TeledyN

The musicians of the Detroit Symphony were hired originally to play only orchestral repertoire and at very high levels of quality. Yet they now face the possibility of having to professionally wear many hats. Future symphony duties beyond orchestra playing would include teaching, mentoring, chamber music concerts, public speaking, among others.

Most change is both good and bad. One criticism of the proposed changes is that the level of quality of their performances will go down. That fear is justified, and probably true. Yet, the proposed versatility of the musicians’ jobs may, after a period of adjustment, improve their quality of life through that variety. Instead of the “assembly line” churning out of high-level orchestra concerts, the musicians will have the opportunity to perform more chamber music, which on the whole is more satisfying than orchestral playing. And their value to the community will be greatly enhanced. It is that non-monetary value which is the true spirit of music and music’s expression. (Needless to say, musicians must earn a respectable income to continue to perform at high levels.)

I see musicians returning to the role of “healers”, rather than distant performers on stage. Musicians are community “glue”, not only through playing beautiful music, but also through encouraging others in their expression of it.

to which David adds the apocryphal postscript: "Connections with people are more difficult to make through traditional concert settings." and that is when I lept to my feet.

Surely I've done 10,000 hours practice? I achieved a standard necessary to play professionally at the top level. Over the years I've been diligent about my practice and assumed that I'd met 10,000 hours. However upon further investigation the reality proved to be a little different.

I did some calculations from memory on the practice and playing that I did between the ages of 11 (when I started playing) and 22 when I was playing at a professional level regularly - around a 10 year time span. I've estimated how many hours I spent practising, playing in groups, having lessons and other associated activities and learning over the given time period.

The Results

You'll notice that I've made a distinction between 'practice' and 'deliberate practice'. The 10,000 hour rule requires deliberate practice, the type that has aims, concentration and results. You'll notice as a beginner I did equal amounts of unproductive and productive practice. As I developed I did increasing amounts of deliberate practice.

It may not be obvious from the graph but my total amount of deliberate practice over the period was in fact only around 5,000 hours - half of what is required to become an 'expert'. Whilst I'm probably over the 10,000 hour mark now I was very surprised to find that I'd done so little.

That's not to say I did not do a lot of playing. If you add in other playing, rehearsals and the like the total becomes nearly 13,000 hours over the 10 year period. Some of these other activities undoubtedly contributed towards my development, despite not being deliberate practice.

Another factor which may not have been considered is the impact of directed learning - lessons. Over the same time period I received 2,500 hours of instrumental and musical tuition. I shall need to re-read the Ericsson study to see if it takes account of external factors such as lessons and group activities.

What does it mean?

So my total musical hours over the 10 years is around 15,500. To put that in some context; the majority of these were during college/university years. During these 6 years I was, on average, musically engaged for 5 hours every single day. 365 days a year for 6 years. This doesn't account for holidays, breaks, illness etc.

It makes you think doesn't it. To get to 10,000 hours is a huge commitment which you'll need to make over probably 15 or more years, day in day out. That's tough. It's also why most people don't make it

What brought this to mind was another item, a video posted by a net friend showing school kids dutifully holding up sound-bite phrases given to them by the marketeers of the New Image Of Childhood and what got me was the frightful resonance in the bite-card that claimed

By the time they graduate, the average child will have spent 10,000 hours playing video games

I kind of blew up at my kids the other day, directed at one more than the other but the other got drawn in, and while we do make a concerted effort to ensure that our kids will not be in the ranks of the 'professional-level' stupid-game players, what sparked my rant was one of them refusing to play a piece of music because ... because ... because it went one semi-tone above his comfort range. I lost it, but tried to be so absurd and animated as to be comic: in a video game you pilot a puppet, a dolly, a pre-school toy pushed around a maze, and oh look golly by gee aren't I amazing? ... I actually picked up a cup. Wow. What skill, what dexterity, what an evolutionary advance for the human species, I can make a doll pick up a cup, or a gun, or spit phlegm at another doll. Even the 'puzzles' in these essentially identical D&D style MUD-room games are not clever deductions, not even on par with second-guessing a 3rd rate mystery novel. They are baby toys and we are creating an entire generation with a professional level of experience not in building them, but in operating them. No species is going to gain the edge in the ecology for having a particularly well-developed thumb, Tom Robbins notwithstanding. To waste the learn-hungry capacity of the young brain on such tripe, however profitable it may be to the vendors, is essentially and practically criminal. We probably deserve extinction for that fact alone.

Which brings me to the above, to his observation that it was between the ages of 10 and 22, the 'school-age' years, where he gained the bulk of the experience that would later show as the competent musician. So far so good, but then he surmisses that there was a particular form of disciplined practice that was requisite so as to make the climb difficult and it was, he says, that very feature of the drudgery that eliminated the vast majority, the majority who apparently then slid into the much easier world of constant Skinner-Box reinforcement for dexterity at pushing phlegm-spitting dollys around a hamster-trail VR world.

I would challenge only one aspect of that: we are all experts at our native tongue, and yet we spent virtually none of our formative years in language engaged in 'deliberate practice'! Quite the opposite: we learned to speak by playing with others, by playing with experts, and playing with experts who were welcoming and forgiving of our baby talk, who even emulated our mistakes so as to draw us in and encourage us to keep at it, because they knew, and they knew we would come to know, that a proficiency in this thing we called langauge was something valuable to know. It has ecological validity, it gives you the edge in the ecosystem. Most parents will tell you that once you get the first concept of the power of the word into the young mind, once they start with mama or bottle or dada or whatever, the problem is not getting their children to learn new modes of expression, but getting them to stop.

And remarkably, using that natural method of acquiring the new language beyond grunts and cries, how long does it take baby to learn a proficiency? Precious little. And what is the difference?

The difference is in the reason, in that first word and the power it brings, in the self-realized recognition that this thing, this simple utterance, gets you where you want to go and from there, well, evolution has created this creature that, once it knows where it wants to go, has an astounding propensity and cleverness to get itself there. That cleverness is what draws it into the marketeer's snare of games and diversions of entertrainment.

Now imagine if we structured the music training in the same way, in a friendly welcoming environment where mistakes are irrelevant to the purpose, the purpose being the social reason for the music, what musicians call the groove, and what happens when the child learns that this 'groove' has direct effects, and they learn this early in the game, like when they learned that saying 'Mama' will get the whole room excited and attending.

So why do we start with notes and scales and fingering? Ok, the highly successful Suzuki method doesn't, but I think you know what I mean: Our goal as music educators should be to lead the young mind to recognize first and foremost the reason for playing, and bring them into the real conversation with real and competent conversationalists, and do this as soon as possible so as to get on the leading wave of that precious and fleeting 10-year span where they have both the capacity for voracious learning and the time available to devour it. Once they get in, once they are in the group of Those Who Can Speak This Language, what do you suppose will happen?

Well, we already know the answer. Or rather, we knew the answer. Those of you from third-world nations are already laughing at my gringo ignorance here because you probably grew up knowing the difference between the son and the rumba clave, tasked with playing it at every jump-up. In Great-Grandpa's day everybody had direct experience with the making of music, not consuming a packaged commodity, but having an active and direct participation, in playing inside the music, inside the social architecture of choirs, of bands, of orchestras however rag-tag and ill-equiped. It was the way we did things.

So where is it now? Well, it is there, but maybe you're not seeing it. It is there in the community choirs (no, you needn't join a church though it is still there too) it is in community theatres, and in the many municipal orchestras and city bands who hang on like raggamuffin monks, clinging to dwindling budgets and media indifference, knowing the societal value of what they hold, preserving that vital lifeline back to where we've been from, waiting for their surrounding society to wake up, ditch the dumb dolly games, and come back to life itself.

But that stat, that fact of sociology that says we are spawning an entire generation of pro-gamers, just as many of the other cultures we had disenfranchised fell into various drug/escape depressions only to rebound and reclaim their birthrights, so will we too wake up one day to realize there is no one here responsible other than ourselves, and that the solution is still there, our prince charming, waiting for us to awake.

This chromatic tuner is sensitive (it can get an accurate reading from a quiet sound) and robust (when a note is being played, it is not easily distracted by extraneous sounds). With some tuners you have to be careful about exactly how you play the note. With this tuner, such care should not be necessary. The ability of the tuner to hear notes even against a background of ambient noise does mean that when there is ambient noise with no note being played, the tuner will tend to pick random notes out of the ambience from moment to moment. So in this situation the tuner will randomly wander around, imagining notes. I deliberately kept it this way since if it was less sensitive then it would be less able to detect notes which are being played.

visit the  Seventh String Online Tuner

You say you don't like Equal Temperament tunings? No problem, just do as the author does and remember the cents offset you want for that tone; except at the very low end, the readings are accurate to a fraction of a cent all the way to 20kHz.

And if you'd rather a tuner that plays reference notes out loud, not to worry, they have that too: the Seventh String Tuning Fork. (and yes, there's a metronome too)

Emily Howell is already a better (sic) composer than 99 percent of the population. Whether she or any other computer can bridge that last 1 percent, making complete works with lasting significance to music, is anyone's guess.

What Chris fails to mention about David Cope's tone bot is that it is creating 'original' works in other people's styles which is, outside of the world of west coast pop music, the mark of a bad composer, at best, it's kitch. It is one thing to emulate Mozart or Bach indistinguishably as a parlour trick or even to sell records to environments hungry for just one more Hershel number, but it is quite another thing to expand the science of the experience of music and to create new music as innovative and enlightening to today's listener as Mozart and Beethoven had been to the audiences of their day, which is to say, there is no danger here of real composers losing their anthropological tribal roles in our evolution. None whatsoever.

And what that tells us is there is more to creativity than simply rehashing history in fresh packaging: creative work is an exploration into the outer space beyond what we previously believed were the outer limits of what we call 'Music'.

This venturing out is in some ways an unpredictable subset space of the greater Universe of sound; there are many 'correct' sounds that no one likes. In other ways, like when we attempt to bottle Music for resale, it seems almost a superset of sound itself, and clearly both of these unknown realms may on occasion be found algorithmically, but very rarely are they recognized algorithmically as valuable additions to our musical knowledge, yet that pruning of the total space of possible sound is essential to the composer -- even John Cage always sought to control what was to be uncontrolled in his aleatoric works, there is always a figure over the background, even in 4'33" our attention is directed to a conducted event. It might be a amusing to provide 'Emily' with the collected piano works of John Cage; while even the average music program grad has little trouble seeing at least potentials of directions to take out into the outer space from there, I really rather doubt the bot would then proceed to find us new conceptual expressions of lessons in Buddhism.

Kevin Pollard is a little more kind to the idea of Emily, who caught him in a mood of transhuman weakness after a close encounter with 'Cynthia', the first synthetic lifeform, but even Kevin has his doubts about Emily's abilities in the Real World:

I’d be interested to do a session with an on-the-fly version of Emily or her successor where phrases are played in a call-and-response manner in real-time…improvised…and see what happens; how I would respond to the musical directions generated by the computer and how it would react to my response. To accomplish that it would need to interpret what I was playing, understand which harmonic direction and tempo it belonged to, and respond by perhaps including some of the elements but not others, deciding the relevant points and maybe adding its own direction whilst adhering to the pulse, dynamics and the unfolding structure of the shared piece, which is essentially what I do when I improvise.

Indeed.  Marcel Duchamp famously punched a hole in the corner of a math textbook, tied a string through it and then hung the book outside his window for a year, "To see how the axioms and corollaries of Euclid would stand up to the harsh realities of Nature."

Even if 'Emily' really is 'the world's most musically creative computer program' -- like they say of the Dancing Bear, the spectacle is not that the Bear dances so well, but that the Bear dances at all. And maybe Emily really is better at the ancient Art of Fugue than 99% of the average Slate reader, but given usual population distributions, I daresay all of the actual composers are in that remaining 1%.  And, on the plus side, if Emily really can digest a style in the traditional forms and churn endless new emulations 7x24 for the cost of the computer time to run the job, hey, maybe it will free up time for Andrew Webber and Philip Glass and the whole hosts of endless cliché TV and cinema composers can now get back to the real work of that thing we call Music!

"Anybody out there looking for music lessons? Or know of anybody who's looking for music lessons?"

Well ... here's the thing: People don't KNOW you offer an enriched learning experience; after now 60 years of being told that music is "just sound" sadly most people in our culture have no direct experience of music at all, and will proudly say,when asked what they play, that they 'play' the radio. They've been sold a lie and even more sadly, we musicians re-inforce that lie every time we hold out a CD as if it was even important. So you can advertise until the cows come home, no one is going to call.

Time was, parents had direct experience of music. These would be the children of the 'tween-war era, those who lived through WWII, every last one of them had heard a real choir, a real organist in their church, they had heard brass bands up close, and their dancehall was a purely acoustic experience of the sonic laser of the Big Band. Most, at least most in the urban areas, had also experienced a full-scale symphony orchestra although in the era since the collapse of Edwardian aristocracy, that experience was, by 1945, rarer and rarer, progressively replaced by the National Radio systems, and by those Infernal Machines, the phonograph. So these parents knew about music, and even the protestants saw value in giving every child possible the opportunity to get in on the musicianship game. It didn't matter if you were poor as churchmice, even the Gershwins and the Blounts could justify the expense; it was a matter of survival.

Today we haven't many parents alive who can remember a world pre-phonograph, precious few remember pre-MTV. Their experience of music is of a commodity that is shrink-wrapped and dazzling, created by mythic heros in the halls of great Olympus, the domain of the gods themselves. Mere mortals do not aspire to challenge the gods of the music industry, they can only pay their tithes and feel priviledged to be allowed to listen in for a fee.

where have all the students gone?

That means no P.A.'s. That means no CDs. That means no electric pianos, no stacks of marshall amps, no 'sound' systems, only the direct brain to body to space to body to brain transmission of musical experience.

And dig: they think it is worthless, so they aren't going to pay a dime for it -- your concerts only preach to the dwindling choir -- if we truly believe music is worth anything, the burden of the proof is ours, it is then left to us to SHOW them what it is worth.

This is why I joined a community band, and this is why I always vote 'YES' when there is even a hint of a potential to play in front of people out where they are, in parks, in parades, on the street, in the shopping malls ...

One concert in the park is worth 10 in the hall. We have to get out there and demonstrate, play not for bucks or sales or awards or acclaim, but play because, very literally, civilization itself depends on our performance. We must rage against the dying of the light, show 'em what we got. If the kids see what you do as the thing they need for their own evolution, you can bet they will line up to learn how its done. But they have to experience it for themselves, they have to feel what it is, they have to SEE the goods,and for that to happen, we have to SHOW the goods.

Or we can sit on our backsides and complain as civilization slides farther and farther into commercialized primitivisms.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it! (Vladimir Mayakovsky)