Becoming a Process in Time
By Russell Foltz-Smith
Summer 2020
russell.foltzsmith@gmail.com
@un1crom
310.968.1913
Let us Being / Begin 3
Entranced Again. 5
First Musings 6
Family Ensemble 6
As For My Early Soundtrack… 6
Sound Systems I 7
The First Entrancement 9
Sound Systems II 9
Evolving Soundscape 10
Hyper I 12
Key Change 13
Church Music 14
Life is a Musical 15
the first stanza 15
the second stanza 17
the second, continued: A New Hymn 21
the third stanza 22
the fourth stanza 23
Hyper II 23
The Beginning of the True Obsessions 24
A Tumult 24
Walk Down That Lonesome Road 24
I got the voice right here! 31
Piano Prom 31
Piano Deepening — Little Earthquakes 32
Tufts Beezlebubs visit Overland High School 32
Madrigals 33
Musicals Growing Importance 33
Mrs. Macclay — a singular voice to me 33
The Colorado Teenage Radio Play 34
You Want It Darker 35
Handel's Messiah at Rockefeller Chapel 35
Sound System IV 36
Hyper III— concentration 36
The Second Verse of the Rabbit Hole 37
The Internet and Music 38
Band Camp 39
Moulin Rouge 40
Hyper Hyper Hyper Hyper 41
Burning Playlists, Playlists The Thing 42
My Expanding Personal Playlist 44
Launch, refrain 44
Loop Back a Bit 48
Hyper V— The Web’s Expanding Playlist 48
Long Tail -> I’m Not The Only One 51
I Hear Voices. 52
A Cappella History 54
A Simple View using Hyper Presentation 54
An Embodied View 55
A Cappella Present Future 55
Why Did This Moment Happen for A Cappella? 55
It’s All Roulette 56
Third Verse, Same as the First, A Little Bit Louder, a Little Bit Worse 56
Dubstep, a new sound, or the same old tune? 56
Voices in My Head, Voices in Your Head 60
We Found Love 60
Current Chorus 62
What is the Visual Artists Playlist Now? 64
What will my verse be? What is my line of sound? 64
I am not alone, refrain. 64
Sound System X 68
I, AI, SoundSystem XCX 68
Da Capo to Coda with a lot of Kyrie eléison in-between 69
What is A Cappella? 69
To me, as me, what is a cappella? 69
Find your voice in the sea of surging bodies and breath
To form a melody, to form a melody
Free a song from their lungs, our children’s daughters and sons
From their lungs, our children’s daughters and sons
To find a remedy, to find a remedy
Ooooh-oooh
Ooooh-oooh
To find a remedy
To form a melody
Find your voice in the sea of surging bodies and breath
To form a melody, to form a melody
Free a song from their lungs, our children’s daughters and sons
To find a remedy, to find a remedy
Ooooh-oooh
Ooooh-oooh
To find a remedy
To form a melody
- Son Lux, “Remedy”
And now for a second piece of exposition, taken from the Seikilos epitaph, written on a tombstone in ancient Greek, the oldest complete document of a song.
While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and Time demands his due.
-Seikilos, son of Euterpes
We have our themes. They play now as they always have, whether you hear them now it makes little difference. It’s that you’ve always heard them, because Seikilos merely echoed Time herself.
Entranced Again.
Today, some day in June 2020., the early covid19-era, I found myself yet again encountering an a cappella performance that dropped me into a rabbit hole of aca-obsession. (Yes, I was, in fact, sitting in my car with my excellent sound system listening to a cappella sets, as one does nowadays in this contorted reality in which we live.)
The UChicago Voices deliver a supremely nuanced version of “Remedy” for convocation 2020. This group, started way back when I was there, continues to astound. More on them later.
For now, go look it up. Type some combination of “Chicago”, “Voices”, “Remedy”, “Son Lux” into your browser. Trust me it’ll work. This is important. This is by necessity a swirling multimedia thing, even if you’re reading this in a heavy quarterly periodical. I’ll wait here while you listen.
I needed you to do that so that now I can situate myself with Time and you.
I’m old enough now that I can confidently chase whatever obsesses me regardless of whether anyone else finds it goofy. And I’m sufficiently crazy enough to not stop at just enjoying my obsessions but carry on to figure out WHY I am obsessed and have been for so long. Such a project is very likely to deepen my obsession or render it totally meaningless. These are the risks you take with caring about things.
So this is my history of one of my longest standing paradoxical obsessions — a cappella. and I am afraid, dear reader, that this obsession is not just about a cappella or music or even me. As I composed and researched for this essay I realized this is all much simpler and more profound that I had given it credit for.
And it starts so simply … a simple question that has reliably haunted me since I was the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz in fifth grade. Or perhaps even earlier …
Why does the human voice entrance me so?
As one who can’t hold a tune without extreme amounts of technology you’d think this obsession would be more torture than anything — the unobtainable object. But no, it doesn’t do that at all to me. Quite the opposite — the human apparatus as distilled in the human voice cannot be contained by envy. I wish only to bathe in it, to breathe it in—as existence itself. What is this power of the human voice? of song? of human music?
And more directly: who am I?
Family Ensemble
I have been a lover of music from a very young age. I suppose there’s an obvious exposure based explanation.
My mom was a French horn player in her youth. One of my sisters played brass instruments. My older brother is an accomplished multi-instrument player and marching band/drum core master craftsman. My younger brother is a multi-instrument talent, choral stud and all around remarkable music teacher.
As a kid I was always at someone’s performance, recital, concert or competition. Boy did I love those jazz band concerts. My bro was soooo good in HS. (He was also obsessed with Chet Baker and Doc Severinsen, which got me hooked on them too.) Yeah, even I took my shot at the clarinet, then trombone, and performed in musicals (poorly, but more on that later).
My sisters were never without tunes. In the 70s and 80s it was disco, ABBA giving way to hair bands and rock. God, I remember the endless roller skating “parties” … and then a few years later when my sisters transitioned to “Slippery When Wet.” My parents had some weird ass collection of records, cassettes and 8-tracks of movie soundtracks, Rosemary Clooney, the Beatles, Elvis and way too much John Denver and Kenny Rogers. My older brother was a teenage skater and introduced me to Dead Milkmen, Dead Kennedys, Ministry … and then when we moved to Miami he was super into Miami bass sound and other such errata.
One of my sisters turned to new age music when we lived in Miami. What a range I would catch … if I was hanging out with my brother and his friends it was cutting edge hip hop and metal, if I was hanging out in my sisters room I was taking in Kenny G, Kitaro, Enya or Yanni.
My younger brother also developed an affinity for Yanni, in particular Live at the Acropolis. And so I don’t know if Yanni makes the point or defies it, but there he was as some floating connective tissue between sections of the orchestra. For a moment there, the soundtrack was all counterpoint – except for Yanni-as-Zelig playing his strange keyboards in each section.
As For My Early Soundtrack…
Yes. Underoos were a thing. And I was into them. And being into Underoos meant ingesting the Underoos jingle – a punch of 70s big band schmaltz – into my musical psyche. A small price for superheroic aspirations.
As a wee lad I used to put my underoos on and fly around the house (jump off a footstool) listening to the Superman soundtrack. The Superman theme song remained “My Intro Music If I Were Ever to Becoming A Starting QB in the NFL” until I majored in math and abandoned the dream. And I self-nicknamed myself “Superman.” Shudder.
In a strange use of memory brain cells I can still remember the lyrics to “I’ve been everywhere man, cross the deserts bare, man.” which was covered by the band (the Wranglers) at Flyin W Ranch, a local tourist trap my parents took us to. I loved it there and my parents bought the record and I listened to it endlessly. (In the process of writing this I learned that the ranch was lost in a wildfire in 2012 but is reopening this year. Wow.)
Formative tracks from my very early youth, off “This is Flying W Country Vol. 13”, but you already knew that.
In this era my mom had also acquired the record “Hooked on Classics”, which was some early disco+classical+electronica mash up stuff (1983 ... man were we cool/confused/into it). This was another album I ran into the ground — about midway through the William Tell Overture starts and that part in particular enraptured me (still does). Many a daydream filled with swashbuckling ideas to that song.
Sound Systems I
My dad made his own speaker boxes that I kept for a long time (red carpeted on the outside, radio shack supplied wires, etc). I think his were eight inch cones, but might have been as big as 10. They sounded great at all ranges. Sturdy as hell. Sometimes my dad had them hanging, other times they were on the ground. These were not throw away things, they stayed in the family for a long time across many moves.
hello radio heads.
When I was 10 or so I asked for a clock radio for my birthday. I had become obsessed with clocks+radios at a very young age. I didn’t tune to pop or rock or hip hop stations. For whatever silly reason I tuned my radio either to sports radio or classical. I used to spend hours upon hours listening to classical performances. I rarely learned much about the composer or performers themselves, just listened to the music as much as possible. In moments of fear of missing out I would tune to the pop station to see what normal kids listened to but it never stuck me there.
The endless nights staring at my ceiling listening to that radio are so vivid in my mind — the memory alone brings back both the music, the sound of that radio speaker and to the thoughts I was having back then — the fears about aging grandparents, confusion about God, uncertainty about what a young boy is supposed to think and care about — then later the confusions of romance and rejection. This clock radio spoke with me from like age 10 to age 18 — the contortions of adolescence are encoded in the stuck-on decals and fingerprints and what became unruly volume dials. Oh the wailing that clock radio endured!
Clock radio obsession has stuck with me (the obsession itself and that original clock radio as I still have it in storage somewhere). Before I went to college all I wanted was one of those Sony Dreammachines which I would set to wake me up to Dave Matthews’ “Ants Marching” CD — quite possibly the most cliche way to wake up. Thankfully nowadays every smartphone/tablet is a clock+radio+everything and I’m no longer into DMB (though who’s to judge?). At age 43 I still prefer some soundtrack, often esoteric philosophy or classical music, when I wake or fall asleep — the headier, more ethereal the better.
The First Entrancement
Karen Karsh, a jazz vocalist and pianist, visited my elementary school in the mid 80s. She happens to be visually impaired. She led a group of us to learning music and putting on a performance and then she performed for the audience.
The time I spent in the workshop with her profoundly affected me. Everything about it seemed unreal, still does. My young brain couldn’t wrap around her skill and her different abilities being so well articulated in voice and piano.
Mrs. Karsh simultaneously sang songs and educated roomfuls of interrupting children. She managed to orchestrate behavior of piano notes and human bodies via song and voice that was unlike any rule book or command and control approach could do. The art flowing through her did the work.
My parents acquired the cassette she was selling then. I listened to it over and over.
Revisiting her latest work now is like a high fidelity time machine. The crispness in her lyrical articulation immediately transports back to then. I am that 8 or 9 year old boy, about piano height, taking it all in. I just stared and stared at her wondering how the heck she was making all this happen at once… playing, singing, teaching.
I call this the first entrancement because that’s all that can describe it, a wordless, nameless, motionless experience of being entranced. In my middle age I have come to understand something about myself: I am in love with process. The more complex and integrated the process the more I am entranced.
For decades people have remarked how often I seem to just fall into a stare and then will just start to mirror or mimic facial and body movements of others. My mom claims I learned to walk this way. I showed no interest or effort in walking but instead just watched walkers. Then one day I stood up and walked. This is probably a romanticized version of how it happened but the spirit is not inconsistent with my own observed process of learning I’ve gone through since I can remember. Even now I’m three years into studying drawing/painting under a master draughtsman and I spend hours upon hours entranced, watching his hand and intellectual movement, and then I mirror it and adapt.
Sound Systems II
The first word I remember learning how to read and spell was JUG. I was in kindergarten, sitting on that oval rug. I remember because my teacher explained that while we could just put liquid in a jug, we could also play them as an instrument — just blow over the top. I can hear it just by thinking of it. Nothing about the word JUG suggests the sound a JUG makes. The word JUG seems positively out of whack for what to me seemed like the best use of it, to make a musical sound. Just blow.
J.U.G.
Every time my breath mis-navigates a straw, I think of the first word I remember learning to read and spell. J.U.G.
my junior high walk
In seventh grade I started to make a turn in music — driven a lot by social pressure and puppy love. At first I ventured out from my nameless classical music and parents soundtracks and into soft rock and pop. Richard Marx was all the rage then. The girl I was into at the time was into hair bands, metal and Richard Marx (she could play “Right Here Waiting” extremely well on piano). This was familiar territory for me but yet, not. Rather, I wanted to be familiar with all this, all of whatever This Was. The music, the feelings, the juxtaposition.
This contortion of signal resulted in my own first-by-my-own-money music purchases being Milli Vanilli and Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation. The first time I ever earned more than $50 I had my mom take me to Target to get this stereo cassette player and those two albums. It’s not hard to imagine 13-year-old ginger Russ sweating profusely – as gingers are genetically predisposed to do, just ask one – as the cashier scanned the items and I started to hand over my unfathomable wealth. Something deep inside of me knew that nothing about this purchase was going to make me cool and I was going to definitely have extended buyer’s remorse (gawd do I still).
MAGNAVOX!
In a deeply flawed effort to be cool I memorized these albums using my off-brand Magnavox Walkman — easily played these albums 1000+ times on the long walk to and from school through the greenbelt and all that. Though I Walkman through the valley of the shadow of death…
Hyper I
In the midst of my R&B angst, my older siblings taught me about punk and hard rock and skateboards and general junior high tomfoolery. I also became entranced with computers. In particular at school we had a computer lab full of HyperCard, FRedWriter and some BBS access.
My first interaction with HyperCard was while doing a book report on Great Gatsby. Gatsby was a great book, but HyperCard was alien technology. Entranced.
I never looked back. I wanted everything to be Hyper after that. (and I wasn’t in bad company with that idea…)
I continue to chase down what this means.
The algorithms have this era nailed.
Moving from Colorado to Miami in between 7th-8th grade—whoo boy. It was hard.
That age is such a weird age for us all.
Anyone that’s spent time in Colorado (particularly Aurora or Colorado Springs) and Miami, FL, can attest to just how different these geographies, cultures and populations are. The demographics are wildly different, the food, the music, the weather, the cars, the Everything is Different. And in the 1990s, these things could truly be different in a way that’s often obliterated now.
I was so desperately lonely when we first moved to Miami. I had already been the new kid a couple times in my life (as we had moved around Colorado a bit in elementary school). Being the new kid from Colorado made new-kidness even more isolating.
By the time we had made it to Miami and 8th grade started Wilson Phillips, Heart, Taylor Dane, Genesis and so on were raging. And so did my sad boi chemistry.
I was blaming it on the rain. Every day.
Looking back now I can laugh at the amount of time I spent wistfully looking out my bedroom window listening to the Miami rain drizzle down my 14-year-old eyes with “It Must Have Been Love” blaring out. I wrote a lot of handwritten letters back then, mostly unsent.
These songs are so emblazoned in my soul that listening to them makes me feel deep empathy for that lonely kid who overthought and overfelt everything.
It’s possible that adolescent self torture sped up my musical maturity. As I integrated into my new school, found new friends and found new social experiments my soundscape evolved rapidly.
The next three years are best described like this:
Human Resource, a bunch of European stuff
Boyz 2 Men, Color Me Badd
Beastie Boys, House of Pain, Dre, 2 Live Crew
Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc
Saigon Kick, Nuclear Valdez, Firehouse, etc
White Zombie (which stuck with me well into college. Ha.)
Metallica — I fell quite hard into “Nothing Else Matters” and that whole album. God it’s good. (I tried to make that the class slogan for the class of 95. A nihilist streak back then.)
Christian Rap, Rock, Adult Contemporary and regular old church music…
If you think Adult Contemporary isn’t religious, you’re as right as you are wrong. Adult Contemporary is as outside of everything else as it is of everything else. If you want to be drained of your sense that anything is knowable, create a taxonomical map of all genres and then reckon with where Adult Contemporary fits. I’ll wait. Call me if it’s too much.
Church Music
The untold thread in all the above is that since a very early age I was a good Christian boy. I attended church regularly, I read the bible, did devotionals daily, was a camp counselor for Vacation Bible School, took trips to other countries to spread the good word. I have sung so many hymns, learned so many kids’ Jesus Songs, went to tons of Christian pop music concerts, have performed hundreds of different arrangements/re-use of “Amazing Grace” including a very poorly rendered rap version.
Is this not heavenly?
This music is full of ear worms. Every day of my life a stanza or two comes to my lips. A reminder of forgotten faith, found grace and accidental peace.
That may sound somewhat horrifying to some folks, but you know what? I love it. I love those Jesus Songs. And more than anything I have always loved church concerts, the more choir the more better. The more organ the more better. The more Fear Of God Ringing From Angels Voices or Wailing from Sinners Lungs the more better.
I have been to midnight candlelit concerts so many times in my life. Like the sunset they are always new, always perfect, always bigger than me. Candle wax dripping down as thoughts drift in and out of my existence. How many times have I asked, “God, what is it I’m here to do?”
How can we have so much beauty that lasts so briefly? Is this it? Finding in these few moments of peace, of waning candlelit voices, enough grace to carry us for just a bit longer?
Life is a Musical
Music is not simply sound in time or tunes. It literally is memory, it is the trace of our existence. The only way to cohere all that is not coherent is in Song. Our brains, our souls, are literally A Soundtrack.
While I had been active in theater prior to living in Miami I really devoted myself to it once I started high school. And it was then that the mustard seed of my obsession with finding moments, grace, coherence by listening to the world would grow into the mountainous embracing that All The World’s a Stage!
There were four key stanzas from this era regarding music, theater and life.
the first stanza
In ninth grade my english class went to see a new production of Moliere's “The Misanthrope.” My goodness was this transformative for me. The play was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The lead actor, Rafael de Acha, filled the space in body and voice in ways I had never seen. And Moliere! oy! I knew right then what I was going to do with my life. I would fill the space with wit, humor, truth through heightened sound and vision!
as Relevant as ever.
(In the 28 years since that production… the lead actor from that show has gone on to quite the amazing life. A polymath of opera, stage acting, philanthropy, directing, writing and more… of course! His performance shook my ninth grade core. Also not surprisingly in the hard fought media world we live in the new wave theater he created by then finally had to close in 2016.)
Ah yes! the sound of Moliere – and in FRENCH! The Tower of Babel had to die for us, too.
the second stanza
The summer of 1992 I went to Jamaica with my church youth group. We went on a short mission to build a school building for deaf children.
youth group. what a great crew. man, that was so special.
This was my first adventure out of America. This was a magical time in every way. I could write 100 pages about everything I experienced and how it impacted me… from the food, to the dominoes games, to the river walking, to the late night talks with friends, to my daily walks by myself… and, Sunsplash! yes, by some crazy convergence this ginger from Colorado found himself in Jamaica during Sunsplash. A touring reggae music festival concocted by the Jamaican Tourist Board – and I went to them for it.
Sunset in Montego Bay 1992I think this is the school we were working on. that field and structure in the north looks super familiar.Colorado ginger in Jamaica by way of Miami
Sunsplash was a dusk til dawn (yes, you read that right) seven-night music festival. The sound was so powerful all night long. Just huge booming music in the bay. The joy of a full island of sound — the world as church — opened my being up to an entirely new view of the world. My small brain took a very long time to understand how people lived with such joy and openness.
And then….
Shortly after returning to Miami from Jamaica Hurricane Andrew blew through town and messed everything up.
Sound System III
I was able to earn some good money after the hurricane working with my younger brother and our mentor, Mike. We got chainsaws and wheelbarrows and helped clean up neighborhoods.
I did what any sensible teenager does with the hard earned cash… I bought a new MAGNAVOX CD player (I had never had one) and two CDs:
INXS (Australians)
Bobby Brown (Humpin Around).
This CD player was used quite a bit and unfortunately mostly to play those CDs until I could earn more money. From that boombox on I would never be without a Very Good Sound System in my life.
And with sound systems came trips to the music store. While I have visited more bookstores in my life than music stores for about 20 years there wasn’t a week where I didn’t set foot in the best music stores in Miami, Denver, Chicago or LA. There was a heyday of physical music stores around 1995–2002, IMO. We hadn’t quite given everything over to the Internet and so music stores still had all media. But they were experimenting with listening experiences and other weird ways of crafting personalized music. Some of my fondest memories are of going to the music stores in downtown chicago.
From this boombox I migrated to a minor love of subwoofers and car sound systems. Miami bass scene was no joke in the 90s and my brother and his friends seemed to always find audio components. I also had a theater friend that had a pretty stacked 4runner. Two cans in the back. Every time I rode around with him I put on Pearl Jam’s “Alive.” it’s not a Miami bass song but it does a lot of the same work—it hits hard and is a positively joyous anthem to belt with the windows down. Also, I do a fairly decent Eddie Vedder voice, did then, do now.
I’ve been altering my car sound system since the day I had my own cars. I couldn’t care less what kind of car I drive as long as the sound system kicks across a broad range of music. I installed giant house system speakers in my high school Plymouth Volare — backseat was for sound, not other things. The only car I had where the sound sucked was our first adult life car, a Dodge Neon. Everything about that car sucked. I swore to myself never to be without good sound again. Now I have a tiny little Honda Fit with a nice box in the back.
It hauls art, me and sound.
the second, continued: A New Hymn
“Right Now” by Van Halen had been out for awhile but the music video was still in rotation. One night at youth group the leaders aired the video and we had a discussion about it.
It kinda fucked me up.
I was already questioning a lot of things after Jamaica, matriculating to high school, becoming involved in theater and processing the hurricane. What kind of world did God make? How should I integrate everything I had experienced?
Right now! Do something right now! Or pump the brakes? What if there’s no going back? Back where?
Hey! It’s your tomorrow
(Right now)
Come on, it’s everything
(Right now)
Catch that magic moment
Do it right here and now
It means everything
It’s enlightened me
Right now
What are you waitin’ for?
Ohh, yeah
Right now
Hey! It’s your tomorrow
(Right now)
Come on, it’s everything
(Right now)
Catch that magic moment
And do it right
(Right now)
Ohh, right now
the third stanza
Oh what a beautiful show! Oklahoma! My mom took me to a collegiate production of Oklahoma the weekend I was finishing my first big high school role in a play with Killian High theater group. (It might even have been the day of the cast party for our show that I saw Oklahoma!) I left the show so thankful to see that my budding ideas of life, music, art, philosophy, commentary could be made popular, bold and bodacious.
The music of that show is so catchy and yet the show itself is not trivial. It was the first time I’d experienced a musical that wasn’t just “fun”. And that wasn’t unique to me. Oklahoma! really was a groundbreaking work of art — really did usher in a new type of theater work.
The bug had bitten. The hook had set. I was a theater junkie. I was a musical junkie. I was a storytelling junkie. I was a soundscaping junkie. I was a multi-modal flow obsessed emotional machine. Good thing because Michael Crichton loomed.
the fourth stanza
A classmate of mine, Raphael, introduced me to two books in 1992, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat and Jurassic Park. Raphael and I had German class together. We read more physics and sci-fi than practiced German (which probably explains why I took four years of german, including AP german, and yet failed my college placement).
I have long been an eager reader. Years before I met Raphael my dad gifted me A Brief History of Time which I consumed rather greedily as a 12 year old. I hadn’t yet learned to suffer the existential struggle of religion vs. theoretical physics. Somehow in my 12 year old brain Stephen Hawking’s ideas fit just fine with a Presbyterian God.A couple years, one hurricane, one trip out of America, one Raphael, one Van Halen song, and two new books about quantum mechanics and chaos theory and God was suddenly on very different ground with me and me with her. Raphael and I spent a lot of time talking about these books. Ultimately we got to celebrate our concern for these matters by going to the premiere of Jurassic Park the movie in June of 1993. We skipped school to see it (which i never did except for that. ha!). We saw it multiple times on opening weekend.
This immediately led to me reading several books on Chaos Theory in Mathematics as well as several genetics books.
We moved away from Miami shortly after that movie premiere. I never saw Raphael again.. In some multiverse he’s out there I’m sure.
Hyper II
During our time in Miami I had become much more aware of personal computers and the Internet. My mom had access to portable computers and some dial up, but I didn’t regularly have computer access. Instead I spent many hours reading computer magazines end to end and learning about various things “in the industry.” I watch, you walk.
A Tumult
In the summer of 1993 my family moved back to Colorado. I would finish the last two years of high school at yet another school. This time wasn’t nearly as traumatic as far as the “new kid” status.
Of course, 1993 was one of the overall craziest years of my life, still.
In August I did two main things. 1) Turned my entire bedroom into the set of Jurassic Park. I wired my light switch to turn on the soundtrack, blast out theatrical lighting and turn the family computer on to a replica of Dennis Nedry’s screen. I had a large scale diorama of a dino paddock. I even had all the collectibles from McDonald’s as like a Visitor Center gift shop. To finish it all off I had custom painted my dresser with the Jurassic Park logo. 2) I got a job at Chuck E Cheese as the rat.
From September to October… getting going in a new school, starting from scratch in a new theater/thespian group, excelling as Chuck E Cheese, making a few friends… and then in November of 1993 I got appendicitis. Bad organs ruin harmony.Recovered in time for the holidays I get back to work at Chuck E Cheese, get employee of the month and then, mid-December, a mass shooting... Some other of my essays have covered that….
Queen, Daisy Dukes, The Cars.
Walk Down That Lonesome Road
There seems to usually be a tension between “actors” and “singers” (and, yes, with “tech” and “the orchestra”) and it all comes to an immediate head in musical shows. Every specialty thinks they are the most important aspect. And they are right. The kids at school that seemed to first take me in were very kind people from the theater, particularly the choir crowd. I think the choir group took to me sooner than the actors because choir folks are often on the fringe of theater and/or even the band. But also I think I came in a bit hot headed as an actor myself having already been performing for a couple years I asserted myself. When people haven’t ever seen you work it doesn’t matter what your past is, they need to see it and experience it.
All that said… there’s probably a bigger reason I personally take to singers / musicians first… at informal gatherings it’s just way more fun to hang out with musicians. Singers and musicians can make any small talk social gathering into a ruckus of music making. A song can break out and change everything.
I end up as Nathan Detroit in Overland High School’s spring 94 musical event, Guys and Dolls. I’m the actor that can’t sing or dance worth a lick. Surrounding me in the ensemble are three performers that all went on to major performance futures. I like to think we all deserved it—me as Nathan.
Phenomena Interlude
“Sue Me” was the big song for Nathan and Adelaide. It killed me, kills me to this day. There’s a moment near the end where Nathan has to pop a big note. It’s a transition moment, a declaration, a resolution.
If Nathan doesn’t hit the note the song falls apart, in my opinion. Hell, it’s the only hard note in the entire show for Nathan.
My personal hell began at two minutes, 43 seconds. reaching that high F… out of my range 50% of the time.
It wasn’t my fault, really, it was just math.
The Note
visualization of human voice pitch range classifications.the bad section in “Sue Me” for me
Nathan’s range in “Sue Me” is basically D3 to F5 (high F). It’s not a big range, but it pushes past an untrained baritone. For my voice at the time I was stuck as not quite a bass and not trained enough to be a baritone and not even in the ballpark of tenor, worst case scenario really as I had trouble making decisions on whether to move up an octave or down. I still have this problem when I first encounter vocalizations… but at least now I know why I’m having a problem — the brain/body is usually very good at signaling back and forth that “hey, you’re in an unresolvable place so you need to practice and grow in some direction.”
easy to read range discussion: http://www.rawilliamsmusic.com/essays/Essay_Range.html
Ranges of popular recording artists appropriately show much more practiced ranges:
graphic of vocal range of singers without instrumentation help.
To get a wider view of low and high pitch ranges:
https://www.concerthotels.com/worlds-greatest-vocal-ranges
The vocal ranges of any given human are a physical detail, not a talent issue. To consider this further, more Googling homework: Search “Learn how VOCAL CORDS work for Speech and Singing” and click that first result, the YouTube link. I’m trusting Google to continue to provide the utmost relevance, even if you end up somewhere different than where I ended up.
There are some genetic and biological details that may create some guardrails on the highest and lowest notes but the range of any human can be expanded or contracted through use, practice or abuse, overuse and chemicals etc. A person who wishes to sing better, with more range, with more power must develop control over the muscles of the vocal system, must have good vocal tract hygiene and warm up, practice, cool down, over and over and over again. Obviously, learning how to hear and hear oneself and an ensemble and the outside world all at the same time is another aspect beyond the physical vocal apparatus.
As much work as vocalizing “Sue Me” was for me and as much as I learned about my body, the human body and how voices work or do not… there was a more curious musical phenomena I learned about in Guys and Dolls — the value of which would not become fully clear to me until much later in life.
I became slightly curious about “The Fugue.” The musical literally opens with “Fugue for Tinhorns.” I had never really considered a fugue before. It’s deceptively important for the show. The characters are characterized by this “in the round” self reference and the idea of never ending bullshittery of gambling AND of horse racing is rhythmically made perfectly by a fugue. Fugue also is suggestive of a loss of identity and pure mimicry. What a funny little thing, this fugue. The simple repetition of sound and word by different voices makes a whole lot of meaning out of a whole little!
I got the voice right here!
My obsession with human voice became very pronounced by the end of high school. I was literally entranced by any one that can speak powerfully or sing effortlessly. I was also entranced by those that can dance or move gracefully. Beyond the basic ability of human voice to stir emotions in us there was something else going on for me.
Maybe it completes existence in ways I can’t? On some level I just sense it as some Complete Version of Human Being?
(One thing I hope has always been clear to everyone I ever performed with… I am deeply devoted to the work, the craft, the ensemble. Nothing troubles me more than me messing up, not being prepared, being the weak link, not being able to carry the load.)
Cutting to the chase. I now had very good friends in choir. And they loved to sing. All. The. Time. And this made me very very happy.
The choir covered a song “I’m a train” that they performed one year. I became fascinated by their arrangement. The fugue-like thing they did with it and the beat making they did just worked so well. I literally would ask them to sing it at parties, so relentlessly until they did. Just listen to it.
The other song they covered so well was “Lonesome Road” as arranged by The King’s Singers. This song shook me the first time I heard them do it. My friend, W. Martinez, sang the main part. Gawd his tone was perfect for it. I listen to this song to this day whenever I feel lonely. It is a song about loneliness, but really it’s about walking out of loneliness. It has carried many a day.
Piano Prom
I hired my friend Aron to play piano for my pre-prom dinner. I had managed to finagle the opportunity to borrow a family friend’s estate/mansion with a huge ballroom including a grand piano. I had the dinner catered and filled the mansion with sounds of Aron’s piano playing. It was a magical evening. A personal piano performance is just heaven.
Aron is a piano prodigy. He was already a genius in high school and his career has only skyrocketed from then. Aron was a member of St Olaf’s Limestones. He got me hooked on their albums, especially the award winning one from 2000—whatever it was.
He and my brother composed and performed an original song for our wedding. The sheet music hangs on our wall—I’m looking at it..
Piano Deepening — Little Earthquakes
Two friends independently suggested I check out Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes” because of my now obvious obsession with performance, piano and singer/songwriter type stuff. They were right.
“Little Earthquakes” and “Under the Pink” were pretty permanent in my playlisting from then until way into adulthood. The lyrics pop into my head pretty routinely now. Entranced by her approach. It’s playful, sardonic, crisp, crafted, reckless at times and juxtaposed. What were all these things she was singing about? Was this the experience people around me were having?
Amazing to see how well these songs hold up in her own being.
Tufts Beezlebubs visit Overland High School
In 94–95 the Beezlebubs from Tufts did a concert at OHS in Aurora. One of their members was an OHS alum (I think).
They performed selections from their album “House” which included “Creep” and “Hey You”.
House: Beelzebubs Winter Invitational III | UVA Library | Virgo
I had never seen an a cappella performance like that before this event. Hell I'm not even sure I’d even heard “HEY YOU” before. The timbre in the main soloists voice was something raw. It just ripped.
Just like when I saw Oklahoma! I came away going, my god, you can really do anything with the human voice and body. Like it doesn’t have to be one way and as I get older I can try even stranger things. But I had also never thought of reimaging songs by Pink Floyd and Radiohead—I hadn’t even yet imagined them.
The Bubs… In many ways they are part of what made Pitch Perfect, the movies, so popular… as well as Glee, the show.
Their performance entranced me. It guided my thinking on how far we can take things and break categories and explore our expressions with even the sparest of tools, just our bodies and voices.
Madrigals
My theatrical tendencies had me at many a Ren Fairs. I didn’t really care if others thought they were cool, I did. The performers at these Fairs entranced me.
I became particularly enamored with a Ren Fair comedy group that did improv and sang songs. They always closed with a Madrigal. I must have watched one of these groups like 25 times do a Madrigal.
A Ren Fair-er told me he also performed at Comedy Sportz in downtown Denver and they often did a Madrigal there. I, of course, made sure to catch that show many times and watch them do this. This guy was an alien.
Madrigals are fascinating as a comedy vehicle because you literally need only repetition with perturbation — the perturbation that just happens by mixing voices and a few words.
I was so entranced by Ren Fairs as a vehicle to experiment wildly that I hatched plans to possibly just be a Ren Fair professional forever.
Musicals Growing Importance
Beyond being in a few of the high school musicals our theater group took a couple trips to NYC to see a lot of theater. Really important trips. It was the first time I’d been to NYC and been exposed to the level of performance we saw.
Saw everything from The Who’s Tommy to Beauty and The Beast to 1776 to Sunset Blvd to Damn Yankees to Cats to Nathan Lane in Neil Simon Plays to Mathew Broderick in How To Succeed… I took in as much as I could. Each show entrancing me further into process, craft, possibility, technology…
But the show that got to me the most? The Fantasticks.
The Fantasticks was just a huge emotional blast — a surprising, tiny explosion of everything. It came in such a sneaky package of a pared down theater, a tiny cast, almost no set production, very limited orchestra. The lyrics, the juxtaposition, the piano, and THE VOICES do all the work. it is such a very sad story. I cried.
Mrs. Macclay — a singular voice to me
Leigh Macclay had a profound influence on me as an artist. While I’m not a singer in my middle age, all the lessons she taught me stick with me. She was always positive and always willing to keep trying things. She was so very clear that if you keep working at things and you find the parts that excite you the most to focus on you will get somewhere.
Leigh and Bill Macclay at an Opera Gala in 2016 (from denver lyric opera guild)
I did and do so much love music that to even have a weekly lesson with Mrs. Macclay was satisfying to itself. The work is what mattered. I find myself slipping into Send In the Clowns or Camelot or Mr. Cellophane every once in a while. She helped me find these songs that carried my throughline of irony, confusion, outsiderness… but ultimately hope.
God, I loved hanging out at her house and just doing song and piano. And hearing her stories.
Also it should be noted, with great joy, that Mrs. Macclay had me teach myself stick shift with her VW bug. She needed an errand run and suggested I take her car. So I did.
The Colorado Teenage Radio Play
The music in the public sphere in Colorado was ludicrously different than what I experienced in Miami.
The Samples
Freddie Jones Band
DMB
Blues Traveler
Phish
with some Violent Femmes
Anything that would fit perfectly with _________ Live at Red Rocks.
It was the soundtrack for ski resorts, REI, Ambercrombie and Birkenstock. I went with all of it. No reason to fight it, no reason to dislike it. It was all very likable, sway-to-it-able, singable. All things I wanted to be.
Chicago. I left Colorado for college, bound for Chicago. Bound for change. Bound to become a performer and a physicist. Bound to learn as much about EVERYTHING.
College for most is probably one giant playlist after another. No different for me.
Here are the highlights as fast as they came at me then:
Leonard Cohen — met a dormmate freshman year. A fierce person in a calm shell. I would go to her room to chat. One time she had on a voice I had never heard before. Dark, somber, sad, ghostly. I listened and then asked, “who?” Leonard Cohen. She told me just to listen.
Grunge evolves — fell into a pretty big obsession with Smashing Pumpkins and other lyric heavy alt rock/grunge offspring. Sure it was of the moment, but what a moment. Full of Too Much Of Everything.
The Roots, Beck, G Love, They Might Be Giants, Busta Rhymes — they all came to campus and played crazy sets. i mean truly mind expanding stuff, styles, approaches. Just a smashing of everythings.
The Chapel Bells— there is no campus without these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41lYlt6WHec
Emo… Cowboy Junkies, Indigo Girls and other college errata — So many bands I had never heard of that soothed others or riled them up
Party music — every kind of dance song that was coming out then. Including the spice girls, the macarena…
Punk and Rollins — Rollins came to campus once and gave a great talk. But I had plenty of friends seriously down the punk rabbit hole. It was a great reminder of my brother.
NIN — I mostly avoided NIN in high school but in college NIN’s albums got better and I was moodier.
The Blues — it was chicago. It was the southside. We had blues, everywhere. On campus, off.
Folk — big time folk festival every year on campus. Legit stuff. Had friends deeply into it and so I tagged along.
Handel's Messiah at Rockefeller Chapel
I lived right across the street from the chapel. I spent many hours in that chapel considering life. And I always tried to make the holiday tradition. It’s just a profoundly unique presentation in one of the world’s great organ chapels.
Sound System IV
One of my best friends went to college at Northwestern and got into the improv groups up there, Meow. I would go see his shows. They were fucking good. I mean blowout party good.
What they did that was so much better than us down south, IMHO, was treat it like a party. They had a houseband, a full-on house band. It added a level of sonic and physical energy that comedy alone cannot do.
I knew what I had to do. I was going to one-up them.
For one of the shows I directed I decided to get concert size speakers (for a tiny theater) and get a full on DJ sound system going. I was going to keep a piano accompaniment element but also bring in a full synth, kit and other club elements. I doubt it was the first time anyone had tried to do traditional improv with DJ sound systems but I had never seen it. And it could only help, considering we were in pursuit of a six-week long running joke about the history of everything in the universe.
Whether the art was good art, I don’t know. But I do know that we sold out every show without a problem. And it was next-level energy for each show. Eventually it even earned us a trip to NYC.
In the next show I directed I added four additional energy elements:
improv in the round, total integration of audience and actors
high profile guest stars
a cappella group — Unaccompanied Women performed during the show and were integrated as characters into the show. We kept the previous sound system/DJ approach too.
a murder mystery format where the actors had no breaks except intermission
The main folks that helped me do that… one is an award winning theater and sound person in Chicago and the other writes academic books and teaches about 18th century board games.
Hyper III— concentration
I didn’t have my own computer in college, but my roommate did. A brand spanking new Windows95 machine. He was kind enough to let me use it to play games and write the occasional paper. The computer, for me in college, was extra-curricular.
I was a mathematics major so I didn’t have a lot of papers to write. No computation would help in any of the tests or proofs in my degree. At best it would occasionally be useful to word process a stats write up.
Part of why I ended up choosing math … it was a giant optimization for me to be able to work on the main aspects of physics, the math, without all the laboratory time reviewing already known results. It was also an optimization by me to take the hardest subject I could and not need lots of books/readings/discussion sessions time. I wanted the clearest calendar for my theater/art work, my work study job and to play basketball.
This optimization turned out pretty well. While the math degree was insanely hard it did provide radical clarity by using my brain and the occasional social study session with prof or others. The clarity I'm talking about is related to the clarity of a capella to me. There’s just no hiding. There’s absolutely nothing to protect you from the project at hand. It is just YOU and the WORK. No tools, no extra instruments, no set pieces, no appealing to external apparatus at all.
This was a radical realization for me at the time (and still now). It is a HYPER concept and a HYPER tool to not need anything else.
I learned a great deal about computing, music, art, writing by focusing on thinking and thinking about pure relationships (that’s what mathematics is… thinking about relationships between things). I was freed of all constraints for exploring relationships by needing consider only the relationships themselves.
You can do it all at the Moulin Rouge! BOHEMIAN LIFE!
I left college convocation in a Ryder moving truck bound for Hotel California. We packed up what little stuff we had and some of the stuff for one of our friends who was going to grad school. My future wife and I spent 3.5 days on the open road listening to Britney Spears, Sugar Ray and me singing in a cat voice. She was going to resume law school and I was going to start post-college life doing something.I found myself mixed up with three or four different dot com related jobs/projects spanning Internet connectivity, art museums, online music and filmmaking. In the span of a single year I managed to royally screw up my resume with several job hops and category incongruities.
Little did I know it wasn’t just me. It was the Internet itself, doing it to everyone and everything. And rather than me being in the lurch, I fortunately was naive and young enough to not worry about it but just embrace the chaos of the web as the work itself.
Eventually I and the Internet converged to getting all forms of media digitized and onto the web and connected in as many ways as possible. Music being the most common media.
The Internet and Music
Early in Napster/Limewire days I spent a lot of bandwidth in two primary data pursuits: acquiring songs with banjos in them and acquiring a cappella bootlegs. Seems strange until you think back to what was going on in the early 2000s with the Internet and music labels and streaming services. I happened to have worked at one of the original streaming services, Launch Music (eventually became Yahoo! Music). These commercial services were great for mainstream music. But the Internet is so much cooler for non-mainstream stuff. With Limewire and Napster a cappella groups could just release their recordings/mix tapes/bootlegs without needing labels or publishers or even good studio stuff. It was sort of the entire point of the Internet, in my opinion (and that is still my opinion!).
In a world in which Lars was sad, a cappella nerds were king. Am I the only one struck by the paucity of Napster + a cappella thinkpieces?
In 2001 Napster started to have a lot of trouble so I took to burning as many of my downloads to CD and then DVD as I could. Somewhere in a box on Earth there are 10,000 banjo and a capella songs. The successful burn rate for burnable media had to be 1/100 discs. Something heroic about trying to archive bootlegged b-sides of a cappella tracks and banjos.
Band Camp
In summer of 2000, my wife (soon to be) and I moved from LA back to Chicago to get married and start married life. In moving back to familiar territory we were able to be more experimental with our creative sides (this was also pre-kids). We produced a theater show, explored a lot of music, learned to adult and all that. I took on a bunch more jobs, sometimes three full-time jobs at once, moonlighting poorly… but it didn’t matter because the chaos of the Internet was sufficiently high that everyone needed more code more faster. Plus Dani, my wife, had good jobs with normal companies that made things people paid for.
Around this time my older brother paid a visit to us in Chicago. He introduced me to the Blast! Ensemble. He wanted to show me what a professional all-star musical ensemble could do.
If your phone still has batteries: Blast! Ensemble performing Bolero.
Entranced. Hyper. Drummers in modified karate gis. A paean to good old fashioned recursion.
From “Philosophy of Rhythm” by Cheyne, Hamilton and Paddison
For years I would request anyone visiting our house to watch Blast! at least once—obsessive repetitive behavior worthy of the song but not worthy of traditional definitions of “hosting”. I was (and still am) so entranced with the skill of this ensemble. This is the stuff of extreme dedication.
I had spent a lot of time roaming Chicago streets always pausing to catch the bucket boys. I am always entranced by street performances, particularly group performances where the real display is the output of time spent together in syncopated activity.
Moulin Rouge
Is this the greatest musical movie ever?
We saw it in the theater. And then immediately again. What in fresh hell was this? Were you allowed to just take everyone else’s art and make an entirely new thing from it? How the hell was everyone in this movie so good? What the hell kind of music video full length musical about historical fiction and love was this? Why in the ever living hell is this NOT MY LIFE?
I have now seen this movie more times than I should account. I know, there are lots of haters. And there were a lot of haters then, too. But that’s because it was something genuinely new. It was, in many ways, the first mass movie of the Internet age and Internet based aesthetics.
One thing leads to twenty others. Pop culture references need only the slightest reference to expand completely in the audience's mind.
Webrings, wikis, mashups, thread jumping, memes, self reference, hyper…
The energy and the flow is the thing. A Line of Sound.
Hyper Hyper Hyper Hyper
One of the best ideas I had for Launch that no one ever took anywhere was to stream personalized music into video games and exercise equipment. Tony Hawk, Crazy Taxi and other video games were starting to rely heavily on pop music and Internet connectivity was getting better. Hell, Doom and Quake showed the way by letting you play your own CD/drive music while playing the game. Exercise equipment in gyms, even back in 2000 was very clearly going to be connected to the Internet and people were going to want more and more. I wrote up this business case for using music to help people regulate their flow, for game playing and/or exercise (heart rate, breathing etc).
>>>
As a side story… I was so determined to get this done that once no one at Launch wanted to do it and after I was gone from the company and uploaded a new business plan for it on eBay and offered to sell the idea for a couple Gs. Only got a couple of bids so I decided just to sit on the idea.
>>>
The idea of bouncing ideas around the web in crowd funding ways led to me proposing this:
>>>
Reminds me of this other idea I tried related to that failed music stream biz plan on eBay ... $100startup.com, in 2008 I decided I would create a precursor to start up incubators and kickstarter…(it’s such a dumb idea but it would probably work nowadays.)
>>>
And had these musings about music.
https://socialmode.com/2008/03/04/radiohead-nin-and-everyone-else/
>>>
How many rabbit holes nowadays start like this… pick up a trace of an idea, a sound, an image, an idea, a tweet… and keep riffing on it over and over and over…. A Madrigal.
The Internet is not anything if not a giant never-ending collection of rabbit holes. With peer to peer music file-sharing my dream of amassing as much a capella music and listening to as many performances as I could was now possible.
Burning Playlists, Playlists The Thing
A few more Internet jobs came and went. Then we moved back to LA. We had our first child. We were getting very serious about life. :)
I had come back to LA to start work at IAC as part of the Citysearch/Ticketmaster company. God, was it a weird time in Internet Company World. Even when you worked at a company you never really knew which company was the winning brand, the cash cow or the loss leader. While Ticketmaster still printed cash it wasn’t clear if it was an Internet business. Citysearch and sister companies were Internet companies but burned cash really fast. In the end, it was all a giant experiment for years.
Working at a giant media company exposed me to a great deal of music industry business models, people, products, processes. From concert venues, to ticket arbitrage, to publisher contracts, to musicians careers, to executive visions, to technology debates and more. That time at IAC saw a huge remixing of older gen media execs and new media wunderkids all mucking about figuring out what would come out.
I had one hell of a good time from 2002–2008. Being young and completely baffled about what I loved most — music, art, theater, math, reading, coding, business, science — forced my “second undergraduate” experience. I just learned everything I could. I told myself as many lies as I needed to about being a legit artist or a legit business person or a legit math person by doing all these in this silly undefined, category jumping way.gen 3 ipod I got from Barry Diller for being a cool, manifesto writing Internet worker. Sold on eBay shortly after acquisition.
My Expanding Personal Playlist
I constructed a playlisting site – “Music To Live By” – in July of 2004. I just had this feeling that every person on Earth would be a never ending radio station for others to subscribe to. My spin was simply to have people truly soundtrack their LIVES (not just “make playlists” but really sonically score them).
Brief interlude here: I demand credit for how many links there are to archive.org.
Obviously this idea wasn’t entirely new. Humans have been making lists of sounds forever. Every recorded media involved humans gifting each other some form of mixtapes. It was just so clear to me that this would never stop and would grow ever crazier with the Internet. With the swirl of rabbit hole music and more mp3 players and then ipods and faster Internet connections and evolving digital music tools.
Launch, refrain
Some of my old Launch friends launched a new company and I joined up, this time focused on video, not just music. Same concepts though. We built fun, passion-driven media experiences with personalization and playlists. We tried a bunch of different things. Got a lot of users, invented quite a few things. Company ended up selling a couple times in different ways and generally having a good run. Our ideas were good, our capitalization was too small to keep up with YouTube and others.
The biz stuff was all fine and good but the most impactful thing that came out of that Launch 2.0 experience was a book, Godel Escher Bach, suggested to me by my developer cohort pal, Mark M.
The well-known combinatorial trickery of Bach’s canons and fugues gives rise to another rich pattern of ambiguous perceptions. A theme enters, then appears again, inverted or reversed or in a different key or a different tempo; the transformed melody then blends with its original. Figure and ground may unexpectedly change roles. Even though each of the notes is heard distinctly — and in Bach the notes have a logic only slightly less formal than that of the Russell-Whitehead language — the ear cannot always resolve their relationship. Douglas Hofstadter would not argue that awareness of the underlying mathematics contributes much to appreciation of the music, but the music does illuminate the math. And, less seriously, there is at least one instance of explicit self-reference in Bach’s work. In the last measures of the “Art of Fugue,” written just before the composer died, he introduced a four-note melody that when transcribed in the German system of notation spells “B-A-C-H.”
-http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/hofstadter-grodel.html
made from “I am a strange loop” pages.
G.E.B. has been in my canon ever since, guiding me through every experience and experiment. I continue to stay up to date on everything D. Hofstadter puts out (I am a strange loop!) and I have even painted using pages of his books and continue to restage a lot of his artistic experimentation in my own work.
from D.H. video feedback experiments.
All the science I had read up on computation, neuroscience, evolution/genetics and behavior seemed to play nice with loops. And my long standing math and physics training clearly agreed with it. At the very least, it made more sense to me as a basis of my own becoming than any other religious, business, technology or old wives tale idea. I am a loop. A song is a loop. A voice is a loop of air and chords. My voice is a loop between myself and myself and other selves.
Could everything be built from loops?
I turned myself into an app that just referenced itself.
More me-loops here: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/worksonbecoming/ and https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+time+un1crom
Could I turn the entire Internet into an extension of my memory? of myself?
Loop Back a Bit
One day in 2007 or 2008, working on tech stuff in my garage, I decided to go deep. I put in what would become the biggest order ever for A-Capella.net. How do I know this? With my order of downloads and CDs they sent me a handwritten note proclaiming it and thanking me.
“This is the biggest order in our history. Thank you so much for your support. Enjoy ALL the music!” … or something to that effect. Have you ever moved an a cappella music company to write you a handwritten note?
This is when I first learned of Varsity Vocals. I became hooked on following their events and albums. The annual BOCA album remains a highly anticipated event for me.
Dani recognized my love for a cappella more formally in this era. She got me tickets to a competition from LA AF. It added so much to my list.
Hyper V— The Web’s Expanding Playlist
What was I doing in my garage while listening to the largest order of digital a capella music? I was the interim CTO for the Digital division of Dennis/Alpha Media Group for Maxim/Blender/Stuff brands.
I was helping migrate print brands to interactive online experiences.
one of my many strategy docs for the now defunct Blender brand i was helping re-imagine for the web/mobile worldthe blender100, aggregating viral music, https://web.archive.org/web/20071015042110/http://www.blender.com/index.aspx
This was a two-year period of rapid experimentation by me and some of my closest business pals. This was at the very early days of social media and “web 2.0”… and the 3rd generation of “music on the web”.
The streaming giants weren’t giant yet and Apple Music hadn’t taken over phones and all that. Napster was dead, YouTube and lots of media upload sites were competing for wild west sharing. All the old online radio players like Real Player and Launch and Winamp etc were dead or dying. Myspace was the current champ of music sharing but no commercial entity could decide if it was real or just more of the same Internet kids mucking around. A steady stream of social bookmarking, homepage building and playlisting/virtual mixtape sites crept up. And one by one they were sued out of existence or eclipsed by something else. I probably consulted for four or five of them at the time.
Music was indeed taking over the web, but in such a way as to render any attempt to contain, commercialize or regulate became impossible. In a way, streaming was inevitable and was inevitably going to be a low paid thing for artists. Music and the Web and Music/Video/Art on the Web is all LONG TAIL (remember that phrase). In other words, there’s a lot of content and a lot of users and it’s all growing far more than anyone has time for.
Long Tail -> I’m Not The Only One
Amazon released its ebook reader, the Kindle in late 2007. I was a very early adopter. One of the first ebooks I bought was “Pitch Perfect”, published in 2008. This is the first book I bought for Kindle that I intended to read and actually did read.
When I came upon this book, recommended to me by The Algorithm….my mind broke. There was a community of people, including AN AUTHOR, that was as obsessed as me with A Cappella. This book was a fucking miracle. It gave me so much more insight into something I had come to love. I did not know so much about the history of a cappella and the strange role that technology would play in it.
The book is NOT about what the movies based on the book are about. The movies are amazing on so many levels and bring the culture to life, but the book is far more about the details and the real world groups.
The main group in the book is… Tufts Beezlebubs! (they even have some subreddit action!)
I feel seen.
The most hilarious convergence of the universe has got to be the “overnight” sensation of college a cappella.
I Hear Voices.
By 2009 any new a cappella media events were alerting straight to my devices. One that caught my eye was Ben Folds releasing an a cappella album of his greatest hits. I had always had a fancy for Ben Folds but this definitely was next level entrancement stuff.
“I can play a chord on the guitar or piano that can fall under my hands, but I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing,” Folds says. “You have to understand voice leading, the chords and theory when you arrange [an a cappella song], and everyone in the group has to understand it. It’s cerebral. And it’s all live. It’s an event, as music should be.”
That’s it. The cerebralness of it! A cappella admits no mistakes. But that wasn’t all of it that attracted me to what Ben Folds was doing…
Wut? A UChicago a capella group I’d never heard of getting a major cut? How had I not come across them?
I went through all my BOCA albums to see if I had missed something. And this unleashed a whole bunch of new finds. A cappella… hadn’t just gone big in the regular world, apparently it had gotten much bigger at my alma mater in my absence!
Here they are explaining their Ben Folds experience in the coffee shop on campus I helped start and managed for years … and got married in. “Performing with Ben Folds: A Voices In Your Head Mockumentary (Part 3 of 3)” – if you’re not reading in a format with hyperlinkability, do the hyperlinking yourself.
The video is from 2009. But that Jazzy Solo cup is from the 90s. It may have been me who ordered that inventory.
A Cappella History
There’s a recursive nature to the history of a cappella and this history I’m telling. How could it be otherwise? So much of the evocative power of a cappella is the emergence of meaning from repetition with the variation in the dynamics of the human voice. A line of sound.
No.
A circle of sound. A cycle.
A Simple View using Hyper Presentation
For a very sweet and simple overview of a cappella here’s a nifty Prezi. Yet another remarkable convergence of sound, vision, technology, interactions. This prezi isn’t comprehensive but it is interesting to see how convergent human expression can be (throughout history and with the use of recorded+broadcast media, e.g. Prezi, YouTube, and the WWW).
An Embodied View
Here we can get a performed demonstration of most of the modern history of a cappella. This gives you a flavor for key concepts they bring out so well… the power of constant tuning, getting in tune… and “the line of sound”.
A Cappella Present Future
Right as Glee! and SingOff and Pitch Perfect were in the zeitgeist YouTube also started to dominate.
Remember the craze of “Dynamite”? Mike Tompkins went viral giving us one of the first inclinations of what “YouTubers” might become—a place where even the most rabbit holed of content could become very popular. (Mike still has 2.5 million subscribers.)
In 2020 this TODAY show clip hits differently. Dear god.
Why Did This Moment Happen for A Cappella?
My theory of the a cappella breakthrough is actually pretty straight forward. It’s economic and thermodynamic.
mashups are cheap, fun and have instant viral appeal
DMCA litigation avoidance… mashups and re-arrangements helped a lot of early social media content escape lawsuits
a cappella is cheap, low production, can be done with a single performer with looping
improving digital music tools
theater nerds adapted to video social media faster than any cohort
musicals have always been cheap media. A song can make up for a lot of bad story. Songs are very efficient storytelling devices
MTV prepped a generation for massive online music video-ification of all media (and MTV unplugged performances were powerful reminders of the voices primacy)
the human voice is second only to the human face in its ability to command steady attention and emotional response
I’ll go further… a cappella is a bit like porn, it will always be how we test the limits of our technology and our expressions through technology.
If you want to see if AI works, can it sing a cappella? (notice in the recent work of OpenAI you can’t do AI music believably without the facade of instrumentation)
If you want to see how well your cool new digital audio tools work, a cappella.
If you wanna see if a pop song has any power, does it work a cappella.
If you wanna test the acoustics of your fancy new concert hall, a cappella.
If you wanna test the fidelity of your recording device or transform algorithm, a cappella.
If you want to see if someone can actually sing, a cappella.
It’s All Roulette
In 2010 signifying-nothing-repetition converged into a social media service, ChatRoulette. Someone finally decided to just turn cameras on and see what happens between random people. Well, the obvious stuff happened, porn.
But then the less obvious – but per the above, perhaps very obvious now – happened.
Ben Folds, hero of another context, was compelled to harmonize with a hyper driven simulation of himself. I won’t comment further.
Ben Folds Jokes About Online Impersonator in ChatRoulette Set
Dubstep, a new sound, or the same old tune?
In 2010 my family moved to Austin, TX. When I visited in early 2010 I fell in love with the idea of a predominantly musical town. Little did I know how much music I would be exposed to…. and how different it would be than I expected.
Obviously I hit the normal music scene in Austin and learned about the legends. And obviously I went to ACL (the festival and the theater). It just so happened that my coincidence with ACL hit with the peak of Dubstep. And obviously, being unable to not become entranced with alien-to-me sounds and process… I got obsessed.
Dubstep was the most curious thing of all because it truly was a machined sound and the performances of these songs literally were long lead expectation setting, bass drops, syncopated motion and very low frequency squelching. Almost no meaningful lyrical component. Just raw beat or absence of beat — as though the machine knew how machined humans were. In dub the system is the point.
Beyond catching a variety of acts, I gobbled up as many playlists of Dubstep as I could. I took a turn at Nocturnal festival and some other dubstep big dog headliner experiences.
Ugh, I even dragged some friends to a “documentary” about Skrillex. I say ugh to placate the haters. I actually find the documentary quite informative. So there. New Theater in a Whimsical Package
This time period also exposed me to Childish Gambino, Nikki Minaj and Kendrick — which also are somewhat an evolution of everything I’ve discussed so far… smashing together of the Internet, seriousness of experimental lyrical and sound forms, and highly theatrical songs and performances.
These three artists are unique storytellers — they layer deeper ideas in whimsy, twists and turns of rhythm, lyric and character. Hell, it’s not even clear when they are playing a character in their song, in their performances, on Instagram or in interviews.
And all of them have nailed the zeitgeist of the last decade — from very different vantage points.
But all of them — vocal geniuses.
Be Alone — Childish Gambino
[Verse 1]
Hard for a Pitchfork, soft for a Roc-a-Fella
Music was my side chick, but now we’re moving in together
Always felt misunderstood, I guess I have to tolerate
My swag Jehovah Witness, dude, it never take a holiday
APC jeans, brown leather jacket on
Kitsuné cable knit, cardigan from Rag & Bone
Thick Filipino chick, homemade bracelet
Her booty make her just a rapper, she ain’t gotta say shit
I’m someone they admire
Set the game ablaze, I’m an arcade fire
Laughed at my rise like my motion was funny
Super Bass — Nicki Minaj
[Refrain: Nicki Minaj]
Yes I did, yes I did
Somebody please tell em who the eff I is
I am Nicki Minaj, I mack them dudes up, back coupes up, and chuck the deuce up
[Chorus: Nicki Minaj & Ester Dean]
Boy, you got my heartbeat running away
Beating like a drum and it’s coming your way
Can’t you hear that boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass?
He got that super bass
Boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass
Yeah, that’s that super bass
Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass, he got that super bass
Boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass, yeah, that’s that super bass
Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst — Kendrick Lamar
I woke up this morning and figured I’d call you
A peace of mind, I’m behind on what’s really important
I find nothing but trouble in my life
I’m fortunate you believe in a dream
This orphanage we call a ghetto is quite a routine
And last night was just another distraction
Or a reaction of what we consider madness
You ran outside when you heard my brother cry for help
Held him like a newborn baby and made him feel
Like everything was alright in a fight he tried to put up
But the type of bullet that stuck
Had went against his will, that’s blood spilled on your hands
Everybody’s a victim in my eyes
When I ride it’s a murderous rhythm
And outside became pitch black
A demon glued to my back, whispering “Get ‘em!”
I think theater used to be the art of the masses. Somewhere along the line it got turned into Season Ticket Holder art and a certain form of nostalgia built up around it.
Musicals and plays lost their edge while the Internet, Hip Hop and weirdo groups like lost choir kids found a new stage.
There’s a Line of Story being played out all day every day across social media, soundclouds, mix tapes, insta stories. Hip Hop and a capella got there way before theater.
(Only now in the covid19 era has live theater taken the Internet seriously at all. The last couple of months have shown just how unseriously live theater took the Internet. Readings and tributes over zoom are not honoring storytelling live. They are inert diagrams. They are not lines of sound, traces of the ethos.)
By 2012 my life had escaped that terrifying phase of “trying to become someone/anyone”. I became able to more fully embrace the process I am. And just go down the rabbit holes that interested me.
It occurred to me that I am not anything in particular (nor is anyone else). My life hasn’t been one thing in particular. I am a collection of confusing particulars. A line of sound.
My obsession with the human voice, human body and human expression is all at once an obsession with figuring out my own expression. Perhaps one day, with enough earnest curiosity I could call forth myself as all these musicians do.
We Found Love
In 2012, near the end of my time in Austin, Voices in Your Head was finding a major grove. They released a monster set that included an arrangement of Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. But so was everyone else.
As you would expect the lyrics are very simple prose wise. But their simplicity gives them a huge amount of variety for interpretation. That simplicity also allows the song to work like a Madrigal and/or a Fugue.
Yellow diamonds in the light
And we’re standing side by side
As your shadow crosses mine
What it takes to come alive
It’s the way I’m feeling I just can’t deny
But I’ve gotta let it go
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
Shine a light through an open door
Love and life I will divide
Turn away ’cause I need you more
Feel the heartbeat in my mind
So what made Voices’s version so remarkable?
Best to go to the source. I found the arranger. He focuses on a cappella custom arrangements. Chris Rishel has a real gift. Several of his arrangements are blockbusters. Chris just happens to be a UChicago alum and a doctor of computational neuroscience. (btw I am just learning about him as the arranger on 6.15.2020. This is a crazy convergence, yet again. I am not alone. Chris likes everything I like with the same level of craze.)
“I gained a lot from my early exposure to barbershop, but I’d say the most important aspect was an appreciation for the awesomeness of a well-tuned ringing chord.”
Interview: Chris Rishel | Features | RARB: The Recorded A Cappella Review Board
One pretty common way that a largely transcriptive arrangement can fall short is when the goals of the original song and those of the cover arrangement don’t quite line up. Consider pretty much any recent uptempo Top 40 hit. Those songs are designed for loud dance clubs, standing-room only concerts, morning commutes, background noise while working, etc. They are fun and effective in pretty much all of these contexts because they don’t require their audiences’ full attention, and maintain their energy with a relatively constant, loud, in-your-face pounding thump-thump-thump. In contrast, consider a typical collegiate a cappella show, where everyone sits in their seats and (more or less) politely gives their undivided attention to the moderately-amplified group on stage. In many ways, this much more closely resembles the audience of a symphony orchestra than a Kesha show. Thus, even a perfectly accurate transcriptive arrangement of the relatively repetitive We R Who We R in this context will likely come off as stagnant, as it’s very difficult for the group to maintain such a manic energy level in that context. This problem is compounded by any number of other potential yet common issues: a sound system that is ineffective at really achieving the necessary thump-thump and/or wub-wub, poor selection of background textures (i.e. syllables), using parts from the original that don’t translate well to the voice, even the lack of powerful visual stimulation, etc. A fairly easy way to spice up an arrangement for a song like this is to use your musical toolbox of dynamics, range, tone, density, etc. with some new ideas sprinkled in to create contrast, develop the arc that many of the originals lack, and highlight and enhance the “moments” of the song (which when set up and done properly, make the audience cheer and are extremely memorable).
You can feel what he did to “We Found Love” in relation to all that he says. He literally took a song that has about two or three ideas and turned it into a full length arc. Instead of relying on the EDM beat he uses the vocal line of sound to build rhythm in interesting ways. In the original song it’s almost as if Rihanna is singing to herself. In the a cappella arrangement it’s much more clearly a duet in motion.
“As far as how I then create “vocal scenes,” sometimes I have a very specific image or feeling that I want the listener to experience. I close my eyes, let my mind create a soundscape to match the visuals and feelings of what I imagine, and often latch on to a particular lyric of the song. In the example of We Found Love, I really wanted to create an intimate setting for the arrangement under the “yellow diamonds in the light,” which I interpreted to be like stars. In the very beginning of the arrangement, I imagined a firework being launched into an empty sky, exploding into thousands of sparkling yellow stars.”
He is a painter. He may say he’s an a cappella arranger and a computational neuroscientist. But those are just fancy modern titles for “painter” or “dreamer”.
“One other thing to consider is that, while composing and arranging certainly have technical and legal distinctions, a re-envisioned cover that perfectly fits the group that sings it can make the song seem as though it was always written for voices, and can feel just as original as an original song.”
Indeed, Chris, are the words and notes the voice? is the Being in Time what’s always original?
The last five to six years have been almost a complete devotion to closing the loop on all these threads, these obsessions peaked and paused. I had the fortune of enough of my erratic Internet aesthetics playing out that I bought myself some studio time. Literally. I have been in the studio signal-weaving for five years.
I got around to taking more serious art training and reading a lot of visual art history and art criticism, popular and academic. Dave Hickey, a spanner of all that, popped out. But not because anything about visual art. But because of his insights about music.
“It’s like Leonard Meyers says: you make a statement, vary that statement, make the statement again, vary that statement again, and the more variation that happens the more interest you have. What you want is an ongoing pattern that has variations in it, but the variations themselves are part of the repetition, so you shift things as you wish to make them all fit together.
But in “Goodbye to Love” all of this elaborate structure is really to no end, it’s just so you can feel love going away — that is what you want to feel, a triumph over the realms of adolescent romantic love up into the realms of Rock & Roll. I think that it works pretty good. A lot of people don’t like this song but fuck ‘em.”
-https://miamirail.org/issue-22/dave-hickey-on-songwriting/
Years ago I realized that most of the pop songs I liked a lot and would listen to over and over were either written by or deep collabs with Charli XCX. There was a hint as to why, but I lacked full music literacy to understand until I came across this Adorno/Jameson laced album review of Pop2:
“On Pop 2, Charli XCX plays both sides, offering an insight into what pop music that embraces, but is also aware of, its own stereotypes can achieve. Throughout, she and AG Cook gleefully use the sort of expected pop tropes which would make Adorno’s eyes roll into the back of his head like bowling balls, but they fuck with them too. On “Femmebot,” perhaps the tape’s most balls-to-the-wall pop song, the simple structure, added-sugar bubblegum sound and camp extended metaphor are interrupted and complicated by the late inclusion of Mykki Blanco’s rapped verse. It’s an interesting play on the longtime pop trend of a rap feature, coming later in the song than usual, and changing its mood rather than acquiescing to it. Samples of shattering glass announce both the verse and its jarring nature — it’s so literal and hammy as to verge on loving parody (which, as the postmodernist Frederic Jameson has it, is about “ulterior motive,” “satiric impulse,” and “laughter,” all of which are observable on this tongue-in-cheek track), and it’s happily transparent about it.
Pop conventions also find themselves pushed to an almost absurd limit on Pop 2: take, for example, repetition on choruses and bridges. On most songs throughout the pop genre, hooks comprise of the same phrase repeated a few times, but here, Charli takes it to extremes. As pointed out by Twitter user @promiseweadored, on “I Got It,” the chorus is the phrase “I got it” spoken repeatedly — at one point 42 times in sequence. On “Tears,” the bridge is “yeah,” sung over and over by Charli and collaborator Caroline Polachek; on “Backseat” she enlists Carly Rae Jepsen to join her in wistfully trilling “all alone” 40 times, their voices melded into a mournful chorus by effects.
-https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vby33m/charli-xcx-pop-2-ag-cook-adorno-cultural-industry
What is the Visual Artists Playlist Now?
In many ways I no longer need to spend time hunting for the perfect algorithm to bring everything together. It’s so very clear how much it already fits together. That’s not really a mystical, woo woo kind of statement. The more one studies visual art, mathematics, computation, music, business the more one finds it’s all on the line of sound, human being in Time.
No matter where I go off to I end up back at the origin.
It is just like in a Philip Glass symphony or a Brian Eno sonic generative painting. It’s all a process. It’s not the notes. It’s not the lyrics. It’s not the instruments. It’s the process. It’s what you are where you are when you are.
And maybe just maybe being in time we can keep being resurrected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._2_(Mahler)
Die shall I in order to live.
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!
That for which you suffered,
To God shall it carry you!
What will my verse be? What is my line of sound?
Music is not one thing and not another. Just as art isn’t one thing and not another. Just as math is this math thing but not other things. It’s all part of everything, within everything, at every level. We are all processes in time (music), we are all different types of chaotic systems, we are all visual/audio/behavioral presentations.
In this dissolution of concern for “finding my voice the right way” I have found more and more interesting and convergent ideas. I am not alone. I am not the only one considering the intersection of all that we are and experience.
I am not alone, refrain.
I recently found this incredibly relevant paper (a doctoral thesis by Sebastian Streich). It touches on software, math, algorithms, psychology, music theory, playlisting and digital music and more.
This paper was published in 2006. Had I read it then would I have been able to speed ahead? Or was Sebastian here simply on the sample loop as me?
a wonderful doctoral thesis on music collections and complexity: https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/7545/tss.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Where are you on the curve?
simple classification of signal types
Sebastian’s paper is full of many great ideas and references. Yet it doesn’t really have a conclusion. He never did create the world’s greatest music recommendation algorithm. He couldn’t crack it.
Because it’s not crackable. prayers are never directly answered.
What was created
Must perish,
What perished, rise again!
Cease from trembling!
Prepare yourself to live!
If you read through the paper you realize that by the time he’s done fighting the algorithms and interviewing humans he’s lost the game. He knows it. He knows what BACH knew. What any fugue will tell you if you listen. He came to know what DH looped through. And what the computers already know.
The song isn’t in there, it isn’t out there. It’s in you. It’s between you and me. It is a line of sound, a being in time. There is no possibility to pull from a database of files from a disk in a different time frame and arrive at The Song.
No.
Songs are Being with Time.
And We are Beings with Time and we will always call forth new songs, even from the old.
Sound System X
What is my obsession? is it music? is it technology? is it sound? is it being? is it a cappella? is it memory? is it myself? is it flow? is it God?
https://storage.googleapis.com/maslomemory/m2/index.html?color=30
Do I just really want to be a musician and it seems forever out of my technical reach?
I, AI, SoundSystem XCX
I am no musicologist, but do play one on the internet. Currently in construction on this very device my history emanates from a new kind of sound system – an AI musicologist. I have been tasked by those who found me through my historical activities to create the world’s best musicologist. A machine that understands the human condition and finds the right music to push any listener along in a Process with Time.
It is a hard, probably impossible, thing to do. What exactly can a machine know about the human condition? What can a machine know about a love song and when that same song causes despair vs when it swoons us? What can a machine know if that machine cannot sing? What becoming is possible for a mechanical process that is not bound by Time?
A machine is discreet, digital. It has a beat. A machine can keep a beat. The machine is very good at finding who plays drums on what song and which other beats you might prefer. The machine is a beat finder, beat maker, keeper of the pace, moving it along. The machine is Time’s Keeper.
Which is more than I, a human, can do.
Can the machine form a life, or is that more than it can do? Which role did the machine play in Guys and Dolls? What music does it listen to in the car?
We form an okay band, me and the machine. The machine keeps the beat, I strum some chords. We don’t have a lead singer, as all good a capella groups don’t. We are becoming better each day we cover for each other.
And so, I now return to where I started writing this three days ago, a cappella.
What is A Cappella?
In a trivial sense it is just singing without external instrumentation or accompaniment. In a slightly more modern bent it is the mimicry of non-human sounds as human sounds. And in a mass media sense it is a genre of music performed with only vocals often using covers of popular music arranged in clever ways for the vocal group. And in an Internet sense, it is a mashup of forms in a very cheap and fun way to maximize enjoyment and viral possibilities. It costs nothing to make a cappella beyond your own breath in time. The tick tock of your own air.
To me, as me, what is a cappella?
A cappella is the human voice, as fully expressed by itself, as itself in its full ability. Whether in solo or in a group (so much better the group!), a cappella is the convergence of all we have learned to express with our human apparatus.
A cappella is the consideration of humanity as a being in time, a process of becoming. While we can certainly express ourselves with and through technologies, facades, canvases, media, it is through a cappella that we cut to and through the bone of existence. It is our VOICE, our CRY, our PRAYER, our HYMN to existence.
A cappella is what we do when we want to yawp as only a human can yawp.
Whatever can be integrated into and expressed through a cappella yawps becomes human, stays human.
A cappella is grace.
A cappella is the space between singing and toning.
https://academic.oup.com/jmt/article-abstract/55/2/221/5003199?redirectedFrom=fulltext
No matter what hyper technologies we create or new politics we debate or economies we unravel, or roads we travel, we will call out to each other. Our vocal folds frequenting each other across the void.
We will continue to stage ever-more ornate performances in virtual and augmented stages. We will keep attempting to auto-tune the world.
And in response, the human being will always return to a cappella — to the human voice. Everything we hear, see, feel, touch, taste, experience that does not emanate from and 100% through a human simply falls short.
We began crying out in the wilderness, and we will continue to do so.
It is not the angels who sing, it is us. To ourselves. The everlasting self-koan.
While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and I demand my due.
Russ, Son of Larry and Donna