Regarding Difficulty

As mammals with linguistic tools handy for the structuring of thought, we are by nature inclined to analyze and categorize and tokenize, so that we might apply labels to things and speak about those things in a rough group consensus of shared meaning/experience.

Modern culture owes a great deal to this tendency, as it allows us to accumulate knowledge across generations, in volumes far surpassing the capacity of an oral transmission medium.

It seems when we're learning, however, that the tendency may get in the way. Consider the case of the word "hard":

"I am learning this new thing, and it is hard."

People who dabble in creative activities, particularly temporal arts like music or dance, would find this statement familiar. Certainly as a software engineer the statement seems like an archetypal expression of experiences encountered every few months.

What does it actually mean? The word "hard" provides a rough label encompassing all sorts of situations.

• "I am working with a distributed database that employs eventual consistency to allow for improved availability and scalability; it is difficult to adapt my thinking to an eventually consistent model."
• "I am learning a new piece of music that freely mixes meter and does not use functional harmony; it is challenging to get the details right because they do not move in ways I can predict."
• "I am trying to understand how collateralized debt obligations wreaked such havoc in our financial system, and I can't make heads or tails of it because everything I read is in such financial insider speak."
• "I am learning a new piece of music that has a lot of melismatic passages and awkward phrasing; it's difficult to keep my tone consistent and to find spaces to breathe without disrupting the line."
• "I trying to make some configuration changes in my distributed software system and it's challenging because there are so many performance-impacting details to consider."

Of the list above, I think only the last two are truly aligned with our original statement ("I am learning this new thing, and it is hard"). These last two are not about familiarity with the problem space; they are about actual details of the problems themselves. The others are better summarized:

"I am learning this new thing and it falls outside my realm of experience."

Or better yet:

"I am learning this new thing and it is not yet familiar to me."

If a thing is outside one's experience, then one cannot authoritatively say whether that thing is intrinsically "hard" or not. Here's an accurate statement about what is hard:

"I am learning and it is hard."

Isn't that more to the point? In learning, we program ourselves. We force ourselves think differently (in the literal sense, as opposed to the Apple marketing sense). We tackle problems that we previously avoided, ignored, or were entirely ignorant of. We experience the world from a broader place. In short, we change ourselves, and that is very hard work indeed.

Take something you tackled some time in the past. A piece of music, for instance. When you first looked at it, perhaps you thought it looked hard. Perhaps those notes just wouldn't come to your ear. Perhaps you just couldn't get those rhythms. Whatever.

After you transcended the challenges of the piece, did it still feel hard to do? Did you even stop and consider it? Or did you integrate the piece into your experience, so it stopped being about hard versus easy and simply became about doing it well every time?

I cannot think of an instance in my musician life or engineer life in which classifying an unlearned thing as "hard" was useful, except as a means of identifying things that would require more effort than usual. For any given learning challenge, there's a pile of stuff you don't know well, but there's a pile of stuff you do know. In most situations, the pile of stuff you do know is larger than the other. Is it fair, then, to classify an unlearned thing as "hard" if in fact you are intimately familiar with the bulk of its parts?

It's more helpful, in my opinion, to think and speak accurately about the problem:

• "The technical challenges of this piece are difficult and require practice."
• "There are a lot of variables in this system and finding the optimal configuration will require careful benchmarking and analysis."
• "I am unfamiliar with the harmonic language of this piece and need to spend more time than usual getting the harmonies in my ear."
• "I am unfamiliar with the problem space of distributed databases and need to read some of the seminal literature on the subject to better understand the implications of this system's design."
• "I have trouble following the metric switches throughout this piece; I need to be better about counting and pay more attention to the word stresses."

That is, shed the vague notion of "hard", isolate the real problem(s), and identify concrete solutions to each. Then the notion of difficulty changes:

• I have not achieved familiarity with the harmonic language of this piece yet.
• I do not have the necessary background knowledge to work effectively with this system yet.
• I am not able to consistently execute these melismatic passages yet.

But I will. That's what's fun about challenges.

Thanksgiving Prayer

On that day, God created Carbon;

He created Carbon, and sprinkled it both within and without the face of the Earth;

and He created Gravity, because it is not Just a Theory, to hold the Carbon and the Oxygen and the gases of the Firmament about the Earth;

and He gave Man dominion over every living creature on the face of the Earth;

and He said unto Man: "Go forth and multiply, and create Markets, and let not ye regulate the Markets".

And Man created Markets, and Man incorporated, and called it Man, and Man gave Man dominion over every Carbon on the face of the Earth.

On that November the ninth of 2011, God saw the Markets, and the way of Man with the Carbon, and the Earth that looked like the Earth of September the fifteenth, and God said it was Good.

On Normalcy

My children are not normal. Not surprising; their parents aren't, either.

Normalcy never struck me as an especially desirable state for a human being, within a certain range of tolerance. The "normal" of standard decorum -- excrete in the allotted area, speak at an appropriate volume for your environment, wear pants to work, take turns speaking when engaged in conversation, etc. -- makes sense and provides a reasonable framework for productive discourse. But the "normal" of social interaction with one's peers, taking the foundational stuff as a given, is another thing entirely. That "normal" feels biased towards a relatively narrow range of interests and behaviors, none of which appear to offer any unique merit apart from their popularity. The former gives us rules for the mechanics of conversation, the latter for the content. I happen to think the mechanics are fine and the content basically sucks.

So I don't offer the assessment of my daughters' standing in this respect with woe or despair. More like amusement at best, and pride at worst.

We recently enjoyed a hurricane-filled weekend with my parents, elder brother, and his family. He observed during the visit that while his son sings occasionally throughout the day, my girls seem to sing pretty much continuously between the two of them.

And well they should: their parents both sing pretty seriously for pleasure and to a lesser degree work. Both work on so-called classical singing on a regular basis. Their mother sings kiddie tunes at various pre-school events. Their father sings damn near constantly, while working at the computer, driving to the grocery store, walking through the grocery store, cooking dinner, taking a shower, or excreting in the allotted area. For these girls, singing is normal.

Lots of parents, and lots of children, sing. The near ubiquity of it in our home, and the primary stylistic focus, are probably outside the norm, but gently so. A little eccentric, perhaps, but an eccentricity that people can appreciate.

Eccentricity: when we listen to "Music Together" albums in the car, my daughters' parents frequently improvise harmonies. Not all that unusual. Except that daddy improvises chromatic counterpoint, or turns every harmony into a seventh, ninth, or sharp eleventh.

Eccentricity: the father's endless singing often eschews identifiable "songs", instead playing out a part in some new piece in his head that will never be written down, never heard by anyone else. It might be the Coltranesque improvisatory horn line, the jazz/funk bass line to the latest James Brown noncreation, or a chant melody on nonsense syllables sounding two parts DuFay and one part Hindustani raga.

(The mother's loving acceptance of the father's oddities in this respect teach us the meaning of grace.)

For my daughters, singing is a constant companion, rather than a mere activity. You don't fit it into your schedule like gymnastics classes and play dates; you carry it with you everywhere you go. Sometimes you go to the grocery store.

Young children naturally emulate the adults around them, before learning the hipness of rejection. The ways in which the described parental behaviors manifest in the children are easy to see. But the degree to which this shifts the girls' sense of normalcy is only recently coming out.

The two year-old now sings around the house with a frequency rivaling that of the almost-five year-old. While she colors, looks at books, etc. The almost-five year-old breaks into song in the aisles of the grocery store, mid-conversation, after dinner at Stone Heath Pizza, whenever and wherever. She looks you in the eye, as if she regards this as a standard part of discourse.

Additionally, after asking her mother about her parents' disdain for Ariel's singing in "The Little Mermaid," and their appreciation of Aurora's singing in "Sleeping Beauty", the almost-five year-old will consciously shift between her regular voice and an affected nasal style. We didn't tell her that one is better than the other, and she continues to enjoy stuff that we pretty much despise. As she should. She simply integrated the information into her awareness and takes note of the different approaches as she hears them.

Every little kid has his or her developmental points of interest. I don't pretend that the girls' behavior is in some way exceptional (in the overloaded sense of exceptional that conflates "highly unusual" with "excellent"). Nor do I maintain lofty aspirations for them or a desire to push them towards a living in music. The degree to which music matters to me, and the place it occupies in my interior life, falls outside the range of normal. My only hope for the kids in this regard is that they might have something occupying a similar position in their lives. It gives tremendous satisfaction to see that they already do. We didn't need to teach them or give lessons. We needed only to let them see us being our own weird selves.

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Extremely Important Thoughts on George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling

I enjoyed HBO's "Game of Thrones" quite a lot, which naturally got me interested in the books by George R. R. Martin. One does not need to spend much time reading the writing about the writing -- the information on wikipedia, various critical pullquotes, etc. -- before running headlong into the Thrones-versus-Potter drama.

Given the publishing timelines of the books, and the overwhelming popularity and general cultural sensation of Harry Potter and the Miserable Adolescence, it is perhaps inevitable that comparisons come up. And of course, J.K. Rowling won the coveted Big Dork scifi book prize over Martin, which only serves to increase the likelihood that readers and pundits draw comparisons between the two series.

And given that near inevitability, it is all the more nearly inevitable that I will weigh in with great wisdom and insight.

First, let's start with the 2001 Hugo award. "Eat your heart out, Rowling. Maybe you have billions of dollars and my Hugo, but you don't have readers like these." Readers like what, sir? Twelve year olds? I'm pretty sure Rowling's got twelve year olds. Older? Younger? She's got 'em. Pathologically concerned with the outcome of the series? Got 'em. So readers like what, exactly?

At least one of the Martin books has a pull-quote in the leading fluff pages of critical babbling that explicitly says the series is "better than Harry Potter." This is obviously a stupid thing to say without defining the terms: better at what?

Both are multi-generational sweeping epics. Martin's is considerably vaster in scope and considerably more complex in terms of parallel narratives, questions of morality, etc. Rowling's is more complex on an emotional level as it focuses so consistently and deeply on the trials, suffering, and development of one primary character.

Is Martin's writing "better"? It's more elevated in tone and more structurally sophisticated than that of Rowling, to be sure. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humor, of poignant loss. There are moments of sheer tedium, when we're told of the outfits the character deemed appropriate for wearing to court, or the history of some local non-existent figure of legend, or the lyrics to some moronic song that a traveling bard offers up.

(In that sense, George R. R. truly is the "American Tolkein"; he may not describe the generations of Proudfeet, nor every succulent detail of Bilbo's parting breakfast smorgasbord, but he doesn't hold back with the utterly irrelevant, pardon-me-while-I-skim-this-horsecrap detail. I don't hold it against him; some of Bach's de capo arias have this quality as well, but Bach's accomplishments remain nevertheless staggering.)

Martin presents a world perhaps more like the one humans actually inhabit, apart from the dragons and the like. People act out of self-interest, nobility is a crutch, and the only honest, loyal people are the broken ones. The world is gritty and unforgiving and, above all, perilous. There's something beautiful and dazzling about the interweaving narrative threads, about the sheer scope of it all. Characters like Tyrion, Jaime, and Arya are quite a lot of fun, as well. And anybody can be taken from you, at any time. It's stark. Refreshingly so.

Yet, Rowling's world, while simpler and more fanciful, is not without grit. Rowling waits a long while before she takes somebody from us that we really care about, so when it happens, it hurts all the more. Martin focuses on the bleakness, the fickleness of fate. Rowling focuses on the loss and its consequences. Which is more interesting?

So, to return to the original question ("better at what?"): Martin excels at scope, grandeur, concurrency, weaving, twisting, turning. Yet his characters all feel a little too simple, too straightforward. Rowling, on the other other, develops a few characters with great care and great patience, and the development of tween years through adolescence feels, to me, familiar and fundamentally true. As much as I enjoy Martin's work (thus far), I find it impossible to care about any of the characters to the extent that I cared about Harry and co.

Which is your preference? Both will suck you in. They're both quite good and quite enjoyable, and both have plenty of flaws. So what do you want from a book series? They are both good enough at what they do that one can almost forget that they're fantasies. The fanciful aspects are just facts of the world the characters inhabit, but the choices and development of the characters are what matter.

For my money, I'll take Rowling. I am a human, and Rowling writes about humans and their pains. But it's understandable that one could conclude differently.

Now, all that said, let's consider one fatal flaw in Martin's writing: the sex.

The sex scenes peppering Martin's books are unfortunate. Truly unfortunate. They read like Penthouse Forum letters. They read like what a hormone-addled, pimply, thirteen year-old boy would imagine sex to be. The epic nature of them, the female submission to the man's sheer man-ness, all of it: embarrassingly ridiculous. That they focus purely on the animal act, utterly devoid of love, could arguably be said to fit with the bleak nature of the series. Whatever the case, as flaws go, the sex flaw is tragic: Martin directs this vast array of characters and narratives with virtuosic ability, but repeatedly exposes the weakest elements of his writing in these superfluous scenes that could be better expressed through implication.

(Arguably one such scene is not superfluous: that of Khal Drogo and Dany in their yes/no dialog. Yet that scene is one of the most absurd and poorly conceived in the entire series. I can believe in his dragons, his wights, his Others, his Lord of Light. I cannot believe in his concept of sexual intercourse.)

It is possible that my reaction reflects some latent puritanical impulse of which I've been thus far unaware. It is possible that my own concept of these topics is shriveled and puny, that these sexual scenarios I find comical are to most people utterly pedestrian. It is possible that Martin is the greatest lover in the history of the universe. All these and more are possible, but the books would still be better without these scenes. These things are better left unsaid. To make them concrete is to make them ridiculous, disappointing, cheap, useless. Don't you know that, George?

Rowling had the good sense to avoid this topic. (Can you imagine the parental outcry if she hadn't? That would've been fun to see.) She touched on some adolescent physical stuff, but only just. She wisely focused on the more relevant aspect of romance (though Martin's sexcapades could hardly be described thus) through the obsessive lens of adolescence. Her characters desire each other with crippling hormonal longing, and it drives them crazy, but they long to be loved rather than to merely possess or grapple. This aspect of the great sex game is actually worth reading about, because it's actually, you know, interesting. It's the great mystery that occupies so much of our time (until suddenly it doesn't). It can't be solved with simple measures. The aspects with which Martin concerns himself can be solved with a good wank.

In conclusion: I admire Martin's accomplishment, and I admire Rowling's. Both are great fun, particularly if you approach them first and foremost as such; that way, you can be pleasantly surprised at the emotional depth as the series carry on. Yet Rowling's is the more meaningful achievement, in my view. Rowling wrote for twelve year-olds, but achieved something moving and significant. Martin strives for something significant, but unfortunately at times writes like a twelve year-old.

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Meditation on "Alliluya"

Rachmoninoff's Vespers make considerable use, as one might expect, of the word alliluya. The manner in which the word is set serves to illustrate the same principles I raved about in my previous post: an awareness of the text, its shape, and its relationship to the musical line inevitably yields a deeper engagement with the music itself.

The Vespers are essentially unmetered. Barlines and subdivisions thereof abound, yet their particulars differ from one moment to the next. The barlines tell us about the musical feeling, and specifically how one beat leads to the next. The first beat of any "measure" or subdivision is typically temporally larger than its neighbors, so it feels like a strong beat, while the tail beat (or beats in the case of a triple grouping) leads.

"Alliluya", which is sung al-li-lu-i-a, frequently sits with the first two syllables on weak (read: leading, moving) beats, and with the third syllable "lu" on a strong beat. That is not an accident.

Furthermore, the final syllables i-a may vary in their setting within a rhythmic grouping, but the word is a phrase unto itself, typically comprising a single-word sentence. This alone tells us that syllable i, as the penultimate syllable, leads to a, and that a should be unstressed as the final note in a musical grouping.

By placing this word so frequently in this manner, Rachmoninoff gives as extremely clear direction. The word tells us how to sing the rhythmic grouping. The rhythmic grouping tells us how to sing the word. On the various occasions when the setting differs, an awareness of this makes the offset rhythm more energizing.

For me, focusing on these little details of this little word brings out all the legato, moving linear singing I have to give. Which is not as much as I might like, but is hopefully always getting better.

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The Mechanical Roots of Inspiration

I've recently been thinking a lot about musical expression, and specifically where it originates for a performer. It's an interesting topic that to me speaks of what it is to be human. Not in some abstract, metaphysical sense, but in a physical, mechanical sense: how we perceive, learn, experience, etc.

As much as I love music, singing, etc., upon starting any kind of practice session -- whether individual or ensemble -- my default mode of operation is primarily cerebral. It's been this way as long as I can remember. The musical engagement focuses on technical matters of execution: proper breath support, vowel placement, phrasing, ensemble awareness, and so on. All important things crucial to keep in one's attention, but not necessarily giving any kind of emotional connection. Yet the emotional connection is the only reason to do such things, and is certainly the only reason to ask people to listen. Without it, who cares?

Finding the emotional connection requires an act of will; it doesn't just magically happen on its own (for me, at least).

I consistently find musical inspiration from mundane mechanical matters. Specifically, from the union of legato singing and word stress.

Legato singing to me means a lot more than connecting pitches; it means proper breath support to sustain the lines, a constant sense of linear motion, of directedness. A smooth, moving legato line brings a kind of tension; not vocal tension, of course, but a musical tension. The line is going somewhere and that trip brings musical intensity.

Breath support and vowel placement as technical concerns are subsumed by the focus on legato singing. You do them because they support what you're doing, rather than treating them as a primary goal. This is how it should be with technique: it is the means to an end, not the end itself.

But word stress is where it really comes alive for me. This draws attention to the text, but at a higher level than mere pronunciation. Attention goes to the actual language, the fabric of the text, and you suddenly consider not just words over syllables but groups of words and entire phrases, so you can shape the syllabic stresses to match strong/weak patterns within both polysyllabic (is that a word?) words and whole sentences.

Vowel placement and attention to diction naturally come in to support this, so as with legato singing the technical attention is there to accomplish a larger goal.

The union of these concerns therefore accomplishes a number of things:

• Attention goes to larger-scale structures. Groups of notes over individual notes. Entire phrases. This is where the music lives.
• Important technical concerns automatically come into focus, but in a supporting role.
• It naturally increases awareness of the interplay between melodic shape and the flow of the language.
• It feels really good. Seriously. It's physically enjoyable.

I find that no matter the circumstances, how I'm feeling, etc., focusing on these two concerns inevitably overcomes distractions and the limitations of my analytical tendencies. They bring deeper, musical engagement that is both a lot of fun and self-enforcing. This engagement feeds on itself: you start to observe ever more nuance in the musical fabric, to feel the dance of word stresses across meter, across harmonic motion, all of which make for a deeper experience and, hopefully, a more rewarding performance for a listener.

"Inspiration" is a loaded word in our culture; one that I typically regard with deep skepticism. We attribute it with grandiose qualities that stray from the personal nature of it (or maybe just I do). Yet, it best describes how I feel when applying these practices. How it would make a listener feel is anyone's guess and beyond the performer's control. But who am I singing for, ultimately? Feeling inspiration myself is a good motivation to keep going.

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Help Me Write my Bio!

So, it turns out that I need to put together a brief bio for myself in preparation for a concert I'm participating in. I did this before a few years back, and never was very happy with the results.

So I need your help! Help me pick the best bio that captures my spirit as a musician and human being.

Here's the straightforward, obvious one:

Ethan Rowe, tenor, is known for his passionate musical advocacy of all things American. His debut of "I am John Galt" at CPAC 2009 heralded the arrival of a major voice of authentic American artistry, and his "Impressions of a Budget: for Paul Ryan" won the Heritage Foundation's American Righteousness award of 2010. When not singing, Rowe enjoys tax cuts, exercising his second amendment rights, and maligning the downtrodden.

This one really tries to put my work and achievements in context:

Ethan Rowe, tenor, sings out of humanity's raw, desperate need to extract meaning out of meaninglessness. Rowe strives through song to hold back the creeping sense of irrelevance, to keep the universe's indifference at bay. When not singing, he does not matter. Neither do you.

This one is more revealing; maybe it's a little too honest?

Ethan Rowe, tenor, is not an American citizen. He studied voice in Indonesia, where he spent his childhood, and where he became a birth certificate artisan and an expert in the ancient art of expressing jihadist Islam through traditional western Christian idioms. When not singing, he is actively converting his "fellow" Americans to socialism.

But shouldn't I somehow work the family in? Let's try.

Ethan Rowe, tenor, specializes in answering the question "whazzat?" His eldest daughter knows three girls, who are all named Madeleine, but they didn't go to the pool because there was a THUNDERSTORM.

And I really like this one, but I'm not sure. Too braggy?

Ethan Rowe, tenor, has been heralded by Miles Davis as having a voice like "a motherfucker." His interpretations of Purcell and Bach have been described as "bad", and his fiery performances "get all up in that shit." When not singing, Rowe smokes cigarettes and hangs around on the corner of Mass Ave. and Boylston.

Thanks in advance for you help!

Poulenc: one month on

So, it's been about a month of the Great Poulenc Study Session of Late 2010. Rehearsals are coming up. At the start of the process documented so voluminously in my previous post, I didn't know what to expect in terms of results, but I hoped that the deep score study would bring a level of familiarity with the piece's harmonic language and ultimately my own part's place therein.

I've met with decidedly mixed results. There are a number of reasons for this.

• Life is complicated. Particularly around the holidays. You can have the best of intentions regarding regularity of practice/study and fall short. Travel, family plans, general stupidities related to JesusDay, etc. You just don't get as much time as planned.


• The morning commute often distracts; the tendency on the way in to work is for the upcoming tasks and problems to worm their way into your consciousness. This does not facilitate quiet focus on music study. Additionally, I found that if I left the house on time, my focus was likely to be much better than if I left two minutes late (in which case I had to hurry to make the train); in the latter case, I would get on the train with my heart rate elevated and my mind more active. A quiet activity requires a quiet start. Unfortunately, I'm late more often than not.


• Stubborness in prioritization: I've had trouble getting as much singing time in lately, so I wanted to keep my singing time strictly about focusing on technique; part of the score study exercise was to maximize use of commute time, which is otherwise a total life-waster, and to get more music in the day without actually making music. This meant that when singing time did arrive, I actively stayed away from the Poulenc. When your time is limited, you have to prioritize, make compromises, etc., so it's not unreasonable that I essentially said "this is Poulenc time, this is technical time." But the study would have been vastly improved by actually singing it more than I did.

Ultimately, I found that studying the score like this has helped familiarity with the harmonic language, the formal structure (to some extent; I don't usually find formal structure particularly interesting and this was no exception). But here's what I didn't get:

• Transitions: the whole point of the score study was to slow down and absorb at a large scale. While this is not incompatible with learning sectional transitions, it's biased against it; you study section by section, in manageable chunks. I didn't account for this, so that's one lesson learned: to get the transitions, you have to study the transitions. Duh. It's quite obvious when you're actively executing something on your instrument of choice. Less so when you're treating the score like a novel. Now I know.


• Mental hearing is not the same as physical hearing/doing. I found along the way that I might get flashes of clarity, where I really could internally hear the parts I was examining, without effort and without approximation. But they were only flashes: most of the time it took considerable mental effort and inevitably approximation would sneak in: you do your best to be honest about what you can and cannot internally hear, but time pressure and the desire to make progress are powerful forces, and suddenly you've gone on for two pages without being absolutely certain that you were really hearing those dissonances for what they are. This is as much a matter of managing mental focus and practice time, and at getting better at internally hearing, as anything else; it's not a problem inherent with the score study, it's a problem to be overcome through years of practice at this kind of score study.


• There are a few spots that stand out as having the greatest harmonic complexity, either from density or from the lack of functional/modal logic or both. I paid a lot of attention to these spots, but my own means of hearing music and experiencing music is so deeply rooted in functional progressions or modal relationships that I found certain progressions nearly impossible to hear accurately. Consequently, I have familiarity with all the parts in such sections, and have a nice academic/theoretical understanding of what's going on, but actually executing my part in context remains nonetheless challenging. And I just need to sing it to fix this problem, I can't study my way out of it.

So, the conclusion one month on: this is rewarding way to study, but it has to be integrated with regular execution. It would have made more sense to study things deeply on the morning train ride and then take 15 minutes after work to sing through what was studied in the evening. Now when I actually sing the stuff some parts still feel like I'm reading (though thankfully quite a few places do not feel like that) and there a few transitions that I need to work out. Additionally, there are two or three places where I just haven't been hearing the intervals correctly which now require correction.

So it goes. I'll keep going with this, because the only way to improve is to continue applying effort over time. What else would one expect on a first attempt but mixed results?