Spirituality in Music
[Back to writing after a daddy hiatus due to my 3 month old daughter!]
Brad Mehldau has always been not only a favorite jazz pianist/composer for me, but also a great writer on what he does. His liner notes on each of his records can be very illuminating, not only with regards to his process but with regards to the way jazz musicians draw on the tradition of music that stretches back before 1900 (read: Classical music). He has an great article on his site called "Coltrane, Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, and God." It first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Scope magazine. I am not going to debate religion here, and Mehldau does a great job sidestepping the issue in his article. Instead, he distinguishes between religion and spirituality, with special focus on music.
First, let's briefly discuss how he separates religion and spirituality.
The term “spiritual” in this context, though, perfectly expresses the vague, and I think, ambivalent relationship between art and morality that is part and parcel with modernity – let’s say, roughly, from the Renaissance onward, from the time that music starts becoming more about the individual composer and less an anonymous tribute to the Godhead.
I agree with Mehldau here - spirituality is a good concept to represent the link between art and morality. A religious experience might be as he describes here:
Religion, though, implies a moral directive. And here is the rub – the evidence of something fear-inspiring and larger than myself that I found in Coltrane’s music was not morally applicable to anything. It was not fear of retribution that I was feeling; it was not a negatively felt fear.
For most of the religions of the world, religion is not necessarily a set of moral guidelines, but rather a way of defining morality, often strictly and narrowly. The entire point of the article is to make the case that a spiritual experience is not necessarily inclusive of a religious experience. Something that seems paramount in making the move from good to great is to "abandon oneself to the music" or to "turn inward." I think that when people speak in vagaries like that they really mean one needs to develop a relationship with how music can be spiritual, or how art can create links with morality that do not necessarily outline a moral code.
This gets to my belief that art is a way for humanity to explore humanity through a venue that resides outside humanity. Before creation, a great work of art exists within humanity, in the creator's mind. Once created, it lies separate from humanity, out in nature, whether that be in a wooden frame, on manuscript paper, as a series of moments in time (musical performance), etc. By creating artistic objects that lie outside the human mind, we are able to not only communicate a personal viewpoint, but we are able to create a viewing port into humanity.
I believe that musicians need to have a spiritual experience on some level to communicate that spirituality with listeners. In fact, I think that the communication, or unveiling, of spirituality is one of the most important facets of artistic creation. I would imagine that most people who reside in cultures that celebrate music can point to one or more times in their lives in which the experience of listening to music has enveloped them. Most of the time that experience involves emotion and knowledge coming together at a time ripe for that; a non-religious spiritual experience. It could happen in a religious setting, but I argue that even then it is a separate process. That experience is really the act of coming to terms with humanity through the guise of music. Hence I can still have that experience listening to Ornette Coleman's Shape of Jazz to Come
FinaleMusic.com Profile
So the fine folks over at MakeMusic (makers of Finale music notation software) decided to profile me on their blog. Check it out!
Quick Plug – Timothy Young + Dan Cavanagh
SEATING STILL AVAILABLE AS
Timothy Young and Dalyce Elliott’s
2009-2010 Holtby House Concert Series Presents
Timothy Young and Dan Cavanagh
SUNDAY JULY 18, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Recommended, free will, donation $15 to $10-- all proceeds to the artists.
Seating will be limited, so email a reply and guarantee a seat, to tim@consumption.net.
Timothy will read from his new poetry book HERDS OF BEARS SURROUND US.
Dan will play his award-winning jazz piano compositions,
and they will collaborate with poetry and jazz improvisations.
Over the past ten years these two artists have collaborated to combine fine
music and lively poetry, including the CD, Pulse by Dan Cavanagh’s Jazz
Emporium Big Band. Also, Dan’s big band jazz composition, Joy Soup, based
upon Timothy’s poem of the same name, premiered at JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER in
New York, May 17, 2006.
129 Melbourne Ave. SE
Minneapolis, Minnesota
612-331-4519
The Prospect Park house sits on a hill between Minneapolis and St. Paul, just
east of the Mississippi River and west of the intersection of I94 and Highway
280. Take Franklin to Seymour, at the stop light turn North. Melbourne is the
next street parallel to Franklin. Turn west to 129 Melbourne on the south side
of the street. The Holtby House Concert Series offers some of the Twin Cities’
finest performers in an intimate setting for a reasonable house concert
donation…….
Due to the intimacy of the concert, this is a perfume-free environment
Quick Plug – Cavanagh & Hagedorn at AQ Tonite!
Just a quick plug - tonight, June 30, come to the Artist's Quarter in downtown St. Paul to check out the exciting and always unpredictable duo of Dan Cavanagh, piano, and Dave Hagedorn, vibes. It's always been a great show. Tom Surowicz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune lists the show as a highlighted event check out this week. And the Jazz Police lists our last concert in 2009 as one of the year's most memorable concerts. Hope to see you there!
$5. 9p-1am.
Art and Collective Cultural Knowledge
Reading is one of the things that I have the luxury of doing much more of during the summer months when I'm not teaching. (EDIT: we just had a baby girl last week, so that statement should be put on hold 
) Often you'll hear that summer is the time for academics to get more research done; write more music, etc. However, I strongly believe that in order to write relevant music I need to be able to relate to the rest of the world, and have a pretty good pulse on what is happening outside of my strangely quaint, little artistic bubble. After all, how many people do what I do and actually get paid for it? Not very many. And so I try to catch up on my reading. As the poet (and my uncle) Timothy Young says, everything that goes into the hopper becomes fodder for later. Of course, if there's nothing in the hopper, there's no fodder for later.
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma
Our cultures have developed bodies of knowledge about which foods are safe, nutritious, and satisfying to eat. Hence, each time we eat food that we know is ok to eat (apples), we are drawing on our, or our culture's, past experiences with that food. If we come across a food in the grocery store that we have never eaten before, we rely on society's knowledge that the food presented for us to eat is safe. Nowadays, many constructs are put into place to make sure this assumption is valid; in the United States, the FDA regulates food safety; grocery store owners have a vested interest in the continued trust in their food; your friends have a vested interest in making sure their recommendations don't make you sick. All of these and more add up to the cultural knowledge of food.
Why does our society not have similar constructs for art? Certainly something like this exists for popular types of art, such as hip hop or alt rock - music critics, iTunes Genius, or certain elements of Pandora's Music Genome Project. But I'm not talking about American Idol. On American Idol, nothing creative is actually happening. I guess Simon Cowell would beg to differ, but everyone on the show sings other people's music. There undoubtedly are people with talent on the show, but talent for others' art is not the same as art, in the same way that craft is not the same as creativity. Most people would not consider someone with a great talent for framing houses as being artistic. They may posses a high level of craftsmanship, but not artistry. The architect, however, possesses a creative bent for design that the framer implements. I am definitely not trying to claim that a framer does not use creativity during his or her work. I would, however, posture that most people would agree that there is a divide between someone who creates and someone who implements others' creations.
For the actual creative side of culture, {Western} society has not developed (or if it has, it has not maintained on a broad scale) an expansive artistic cultural knowledge that is passed down to almost everyone. There are certainly small pockets of the population for which an extensive cultural knowledge exists and is a significant portion of their day. But for most, that's not the case. Part of the fault is in the schools. Music, art, drama, and other types of creative programs are being cut in record numbers from the public schools. But this is not a diatribe against the shortsightedness of voters. Rather, parents and the people that surround children do not, in general, pass down cultural knowledge of great art. How many people were exposed as youngsters to the great classical composers with more than a passing gesture? How about jazz, or dance, or abstract art?
Of course, this gets into the philosophy of why we should have an artistic cultural knowledge in the first place. That will need to be explored at a later date, but I take for granted that art is one thing that a society needs to have to make it. The eminent scientist and well-known author Jarod Diamond argues in his Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
One way to do that is to create art that showcases society's need for art. In other words, to use art as a critical commentary on why art is such a crucial factor in maintaining a strong society, i.e. "Meta Art." Another way is to be an advocate for art and for society's need for a strong cultural knowledge of art. Share with your kids. Read about it. Take art beyond the concert hall and beyond the walls of the museums to the world; beyond the 4th-6th grade classrooms. Many philosophies of teaching in talk extensively about integrating subjects: using word problems in math, writing skills in scientific reports, etc. If we as a society can integrate using art to examine issues with the same intensity that we use science, we will go a long way toward strengthening our culture for the long run.
[thejazz] no. 1 – why [thejazz]?
During the course of my artistic endeavors, I often realize the need to flesh out in writing what I'm trying to do. As I move further down the road in life, I find that it is the "writing about" part that gives distance to my creative activities, whether they include composing, playing, or teaching. Writing often wedges its hands in and parts the veil. Sometimes this act of "writing about" takes the form of drawing graphs and pictures (as any of my composition students will tell you - they have to do that stuff all the time for me. I have a gigantic white-board on my office wall). The point for me has been that in the last 5 or so years, analyzing my own art form from outside the confines of my art form (which is - usually - modern jazz, but also can be classical music) has been immensely productive. It has also given additional depth to my work, something I do not think would otherwise have been there. After all, most people experience jazz, or any kind of art form, from their own prospective: outside of the art form. It's one small way to avoid artistic narcissism.
Writing about what one does is a very old tradition in any culture on this planet that writes things down (not all do, mind you). In some partial sense, it's a literary version of the master-apprentice relationship: the master writes down what (s)he does, and the apprentice reads about it and gains some sort of knowledge or skill. However, writing can also serve to attack a creative problem from a different angle, to work out the cobwebs, or to exercise a [different] creative part of one's brain with which our culture is unfortunately losing touch. Many of literary treasures that are so illuminating to us come in the form of sketches, handwritten manuscripts, outlines, rough drafts, etc. Of course this applies in any art form; composer's sketches, artist's planning drawings, poets' rough drafts; all give us critical insight into why the final work of genius has so much depth and remains vibrant and test-of-time-worthy. Particularly interesting to me, though, are the writings of artists who are not writers; Lutoslawski's essays, Kandinsky's writings, or Robert Bly's prose analyses are treasure-troves of insight, not only into their processes and thoughts, but into my own.
To understand why "writing about" works for me, and why it probably will work for anyone working on anything creative, I think a self-examination of my artistic philosophy is in order. I have found that the act of "writing about" significantly clarifies the artistic goal I have in mind, like using a pair of binoculars to see a distant shore.
In general, I believe that when you first start creating, if you can see the opposite shore of the lake, the lake either isn't big enough to bother with (not enough big, eating fish), or it's not worth going over to the other shore because you can already see everything that's over there. It's the shores that you cannot see clearly or at all that are intriguing to visit. When I was in college, I wrote a composition for string quartet called the Struggle. Although I don't necessarily think that it is a very good composition (the lake was a bit to small, and it wasn't very deep), it was my first attempt at an intellectual/musical fleshing-out of my creative philosophy. Although I composed things starting when I was a younger laddie, once I got into college I definitely thought of composing as a struggle. Part of it was that the intellectual part of my brain was getting in the way of actually creating at a high level. I also was nowhere near to the understanding of an artistic process, and was still at the infant stages of the craft of musical composition. So composing was a struggle. I have since grown to realize that for me, the struggle part is more of an outfitted expedition than a man-meets-nature free climb.
"Writing about" is a resupply mission in the middle of the longer expedition. Sometimes these resupply runs come at planned times, but most often they come out of necessity: composer's (writer's) block. For me, composer's block can come in very small doses or in one gigantic, blank expanse, and every size in between. Sometimes all you need on your road trip is to stop for gas and pick up a candy bar. Other times, you need to pull over, get a good night's sleep, and plan for the next day. Either way you need to get off the highway.
One night about a year ago, speaking with the former Atlanta Symphony bassoonist turned great philosopher Charles Nussbaum, I mentioned that I wanted to begin writing about composing. He replied that it was unusual to find musicians who actually wanted to write about what they do. That's a shame. Hopefully this blog will start to change that.