Sloughing Off the Yoke of Classical Culture

In my psychotherapy practice, given my focus of working with artists, I often find myself engaged with patients who were in gifted and talented programs in school.  These folks commonly report that, rather than being opportunities for growth, the programs left them feeling burdened and disempowered, that teachers, mentors, and parents communicated -- often explicitly -- that the G&T students, being gifted, were therefore obligated to do great things.  This is tragic; despite whatever gifts they may have, participants in G&T programs are not necessarily any more likely than other children to have any real sense of what they want to do when they grow up -- and so frequently conclude that there is something wrong with them if they can't meet the expectations of the adults who keep telling them how special they are.  Far too often, G&T programs create a cult of prodigy, adultifying children who excel in specific, socially desirable domains and then fetishing them, robbing these young people of the chance to play, to experiment, to fail and recover, which is necessary to developing an identity and a sense of direction in life.  Too, our culture presumes that one will -- or at least should -- love a thing that one excels at, but excellence and passion are not the same thing and collapsing them when talking to young people is confusing at best and dooming at worst.  In the end, the children we identify as gifted often come to believe the opposite of what is intended by the programs:  that they are failures.*  

When I was in school (I'm a late Boomer), G&T programs per se had not yet reached the ubiquity that more recent generations have experienced.  However, a recent conversation with a patient prompted me to make a connection between the above G&T experience and my own adolescence, specifically, the years in which I took up and actively studied viola.  Anyone who knows me, or who has read much of this blog, knows that I've struggled greatly for more than forty years, trying to make peace with this instrument that I both adore and abhor and with the confusion of my early life as a violist.  The insight that arose from this conversation struck me like I was sucker-punched, forming a kind of perfect psychic tetromino and causing decades of emotional coprolite unexpectedly to fall away, leaving me clear about my musical life in ways I feel I have never been.  This post is both a share about and an attempt to make sense of that insight.  

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I don't remember my first awareness of the effect music had on me, but I know it goes back at least to age five or six and memories of my parents playing old Louis Armstrong LPs or the latest Beatles album on my dad's HiFi.  Music lifted me, sometimes transcendently, and it seemed perfectly natural that it should and it didn't occur to me that not everyone responded to it that way.  My parents were musical -- Mom sang constantly in a wonderful voice and played organ and piano, while Dad played trumpet beautifully and could mess about on a keyboard -- and music, whether on the radio or HiFi or played by my parents, was more or less omnipresent in our house, a magic that was unspoken, assumed, a "just so" part of daily life.  As I grew up, my dad sometimes came home from trips abroad with unfamiliar instruments -- various bells and gongs, an unnamed Japanese bamboo wind instrument I've seen or heard only one other place, and other oddities.  As part of my elementary school education, I had a fairly typical exposure to music, participating in children's choirs and learning the names, sounds, and placements of the instruments comprising the Western symphony orchestra.  Through sixth grade I cycled through multiple, repeated, and brief love affairs with piano, organ, my father's brass instruments (mostly mellophone, but also coronet), an ocarina, a fife I picked up on a family visit to Colonial Williamsburg, and a bevy of toy-ish instruments.  I knew I wanted to engage in music actively in some way, but, as with most children, it was just all so interesting and my attention wandered, so no single expression really stuck.  

Triggered by I don't now recall what, during the summer between sixth and seventh grades, I developed a strong desire to learn violin.  At the time, we were about to transition from living in the Californian Mojave to Albuquerque, so the plan was that I'd start in the fall at my new middle school, which, it turned out, had a surprisingly robust orchestra program.  My new music teacher effectively voluntold me to play viola rather than violin -- nominally a result of my large-ish hands, but I also suspect in response to her dearth of violists -- and so, understanding that a) it was more or less the same as violin for the purposes of my interests and b) playing it instead of violin would give me greater opportunity (violin being very competitive due to its popularity), I said okay.  

I quickly showed an aptitude, at least in the eyes of my orchestra teacher, and she encouraged me to audition for one of the extracurricular honor orchestras that Albuquerque is now well-known for.  By the end of seventh grade, I had been accepted and every year after that I advanced to the next level orchestra until, as a sophomore in high school, I was playing in the most advanced symphony program in the city.  By the end of high school, I had twice qualified for and participated in statewide symphony orchestras, one of which was New Mexico's most elite young person's orchestra.  

I enjoyed this very much (although my pleasure was not unadulterated; more on that below).  Most of my best friends, relationships I still maintain and cherish, I met through the youth symphonies I played in, often people like me who felt out of place in other contexts, who had tastes and passions that I later came to understand were unique to the path of the young artist.  Sitting in the midst of a hundred musicians all playing in synchrony to create a cyclonic galaxy of sound was a transcendent experience within the transcendent -- and to have friends who shared that experience with me was unlike anything I'd ever imagined possible.  Those years contained many of the peak moments of my life.  

The aptitude that granted me access to those moments also led my parents to seek private tutelage for me under respected viola pedagogues and, almost every year, I was transferred to more prestigious mentors.  This didactical hopscotch, however, was less a function of any prodigy on my part and more an artifact of each teacher eventually refusing to work with me:  despite my love of music and enjoyment of playing viola, I was far from disposed to practice.  Teachers would initially be enthusiastic about what they perceived as talent but, before long, would get frustrated with me and refer me on.  Commensurately, through high school, the rate of my progress decelerated, leaving me feeling increasingly discouraged and left behind.  In my senior year, I watched with dejected envy as my friends auditioned for and won scholarships to world-class conservatories, while I failed even to try out for any music school and fell into a part-time music major at the local state university.  The old pattern of working with new teachers who were initially encouraging but eventually threw up their hands continued in college until, at age 21 and a bit more than half-way through a BFA in viola performance, utterly demoralized, I quit school and, within a few years, gave up the instrument entirely.  

I quit because I believed myself to be a failure.  I believed this because it was essentially what these teachers, whom I universally respected and mostly admired, repeatedly told me:  I was talented -- even exceptionally talented, by some reports -- but I "wasted" that talent because I refused to practice.  Teachers implored, cajoled, encouraged, demanded -- once even violently and publicly shamed me -- in their attempts to get me to practice, always on the premise that something must be wrong with me for not practicing, that it was inconceivable and tragic that someone as (nominally) talented as I was should fritter away their gift, especially given that others, not so blessed, were forced to work much harder to achieve less.  I could only conclude that, because of my persistent struggles with practice, I was a failure as a violist and a musician and, as such, I must inevitably disappoint my teachers.  

That's the story I lived with until just the other day.  

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Prompted by the recent conversation about how expectations embedded in G&T programs end up leading children to perceive themselves as failures, I began a few weeks ago to re-examine this story I've told about myself for decades.  What I am coming to see as a result is that, in those critical developmental years, few people, if any, were listening to me.  Music called to me and, if I was to play viola -- or any instrument -- I needed to be able to hear its siren.  The repetitious practice that I know is required to play any musical instrument competently is nonetheless, for me, crushingly bereft of any hint of music and empty of joy -- and thus of sustaining motivation.  Seriously, practicing scales is aggressively aversive.  Simply awful.  Add to them dry exercises and etudes -- Schradieck, Ševčík, Wohlfahrt and seemingly endless others -- and practice, for me, becomes about as appealing as eating waterlogged cardboard for breakfast while hungover.  

My complaints about this were consistently met by my teachers with some version of, "Well, if you want to get good at viola, you have to do this."  That's entirely fair, of course, but it missed the point.  I needed someone to sit down with me, put a hand on my shoulder, face me, and say, "Look, you don't have to do this.  There are lots of ways to make music and lots of kinds of music to make.  You're not required to make this music this way.  Why don't you take your viola home and just mess around with it?  Explore it and your muse; don't try to fit yourself into this classical mold:  find your own shape.  Spend some weeks or even months doing that and then let's talk."  I don't know if I would have been capable of hearing that message then, but, in retrospect, it is what I needed.  Instead, I had columns of adults ostensibly helping me, guiding me to stay the course of the classical music moving sidewalk to a conservatory-based career as an orchestral musician.  

Looking back on this now, I think part of what was confusing was that I really did love classical music.  One of my earliest memories of musical inspiration was dancing around our living room to Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (oh, those French colors!).  I recall being electrified the first time I heard the Preludio from Bach's Partita No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.  The Slavic Romantics were big in our household, too -- Tchaikovsky (of course), Rachmaninov, Dvorak, all covered me with goosebumps -- and the first album I ever bought (fifth grade? sixth?) was Beethoven's 7th Symphony, a work that still thrills me to my core.  The problem I had as a viola student was that a lot of music written for viola is boring and awful:  solo music was nearly nonexistent prior to the 20th century and orchestral parts were, with rare exception, endless "pas" in the "oom-pas" of orchestral rhythm-keeping or harmonies that were meaningless by themselves and typically got lost in the orchestra anyway.  (This changed somewhat in the 20th century, as the instrument's virtues seemed finally to be discovered by new composers, but that's another conversation.)  Too, I completely lacked the confidence then to admit it to myself -- let alone anyone else -- but I wanted to create music, to compose and improvise, to give voice to the sirens that sang in my skull.  So, despite my love of the instrument and of the Western symphonic tradition that created it, classical viola music mostly was not for me -- but I couldn't see it, nor, apparently, could the adults around me.  

I now understand the trajectory of my musical career thus:  a twelve-year-old kid suddenly and more-or-less arbitrarily decides -- as twelve-year-olds do -- that he wants to play violin, but an adult determines he should instead play viola; later, when the kid displays some knack for the thing, the adults declare he should be placed on a career track; the kid doesn't know any better and is getting kudos for doing something he enjoys and so buys in; from there on out, the kid is related to as if a) he understands the trajectory he's on, b) experiences having some agency regarding being on it, and c) loves it.  The problem is that the first two premises are untrue and the third is oversimple.  There's no way I could have known what I was saying yes to (any more than any adolescent grasps adulting) and the grossly underdeveloped identity I struggled with at that age rendered me effectively incapable of any agentic choice, let alone choosing a career.  

I got sucked into the culture of classical music, which piously declares itself to be the only "real" or "serious" music.**  I was ripe for it, too:  the hollowness I felt, the powerful deficit of self-sense I experienced as a youth led me to hunger for the certainty and promise of belonging that elite classical musicians flaunted.  No matter that any given person's self-righteous opinions were as likely to flay me as enfold me, here was a community that claimed meritocracy and welcomed me, that said that I was good enough and offered me entry into exclusive circles.  Even a tease of validation like that was the stuff of addiction for a teen like me with zero self-worth.  Of course, entry was only proffered as long as my performance skills were up to snuff.  Peers whom I and others perceived as technically adept but musically plain progressed and continued to gain access to ever-more-rarified chambers and stages, while I, declared musically sensitive but technically unremarkable, found myself increasingly isolated.  Such is the culture of the orchestral music scene, in which musicians are often relegated to being mere technicians in service of more revered creators, the composers.  Thus, the ability to play what another directs one to is prized before generative or even interpretive capacity.  

And the whole "disappointing my teachers" narrative doesn't even belong to me:  I'm not (and wasn't) responsible for my mentors' disappointment.  I was just a kid doing my best, trying to navigate rivers of others' expectations.  I stumbled by dumb luck upon an instrument that allowed me opportunities to participate in all kinds of cool stuff that I never would have found on my own, but I had no idea what I was doing.  All I knew was that I enjoyed making music on the viola and hated the kind of gear-grinding, temporal-lobe necrotizing, anti-musical exercises that presumably would give me more facility with expressing myself through my instrument; I understood the trade-off, but just couldn't buy into it.  My teachers' expectations that I would practice was not unreasonable, but neither did they belong to me.  I wasn't a failure; I was set up.  I was a teenage victim of a G&T program -- in this case, one called "classical music training."  

It sounds like I'm blaming my teachers here, but I really don't blame them; like all of us, they were doing their best.  In fact, I sympathize:  there is very little more frustrating than an ambivalent student.  I know that I was privileged to work with the city's most talented violists and viola teachers.  What's important, though, is that what I needed was someone to check in with me instead of declaring me a problem child for not crossing off all the boxes for prodigy.  If there had been some adult who could break that invisible, strictured premise and help me explore myself, I might not have achieved what I did as a symphonic violist, but I might have felt less like a failure, been more self-expressed, and actually folded music-making into my life in a sustainable way.  

I know I sound bitter.  I am; I believe I have good reason to be.  It's not merely the bitterness of the passed-over, though.  I understand why my high school and college peers continued on and I didn't.  Strip the elitism from classical music and you still have excellence; indeed, I agree that the striving for excellence is -- and should be -- at the heart of all great art.  And it's not like I think myself incapable of excellence in other domains; I believe and am told by respected peers that I have laudable skills in some aspects of my psychotherapy practice.  Neither am I bitter for lacking the skill or knack required for iterative practice; I appreciate that talent alone (to whatever degree I had it) is insufficient to become a competent and effective musician.  Friends, teachers, writers, and others have touted to me the tranquil, meditative states they access through such practice and I believe them, but years of struggle with it has led me to conclude that my brain is just not set up that way.  No, my bitterness comes from being told that something was wrong with me when nothing was wrong:  I just didn't fit where I was told I fit.  I'm bitter for being misidentified; I was and remain a lover of music and a maker of music (I still struggle with the designation "musician"), but I was and remain a shape fundamentally different from that of classical violist.  

And that is the insight that is freeing:  that I'm right to be bitter about these experiences.  Sometimes anger is the path to reclaiming agency.  Said another way, seeing that there wasn't -- and isn't -- anything wrong with me, but rather that I was stuffed into a mold and suffered injury as a result grants me the space to make peace with myself.  Everyone can do their best and people still get hurt.  Happens all the time.  Reminding myself of that gives me the freedom to be angry -- knowing that no one was trying to hurt me and yet I got hurt anyway -- and I can grieve and heal and start over.  For decades I focused on my injuries, believing I deserved them, but now I can see them as no more (and no less) than the sort of slings and arrows one suffers while tangled in this mortal coil and, as such, I can turn my attention from lamenting the mold I believed I should have fit to discovering the shape that I actually am.  

So, today, freshly free of responsibility for others' expectations of me, I'm asking an old question newly:  What do I want musically?  From here out, I endeavor to recognize and let go of introjected narratives from when I was a child student of classical music and to listen for the music that bubbles up within me and to give it voice.  I will explore how much I want to play viola and the manner in which I want to do it, unburdening myself of the shoulds and presumptions of the finger-waggers of my adolescence.  I will make musical instruments of my own invention and search out the sound of music in the world around me.  I declare music to be a voyage of discovery, the journey that my soul yearned for as a child, but could only begin now, in my maturity.  

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* I don't wish to suggest that G&T programs are bad or not worthwhile.  It's important to note that my patients are, by definition, folks who have had difficult experiences with which they need help processing.  People who go through G&T programs which they found empowering are less likely to complain about those programs in therapy (even if they may have unrelated reasons to seek treatment).  By definition, my caseload is not a representative sample of graduates of G&T programs; I leave it up to the reader to seek what I'm sure is ample research on G&T program outcomes, should they desire such evidence.  

** This isn't unique to classical music, of course; indeed few musical cultures are entirely immune to it.    

Woodwroking

Sometimes woodworking is like: 

Prep a stone
  in order to 
Sharpen a tool
  in order to 
Level piece of wood
  in order to 
Cut the piece of wood
  in order to 
Make a tool
  in order to 
Make another tool
  in order to 
Create a jig
  in order to 
Build a part
  in order to 
Make the thing you wanted to make in the first place.

Project: The Vionola/Rotola

 Last fall, while walking down my upstairs hallway, an idea came into my head, Athena-like (more or less), for a kind of drone instrument:  a cylinder with strings running down its length all around, turned by a crank on an axle, and with a curved horsehair bow wrapping around half of it.  I envisioned it as fairly large, several feet long and with at least a few dozen strings.  It could be a monochord (all strings tuned in unison), or perhaps tuned to a pair of notes a fourth or fifth apart, maybe even a pentatonic scale, and, in any case, with half the strings being bowed simultaneously.  

I was very excited by this idea and spent the next few months envisioning ever more precisely how such a thing might be constructed.  I began assembling the needed tools, CADing a prototype, and ordering the materials.  I'm now at the point where I can begin to build it.  Here are some screenshots of the rendered prototype: 

What you're looking at:  the core of this instrument is an octagonal cylinder about 20 inches long, across the length of which eight strings are stretched.  Each side is comprised of what is essentially a one-sided zither:  a spruce soundboard, underneath one end of which is a pinblock (unseen in these renderings), into which, in turn, is driven a tuning pin; from the pin, over a small bridge, along the soundboard, and over the slot-like soundhole, runs a wire string, which then anchors to an endblock that also serves for a nut.  Eight of these simple zithers are then set next to each other to make the cylinder.  The soundboards, although they make the shape of the instrument, are not intended to provide structure.  Instead, the pinblock and endblock are themselves anchored to the axle on which the whole unit turns; thus the load of the string tension is intended to be borne by the blocks and the axle, freeing up the soundboards to resonate.  (Also, the spruce to be used for the soundboards is a fairly weak wood structurally.)  The ends of the axle then rest on Y-shaped supports in a frame, allowing the player to rest the instrument on a surface, turn the crank with one hand, and hold the bow -- the large hoop-like shape -- with the other.  

As you can see, this proof-of-concept prototype is much smaller than what I described above, having only eight strings and being about two feet long overall.  There are several issues I need to test before investing the time and, especially, materials in a full size version.  First, I need to learn how to construct a tubular soundbox such that the soundboard can take the medial (toward the axis) force of the strings, while also putting as much of the longitudinal force of the strings (that created by the string tension) as possible elsewhere (i.e., the blocks and axle); for that matter, I'm unsure of exactly how much total force the structure will have to withstand.  Second, I have no idea about how the resonance of a wooden cylindrical shape when stimulated by a bow and string might work (as opposed to when such a shape is struck like a wind chime) and will need to identify nodes and anti-nodes to determine where the bridges can to be placed, their ideal shape, etc., and, indeed, if the thing can sing at all.  Third, the mechanics of a hoop-bow are, at this point, entirely imaginal; I am unsure if it can even work.  There are other, smaller challenges to work out, as well as unforeseen problems that will certainly arise.  I fully expect, too, that scaling up to a, say, four-foot long, 32- or 36-string version will produce new issues, but I'm hoping that this prototype will help me "figure out how to figure out" how to build it.  

To the best of my ability to ascertain, this is an entirely novel device.  I would not put money on it being so, as humans have been inventing sound making machines perhaps longer than we've had language, but I've not seen anything like it in any of the research I've done on musical instrument building.  I think of it as a kind of inside-out hurdy-gurdy:  in that instrument, the strings are stationary and a rosined wheel that serves as a kind of endless bow is cranked across them, while in this, the bow is stationary and the strings move across it.  I would be unsurprised if no-one had built such a thing, as, honestly, it seems a pretty ridiculous way to build an instrument, but it's my idea and it's interesting to me, even if it is terribly impractical, and so I plunge ahead.  

For a name, I chose "vionola" as a reference to both the violin family and the instrument's mechanical nature, recalling the trend in the early 20th century to add "-ola" to a variety of brands and objects (although not exclusively mechanical ones).  Also, it harkens back to my first career after music school, rebuilding player pianos, for a kind of nostalgic symmetry.  (To be fair, and as I implied above, the instrument has much more in common with a zither than a violin family instrument.  Technically, a zither is a stringed instrument the strings of which do not extend beyond the soundboard, while the bow is not relevant to the definition; for example, a bowed psaltery, while played somewhat like a violin, is nonetheless considered a type of zither.  That said, while "zithola" might arguably be more correct, I'm going to indulge my violistic bias.)  

My plan, beginning in the next week or two, is to post my progress here, showing pix of what I'm doing and relevant excerpts from my CAD.  Having now watched countless hours of woodworking, guitar-building, and various instrument-making videos on YouTube as a result of the pandemic, I have a sense of the time and effort that goes into a filmic documentation of one's work and, at this stage anyway, have no interest in making that investment.  I'm not even very confident I'll be self-aware enough to remember to take pictures of the project as I proceed, but I'm going to take a swing at it.  

Long Time Coming

"A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned."
- Paul Valéry

I originally conceived this piece over two years ago and have been futzing with it off and on since.  That time was largely split between trying to figure out the end of it and rehearsing the more exposed viola parts:  this is the first "public" performance I've made as a violist in close to twenty years.  

Not to presume to call this "a work of art," but after a great deal of fretting -- especially about my intonation -- it became increasingly difficult to justify further tweaking.  I had reached the limits of my current abilities as a violist and, as a composition, taking it further musically would entail reworking the thing more or less from the ground up.  Time to stop.  

The piece is deliberately spare, using only three instruments:  viola (sometimes more than one voice), toy piano, and a synthesized pseudo-choir.  Initially, it had much more of a music-box quality (yes, even more than it has now), but I found myself enamored of the melody, which I eventually showcased in the viola solo in the middle section.  

As mentioned in the Bandcamp page, this is one of several works for/featuring live viola that I have in my project pile and the only one, so far, that I've been able to play with anything approaching a level of satisfaction (and definitely a limited level at this stage).  Most of the pieces in the collection are as yet unfinished compositionally, although some are closer to completion than others, and several of them I'm unsure of how exactly to get them performed:  while not beyond my skill level when I was a young full-time viola performance major, those days are long gone.  It will take significant emotional processing as well as practice to get my chops back to where I might have a chance of playing what I hear in my head.  Sharing this piece is part of that journey; we'll see where it takes us.  

*****

Technical notes:  This was recorded using a Realist acoustic pickup on my viola, some cheap piezos attached to my Schoenhut toy piano, and a native choir voice in my Yamaha S08 synth.  The DAW was Ableton Live 10 and several of its native effects, along with Valhalla VintageVerb.  

4:1 and 3:2

 I was sitting and reading in my backyard last summer and happened to look up and see, through the window in my wife's office, a ceiling fan.  Earlier in the year, one of the fan blades had broken off in rather dramatic fashion -- fortunately no one was hurt -- and so the fan had hung motionless since, awaiting a replacement wing.  That afternoon, though, I saw it wheeling about at low speed, surprisingly wobblelessly; being a moderately warm day and my wife being a lover of fresh air, the windows were open and so she had decided to risk the fan's aid in keeping the breeze flowing through her space.  After I got over my initial uneasiness from seeing an unbalanced fan running, I noticed that the blades cut across my view through the window with an interestingly odd meter:  1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-(), etc.  Even on low speed, the tempo set by this aeolian zeotrope was fairly high and, getting out my favorite metronome app, I timed it at about 178 bpm.  Tapped out by hand, this created a compelling beat and I went right up to my studio and began composing what ultimately became this:  

I love 5/4 meter generally and usually divide it fairly conventionally, 3:2 or 2:3 (sometimes alternating between both, creating a 10/4 or10/8 of 3:2:2:3), but here the 4:1 division set up a whole new way of participating in it, so that's how I began this piece.  You'll notice, though, that, while the percussion hammers at the 4:1, the melodic instruments don't follow that division especially closely.  Indeed, the opening theme(s) could be argued to be polymetric, with a 2:2 4/4 against the 4:1 5/4, but, in the end, I modified the melodic dynamics to accentuate the 4:1, finding that adding a polymeter to the system ended up being more confusing than interesting.  About a third of the way through, the theme changes to a more straight-ahead 3:2 divided 5/4; it seems I can't get away from that wobbly waltz -- and maybe I don't want to -- but the piece returns to the original 4:1 at the end.    

Coming in the wake of other recent forays into quasi-chamber/orchestral-sample-based music, the sounds that came to mind out of the 4:1 beat were of the same ilk, so I went with that.  My last semester of music school I performed as part of a quartet for flute, viola, 'cello, and vibraphone and that formative experience, along with my abiding passion for Debussy's third Sonata for Diverse Instruments, often leads me to set viola among similar fellows and this piece is very much a result of that bias.  

As I got closer to sensing an ending for the piece and started attending more to its mood and expression, I grew more aware of its musical stiffness, a nearly universal problem for computer music.  The piece then became an opportunity for me to explore just how expressive -- primarily dynamically -- I could get my software could be.  I learned quite a bit on that sojourn and distinguished aspects that I had some control over -- mainly velocity and those components of a sample that could be modulated by it -- and those that I didn't, especially the quality of the sample.  So, the success of this experiment in expression is a function of my ongoing lessons in computer-performed music and the limits of the samples that I can currently afford to buy.  Overall, it seems workable enough to me, although I would very much like to have better samples, particularly of the viola (🤑).  

Technically, there is little to describe here:  this was created in Ableton Live 10 using the native Orchestral Strings, Woodwinds, and Mallets sample banks and the native Grand Piano sample bank.  The drum kit was partly a native Live sample bank plus some brush samples I ripped from YouTube.  I then added just enough Valhalla VintageVerb to sound as realistically like a recital hall as I could discern.  

The Young Lions

It is a cityscape composed of brutalist polygons and spires, jungle vines, and oddly young asphalt.  Sweeping curves abound in the architecture and the streets; the few straight lines intersect bends at acute angles and tangents.  Fresh, neat sidewalks band city blocks in uniform gray.  Blank glass panes hold back blackness behind street level storefronts and upper storey windows.  White crosswalks and lane demarcations seem only months old, yet all feels empty and abandoned.  Draperies of unidentifiable foliage make bunting that everywhere celebrates Nature’s apparent reclaiming of this hypermodern space.  

This theme continues uninterrupted for blocks.  Here and there, down an avenue or between buildings, small parks are revealed, with grasses and brush overgrown and trees clothed in the same vines decorating the otherwise naked brute castings of the city.  Above, a bottomless blue-blue sky accented artfully with an occasional cumulus.  No breeze; comfortably warm.  An ideal day, but for the incongruity of the place.  

Time passes like the endless theme-and-variation facades of concrete and glass -- then, a sound of movement.  From around a far corner:  a young man, bedraggled as through some extended physical abuse, attached via a strange, stretchy, starry, translucent cord to a young male lion with an especially scruffy mane.  The man is obviously but futilely attempting to master the lordly cat, tugging agitatedly on its leash -- which appears to be of a piece with the lion’s collar and a loop firmly around the man’s wrist -- and variously castigating, cajoling, cursing, and crying at it.  For its part, the lion responds to the man with no more care than it would were a stone at the end of the tie, sniffing about, ambling a bit, looking inquisitively this way or that, only now and then casting the mildest of interests in the direction of the gesticulating primate.  Clearly, the young man believes the young lion owes him some due of respect; clearly the lion does not.  

If the lion moves in the direction the man wishes him to go, it is coincidental, but that does not stop the man from expressing exasperated relief and reiterating, verbally and gesturally, his intended direction and strutting off thence -- only to be yanked comically off of his feet by a combination of the elastic leash and the imperturbability of his three hundred pound companion.  If the man attempts to push or otherwise overpower the beast, he is mostly ignored.  However, given enough persistence and enthusiasm, the man’s efforts may be rewarded with a gentle mauling; hence, the man’s tattered mein.  Once his Panthera partner gives up this attention and moves on, the hominid has the option of either being dragged by the line at his wrist or pulling himself up and staggering alongside.  Typically, it is only a few moments before, bloodied but unbroken, this wisest of species of men renews his entreaties for dominance.  

This continues for quite some while.  

At a certain point, a distant snuffling, shuffling, and soft growling is detected by the pair.  Both stop their torturous tarantella and listen intently.  Determining that the noise is coming closer, the two head perpendicular to its anticipated direction and conceal themselves around a corner.  In a few moments, a pack of male lions comes into view, half a dozen or so individuals of mixed ages older than the one with the young man.  As if a single but chaotic unit, they walk along a sidewalk bordering a park, with a wilded hedge on their left, sauntering confidently and closely, rubbing shoulders and haunches, and shifting position within the group as if in a slow, informal, but highly competitive race.  They pass out of sight as they came.  

The pack gone, the young man and his pawed partner come out of hiding and resume their queer pas de deux.  As the day passes, this pattern repeats:  the man and the cat interact, always to the man’s detriment, yet always at his insistence, interrupted only by the intermittent passing of some tightly-traveling half-pride of maned veldtian expats.  Once, a younger member of a group is seen wearing the shredded remnant of a sparkling collar-and-leash identical to that binding the man-cat pair.  No other living things, that aren’t green anyway, ever appear.  

If the man’s and lion’s dynamic seems unsustainable, it is.  At a certain afternoon moment on a particular street corner, maximally piqued by the lion’s indifference, the man throws himself at his fellow captive in a last ditch effort to bring the animal into his control, an effort that is, in fact, his last.  The great cat concludes that this gnat must simply be swatted and, noting too that he feels a bit peckish, casually but messily at once rids himself of his annoyance and settles his stomach.  Thus endeth the youth.  

Having mostly decapitated the man as he crushed his windpipe (the simplest way to kill) and supped on his entrails (the easiest to access), the lion gets up to leave his meal and rapidly realizes that, of course, he is not yet quit of his burden and so spends a few crunchy moments gnawing the forearm off of the corpse.  Once through the bone and gristle, the lion sits up and looks around, a forlorn hand still dangling, but no longer a bother.  He sits facing away from the sun, gazing into the distance, sated, occasionally cleaning the blood from his paws and muzzle, Zen-like in his tranquility.  

Eventually, the lion stands, lazily, and turns around.  At this moment, he sees you.  You have not been aware of yourself prior to meeting his eyes; you have been a bodiless observer, floating, dronelike, drifting in this experience curious but detached.  At this moment, you have deep knowledge of your body, with arms and legs and a head, all made of meat.  Live meat.  Meat that you would very much like to keep alive.  And the young, shabby-maned lion, standing passively, sees you and your meat.  

He begins walking toward you.  It’s strange how you can sense the early evening air, the post-afternoon cool coming on, and how the shadows seem unexpectedly high up the city’s vine-draped facades, as this adolescent carnivore, whom you’ve just watched amiably devour one of your species, ambles in your direction, eyes locked to yours, a still-cooling hand at the end of its tether trailing blood on the blacktop as he goes.  

How do you react?  Do you run?  Do you think it through?  Like, “Okay, he’s just eaten his fill, it seems unlikely that he’s coming to eat me, but do I want to test that hypothesis just now?  Maybe I’m supposed to slip the leash onto my wrist and follow the lion, attempting to tame him until I annoy him enough to eat me?  What the hell?”  Prudently, you opt to bolt.  

The lion, in your wake, stops in surprise at your flight and watches your rapidly shrinking silhouette disappear into a distant doorway.  After several moments, hearing nothing, you peek timidly from around its edge and see the lion waiting, standing in the empty street, looking mildly bewildered.  After a few moments, you both hear the familiar snuffle-shuffle-rumble of a pack of adult lions coming down a street behind the recently fed-and-freed feline.  Suppressing your still-raging breath as best you can in order to avoid detection from the approaching pride, you cringe back into the doorway, but your new friend turns and looks in the group’s direction.  After a moment’s pause, he walks toward the sound; as the pack comes into view, they spy him and stop and wait for him, then greet him with licks and head-butts when he meets them.  One of the younger members picks up the still attached severed hand and, with a quick jerk, frees it from its band, sending the leash to jiggle briefly about like an epileptic tentacle, as he munches the body part snackily.  The group walks on with its new addition, leaving the street empty again and your heart yet unquieted, as you wait, blind in the doorway, for silence to return.  

However, it does not.  Before time enough for the pack’s soft sounds of danger to fade, you hear in another direction a chuffing and pumping and grinding, as of an immense engine powering a monstrous machine across asphalt.  You hide in your shallow city-cave as the mechanical mishmosh gets louder and closer, but your desire to see another human soon outmatches your fear of the departing lions and you poke an eye into view of the street:  no maneaters in sight.  Warily, you reveal more of yourself in order to see further, then step onto the sidewalk and begin watchfully walking in the direction of the sound.  

From behind a building a few blocks up on the left emerges a sphere several storeys tall.  Longitudinally striped in dirty red and white like some circus helium balloon, it gropingly jounces into view.  However, it is not floating:  it rides on a truck of heavy tires, partially obscured by its striped bloats.  Into the intersection, the vast, Gilliamesque machine rumbles to the right and heads down your way.  Startlingly, you abandon all heed and find yourself careening toward it, hollering for help and waving your arms in a frenzy.  The balloon treads on slowly toward you, as yet indicating no awareness of your presence.  

Racing up the street as if chased by lions, with the machine still unacknowledging of you or your need, you come to a stop several yards before it.  Awed by this colossal, gaudy, banded-bubble-on-wheels, you stand slackjawed as it juggers toward you, wondering if you are about to be crushed.  Then, abruptly, with a sharp venting of steam, it stops, the balloon wobbling ominously forward and back, and, with another steamy hiss, the balloon releases its gaseous contents and, supported by a towering circular-shower-curtain-like rack, parts to reveal a behemoth, red-painted, steampunk engine.  Cartoonish mechanical arms leap out from nowhere, one of which sweeps you up and stands you on a flat spot on the front of the vehicle, while others fly about with mysterious tasks.  A jointed spray-arm erupts from near the apex of the machine and deposits a foamy circumference on the pavement; somehow, you understand this to be lion repellent which, while effective, also dissipates quickly and benignly.  

Amidst this Seussian flurry of activity, you notice a figure ricocheting about the giant apparatus:  about five feet in height, shaped roughly like a squat tromba marina, with a pair of two-fingered tentacles for arms and a head like a Handycam, it is vaguely translucent and filled with star-like lights like the leash you saw between the young man and lion.  As it caroms around, you realize that this being, whoever it is, is the root and power behind all you have seen.  It acknowledges your presence only with a few passing glances, and makes no sound, but its movements are joyful, buoyant, efficient; you sense that you have become a part of some grand project.  In any case, you seem to be at the mercy of this evidently advanced being and to have little choice but to wait and see if you can understand what is going on.  

In a flash, you see an arm appear bearing a young male lion and another carrying a sparkly leash, while a third grabs you and places you back onto the street, along with the lion, just outside the fading foam ring, and the second slaps the leash onto both of you.  As quickly as they materialized, the arms disappear and the starry being bounces out of sight; the hulking red machine begins chugging again, pivoting, reversing direction, and sweeping the slowly reinflating balloon back around itself, leaving you and your lion looking confusedly at each other and at the new umbilical joining you, in the midst of the macadam and the surrounding grays and greens of the vine-festooned concrete canyon.  

As if placed in your mind as a parting missive, you -- and, presumably, the lion -- suddenly understand what is happening:  

You are part of a child’s impassioned experiment to help lions and humans “get along.”  There have been many iterations of this experiment before you.  It is the child’s sincerest wish that you and this lion should succeed where other pairs have not.  [You feel a deep, joy-filled, well-wish from the child-being you saw on the giant balloon machine.]  

Prayer Walk

 The words "psalter," meaning a book of psalms, and "psaltery," which, in modern usage, is a kind of zither, both come from the same Greek root referring to a family of harp-like instruments.  It is easy to imagine (although I don't know that this happened) the one coming to be associated with the other through medieval prayer rituals.  Interestingly, the bowed psaltery, a 20th century invention, has a voice that harkens me to the sound of sacred psalms sung in ancient, reverberant church halls:  the instrument feels inherently meditative to me.  

After spending a fairly short time with it, I could clearly auralize the psaltery's strings in a choir together, surprisingly resonant and sustained, and, building on this inspiration, constructed a series of four-voice chords.  Each is repeated once via the delay (no feedback) and from one chord to the next only one note changes at a time, creating -- hopefully -- a kind of wandering but even musical kinhin.  Over this, I improvised an independent fifth voice, allowing my ear to move the bow where it wanted; I did some light editing of this melody, adding a few notes in spaces that seemed missing them, but I did my best to retain the sense of meditativeness.  

Like the work with the bowed clock chime, this piece is mostly a first experimentation with and demonstration of the instrument, exploring its timbres for future inclusion in other works not necessarily based or focused on it.  The more I play with it, the more I like its sound and am excited to continue on the path of discovery it blazes.