Piano

I've been practicing piano a lot lately in preparation for the program of songs by Bertolt Brecht that Deb Colvin-Tener and I are presenting at the OSU Urban Arts Space in September. I studied piano formally only about a year and a half (oddly enough, I studied guitar formally for only a year and a half -- do I see a trend?), so it takes a lot of work for me play basic stuff.

I have noticed that my approach to the piano is radically different than my approach to the guitar. While my touch on the guitar can be pretty rough at times, I am peculiarly graceful and delicate on the keyboard. It is almost as if piano lets me explore my musical yin as compared to my guitar yang. I can't say that I have ever caressed the guitar like I do the piano. In fact, I don't think I have ever caressed the guitar.

The thing is with guitars, playing them hard with a pick brings all sorts of interesting sounds out of them. You can get some really percussive effects, and you can bring out some of the higher overtones on the strings really nicely. And when you're improvising on acoustic in a group, it is these harder sounds that tend to cut through. All of those beautiful artificial harmonics would just disappear in the mix.

The closest I may ever come to playing a guitar gently is when I play jazz ballads like Lost in the Stars or Polka Dots and Moonbeams. But even then, I don't feel like I'm playing gently as much as I'm surpressing my natural tendency to play everything like My Generation. But there are some delicate players that I really love -- Wes Montgomery, Ted Greene, Pat Metheny, Bill Frissell. But I don't really play that way. I can't really play pretty on the guitar. And if I do, it is probably a process akin to method acting.

On piano, I tend to prefer sounds in the piano range more than forte. Piano sounds so nice quiet, and when I play softly, I feel like am really caressing the instrument and coaxing little sighs out of it. Whatever it is I do on guitar, it is sure to be bruised and sore afterwards.

I wish I could make beautiful, pretty music on the guitar, but I don't know if that is my thing. Sometimes it bothers me that most of the music I make isn't beautiful, and my tone can be harsh and jarring. But I feel much more comfortable playing pretty things on the piano.

Sharing

As I have said before on this blog, I do not make a living from playing guitars weirdly, or playing them normally for that matter. I have a corporate day job where I am well appreciated and fairly compensated. However, I never have seen a hard and fast division between my day job and music. Just because I'm sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 each day doesn't mean that I stop being a musician during this time. I think about music a lot; I notice sounds constantly.

One of the most thrilling moments in my corporate career was when I realized I could download iTunes onto my PC and then see everyone else in the building's shared playlists. I've always been a huge fan of mix tapes and I'm always fascinated to see what people put on them and how they decide to order the music. The syntax can sometimes be just as revealing than the phonics. But that is a whole other discussion.

For the most part, as you might have guessed, most people listen to the same stuff. There's plenty of Jars of Clay, Alan Jackson, Sarah Maclachlan, Outkast. Then the people who listen to "cooler" stuff all seem to listen to the same cool stuff: Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Beck. There are very few oddities and incongruities.

Until you get to my list.

From the minute I downloaded iTunes, my playlists have been huge exercises in musical exhibitionism. If I cannot be diverse, eclectic, and odd in my work interactions, my playlist allows me to show off the tattoo I keep hidden under my sensible khakis.

So what's on my playlist? There's Slayer and Glenn Gould. There's Merbow and Stevie Wonder. There's Sidney Bechet and Morton Feldman. It's a really odd mix. Once, through a tech slip-up, my playlist was moved from my PC to the main share drive, which meant that everyone could see it (and, unfortunately, it was posted as "Larry Marotta's Library"). As one of my co-workers commented, "You have really eclectic tastes in music."

Of course, all of the music is on there because I sincerely enjoy it. It certainly doesn't shock me at all. But there is an odd thrill of creating this musical persona that is an amorphous, monstrous beast, and is quite incomprehensible to anyone who is not me. It's like having a nipple piercing that no one knows about (I don't, BTW). I like that.

It is really important to me that people discover and listen to and appreciate my list. I am constantly checking under the Sharing tab in Preferences to see if someone is listening to my playlist and I am disappointed when no one is.

Then I try to imagine who the listener is, and what song or artist he or she could be listening to at that moment. Then I imagine what the listener is thinking about the music. Of course, though, it is all anonymous. I have no idea which employee owns which playlist, and most people probably don't know which list is mine. Sometimes I do manage to figure out which list belongs to whom. But sometimes I can't find out, even if I do try. For example, there was a playlist for a while that had some really neat guitar stuff -- Snakefinger, Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith -- but after the company let a bunch of contract workers go, I never saw that list again, and I never did find out who that kindred spirit was.

There are some odd things that do happen through my list. Like my conservative work friend who discovered to her chagrin that I liked Sabbath and Slayer, who then apologized for her more traditional tastes. (I assured her that it was unfair to compare most people's range of music tastes to mine. I did not, however, tell her my theory that Sabbath was the original Christian rock band.) 

And then I am sometimes confounded by odd playlists that have mostly very junky mainstream music on them and then something incongruously good like Eno or Kraftwerk or Bjork. How does that happen?

I guess it all boils down to the fact that it is music that I believe makes me interesting and worth knowing. When I started playing guitar, I was a real misfit of a boy who looked a mess and had no aptitude for anything physical. Playing guitar made me cool and worth noticing. So even to this day, I think it is the musical choices reflected in my playlist that make me interesting, not how well I do my work, or what I talk about at the lunch table. The person who listens to Boredoms, Pat Metheny, and Pandit Pran Nath is much more interesting that the person writing reports and plugging in dates on an Excel spreadsheet.

Overdue

Just when you think things are bad, there is always something like a swine flu pandemic to make things a little bit worse. Of course, we have no idea what will come of any of this. Not really. If we are supposed to learn something about humanity's hubris because of this virus, it is also another kind of hubris to think we know whether this is catastrophic or not. We can't really know.


What has struck me in a lot of coverage of the swine flu is the use of the word overdue. The context for this is that with the major Spanish flu pandemic that swept the world at the end of the Great War in 1919, or the milder Hong Kong flu that swept the world in 1968, we are now somehow overdue for a pandemic. If you notice, things for which we are overdue are almost always negative and are meant to teach us some lesson. Humanity is never overdue for peace, love, happiness, or even a good hand job or a nice box of Belgian chocolates. Humanity is typically overdue for nasty things like hurricanes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and diseases.


It is a cliched writer's device to quote the dictionary. In just about every speech contest in high school, someone would always proclaim "Webster's dictionary defines _____ as," and then would go about supporting or augmenting that definition. But in this case, I think a dictionary definition is useful in trying to understand why people are somehow overdue for a flu pandemic.

Merriam Webster gives several senses of the word "overdue." One is the sense of being unpaid, as in an overdue bill. This suggests that something was supposed to have occurred at a specified time, and we did not fulfill our end of the contract, i.e., the phone bill was due on 4/1/09 and I forgot to pay it and now it is overdue. Under this meaning, humanity was supposed to suffer a major pandemic by a proscribed date, and we did not fulfill our end of the deal by contracting the flu. This sense suggests that someone knew when a pandemic was supposed to happen (or, loosely, when we think it should have occurred). Of course, having statistical and scientific data that suggests that a pandemic should occur is not exactly knowing when it should occur. So unless we could have been certain of a date or reasonable range, we can't really be overdue.

The next meaning is "delayed beyond an appointed time." This again suggests that we have a knowable point in time after which, if the thing doesn't occur, we can say it is overdue: "The plane from Tashkent was supposed to arrive at 11 a.m. Since it is now 11:30 a.m. and the plane has yet to arrive, the plane is overdue." Again, this works only if we have a promise of when something is to occur and that time comes and goes and it doesn't happen. But I know of no appointed time when a pandemic was to occur, so we can't really be overdue. Unless you have a deep belief that something will occur at a certain time as some apocalyptic religions do. For instance, if you believed the Y2K hype that the world was supposed to end in the year 2000, then you might say that we are overdue for an apocalypse. But did anyone believe that a flu pandemic was scheduled to happen last year, so now we are overdue and we're all waiting and waiting?

Vladimir: You have a message from Mr. Godot.

Boy: Yes Sir.

Vladimir: He won't come this evening.

Boy: No Sir.

Vladimir: But he'll come to-morrow.

Boy: Yes Sir.

Vladimir: Without fail.

Next meaning: excessive. "Although all of the boys vandalized the school, only Scott was expelled. He received an overdue share of the blame." I don't think this is what is meant, but if a flu pandemic wiped out the human race, then we might say it was overdue. There certainly wouldn't be anyone around to learn any lessons.

Last meaning: "more than ready." This is what I think most people really mean when it is said that we are overdue for a pandemic. This is where there is a stern moral sense to all of this discussion, along with a prophetic tone. In this sense, human beings have been allowed to think that they are greater than nature, and that they have the knowledge to counter any challenge, artificial or natural, and now they somehow must be taught a lesson and shown their place in the cosmos. The party has gone on too long and the retribution is overdue.

First of all, I don't know what lessons we are to learn from a catastrophic pandemic. Should I have behaved differently? Should I have eaten more broccoli and less pork? Should I have washed my hands and gone to church more often? It seems that the crime, if any, is not recognizing our own powerlessness as people. But in what fashion are we supposed to recognize our powerlessness? And then the suitable punishment for our hubris is to have a lot of people die? And once they die, what lessons are we to have learned and how will we behave differently as a result?

The pandemic is not the same situation as, say, global warming. With the spectre of global warming, there are many lessons we can learn and act on right now: recycling, using less oil, being mindful of our resources. But what is an equivalent reaction by the average person to a pandemic? They should have studied virology a little more?

The thing is, anything that would prevent a pandemic is out of the control of the average person, and the things that increase the number of the deaths in a pandemic -- limited resources, inequitable distribution of medicine and medical care, etc. -- are not things we can easily affect since these are in control of those in power like politicians and insurance companies and banks.

Let us also not forgot that this new swine flu is punishment for white Westerners. AIDS has been a major health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa for years with a generation of "AIDS orphans" the result. Was this something for which African children were overdue? Since they saw themselves as being above nature, they are learning their lesson by having their parents killed off? Our swine flu is certainly puny when compared to that. But those are only black people in Africa.

I know this is a grotesque example, but purporting to know when catastrophic events when and should occur, and that people should learn lessons from them, is a very high level of hubris indeed.

Return of the Sun

Since I grew up in South Florida, I took the sun for granted. It's pretty much always sunny in South Florida. If it rains, it's usually in the late afternoon and is here and gone in a matter of moments. There are not really the days on end of gloom and damp, chilly rain.

Lots of people ask me why I moved from South Florida to Columbus, Ohio. I will usually say something about the variety of weather we have up here in the Midwest, while Miami just has about 10 months of summer, about 6 weeks of early spring, and about two weeks of potential chill. And to be honest, there are days in Ohio -- the first warm day after winter, the first crisp day after a brutal summer -- that have no equivalents in Miami.

Where I used to live.

Where I live now.

But it's the sun, our very shy sun, that can make Columbus so challenging for me. The older I get, the more issues I have with the winter. Clinically speaking, I probably have Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I haven't had an official diagnosis. It's not a major case, although my family can now predict that I will not be at my best from January through March, and maybe through April if the weather stays lousy. It makes me sometimes wonder why I would choose to live in such a gloomy place. It's not really the cold -- I can deal with that -- but the light.

I remember when I was in South Florida at the tail end of winter about two years ago. I was driving a car back to Ohio that my parents were giving me, and I stopped along the ocean. It was a nice small beach in Palm Beach County, and it was about 65 degrees out, which is sort of chilly for South Floridians. I remember standing on a concrete walkway along an inlet, watching boats traveling in and out packed with weathered wooden lobster traps. The salt air was warm and seabirds perched nearby. I had a definite "I moved to Ohio, why?" moment.

But I'm 41 now, which is just about the age when my parents got fed up with the cold and moved from New Jersey to Miami. It is only age-appropriate that I should want the warmer weather in middle age. I don't know if I can live out the rest of my adulthood in the gloom.

However, moving back to South Florida is not really an option. So much of the art and music I love is up north, and my colleagues are, too. And as far a day job goes, I don't think there is any real work for me down there. If anything, I could see living in a city like Chicago, but that just means more cold and gloom.

As an artist, I feel the least creative and inspired in the winter. Through the years, I've learned not to take this as a sign of diminishing abilities. I just know on the first really nice day, everything will come back to me.

But I'm getting better at dealing with it. I find that if I give myself "assignments," then I can keep my mind going through the worst of the clouds and rain and cold. So if I feel aimless, I'll read a book (like The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam), practice a piece on piano (as I'm doing with the Brecht/Weill Salomon Song), research a particular topic (like the guitar method I'd like to actually put together). Or write in this blog, like I'm doing now.

If you note the date of the previous posting and compare it to this one, you will see the outline of the worst time of the year for me. It should be no surprise to anyone the at the time of the writing of this entry it is sunny and 82 and the grass is green and the trees are covered with buds.