The Illiterate Musician; How To Transpose

Infants first learn a few words through repetition and imitation.  They then learn a few more words because they understand that the words have meaning and can get them something.  Then they are taught the alphabet and they learn to spell small words and sound them out.  As their vocabulary increases, they are able to put together more complex sentences and mix and match the words to convey a message or to get what they want. 

Once they are able to read, spell and write, they are able to create and communicate ideas and feelings which opens up new worlds of possibility for them.  Some children are able to make up or improvise their own stories using their imagination, drawing from their experiences or using concepts and ideas from other stories or people.

Sadly, some children never advance beyond the stage where they are taught to speak.  Due to either a learning disability or behavioral issues they can't comprehend the concept of breaking down the words to their base letters so for whatever reason they don't learn to read well.  They acquire a basic vocabulary just enough to meet their needs and have no interest in expanding beyond that.

Musicians are like that, too.  Some only learn to read and repeat the notes on the score and like words, don't grasp how or why they are "spelled" as they are.  For those who learn basic music theory, the notes on the page may appear as blocks of phrases, scales or chords to them without the music student actually understanding how each note is used in each phrase or harmonic block.  Furthermore, despite maybe having a musical vocabulary, they don't know how to use all the theory they do know or how to create or manipulate the music with what they do know. There is a disconnect.  A musical autism.  They are like a TTS (text to speech) computer program which robotically  reads back the written word without understanding the words or meaning or spelling. 

Most musicians are taught to read music and that is all they need or think they need.  Others are taught music theory but are never taught how to apply it. Others teach themselves to "play by ear" and hope for the best.  They are constantly taking chances, may not know what they are doing, can't duplicate it or their playing can easily come crashing to a sudden halt because they don't know what they are doing or don't know where to go next.

A high school teacher friend asked me to help do tech for her at a recording studio for a school project.  She brought in the biology teacher to accompany her at the piano and he introduced himself as a musician, too.  I thought to myself, no you're not, you're a biology teacher.  He let it slip out a couple of times that he had a music degree from Juilliard saying things like "They taught us to do that at Juilliard," or "My teachers at Juilliard would be aghast at me playing such simple music," or after a compliment, "That's what four years at Juilliard can do for you."

At one point my friend asked him to transpose the piece up a third and he couldn't.  He asked if there was an electric keyboard available and there wasn't.  My friend asked me to step into the studio because she knew I would be able to do it.  The biology teacher said, "I'm an artist, not a technician." I'm not sure but I think I was insulted.  But, I think it was more him trying to save face because he realized he was not as smart as he thinks or has been told he is.

So, that is why I wrote this blog and made the accompanying video on how to transpose.  Because this guy has the musical IQ of a four year old or someone with a severe learning disability or can only regurgitate what he sees on the page, like a TTS program. 

Actually, it is not his fault.  He only knows what his teacher taught him and their teacher before them and their teachers before and before.  Somewhere along that lineage, none of those teachers had a teacher who could teach them the open secret of numbers.  Here is the video:
http://youtu.be/JrMrYbViCIw

My Local News

I am regularly disgruntled by the quality and content of the local morning news so I decided to watch all three of my local stations simultaneously to see what each chose to report on the first thing in the morning.  I watched the six a.m. time slot and this is what each station chose to lead with during the first five minutes. 

Channel A:
NYS Budget issues.
The closing of an interstate ramp today, leave early or find alternate routes.
The opening of a new exhibit at the museum.
The Golub family launches a fund raiser for fire victims.
Commercial.

Channel B:
A woman was arrested for poisoning her husband.
A man is to appear in court today on charges of animal abuse.
There was a home invasion while a family slept.  No leads or arrests.
A tease about the court case of the Boston Bomber - story coming up.
Commercial.

Channel C (mind you, I live in Albany, NY):
Banter and tease about weather coming up.  Photo of sunrise.
The death of an oil millionaire in Los Angeles.
Autopsy results of a deceased couple in PA to be released today.
Banter about the weather.
Brush fire in California.
Commercial break - Up next, the NYS budget

I found it interesting that one channel chose to lead with stories which affect local lives, the second focused on crime and fear while the third talked about stories not about my community.

Chickadee Fight

For the past two weeks I have had a chickadee repeatedly and tirelessly attack the four windows on the back of my house.  I suspect it is nearing mating season and he is attempting to scare off this "other" male from my yard which he has claimed as his territory.  I have since hung up pool floats and curtains on the outside of the windows so he can't see his reflection.

Junipero Serra as Saint?

It is bad enough that we celebrate Columbus Day here in the United States.  Columbus, while praising and thanking God for the bounty of human cargo, was responsible for the complete and total genocide of the Arawak people on the island of Haiti (and Dominican Republic).  Women and children were raped and murdered while the men were taken as slaves if not murdered and tortured. 

Likewise, His Holiness Pope Francis plans to declare Junipero Serra a Saint.  The Pope has indicated that he "Values Human Life" yet the indigenous people who were dominated by Serra were considered collateral damage by the Church. The canonization of Junipero Serra will glorify and support post Inquisition Doctrine of Discovery; a very dark, and brutal time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Civilization.

The domination and genocide of Indigenous Californians from the brutal Mission system does not support this canonization.  Rather than make this man a saint it would be better to recognize the inhumane treatment of the indigenous people of California by openly abandoning the canonization of Junipero Serra.

Pope Francis is coming to Washington, D.C., to canonize Junipero Serra as a Saint and it is imperative he is enlightened to understand that Father Serra was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America.

The reality of the California Mission system has yet to be accurately taught in California schools or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Elementary school children tour mission grounds and are taught that native people were "docile and child-like savage pagans, saved by the kind and benevolent padres."  In reality, the human remains of thousands of indigenous people are scattered beneath the grounds of the Missions that were built by Native American slaves as garrisons for the church and Spanish crown. Indigenous people died of rape, beatings and diseases introduced by the Spanish conquistadors in California. Spanish Priests did little to recognize indigenous people as humans and did not come to their rescue when women and children were raped by soldiers and settlers. With an over 90% indigenous mortality rate, Serra hardly "saved many souls."  This is another great shame of the Roman Catholic Church beneath the banner of Christianity.

Urge the Pope to vacate this plan by writing to him.  Pope Francis does not have a direct mailing address but you can contact the Vatican's press office at av@pccs.va  Alternately you can mail to the pope via usual mail at this address:

His Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City  

(Vatican City is its own country so you don't need anything more than that.  While procuring postage, if your postal worker insists you that you need a country or begins to write "Italy" on the envelope, stop him and ask him to look it up)

The Pope's Twitter handle is:
@pontifex

To gleam some ancillary insight into what happened, If you have not yet seen the movie THE MISSION (1986), do so.

How Dangerous is Marijuana?

Here is a compilation of annual causes of death according to the CDC:
Homicides: 16,121 (11,208 involved firearms (many were domestic abuse))
Alcohol-impaired driving crashes: 10,322 (1,168 were children 0-14 years old)
Heart disease: 611,105
Cancer: 584,881
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 149,205
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,978
Alzheimer's disease: 84,767
Diabetes: 75,578
Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,979
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 47,112
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 41,149
Marijuana: 0, no recorded cases of overdose deaths from cannabis have been found

Why is it illegal?  It can't be taxed other than by collecting money from arrests, tickets, court fees, fines and incarceration.  It is in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry, tobacco and alcohol industry, lumber industry and prison industry to keep it illegal.

For further reading, take a look at the LaGuardia Report on Marijuana:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/lag/lagmenu.htm

Drive Your Own Car

My father taught me to drive when I was about thirteen.  Yeah, I know, it was illegal.  What are you going to do, arrest him?  There were kids younger than I driving mini bikes, snowmobiles, horses and farm equipment on the same roads.  He taught me many valuable lessons, one of which was to "drive your own car."   That is to say, don't necessarily be nice, don't yield your right of way and never wave another vehicle to move when they don't have the right of way.  You can leave a hole but never wave someone on.

The drivers around you have an expectation that you are going to operate your vehicle in an orderly and predictable fashion which maintains the natural flow of traffic.  Any time you yield your right of way, you not only introduce an unknown factor into the mix - the other driver who doesn't have the right of way, but your expected action deviates from the natural flow and another driver who may not be paying attention can get caught off guard resulting in an accident.

My father also taught me to never follow a driver who has damage to the rear end of his vehicle for, chances are he performs erratic and unexpected behaviors which can cause accidents with drivers behind him. 

There is an old joke about an elderly driver who gets pulled over for doing 35 in a 55.  She tells the officer that she has never had an accident in her life but a lot of drivers behind her have.  That joke demonstrates that a driver who is driving in an unexpected fashion can interrupt the natural and expected flow of traffic.

Here is a short video demonstrating the dangers of being nice or, as my father put it, "driving someone elses car."

http://youtu.be/yM0M8Q6ObIo

You can see me driving down the road while there is a line of stopped traffic on my left.  A grey van is looking to get out of a parking lot and the driver of a black SUV decides to be nice and most likely waves him out - not taking into account that I am coming from the other direction.  The driver in the grey van takes the word of the black SUV that it is safe to cut across when, it wasn't.  You can see that she cuts right in front of me.  Luckily I wasn't texting, eating, changing my clothes, putting on make up, talking on the phone or rifling through the glove box as I see so many other drivers do.  Because I was paying attention I was able to brake in time.  You can see that I also began to veer off the road a bit in anticipation of a crash.

Further analysis of the video will reveal that if the black SUV waited, there were not many vehicles behind them and the grey van could have navigated themselves out of the parking lot all by themselves in their own time. 

The lessons here are (1) never tell someone else how to drive their car with a wave for, chances are you can't see what they see and you are only focused on being nice, not the ancillary drivers who don't know what you are doing with someone else's car.   (2) Never take the word of a nice driver that it is safe for you to move because they can only yield their right of way, not that of ancillary drivers. 

If someone waves for you to pull out and another car hits you, whose fault is it?  The guy who hit you?  You for cutting in front of them?  Or the guy who told you it was safe to pull out? 

Nice is different than good.  Be a good driver, not a nice one. 

Singing Tips

While watching the battle rounds of THE VOICE with some friends, we were sometimes at a disagreement over which singer was superior.  I always won but that doesn't mean I was always right.  Listening is in the ear of the beholder.   In these reality competitions, sometimes the eye.

I was listening for dynamics, enunciation, good phrasing and singing off the page.  Some people would call it soul, or tone and the judges often called it "in the pocket."  Randy Jackson used to call it "the 'It' factor."   I'll break it down on my personal technical level.

Singing with dynamics is easy to comprehend.  The singer gets louder and softer while singing phrases.  It adds a contour to the phrase or even the entire song.  In this instance I was listening for more inner dynamics.  More than within a phrase but, including within a word.  If they were singing a vowel on a whole note or a note held for a while, I was listening if they did anything with that note.  If they held note at the same volume, I was bored.  If they got loud or soft on it, they piqued my interest.  One of them evolved the diphthong and that was cool.  A diphthong is a vowel which has two vowel sounds such as in the word "eye."  A trained singer would sing it sort of like "ahhye" or maybe "ahhhh."  "E" is a harsh sound and can cause a singer to lower their soft palate and raise the tongue.  What is bad about that is it diminishes a clear, full and open tone.  An untrained or maybe a country singer would sing, "ah-eee."  Try it yourself.  Sing the letter "i" and notice how quickly you want to sing an "ee" and raise the tongue.  That's a diphthong.

A second dynamic I listen for is what they do with repeated words.  Let's say you fell and broke your leg.  You would yell for help.  If no one answers, you yell a little louder.  No answer?  You yell LOUDER.  Try it (but softly in case someone hears you).  The same thing would happen as you lose hope.  You yell "HELP!"  Then maybe "help . . . " then "hel . . . "  So when one of the singers sang "I love you, I really do love you, yes, I love you." each repetition about love needed to be different every time.

Poor enunciation is, well, singing without consonants.  A singer can't be understood and what is the purpose for singing if it is not to share words?  In other words, wi  ou  onso an  ,  ou  an'  e un erstoo.  I zone out on singers who make me work to understand them.  If they mumble their lyrics, clearly they are not important to them, why should I listen then?

Phrasing is when a singer takes a breath.  It is the commas of the musical line.  Some singers can be artistic with this such as Adam Lambert who while competing on American Idol would sing long phrases without taking a breath.  I loved that.  Others, take lots, of breaths, all over, the, place.  For me the worse sin-(breath)-gers are the ones who take breaths in the mid-(breath)-dle of words.  Those of you who go to church, listen the next time a soloist sings the song "Ave Maria."  Many soloists will sing "A (breath) ve, Mareeee (breath) eee (breath) ya."  Cracks me up every time.

Singing off the page is a simple concept.  It is nice when a singer adds a run but often, the run is just ornamentation and has nothing to do with the lyric.  Too much meaningless ornamentation can be tiresome.  I prefer singers who throw in bent notes.  These are also known as crushes, scoops, gliss or blues notes.  They are notes that are just slightly off pitch but resolve to the correct pitch.  It is very satisfying.

Another factor is something called entasis where the singer is just slightly off the beat.  This isn't the same as dragging because they only do it on a few beats every few bars.  It is a way of accenting words and saying to the listener that these words are important so I am giving them a little more time.  Jazz pianist great Erroll Garner was a master at playing off the beat and he would often do it for a whole song.   Our brains crave the unpredictability of entasis.  Just listen to any MIDI file where the notes are quantized perfectly on the beats and you'll hear how boring perfectly-on-the-beat music can be.

A great performance is often filled with purposeful uncertainty.  Those musicians who can do that are called artists.  With music, as with all things, your mileage may vary.  How perfect is that?