DAN WALLACE MUSIC

The official release date for my new album, DEN OF MANIACS, has been confirmed as March 23, 2010. In the meanwhile, here are two free mp3s and the album cover (left-click to listen, right-click to save):

Look at Me
(in which I improvise a lot of electric guitar solos as a means of coping with
increasingly colorful existential quandaries)

Go Away
(a 6/8 response to a famous song by Jacques Brel)

Pre-order DEN OF MANIACS today at Amazon.com.

To read lyrics, go here.

Click here to read a previous blog post that has more info about the album (including track listing).

The cover art, featuring me and Jonathan Arron Taylor, was done by Vesna Jovanovic with the assistance of Pawel Mlynarczyk. The drums on the above tracks were performed by George Lawler.

The other day I was listening to an online lecture in which the following scenerio occurred (I’m paraphrasing in spots, but the salients remain intact):

British Lecturer: Suppose a student comes in late to class the fifth day in a row and I say to her, “Early again are we?” What have I really said?

Class of British Adults Attending Beginning Philosophy Lectures: She’s arrived late again.

Lecturer: Right, my meaning is not the literal interpretation of the actual words, but is dependent on [certain factors]. You know perfectly well what I mean if you are an English-speaking person.

Man in the Class, Interjecting (this one’s a quote): Isn’t it cultural? If you said that in America they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

(End of recreation.)

What? The lecturer responds, saying some stuff about cultural conventions that come into play when people communicate ideas, then comments that although it is supposed that Americans don’t use irony, she’s sure that sometimes they do, though she can’t think of an instance (she characterized Jon Stewart as being sarcastic, not ironic; I assume her distinction has to do with degrees of subtlety/dryness and possibly context, but considering the obviousness of the “late student” example she gave, an explanation would have been nice).

I tried to shrug this off because, really, who cares, right? Well, I guess I care, as that was a few days ago and it’s still gnawing at me. It wasn’t just that the (smug, “I’ve got you now teacher” sounding) adult student was ignorant, it was that the (smart and seasoned) lecturer herself didn’t have a proper response to the stereotype. Maybe she hasn’t been to the U.S. or had any American friends, or maybe she was just too tired to address the issue after over an hour of having to field the constant attempts from her students to challenge just about every other thing she said.

I’ve run into this kind of thinking before, by the way. I once met some young British men in Paris when I was in my mid-20s who were hilarious afficionados and practicioners of sarcasm, just as many of my back-home American friends were at the time (in fact, neither of these guys were ever as complex in their practice as my American friend whom I once heard being elaborately sarcastic while sleep-talking). My new British friends were happily surpised to discover, very much contrary to their expectations, that Americans not only understood sarcasm, but could engage in it. (Incidentally, one of them asked me, ”But isn’t it true that Americans don’t understand sarcasm?” The word “irony” never came up.)

The best (well, my favorite anyway) argument I’ve heard for American irony/sarcasm comes from a British man I blogged about recently, Stephen Fry, in one of his Blessay/Podgrams:

“Incidentally, forgive a detour here, but if there is one misapprehension about Americans that annoys me more than any other, it is the lofty claim, usually made by the most dim-witted and wit-free Britons, that America is an – ho-ho – “irony free zone”. Let it be established here, this day, that no one, on pain of being designated fifty types of watery twat, ever dare repeat that feeble, ignorant, self-satisfied canard ever ever again. Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else and the repeated assertion (and it is no more than an assertion not a demonstrable provable fact) is no more than a pathetic symbol of a certain kind of Briton’s flabby need to convince themselves of their sophisticated superiority over the average American. Now, don’t feel bad about the fact that you, dear listener/reader have, at some point in the past been guilty of repeating and transmitting this feeble myth, we all have. It’s lazy, easy and gives us a warm glow. My war on the lie begins now, and is not retrospective, so you need not feel ashamed. Only promise never to repeat it. Actually, even if you think it’s true, have the grace to recognise that such a clunking, tedious, oft-repeated cliché is so dull and well-worn that it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it’s just plain tedious and only bar-stool bores and dull-witted gibbons would ever think it worth trotting out. Besides, it is ugly, graceless and rude.”

Thank you, Stephen, for saying this in terms that the Briton can relate to (does “watery twat” mean what I think it does??).

Finally, I’m reminded now of something I read some years ago (only a few months after the abovementioned Parisian trip, in fact) in a book called Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, in which Whitehead (a British philosopher who died in 1947) is quoted as saying:

 ”Irony, I would say, signifies the state of mind of people or of an age which has lost faith. They conceal their loss, or even flaunt it by laughter. You seldom get irony except from people who have been somehow more or less cleaned out.”

The documentary American Artifact: Rise of American Rock Poster Art, which features two of my songs on its soundtrack, will be making its Chicago premiere this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center, running January 29th through February 4th. The Saturday, January 30th, 8:00 p.m. showing will be followed by a Q&A Panel with director Merle Becker and poster artists Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, Steve Ryan, and Jim Pollock (I will be attending that one as well).

For more info about showings in Chicago and other cities, and to learn more about the film or read some of the great reviews it’s been getting, check out the American Artifact website. There’s a lot of great poster art there as well. I would definitely recommend the film to anyone with the slightest interest or curiosity for rock poster art or, really, art in general… or design, rock music, talking pictures, people, and/or… uh, stuff that’s cool in either the traditional way or neo-nerdy way. So, if you like stuff that’s classically cool, ironically cool, unironically neo-nerdy cool, co0l-by-association, or cool via disinterest in coolness, you will enjoy this film.

Also, note this bit of good news:

“American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art”, the documentary about the history and subculture of rock poster art in America, will officially become part of the permanent archival collection at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.

The museum, whose mission is to educate visitors, fans and scholars from around the world about the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music, will make “American Artifact” available for visitors to watch starting in late 2010, when construction on the museum’s new addition is complete.

The producers will also donate a complete set of 10 movie posters that were done for the film (by artists appearing in the movie) to the museum for display.

My music will now be heard within the immortal walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thanks to the tireless efforts of the fine people behind this film. I look forwarding to meeting some of them at the premiere. Hope to see you there too

N.B.: The above poster was made by Steve Walters of Chicago’s Screwball Press for the Chicago premiere of American Artifact.

I have not read Nathan Rabin’s new memoir The Big Rewind, but I did read and enjoy his recent A.V. Club blog post about his experience as a first-time author. It deals not with getting published or creating the book itself, but with the process of putting out his book. The article’s intended audience are those first-time or aspiring authors who might benefit from his experience, and it contains the kind of honest, real-world account of a working creative type I find inspiring.

I don’t publish books of course, but, as I hope you know, I do release music. Whatever the medium through which someone is disseminating ideas into the world (whether it be writing, music, dance etc…), things usually shared in common by their creators are the toil that’s put into the piece, the excitement that comes as the piece is nearing completion, the anticipation of sharing the work with the world, and the complex emotions one experiences as the work makes its hopefully long, unpredictable, and exciting journey through the world. Rabin’s post mostly touches on this last item.

Also, as I can rarely take anything in the media at face value, I’ll point out here that in addition to giving advice, two other motives seem to be behind the blog post. One is to promote the book to A.V. Club readers, obviously. The other, and I think this might be the main reason he wrote this piece, is to address what Rabin characterizes as a particularly nasty review made by a Washington Post reviewer. This redemption of credibility, honor, morale etc… enhances the article, I think, because it’s interesting to see a critic qua memoirist responding to an allegedly mean critic in a way that doesn’t come across as overly defensive or whiney (the usual rule of thumb is to ignore the writers of bad reviews, no matter how ignorant they seem to be of the facts), and it does serve as a lesson in general for aspiring creative types.

The overriding message: when you’re selling something that is important to you like a memoir, you are unavoidably engaging in cold, hard, bottom line-oriented business; the real reward is the interaction with people who appreciate what you are doing as a feeling, thinking, creative person, not as a business person. (However, I would add here the caveat that this sort of appreciation – or admiration - is generally directed towards the image and idea people have of the person who created the work as well as the work itself, not at the actual person; that’s what friends and family are for.)

One of my favorite discoveries in recent years is composer Gloria Coates. I first heard of her via an interview she gave on the Naxos American Classics podcast in promotion of a recently released recording of her 15th Symphony (along with two other works) by Naxos. I was taken not only with what she said in this inspiring interview, which you can listen to here at iTunes, but was also, of course, taken with her music. There is a spirit of freshness and sincerity in her work that I can’t put my finger on (nor do I feel a need to), but I think we get some insight into when she explains in the interview that as a young girl studying music in Wisconsin back in the 1940s and ‘50s she would play tone clusters because she liked the sound of them (and against the advice of her teachers who were no doubt insecure about their inability to classify what their young pupil was up to). She didn’t know what to call the clusters until she encountered Alexander Tcherepnin, with whom she ended up studying as a young adult. In 1969, she moved to Munich, Germany, where she still lives.

The best way to get an idea of what her music sounds like is, of course, to listen to it, though I will say that, in addition to the abovementioned qualities, it is technically brilliant without being perfunctory, and there is an emotional quality that is both arresting and, I think, highly temporally focused even at its most seemingly chaotic (you can read about attempts to describe her music here; it also includes info on her methods). This mixture of the intellectual and the emotional is a very refreshing thing to find in an essentially avant-garde (or mid-20th century modernist) American composer whose generation quickly gravitated towards embracing a purely intellectual musical approach.

I’ve always felt that what we often refer to as the music of the Institutional Avant-garde worked better before it abandoned its expressionistic element. So, I vastly prefer Arnold Schoenberg’s (“pantonal“) music to Milton Babbitt’s totally serialized compositions: both composers are very intellectual, but Schoenberg (who invented the serialism, or dodecaphony, upon which Babbitt built his own methods) has a balance of intellect and expressionism/intended hyper-romanticism without which, Babbitt’s work just sounds like a math problem set to music. Coates, who I think also has an expressionistic leaning (though, to be clear, is not a serialist), uses her intellect as a means for getting at something deeper than what the intellect alone can understand or describe. She herself claims her work to be technically simple enough for “young people” to play, though I would be surprised if that were true, but maybe it is… maybe the scores are easy to read and execute, but the moving, original music that results is a more complex affair.

All right, now to the music itself. I recommend:

- Symphony No. 15 “Homage to Mozart” (my favorite is the second movement, called “Puzzle Canon,” which is how she refers to the form she used)

- Symphony #1 (especially the fourth movement, titled “Refracted Mirror Canon for 14 Lines”; this title, as with the Symphony No. 15 example, alludes to her methods)

- Symphony #14: “Symphony in Microtones” (especially movement 3, titled “The Lonesome Ones: Homage to Otto Luening”; this is on the same CD as Symphony #1)

- String Quartet #1 “Protestation Quartet” (I think it was this piece I recall her mentioning from her early college years, written outside of her studies, which expected a different style from students than the one she was naturally interested in; this would be before she went off to study with Tcherepnin, who encouraged her to pay special attention to the study of Renaissance era counterpoint but to keep her studies-related composing and her intuitive composing quite separate; this idea brings to mind my recent post about music theory).

To learn more about Coates, here’s a website with bio, works, articles, and listed recordings. And/or check out her Wikipedia entry.

Finally, here’s something she said about becoming a symphonist (she decided to call some of her works “symphony” well after having written them, and was initially worried about having called them that):

I always had an idea of symphonies being in the 19th century, somehow. I never set out to write a symphony as such. It has to do with the intensity of what I’m trying to say and the fact that it took 48 different instrumental lines to say it, and that the structures I was using had evolved over many years. I couldn’t call it a little name.

There you have it. Gloria Coates: listen to the interview and investigate her music!

PS: The title I gave this post reminds me of the scene in the Woody Allen film Love and Death, when a highly affected aristocratic opera attendee says, “there’s something about Mozart,” and Allen’s character responds, “I believe you’re referring to his music.” I think it goes beyond that, though. We look for more in an artist than just their art… I’ll save this idea for another post.

From time to time I find myself in a conversation with a musician who says something to the effect of, “I’m not interested in learning music theory because it would ruin my music; I believe that music should just come from the soul.” This idea is not an invalid one per se (provided we take “soul” as a metaphor), but in most contexts it doesn’t hold water.

One of my biggest problems with this view is that in every case I can think of, the musician in question has a vast pantheon of musical idols who knew theory. It’s incongruous to say that music theory inherently ruins music while being a fan of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, The Beatles (at least the contributions of George Martin and, later, Paul McCartney), Randy Rhoads (and many other metal guitarists), Frank Zappa, and countless others (you know, like the entire realm of classical music).

When challenged, some musicians will say that learning some theory is ok, but learning too much is where ruination comes in. I have a problem with this is well, not because the only way to measure “too much” is to pinpoint when a musician becomes less good (so, any theory-extensive person who makes good music cannot have learned “too much”), but because the person saying this always seems to be drawing an arbitrary line right at the edge of the limits of their own knowledge. My response to this is to ask if they know what a “C” chord is, or the note names of the strings on the guitar they play. Where is the “too far” line exactly? It’s ok to know 7th chords, but 9th chords, well, now the creative process has been spoiled?

Of course, the limits of a person’s knowledge correspond to the limits of his or her interest, which is fine. What I don’t like is the insinuation that if someone has a greater interest in theory than s/he does, it must mean that the theory-interested person is not creative. In other words, I don’t like being characterized as some kind of unfeeling, computerized musician just because I happen to have an interest in music that extends beyond the  actual sound and emotional impact of it. There are also those whose interest in theory goes well beyond mine. I don’t fault them for that, nor would I expect to be faulted by them for the limits of my own interest. In the end, I either like someone’s music or I don’t. Their knowledge of (Western, Eastern, or whatever kind of) theory – or the extent to which they apply that knowledge during the creative process – is irrelevant to me.

To be clear, I have studied theory obsessively, especially when I was a teenager (it was a good way to help manifest into the world the complex of new sounds in my head), but I don’t consciously use or think of theory when I make music. There are times when it does come in handy, but in the creative moment, I’m just listening.

Here I should point out some examples of people for whom theory was not so useful. A handful spring to mind:

Erik Satie claimed that studying counterpoint in Italy later in life ruined his originality (note that he was already musically educated, but had holes by some standards). What ruined him wasn’t learning counterpoint, however, but was that he had studied it in the most disciplined environment imaginable, and in which exercise after exercise ingrained into Satie a certain way of thinking. In essence, his nature was transformed from an original one to a manufactured one. There is also the possibility that Satie was making an illusory correlation; that is, perhaps the reason he went to study counterpoint is that he was out of ideas, and the reliance he handed to this newly formed mastery did not help renew his creative energies. Also, this was 1905, a time when artists were beginning to reject the Romanticism of the 19th century, which also contributed to his desire to affect a change in direction (or to deny his seemingly inherent Romantic nature; he wanted developmental clarity now, not harmonic splashes of impressions). Whatever the case, I’ve always been against the idea of doing extensive imitative exercises as a way of teaching composition, but I’m all for the teaching of composition itself. So, this is a pedagogical issue, not an issue of content.

Another example is Django Reinhardt, who didn’t know chord names, was basically illiterate, and seemed to have been born with a fully developed musical sensibility. I don’t think theory could have chained down his independent spirit, but it also probably wouldn’t have lifted him much higher either (he also was known to have composed at least a few orchestral works, one of which appeared on a program with a work by Maurice Ravel, and reportedly rivaled that composer’s work in quality; it may have been an organ composition, come to think of it… maybe an interested person will look this up and let us know).

Thom York of Radiohead also comes to mind, whom I recall saying that he thought about learning to “read music” (perhaps an endearingly naïve metonym for “music theory”), but his band-mates, who all do read, were against the idea because it might damage the band dynamic. Perhaps they’re right, since they are working as a whole, the parts of which each contribute some special value. But I bet if York ever ends up going totally solo he’ll start learning more about the inner workings of music (I also bet that by “band” York especially meant “Jonny Greenwood”).

We see then that there are plenty of musicians who don’t need to study theory in order to engage in their creative project, nor will it magically instill creativity. On the flipside, however, there’s at least one musician whose music I love but I think would have benefited from some theory (due to his claims of being in a musical rut): Kurt Cobain.

Another thing going on here is that I don’t relate to how someone can be passionately interested in doing something while denying the value of studying certain areas pertaining to doing that thing. It’s acceptable for (and often expected of) photographers, painters, actors, ceramists, sculptors, and poets to fully explore the technical aspects of their art. Why can’t it be acceptable for musicians? The answer can’t be “because of punk,” because the musicians I’ve had these discussions with weren’t punk musicians. Maybe it’s the general anti-intellectual current running through pop culture in the last, I don’t know, 20 years (by the way, in musical terms this trend seems to be reversing as we see Prog-like music on an upswing, thankfully). Maybe it’s simply fear and insecurity. Or could it be just another example of giving special status and applying different standards to the likes of cultural icons so that they’re exempt from the mortal pitfalls of which the rest of us must be wary? When I think of this idea, I feel that deifying people in this way is an attempt to justify the perpetuation of our collectivistic, conformist culture (despite the US being one of the most individualistic cultures on Earth). That’s another topic, though…

So, before I digress, music theory: if you don’t have an interest, that’s fine by me. What’s not fine is being put down for having that interest myself. Especially by someone standing in front of a Miles Davis poster in their own living room, five minutes after telling me about how unsatisfied they are with where they are as a musician. Now as I think about it, I can’t recall an instance when anyone who was excited about the music they were making told me that they thought learning more about some particular aspect of music (i.e., theory) would be their creative ruin.

I’m not really interested in the question, “What is jazz?”, but I do find it funny that there are things called  ”jazz purists,” such as the one featured in this guardian.co.uk blog post.

I don’t understand the idea of being a purist about anything (which is part of why I don’t care for the need to commit to a genre in the marketplace). But let’s say we peel away the layers of musical impurity that have come to conceal pure jazz. We peel away all the fusion and smooth and Latin and Indian and hillbilly and cool and funk and free jazz and neobop and hard bop and bepop and swing and ragtime, et al… since there’s no way to know where to stop, eventually we are left with two musical entities that sound like Gregorian chant and African tribal music of some sort (who knows for sure?), and that’s about as close to anything that our documented musical history can give us in terms of the roots for current music.

We do have documentation of the Western musical heritage that precedes the Middle Ages, but outside of technical (Pythagoras) and intellectual (Aristotle) ideas about music, Gregorian chant is as far back as we can go in terms of an idea of how things actually sounded early in the eurocentric tradition; regarding African music (the history of which I am less aware of), we can only make assumptions about how it sounded in the past because of their use of an oral tradition as opposed to a notated one. Still, I’m certain that the more we peel, the further we get from anything that resembles jazz, and the closer we get to nothing. No music at all.

From the other side, if we peel back the layers of methodological impurity, such as would render Duke Ellington to not be “real jazz” due to his lack of improvisation (and who knows where that puts the likes of Bob Graettinger), we end up with chaos. From this angle, the closest thing to “pure jazz” would be the noisiest, least organized free jazz possible, which is clearly not what the purist is in search of.

Slippery slope arguments, you say? Probably, yes, but there is no way to know where to draw the line, which isn’t really my point here anyway. My point is that the only thing that could reasonably be called “pure jazz” would be a sort of jazz that exists only in the imagination of whoever decides to think of such a thing. So, as opposed to going to see a concert based on something as tenuous as genre, we should go based on having checked into and having determined that whoever’s playing is someone we want to spend money and time to see. This would seem to be especially true for the so-called “purists” among us.