kind of work) or a more complex decision that relies on some other aspect of the music (“Well this is a piece for Brass so perhaps starting in Bb will be good…”). At this stage of the game I try to move as fast as possible across all these “pre-compositional” workings. I am not saying that they are lesser aspects of completing the work, on the contrary, these are the foundations of the entire work, on which the rest of my writing will balance upon, but I like to get through it quickly to keep the momentum going, start the ball rolling, and reminding myself that the piece should never be so complex that the audience will never understand it. In moving through this phase fairly quick I am assuring myself that I don’t complicate matters.

Right after this initial phase I begin pulling back, slowly. I imagine myself analyzing something visual, a landscape or a painting. I am quite far away at the beginning, I can make out that I see something and I slowly move in to see what exactly it is, and how it is made, right down to the most fine detail. I keep writing, in words, describing how I wan the piece to “go”. I’m going to use a form, let’s go with a tried and true A B A. The piece is 5 minutes long so how long is each A section, is the B shorter, longer? How are things weighted? Will B be developmental or just different, contrasting? Slow, Fast, Slow or Fast, Slow, Fast? No tempo change at all? etc.

I zoom in further. How is the A section divided up? How long is it going to be? Time signature? Will it move from the initial tonal center to another? Will the tonal center that it moves to help me get to where the B section begins? How many phrases are in the A section? How long are they? What about the basic durational units? Registral placement? etc. etc.

There is plenty to think about at this point, early on. This is where some of my best thinking takes place. I really love this part of the process. I can burn out a whole slew of ideas in a wild frenzy. Some people call this “sketching” but for some reason I despise the use of that word. It just seems so pretentious to me. I’m laying the foundation for my piece, in words. I am more comfortable to start off in my first language, that being English. After I have planned out my piece in as much verbose prose as possible, getting as specific as I can I move to the manuscript paper.

Though this part happens in stages as well. I don’t immediately run to a piano and start splashing notes down. That would be counterproductive, I must continue on the path that I have started for myself, that being: zooming into the picture as slowly as possible. Rhythm first. All of the outer parameters of the music I have laid out beforehand, in words. I know how long the piece is, and the tempo, so I know how many beats it will take me to get to the end. I know the phrase structure and the overall form. All this is mapped out. I now begin writing rhythms and general pitch information. Nothing gets too specific. Notes are simple: High or Low. The rhythm and the inflection working together as I sing out what I hear in my head. All the basic elements of the music are now in place, I mark out where important things are going to happen (“should sound like a half cadence here”, “cadence”, “moving towards D#” etc.) I circle things and make notes, general things like harmonic pulse and motion are marked out at this point too.

Things are beginning to solidify at this point and things may change from what I had initially planned. I find that it is better to let the piece, to a certain degree, go where it wants to go. There are certain things that just need to happen, and the music will go where it needs to go, or else it will sound unnatural and forced. Flexibility is the key, though if it is desired to stick strictly to the plan that was drawn out beforehand then that can be done too, it is completely up in the air.

After the piece is mapped out, with rhythms and general inflections I move operations to my computer, or to the piano. It is time to start hearing the piece in further detail, hearing specific notes and trying out several harmonies. The reason that I do the rhythm first is so that my thoughts are allowed to move fairly quickly, this final step moves pretty slowly, but calmly because I know that I will not lose sight of what the piece is supposed to be about. If I am at a piano I play through all sorts of ideas that fit within the rhythmic and inflection parameters that I have started out with, in the tonal center that I decided on. This way everything that I can think of is taken care of beforehand, freeing up my mind and my creativity because I don’t have to think of 40 things at once, I am just following the directions on the paper that I have written myself.

I am usually able to come up with several ideas for each phrase and this is the point in the process where subtle tricks come into play, little details that could not have been planned ahead of time that now seem so obvious and excite me to no end, propelling me to finish as much of the piece as possible in one sitting. These things are all possible if sitting in front of the computer as well. This all depends on where I am at the time.

Nothing is set in stone, and things often change all the way through the process. Practical application of notes to the schematic that is laid out will cause some things to shift. I personally find that this is the way that works best for me. I don’t know of anyone else that works in this manner, but I tried for years in vain to write in the way that I thought everyone else worked and my music was scattered, without focus and difficult to hear and understand. This process I developed for me to help my writing and so far I like the way that it is working, it is helping me to write more efficiently and just to write more.