Monday, May 25, 2020

Murderer of Summer

When I was small, my maternal grandparents lived next to the local ice cream man.  His name was Mr. Sweet (really) and I remember seeing his Good Humor truck parked in his driveway during our regular August visits.  Although I don't recall ever meeting him, he kept Gramma and Grampa's basement freezer stocked with grandchildren's treats.

On the scale of quality, especially compared to the town creamery or to modern artisanal ice cream, they weren't fabulous, but they were cold and sweet and, as a kid, that was enough.  Or nearly so:  along with Nutty Buddies, which were probably my favorite, I sought, and sometimes fought with my little brother for, Buried Treasure.  Like Nutty Buddies, they were mass-produced, paper-wrapped conical things, but they didn't have a graham or cake cone; instead, they were more like popsicles made of sherbet (I don't recall any flavor other than raspberry, although it seems like there would have been). Treasure pops, as I called them, had a plastic handle topped with a flat, bas-relief figurine, which, in manufacture, was dropped handle-first into the pointed end of the wrapper and the sherbet poured on top of that so that the figure helped hold the sherbet.  When you unwrapped it to eat, what you saw was raspberry sherbet on a stick, but as you ate your way down, you'd get to the "treasure" of the figurine.  I loved these things, not least because the sherbet was pretty tasty, and I casually collected the sticky leftover hilts.

That was the closest I got growing up to living where there was a regular Ice Cream Man in his Ice Cream Truck.  The five Air Force bases I stayed on as a child did not allow them.  The year I spent in my parents' home town and, thus, in Mr. Sweet's territory, came after he retired.  The housing development I lived in as a teen had no such thing, which, in retrospect seems possibly to have been a consequence of High Desert life (I imagine cruising over macadam in 100ยบ+ Junes and Julys would play havoc with freezers).  In any case, all my early associations with ice cream trucks come either from the second-degree proxy of Gram and Gramp's freezer or shared cultural myths about them.

As an adult, however, my experience has been very different.

We can leave the "ice cream" itself alone.  Any adult with even the most passing exposure to real ice cream would be forgiven for not recognizing the modern multiply-refrozen mess revealed under the sickly-bright wrapping dispensed by your average ice cream truck occupant.  Too, the unnerving price of these semi-crystalized pseudo-noshes clearly reflects the challenge of keeping a small mobile business moving today, compared to when gas was 10¢ a gallon and car insurance was optional.  No, that unfortunate casualty of modern life is to be lamented and justly grieved, not berated.

For me, contemporary ice cream trucks have devolved from tragedy to atrocity because of their assault on the sonic environment.  Long gone are the quaint miniature carillons (if they ever existed) tinkling out tunes announcing the arrival of The Good Humor Man in Pleasantville.  My earliest memory of a musical ice cream truck was in my 30s, when I lived in a New Jersey suburb of New York City:  the fake electronic "bells" were broadcast over a bullhorn speaker that would render even the sound of the Choir Invisible fully infernal.

Ice cream trucks seem to be something of a fixture in Maryland, at least in most of the neighborhoods I've lived in since arriving here in '07.  And, although the PA systems over which their "music" is blasted have improved, that which erupts from them seems only to have become more heinous.  Bells, acoustic or electronic, have given way to flat-enveloped sine-wave tones even lower-fidelity than 80s video game soundtracks.  Worse, they play one, single, looping tune, ad nauseam, which pierces my brain like a neurotoxin-tipped arrow, leaving me cognitively paralyzed for the half an hour that they are typically within range of perception.  The tortures of their endless excretion of "Turkey in the Straw" are so great as to believably incite even Phillip Glass or Terry Riley to murderous violence.  Greater yet is the unforgivable, criminal, diabolical, deployment of "It's a Small World."  I assert that even the likes of Ghandi could and would recruit the enthusiastic assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Fucking Theresa in pulling the driver from his seat and pummeling him into pink goo over such an act.

In all seriousness, I would rather listen to car alarms and leaf blowers.  At the same time.

Summer's chorus is one of my greatest pleasures.  As my local ice cream man meanderingly serenades my neighborhood in hopes of enticing the many children here to entreat their parents for the price of his icy indulgences, I have to gird my cochleae against the aural assault of his efforts.  Quickly, before That Song gets tattooed onto my auditory cortex:  I reach for my phone and play something -- almost anything -- loudly enough to drown out the Mephistophelean chant.  I don't begrudge the kids their treats nor the dairy entrepreneur his living; I just resent that ice cream trucks can't more benevolently make themselves part of the delicious soundtrack of summer.

Summer Return

On the first day warm enough to really sweat,
When shadows are brief and the sun lingers,
Open windows beckon with alarm bells of
Distant raucouses of children,
Meditations of lawn mowers,
Cacophonous ensembles of horny avians,
And soft, reassuring drones of air conditioners.

I awaken from eight months of restless dreaming,
Greyness, a desaturated life,
Wrapped defensively in too many layers
And not enough air;
I stretch to find my tightness and resent
The lifetime lost to seasons that were not meant for me.

Although I am February's child, I regestate all the year
That is not Summer
And fill my lungs anew only as the sun slows its march to zenith
To bask in this fraction of the year
When I feel myself.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Dory and Viola

Here's a new piece!



Laying in bed one night recently, I had the thought to build something out of loops using the first four or five steps of a C Dorian scale (Bb and Eb, if you don't know) on each viola string.  Each string would be its own voice (so, four voices, with four loops each on the C, G, and D string and five on the A) and each loop would be of differing lengths and could include only one pitch, but each pitch could be played more than once and in more than one manner (legato, staccato, etc.).  Ableton Live 10's Session View, based as it is on clips, can extend this Enoan technique by allowing randomization of clip order, velocity, and other parameters.

I haven't played my viola since before the lockdown, mostly because I just don't have the energy these days to practice.  But this piece really wanted the viola voice, so I relied on Ableton's Orchestral Strings sample pack, which I've used many times before.  Its voila samples in have some significant shortcomings, which were especially apparent in my last piece, but the requirements of this one were such that it wasn't as much of a problem.

While I appreciate the concept, I'm mostly not gaga about algorithmic music per se, as it often feels flat to me and doesn't seem to go anywhere.  However, my intention here was to use the algorithm as a foundation and then to perform effects on it in a way that would create some sense of development and direction.  Compared to most of my other music, this approach much more like that made on a modular synthesizer in which a patch is set up, usually with one or more generative sequences, and the performer manipulates the mix of those sequences and various effects to produce a musical piece.  A key challenge in that modality is to design effects and how they relate to each other in such a way as to be musical and performable.  After much head-scratching and flow-charting, I settled on a routing structure that would allow me to manipulate sections of the work live with a feedback delay, a harmonizer, and a buffer-based sequencer and then feed the whole thing through my favorite reverb.

The harmonizer is a relatively old (I'm guessing Max 6?) Max for Live device called M4L.dl.13.Harmonizer (I couldn't find documentation for it beyond a reference in an undated tutorial index).  I like it because it has a feedback loop, so the transposition you pick stacks up:  if you choose a two-step transposition, you get whole-tone harmony; with three steps, you get diminished chords; with five steps, you get quartal harmony, etc.  Additionally, it incorporates per-channel delays, giving a kind of pseudo-arpeggio effect.  I manipulated the direction and distance of the transpositions to give the algorithm a sense of mood and movement. 

The sequencer I used randomizes pitches and limits them to whatever notes (or microtones) you want.  In this case, I continued using the dorian scale; i.e., any sound in the buffer would be repitched to any note in a dorian scale in the first octave up or down from that sound.  This has the effect of creating a new dorian "key" centered on whatever note goes into the buffer; in other words, if the note being played is D, then the sequencer plays random notes from a D dorian scale (no sharps or flats).  When you have multiple notes going into the sequencer, this can get a bit chaotic, but it somehow feels to me still tonal, if strongly chromatic, at least compared to allowing the sequencer to play in twelve tones. 

I also experimented with controlling or randomizing different parameters of the loops themselves.  For example, I had hoped to map velocity to attack, with low-velocity notes having long (1500ms or more) attacks; my experiments with this were ultimately fruitless, though, and I abandoned the goal. 

I enjoyed being able to incorporate performative components into this.  I did several takes of it, all of which came to about the same length, giving me some confidence in the naturalness of the flow.  In the absence of my viola (or at least the energy to invest in it), I expect to be looking for more ways to make my electronic music more "live." 

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Days of the Virus: The Cost of Paradox

You know, I'd rather see this on TV.  
Tones it down.
- Laurie Anderson, from "Sharkey's Day" on the album Mister Heartbreak

I'm very fortunate.  As I've described elsewhere, I live in an easily protected place with family I care about and get along with and am able to continue my work.  By almost any standard outside the US, I am wealthy (in the US, I'm solidly middle-class).  My house is in a safe neighborhood; I have nice toys; my family has plenty to eat and we get both our groceries and takeout delivered.  We are all reasonably healthy for our age and able to care for ourselves and each other.  We are about as well set up to weather the pandemic as could be wished. 

In contrast, am also free of many risks and stresses.  I don't have to make my living doing things that regularly expose me, and therefore the rest of my family, to the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  I'm not working in a hospital, retirement or nursing home, or dentist's office; I'm not a police, firefighter, EMT, or other first responder.  I don't work in a grocery store and I don't deliver groceries, takeout, or packages.  I'm also not unemployed:  I'm not a restauranteur or server or cook; I'm not an artist or performer; I'm not a retailer.  I'm also not homeless nor am I living in a crowded, underserved and over-policed neighborhood lacking basic infrastructure services.  As of this writing, no one in my family or network of friends or in my patient caseload has died of COVID-19. 

For all these reasons and more, I consider myself and my family lucky.  And therein lay a problem. 

As I've been chronicling in this series, the pandemic has been difficult.  The loss of physical contact, of variety and novelty, the ongoing uncertainty and fear of dying or of someone close dying -- all these are things that normally cause pain and would be normal to grieve.  In a normal world, when we suffer a loss, our family and friends rally around us for support; they witness our pain and tell us it will be okay and reassure us that they are and will always be here for us.  They can do that because it's very likely that they are not suffering a similar loss at the same time.  Conversely, we, who are in pain, feel free to be so because we know our pain, relative to our loved ones in that moment, is significant. 

That's not true now.  The burnout, depression, anger, disorientation, etc., that any one of us is experiencing right now, while significant on the scale of things, is not greatly different from most others in our community.  Everyone is struggling, laboring under deficits imposed by the pandemic. 

Grief -- the process we go through when the world changes around us -- requires permission, welcome.  To grieve, we must accept our grief, the pain of it, the inconvenience of it, allow it to bubble up and wash over us when it chooses to.  In grieving, our bodies and our minds process the losses and accustom us to this new world, absent of the things or people we lost and different from the world before. 

The ubiquity of loss and grief in a pandemic -- it is a pandemic after all -- makes this permission difficult.  How can I "complain" about how hard it is when there are people dying alone in plastic isolation bubbles with no more human comfort than an iPad screen can provide?  How can I "indulge" my anger or sadness at my lost privileges like a private office and a gym membership when folks in my city have no safe shelter of their own, let alone safety from the virus? 

To be able to grieve in times like this requires we tolerate this paradox.  It is true that I am very fortunate; it is true that others suffer horribly.  Yet those truths do not make my suffering untrue.  If I am to be well, both for my own sake and so that I may be of service to others who suffer beside me, I must grieve my loss, feel my pain. 

This is what is required of us:  to grant ourselves our pain.  Humans' greatest strength is community (even if Americans aren't especially good at it).  Not only do we serve each other better when we can accept our own grief, but we grieve best when we grieve together.  In permitting ourselves to be in pain, we permit each other; in permitting each other, we permit ourselves.  And with permission, we can grieve and disencumber ourselves and be of service. 

Monday, May 18, 2020

Days of the Virus: Pacing Oneself

Last Saturday marked the end of nine weeks of quarantine for my family and me.  The first month-plus wasn't too bad.  We have been fortunate to be able to continue to work; we live in a safe suburban neighborhood in which it's easy to isolate ourselves; our children are safe and we have remained healthy.

Starting about four or five weeks ago, the isolation began weighing heavily on me.  For two or three weeks, I ended each day just a little more exhausted than the one before, despite doing what I knew to do to keep my energy up -- making music almost every day, hanging out with my wife in the evening, working on household projects together with her and my mom on the weekends, keeping my sleep schedule regular.  I couldn't figure out why I felt like I was losing ground.

After talking with my wife and my therapist (yes, a lot a shrinks have shrinks), it became clear that I was suffering from burnout.  This was, while obvious in retrospect, a surprise and a bit of an embarrassment, as I have plenty of experience with burnout both personally and clinically, so I felt like I should have recognized it.  I left my last corporate position and turned to private practice specifically to avoid burnout; I felt like the institution I was working for was using me up and I would eventually be tossed aside as a desiccated, cynical husk.  In private practice, I began to grow again, my compassion and love for my patients rejuvenated and I felt grounded anew in the inspiration that had led me to this path eighteen years before.  How could I be burning out?

Then, on a videoconference with colleagues discussing our respective practices, a friend shared poignantly his insights about the emotional cost of conducting clinical psychology via a computer screen.  As "talk therapists," the intimacy of our work creates a deep and powerful channel of energy that we experience when sharing a physical space with a patient.  Conducting psychotherapy with an animated image of our patients robs us of that sustenance, leaving us feeling drained -- and, in my case, wondering why.  The group consensus enthusiastically endorsed and validated our fellow's experience and I confronted my failure to recognize the loss' affect on me.

With this new understanding, I've been able to get my scales rebalanced.  A few patients have completed and I'm not refilling those slots.  I'm taking more rest time over the weekend, sometimes moving my work schedule around to consolidate time off, and prioritizing "shouldless" time -- hours when I do what feels good to do in the moment that it feels good to do it, whether it be washing the car, making music, taking a nap, or baking blueberry pie.

For the last two weeks, I have felt ready at the beginning of the workweek, rested and present for my patients.  By the start of this weekend, I've even felt like I had space for my family, able to be present for them, like I have enough of the compassion and care that, as a therapist, I've previously had to steward so carefully, but now I can "spare" some to be a husband and father and son again.

Of course, I'm not 100%; I don't expect to be nor do I expect others to be for a long while yet, but things seem to be working well enough.  I've had several creative projects going:  I have a new composition I hope to publish soon.  I sampled a tubulum I've had for years and made a very serviceable digital representation of it.  I designed and received delivery on the materials for a workbench in my basement; as I write this my legs and back ache (in that good way) from schlepping said materials into said basement.  I purchased a sketchbook and have actually put pencil to it twice.

These things to me are not only acts of repletion but evidence of balance and sustainability:  when I'm burning out, I can't even lift myself up to engage in them.  And preventing burnout critically depends on awareness; having been shown that, even when things seem ideal, it's possible to have more going out than coming in, I can stay alert for that debtward trend and, hopefully, catch myself when (not if) it happens again.

Friday, May 8, 2020

Two Years

Two years ago about 2:40 MDT this morning, my father was declared dead.  He actually passed closer to midnight, maybe even right at midnight, but it had taken the hospice nurse a few hours to get back to my folks' home from visiting another patient.  When I had arrived about 7:00pm that evening, after an anxious 4 1/2 hour flight from Baltimore, his breathing was spectacularly labored and loud.  "That's hypothalmic breathing," the nurse had said.  "The last parts of his brain have shut down; there's almost nothing left."  She predicted he'd go that evening, most likely once the family that had gathered had left and Mom and I went to sleep.  "People need to be alone to die," she exhorted.  And that seemed to be the case with Dad:  as I was drifting off to sleep, just a few minutes after Mom and I had headed to bed, I noticed the absence of his breathing.

In the days and months since I held his cold and stiffening hand in mine and kissed him good-bye, my family's collective life has changed dramatically.  My wife and I bought a house with my mother and we share our little serving of suburbia together, building gardens, cooking for each other, caring for and worrying about members of our blended and extended family, and coming together or going off into our respective corners as we can and need.  Old friends of Dad's have become new friends of ours and allegiances long steadied by his influence have withered or failed.  The hot steely longing of being unaccustomed to his absence has cooled to the familiar hardness of a world without him.  Dream visitations and habitual thoughts of "oh, I should ask Dad about that" have fallen out of mind, leaving the what's so of those who remain.

Of course, Mom and I still actively remember and memorialize him, if more purposefully now than before.  As I write this, I am wearing a favorite ring of his; today Mom carries on her neck a small chain with an elephant pendant that he wore in a photo she has with him.  Tonight, we'll order in Red Robin:  Dad loved hamburgers and opted for meals from the chain when he couldn't find a local place.  We'll make a communion of beef and onion rings and, for a moment, feel his presence.  But our day to day lives are much more about living forward than they were two years ago, which is what he wanted.

I sometimes wonder what Dad would make of our current crisis.  I imagine he'd be his usual circumspect, gentle self, even as he would probably be enraged by our Federal government's response and by the more radical individualist behaviors.  Having lived through several wars and fought in one, I expect he would contextualize current events very much within the ebb and flow of civilization.

Which seems like a good lesson.  Things are serious, but sometimes things get serious.  Do what you can and let go of what you can't.  "We come in in the middle of a movie and we go out in the middle of a movie" -- something his friends told me he said to them a lot.  I might think of him as a 20th century Taoist Farmer.  He was a smart guy and a class act and a model I'll never equal.  But I don't mind trying.

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Parts of Ten

On a roll from my last piece, I decided I liked working with a more orchestral palate and went browsing through my files for an old idea to play with.  I found a piece I had originally started in Logic 9 (so it had to be at least four years old) and spent the next month building on its stem to create this short piece for chamber ensemble.



The original bit was nominally for ten pianos, but that was simply out of the happenstance of messing about with grand piano samples and having come up with ten short loops that all fit together.  I had really liked the motifs and how they summed together, but at the time didn't really know where to go with them, thus mothballing the project for a future date.  Upon review, the collection seemed ripe for orchestration, so I went through each voice and assigned instrument samples according to what I auralized each one to be.  The resulting ensemble was comprised of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, marimba, piano, violin, viola, and 'cello.

The main challenge, though, was to figure out where to go with the basic loops.  The piece was written in a syncopated 9/8 and, after much experimentation, I decided to build sections out of subsequently reduced time signatures:  8/8, 7/8, and finally 5/8.  I skipped 6/8 mostly because I couldn't come up with any interesting syncopations; everything ended up being some version of either 2x3 or 3x2.  Next, because all my original motifs were confined to the octave and below middle C, I widened the original pitch range of the piece to take advantage of the highs and lows of the expanded ensemble.  There's a longer story here, but the short version is that this basic rule of orchestration ended up resolving a problem I've had for a long time:  why much of what I write sounds muddy.  It was embarrassing that I had not remembered this principle from my years of music theory and being a symphonic musician, but, well, there it is.  The rest of the composition process involved creating variations of the original loops in shorter meters and experimenting with how these new versions fit together.

The piece has almost no intentional vertical structure.  Although it is "in" two sharps and phrases and motifs tend to come down on D, E, or G, it has no key center as such.  Although I studied and understand verticality in music (chords, harmony, tonality, etc.), it has never been intuitive for me; put it down to being a violist rather than a pianist or guitarist.  Something I came to appreciate while writing this, however, is that that doesn't really matter, at least for the purpose of creating music.  Nearly all contemporary Western music -- whether it's jazz, pop, folk, or what we think of as "classical" art music -- is fundamentally based on vertical structure and highly vertically organized, so I've had this sense all my adult life that I "should" make my music that way.  But I never have.  It's always been linear, always about where a given part is going rather than the harmonic context it creates.  Of course, once you have more than one line, harmony is a necessary consequence, but, for me, trying to write lines based on how they stack up has always felt labored and I end up making very stiff and uninteresting music.  In this piece, I found myself able to surrender to a horizontal orientation and discovered that the happy vertical accidents that arose from that were far more interesting than anything I could make on purpose.  I plan on continuing in that vein (sic) in the future.

I also learned more about making expressive orchestral music on a computer.  Some things are far easier on a computer than with live musicians:  if, in the midst of a rehearsal, I realize that two sections should trade structures, making that experiment with an in-person ensemble would be impossible, but on the computer, it's just cut-and-paste.  On the other hand, dynamic expression and intragroup balance with musicians is as simple as saying "more clarinet there, please" or "as legato as possible in the viola, please."  Getting a computer to do the same thing, though, requires hours of tweaking velocity and volume parameters -- and that's assuming that the dynamic resolution of the sampled instrument is deep and fine enough to make the subtle changes you're seeking.  In the end, though, I'm essentially pleased with the result; the casual listener can hear enough of what I intended to get the idea and I learned enough to feel more confident in whatever my next project might be.

Technical notes:  This piece was written and performed in Ableton Live 10 Suite using their Orchestral Strings, Orchestral Woodwinds, Orchestral Mallets, and Grand Piano sample packs and Valhalla VintageVerb for concert hall reverb effects.