Philosophy

One of the most pervasive paradigms that has entered modern consciousness is the idea of garbage, disposability, and the act of throwing something "away." The ease with which most people toss things in the garbage is astounding, as amount of time thinking about the notion of throwing something "away" will reveal that away is always merely somewhere else. For someone or something, away is very much here, and in truth throwing something "away" is more about putting it out of sight and out of mind.

The ease with which we can throw things away, and the lack of consequences for doing so, increases the likelihood that we will do so. In a sense we become alienated or estranged from the repercussions and result of our habits.

Imagine with me if you will, a world where there was no garbage service and we had to deal with the consequences of everything we acquired and consumed. Pretty quickly everyone would begin composting, an activity that mainstream culture currently relegates to the hippies and the ecologically inclined, as a matter of necessity in dealing with food waste.

We'd certainly reuse items more, since the consequences of not doing so would be that we'd have to figure out where to put the "waste." Recycling would become more widespread as people realized that everything is recyclable in some sense.

Even more than that, we'd be become more careful about what we produced, as its production would become inexorably entwined with its eventual demise.

In the digital realm, it's even easier to dispose of something. There's no consequence to collecting and then disposing of massive amounts of digital debris. All you have to do is wipe out those pesky 1s and 0s, and you're back to where you started, with a clean slate.

Just as the notion of disposability in the tangible world leads us to create more waste, the ease with which we can both acquire and dispose of digital material creates an environment where the value of digital material is reduced.

The ease with which I can download and delete a piece of music does not reduce the value of the music contained therein, but it certainly reduces the value of the digital file that I pay for and download. It is immediately replaceable, with the reproduction costs relegated to a petty amount of processing power and bandwidth, as opposed to the physical reproduction cost of a CD or piece of vinyl, which then must be distributed physically.

Interestingly, it is more difficult to archive and maintain digital collections over the long run than it is if you collect most physical media. Backups beget backups, and as the digital mountains pile up there is an associated cost with maintaining their mere existence. When a computer crash can wipe out all of your collected data you have to make duplicates to ensure redundancy, so every time you acquire a digital file, you need to allocate twice its size for storage, one for use and one for backup.

At some point you come to realize that paper is a better backup than all those documents sitting on your computer. Hell, a carved stone tablet is a better backup than paper, given that it can withstand fires and all manner of destructive events.

Ease of disposibility encourages producers of digital debris to churn it out at a greater pace, throw more things against the wall to see what sticks. That's how you end up with 100,000 applications in Apple's "App Store," the majority useless time wasters that contribute little to collective knowledge or productivity.

Meanwhile, you have producers of creative endeavors such as music attempting to participate in this digital rat race which undervalues their production due to the medium of delivery. While it is certainly important and even necessary to throw their hats into the digital ring, it also seems that there's something to be said for in parallel creating some artificial scarcity through the production of limited edition LPs and other items of enduring value that aren't infinitely reproducible.

On the Internet businesses are increasingly turning to the tiered pricing model where they give something or some service away for free, and then have tiered levels of products that give their core constituencies exact, tailored solutions for associated prices. I think there's something to be said for creative producers taking a page out of this playbook and considering ways in which they can release certain work for free digitally and then produce items of enduring value that will appeal to the people most likely to pay for their products in the first place.

While it's also clear that any physical product is increasingly a loss-leader that hopefully begets performance opportunities that might help pay the bills, I believe there's a feedback cycle once true believers and fans exist that can help turn the physical product back into a positive feature of an artistic career.

More and more artists are doing it, and I think others would be wise to consider the same route. Old modes of thinking are not going to become viable again through sheer willpower, so the choice is theirs to either swim upstream or to figure out how to take advantage of the current.

Death.

It's the one thing we can be sure of.

Change too, I suppose.

If you were to visualize a tree with change at its base/trunk, branching out in degrees of change, I always figured death might be next in line after change itself. In some sense all change comes in the form of the death of one thing that gives way to another, which points us to the inextricable, inexorable link between death and birth.

Death comes in lots of forms. Human death is the great change that frames our lives. In some ways it is equaled by birth, but the peculiar thing about birth is that we never ask to be born, and we're not conscious of our own birth in the same way we our own impending death.

Music is in the business of change, and in that sense in the business of death and birth. We often think of creation only in terms of birth, but as soon as something is born it casts the shadow of death.

Change itself has no intrinsic value. It can be subjectively good, bad, or benign, but in and of itself it is a descriptor of an ongoing process that we sometimes break down into individual events, most often points of inflection that represent a greater degree of change. It's part of the way we compartmentalize change, in degrees of change, from little change to big change. Death falls at the big end of the spectrum.

Musicians also deal with degree of change, because it's music is created by manipulating the status of a sound through pitch change or rhythmic change. Juxtaposing many changes at once we get music, and structure in music, both improvisational and compositional, is about layers of change. Within a verse there are chord changes, melodic changes, and then there's a separate bridge that represents a macro level change in the scope of a song.

Part of making good music is not only understanding change itself, but also the way we experience musical change as listeners. That of course is all wrapped up in the managing of musical expectations, a topic approached in studies of musical phenomenology.

Anyone who composes for improvising musicians allows change to exist as a variable element within a larger structure. The extent to which that structure is or is not changing and fluid itself is yet another factor in the layers of change present.

To paraphrase, Alan Watts once said that human beings try to make a wiggly world straight. Music at its best, instead of making a wiggly world straight, represents life in all its wiggly glory.

This essay is offered as a replacement for a review of Bill Dixon's new release, 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur (In Concert at Vision Festival XII) - entirely inspired by the music contained therein and in that sense a tribute to the potency of its contents.

What is the quality of music that distinguishes the revolutionary from the mundane, the seeking from the sought, the cherished from the discarded? Music can serve many functions (and I am adamant in my belief that music is a highly functional art), but in this continuum of music we might call jazz, or in the history of African American creative music that people of all colors, shapes and sizes have participated in and drawn from, what is the quality that musicians who stand out from the pack cultivate?

To my ears and personal experience, there is an element of sincerity of approach and vision, a seriousness in purpose and path that translates into a pure expression of a personal music. The element of individuality is one of the qualities as well, correct? An outward manifestation of an inner understanding or quest for understanding, what George Lewis has termed an Afrological approach to music, where the musician is searching for a sound and personal voice both as a composer and as an instrumentalist (the two are inseparably intertwined).

This is as opposed to a Eurological approach to organizing sound as a composer to be faithfully reproduced in accordance with the original vision of the composer, where the individual instrumental voice is subsumed by the compositional voice.

We can see in the Afrological model that there is a potential to enhance and expand the concept of the latter, where the individual voice is empowered within the context of a compositional structure to enhance and expose supra-musical elements, and indeed is encouraged to do so. It requires not only following a pre-conceived musical score, but also understanding the sound the composer is searching for. To achieve that goal, the musicians must listen and react in addition to following structural concerns.

This idea of searching for a sound, a whole sound that we can hear from its development to its completion, is markedly different than a notion of constructing harmonic and melodic composition, but certainly does not exclude it. Both of them work toward goals and reward the forest view of music, how the trees compose the whole, how the tension contrasts with the release. The former is decidedly more exploratory, and the goal is oftentimes more elusive. There isn’t a conclusive map that will lead to the sound, although as with any unknown territory, the more a musician searches and finds, the easier it will be to map and return.

This brings us back to the original question proposed at the beginning of this piece – that the process of searching for a sound, both as an individual musician, or as a composer, is an ongoing process that leads to the creation of a certain type of music palpably, viscerally distinguishable from music that does not. Bill Dixon is nothing short of a master when it comes to this concept of sound, and at his age and stature is unique in his ability to offer us an incredibly refined vision of this different approach to sound and music.

You can read more about the event itself at Stephen Haynes' blog and at SpiderMonkey Stories.

The artist's dilemma and the meditator's are, in a deep sense, equivalent. Both are repeatedly willing to confront an unknown and to risk a response that they cannot predict or control. Both are disciplined in skills that allow them to remain focused on their task and to express their response in a way that will illuminate the dilemma they share with others. And both are liable to similar outcomes. The artist's work is prone to be derivative, a variation on the style of a great master or established school. The meditator's response might tend to be dogmatic, a variation on the words of a hallowed tradition or revered teacher. There is nothing wrong with such responses. But we recognize their secondary nature, their failure to reach the peaks of primary imaginative creation. Great Art and Great Dharma both give rise to something that has never quite been imagined before. Artist and meditator alike ultimately aspire to an original act.

--Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. IV, #2