On the pleasure of making music

I recently posted a video in which Adam Neely argued against using AI to make music. In that video he showed the CEO of Suno, Michael Shulman argues, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice.” Hence the justification for an AI program that does all the work for you.

I’m with Neeley on this one. I note further that the idea and practice of being merely a consumer of music, without being able to make your own, is relatively recent. Before the invention of sound recording in the late 19th century and the invention of broadcast media in the 20th, before those things happened the only music was live music. If you wanted to listen to music, you have to be in the presence of live performers. To be sure only a small group ever became full-time professional musicians, but a somewhat larger group became reasonably competent amateurs. And I strongly suspect that everyone participated in some active music-making or associated dance more than is the place today.

Passive listening is a different kind of experience. To be sure, it is now possible for anyone to experience the best possible performances through sound recording and broadcast, and that is surely a good thing. But it’s not quite as good as being there in person. And in either case the pleasure is not the same as making your own music, even if your music is, shall we say, a bit basic.

Wayne Booth makes that point in his book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (1999), which is grounded in his love of cello playing. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

So what will be the main point here? Well, obviously not the totally, finally inaccessible perfection but the playing itself, good and bad. We usually manage to rise above the distractions and play, for the sake of the playing. While much of the rest of the world is negotiating costs and benefits of a different kind, we are negotiating interpretations—and when things go well, the pay-off is beauty, friendship, and joy. (About the many in the world who can afford neither kind of negotiation—the impoverished, the hungry, the deprived—I'll not say much, and what I say will be said guiltily. To fiddle while much of the world burns is surely wicked, but everyone who has read this far is to some degree already caught up in the wickedness. Will I be able to say any more in my defense than that some kinds of fiddling come closer to redeeming the world than some other kinds?)

Later:

What I hope will harmonize the debating voices is an unqualified celebration of what it means to take on any difficult and complex task for the sheer love of the task itself, with no possibility of future pay-off. In a world filled increasingly with easy pleasures why take on a tough love that requires daily practice, burdens you with a sense of critical failure, and risks leading others to accuse you of wasting your time—and theirs? Or, if you are bored with the easier pleasures, why not instead give yourself more of the pleasure yielded by getting ahead professionally? Steady devotion at the office will get you somewhere, while steady devotion in front of a music stand or learning jazz trombone or gardening—well, won't you just end up about where you began?

And this:

I am an amateur cellist with an uncomfortable vulnerability to that word "lack" in the second definition. I do love to play the cello—especially when others are playing with me; over the years it has come to feel less and less like a mere addendum to life, a pastime, a hobby, and more and more like something beyond even an added luxury: it's now a necessity. But though I "practice" the art lovingly, "for my own pleasure," practice at least an hour a day, I often practice it with little ease and never with any skill remotely resembling "professional."

There’s more at the link.

The idea that we should rest content with having AI generate tunes for us, that ultimately we don’t need humans making music at all because the AIs can do it “better,” that betrays a frightfully shallow conception of being human, of living. It reduces being human to being simply a consumer of experiences, which seems to me to be the ultimate motivation of the fantasy that we’re living in computer simulation, that we’re not doing anything at all but are rather being done to. That’s the (ultimate) triumph of Homo economicus over Homo Ludens.

The Fairy Voice Mother reacts to “Unchained Melody” [Media Notes 181]

Fairy Voice Mother says:

In this video, I (a contemporary voice specialist) analyse “Righteous Brothers” performing “Unchained Melody” (Live in 1965) on the fly, whilst watching and hearing it for the first time.

Watch me adoringly describe Bobby Hatfield’s incredibly classy use of vocal technique, obsess over his ingenious switch-a-roo between Mode 1 & 2 (head to chest voice) and dive into to the magic of contrast. In this video, I analyse the composition and vocal performance in depth. I explain and demonstrate the vocal techniques (from an anatomical perspective), and ultimately tell you what I think makes this so great.

I love this video. I love the song and performance and have listened to a half-zillion times in the last two years or so. And I love both Lolli’s spontaneous reactions and her explanations of vocal technique. She thinks about the voice like I think about the trumpet. And there’s some cross-over between the two. She talks about manipulating the vocal cavity to influence the sound. Trumpet players do the say thing, though we don’t quite have the same range of control because of the constraints imposed by the instrument itself.

BTW, I'm treating this as a media note because I want to draw some attention to the reaction video as a genre. Now that I've posted this I'll probably post some more reaction videos.

Performer and audience, heartbeat in synch: Yuja Wang performs Rachmaninoff [Bonus: Music and tears]

Janet Horvath, Musicians in Sync – What Yuja Wang’s Heartbeats Tell Us, Interlude, December 7, 2023.

During the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth, pianist Yuja Wang undertook an extraordinary feat. She performed all the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one marathon concert at Carnegie Hall on January 28, 2023. Wang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Maestro Yannick Nézet- Séguin. The audience was treated to a four-hour program, with two intermissions, consisting of 97,076 notes and 621 pages of music. But who’s counting? It turns out that noting the numbers was part of the evening. Wang was asked to wear a device to track her heartbeat during the concert, and so did the conductor, nine members of the orchestra, and six members of the audience. The results of this experiment are quite extraordinary.

Read the whole article at the link, which includes excerpts and graphs of heart-rate. This is a link to a number of articles and videos about the concert.

* * * * *

From tonebase Piano:

What Yuja’s Rachmaninof marathon reveals about the miracle of live performance.

Hosted, written and edited by Robert Fleitz ‪@RobertFleitz‬

In January 2023, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening at Carnegie Hall — a feat once thought impossible. But this concert was also an experiment. Yuja, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and audience all wore heart-rate monitors, revealing the invisible instrument at the center of it all: the human heart.

In this video, Robert Fleitz explores what Carnegie Hall’s data revealed — not only about Yuja’s extraordinary focus and endurance, but about the shared physical and emotional pulse that connects performer and listener. Drawing on insights from Juilliard performance psychologist Noa Kageyama, choreographer Martha Graham, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and pianist-teacher Seymour Bernstein, the film asks how art lives through the body, and what it means to face our own limits in sound.

The story widens beyond Carnegie Hall: Clara Schumann’s journals describing the physical toll of constant touring, Rachmaninoff’s lifelong stage fright, and the tragedy of pianist Simon Barere, who collapsed mid-performance in 1951. From those histories to this year’s Chopin Competition — where a young pianist broke down in tears mid-performance — the through-line is clear: the greatest performances touch the limits of the human body.

Featuring performances by Nikolai Lugansky and materials from Carnegie Hall’s report on the data, this film explores how the heartbeat, the body, and the audience’s breath all become part of the same living organism — and why that fragile aliveness may be the real miracle of performance.

⌛ CHAPTERS ⌛
0:00 A cold night at Carnegie Hall — January 2023
0:23 Yuja Wang takes on the impossible
1:09 Rachmaninoff’s concertos: a marathon for one pianist
1:30 The hidden instrument: the human heart
2:09 Taming the body — the pianist as cowboy
2:46 “The mood is gone.” When control meets chaos
3:05 Coughing fits and breakdowns at the Chopin Competition
3:24 The delicate, dangerous art of live performance
3:56 What Carnegie Hall’s heart-rate data revealed
4:31 The shocking calm of Yuja’s Rach 3
5:08 Heart racing in the Fourth Concerto
5:40 The science of learning, memory, and adrenaline
6:25 Lessons from Lugansky, Avdeeva, and others
7:20 “It’s not just intellectual — it’s biological.”
7:55 Schumann and Rachmaninoff at the edge of their limits
9:05 Simon Barere’s final performance
9:45 The Romantic obsession with suffering
10:12 “There is only one of you in all of time.”
11:14 Profound data and deeper questions from Carnegie Hall
11:40 When performers and audiences breathe together (feat. Lady Gaga)
12:07 Yumeka Nakagawa’s tears at the Chopin Competition
12:25 The miracle of performance
13:24 “Unable to stop smiling.”
14:08 tonebase biggest offer of the year
15:20 (Yes, we can do jokes here.)

Sticks and cymbal

Conductor David Robertson on Boulez and Audiences [Cowen]

Tyler Cowen, David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation, Conversations with Tyler, Episode 248, July 9, 2025.

What the conversation is about:

David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez’s storied contemporary-music ensemble, he went on to rejuvenate the St. Louis Symphony. Robertson combines a fearless approach to challenging scores with a deep empathy for audiences.

Tyler and David explore Pierre Boulez’s centenary and the emotional depths beneath his reputation for severity, whether Boulez is better understood as a surrealist or a serialist composer, the influence of non-Western music like gamelan on Boulez’s compositions, the challenge of memorizing contemporary scores, whether Boulez’s music still sounds contemporary after decades, where skeptics should start with Boulez, how conductors connect with players during a performance, the management lessons of conducting, which orchestra sections posed Robertson the greatest challenges, how he and other conductors achieve clarity of sound, what conductors should read beyond music books, what Robertson enjoys in popular music, how national audiences differ from others, how Robertson first discovered classical music, why he insists on conducting the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka rather than the 1947 revision, and more.

On working with Boulez:

Robertson: That was fascinating, both to see someone working with players and have a clarinet player say, “This actual tremolo between these two notes doesn’t work very well.” To have the man that I would think of as supremely knowledgeable about writing for instruments say, “Oh, well, if we did this one, would it work better?” And the player says, “Yes, sure, that’s fine.” To see this kind of flexibility with his own works, and then to be up in front, conducting and having the computer create the sounds in real time based on the information that the MIDI flute was giving it.

For me to say, “Pierre, I think it’s actually just a little too fast for us to be able to — ” and he said, “Oh, just a minute. Just a minute. We’ll make the calculations.” He calculated everything so it would be slightly slower. I turned with some chagrin to the ensemble and said, “Do you know how we recalculate the tempo?” And I just gave an upbeat. This was one of the things that we worked on together in a sense. It was very close collaboration.

But then about two years later for a big birthday celebration in Tokyo, I was doing a performance of it in Kioi Hall. We got to the slow central passage of Transitoire VII, which is the first movement of Explosante-fixe, and I remember thinking, “This is so incredibly sensual, and it sounds so beautiful in this hall, I’m going to really push the envelope.” I think Pierre’s tempo marking is ♩=40, which is quite slow, but I was down almost at the double of that, like ♪=40. It was the most unbelievably seductive Ravelian sound that you could imagine.

After the rehearsal, Pierre was there, and I went up to him, and I said, “Pierre, I’m very sorry. I really indulged in this little section.” He said, “No, no, no, no, you can actually do more.” That was the moment where I realized he has no problem when the emotion is put into his works in an immensely intense way, but he is not able to do that himself as a performer.

There are a lot of his works where I have done things in his presence, which he doesn’t do, and you won’t find it on his recordings. He said, “Oh, yes, that’s really very nice. That’s lovely.” It’s a fascinating question, this one of how does one express emotion and how comfortable is one with emotions in public.

African influence:

Robertson: This is a constant — the African masks and Picasso and Braque, and the whole idea of changing the perspective of things in Cubism. There’s so much in Pierre’s music that is about his paying attention and listening all the time, whether it’s to Scottish bagpipes, to work out this idea of “Oh wait, the chanter has all of these tiny little notes that it plays and they have very specific rules for how they play these. I like this idea and I’m going to bring it into my music.”

Time:

Robertson: [...] composers use two basic ideas when they’re going to notate their music. One is to take a certain amount of time and subdivide it. This would be like [finger snapping and vocables]. There are many composers who do that. Then there’s the idea that you have, say, a group of eighth notes or sixteenth notes that form an underlying pulse. This is very much coming from the Indian subcontinent. You have this thing going [vocables].

That’s why the notation in Trois petites liturgies, which comes from the second movement of Olivier Messiaen, requires those differing time signatures, because otherwise, if you measure it by a grid, everything else that doesn’t fit in the grid becomes a syncopation. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is what is so wonderful about the grid that jazz players are able to manufacture, where there’s so much push and pull with the grid, and that’s, actually, where a great deal of the energy comes from.

Audiences:

Cowen: You conducted for some number of years in Sydney. How are Australian audiences different?

Robertson: Oh, that’s a really good thing to talk about because I think all audiences are different. There are certain cultural aspects. I just came back from a European tour. The amount of applause you get from European audiences is sometimes surprising to Americans. I remember having to tell some American soloists when we’d come out for the seventh time, and they’d already played their encore, that the audience still wanted to see them again, in Lyon. You have a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall and you come out twice and then it’s over.

In Sydney, there is a sense of adventure. There’s also a sense of pride in their institutions that you don’t necessarily find in every place. There’s enough newness about the country that the idea that it’s the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is already a source of pride before you’ve even started to play.

There’s that, but I think the more important point is that an audience anywhere is a collection of individuals. We play a concert for one individual, but for economic reasons, we just get 2,000 individuals together at the same time because it’s cost effective, but each person brings their own sense of what’s there and their experience with them. This goes back to what you were saying about people hearing contemporary classical music and going, “Ick.”

That has to do with, have they played an instrument? When they’ve played an instrument, are they the kind of person who likes to make funny sounds on the instrument? Or do they want to stick with only what’s in the Tune A Day book? If they’re the person who liked to honk and make strange sounds to annoy their siblings, they’re probably going to be closer to contemporary music, and they bring that with them into the concert hall.

You have people who are there to celebrate a fantastic, “I just met this person and I invited them to the concert and they said, yes. Oh, this is great. Can I put my arm around them during the Tchaikovsky?” You have people who come in, and they are still in a situation of bereavement. You have people who come in, and they have looked at something in the news that has disturbed them greatly.

All of these people come in, all of them as individuals, and our job, I think, is to create the most open experience possible so that each one of these people feels they can come into the structure of the music in a way that they can then find themselves and have the incredible experience that it can bring forth, talk to them.

EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience

I uploaded the first edition of the document over a decade ago. This is now the 14th edition, which I've spruced up a bit. You can download it from Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_14.

I've added a new preface, which I've reproduced below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Prefatory Note: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience

I’ve been a musician for most of my life. Early on I read Jean-Baptist Arban say, of music, “There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them” (see p. 34 below). I sure liked the sound of that. But what did it mean? Somewhat later I read musicians talking about how, on this or that occasion, the music “played itself.” What could that possibly mean? At some point I came to experience the second, that is to say, I experienced something to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. And I think I know what Arban had in mind. That is to say, I have heard playing to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. I may even have done some myself.

And so, back in the mid-1990s, I started assembling accounts about, well, musical experiences that caught my attention. I wrote brief descriptions of some of my own experiences and collected anecdotes about the experiences of others from various sources, magazine stories, interviews, books, and, more recently, online articles. I put the first edition of this document online about ten years ago and have then updated it when I came across more anecdotes.

I’ve never established explicit criteria for these anecdotes, for that would contradict my fundamental reason for creating this collection in the first place. I am simply on the lookout for interesting things that happen to musicians – also listeners, but mostly musicians themselves – while performing. The idea is to get a large and diverse set of accounts in one place so that we can look at it and ask: What’s going on?

That is to say, there is a sense in which I do not know what these musicians are talking about. The experiences are often hard to describe, we don’t talk about them, and there so there is no standard vocabulary. And yet I feel that these phenomena are the life of music. And so I’ve gathered these anecdotes together into a single document and offer it to anyone who is curious. One day, I assume, or at any rate I hope, one day someone will begin to make sense out of it all. My job is simply to provide something to make sense of.

What happened? And by that I do not mean a deep question about underlying causes and significance. No, I’m asking a simple question about phenomenology: What kinds of experiences are there? Under what circumstances did they occur? How common are they? How do we classify them?

Finally I note that I have never undertaken a systematic search for such anecdotes. The ones I have gathered here are simply ones that I’ve come across in the ordinary business of thinking and investigating. I have no idea what a systematic search of either the web of the archives would turn up, much less systematic interviews of a wide range of people, musicians and non-musicians alike. Needless to say, we desperately need an extensive and systematic effort to collect such stories.

* * * * *

This document is in five parts. The first contains various experiences I’ve had as a musician. These are my windows into how emotion & magic arise in musical performance. Many of these experiences are of a kind sometimes known as altered states of consciousness (ASCs). I list these first, not because I think they are somehow special. How could I possibly know that? I list them first simply because I am able to describe them more completely than the anecdotes I have collected from others. With these, I know what I’m talking about. They span my musical life from my middle school years into the current millennium.

The second part contains a few statements by listeners. The third part collects a few anecdotes from musicians I know. The fourth part is a list of passages by various performers that I’ve collected from various sources over the years. I’ve come across these anecdotes in the normal course of my reading. There has never been a period when I specifically looked for such anecdotes, but I’ve read about music and musicians all my life. These stories do not represent a systematric effort to collect such stories.

Finally, I offer a typology of sexual experiences that, Leola, a sex educator and healer, has developed. The typology applies to musical experiences as well. The stories in this collection are mostly about restorative and transformational music, to use her terms.

What’s new with the 14th Edition

That third part, anecdotes from musicians I know, that’s what’s new to the collection, and they’re what prompted me to expand my original preface. At some point I may go through the whole collection and classify them according to the typology in the fourth part. That would be a good way to begin making sense of these various anecdotes. I’m sure various issues would turn up in that process: Some experiences won’t fit one of the categories; others may fit in two or even three; it may be impossible to tell in some other cases. But that’s more than I want to undertake at this time.

About the mandala on the cover

I uploaded the 13th edition to ChatGPT and asked it to create an image suitable for use on the cover. I put that through several iterations before I decided that perhaps a mandala would be more suitable. The final image is based on the fourth mandala ChatGPT created. I uploaded it to Photoshop, played with the color a bit, and added the lens flare effect.

The amazing hands of Michael Moschen

Adam Neeley: The Ethics of Fake Guitar

0:00 Intro
3:42 Part I - A Brief History of Faking Performances
10:15 Part II - How to Fake Musical Performances
15:07 Part III - Why Faking Performances is WRONG
19:54 Part IV - Why Faking Performances is OKAY (the noble lie)
27:21 Part V - Genre and Morality
37:00 Part VI - “Let’s Talk about Jazz”
47:34 Part VII - Role Models

Football • {sports commentary} • [Media Notes 154]

I confess, football doesn’t interest me very much, never has. But I’m an America and I live in America. So I can’t escape it.

When I was in junior high school and high school I played in the marching band. That required me to attend every football game so we could provide half-time entertainment. We were so good, however, that I suspect some people came to the games more to hear us play than to see the game itself.

That’s the only time in my life that I ever watched football regularly. Of course, we played a bit of touch football in gym class, but that was it. I attended one football game in college. I was in the band. When one half of the band finished a tune eight bars ahead of the other half, that’s when I decided to blow this pop stand.

When I was in graduate school at SUNY Buffalo a roommate bequeathed me a small B&W portable. I watched a number of football games on it. This was during the O. J. Simpson years and I’d watch the Bills games to see him run. He was sensational. Football I didn’t care about, human excellence, that’s another matter.

After that, sure, every once in a while I’d catch a game. At least I assume I did. As I said, I’m living in America. Then, for some reason, a couple of weeks ago I decided to catch a play-off game on Netflix. Why? Why not? So I watched the Baltimore Ravens vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’m from Pennsylvania, so that inclines me toward the Steelers. (The name “Franco Harris” sticks in my mind, so I must have watched some games when he was playing). I sent to school in Baltimore, which would tip me toward the Ravens, thought it was the Colts in Baltimore when I was there (Johnny Unitas as QB). Fact is, I could have cared less who won. Didn’t even watch the fourth quarter.

A week later it was the Buffalo Bills vs. Kansas City Chiefs. I made it the whole way through on that one. But I would hardly say I watched the game. Us, I did watch it, in fits and starts. But I also cruised the web doing this and that.

Which brings up a question: Let’s say the total elapsed time from the beginning of a game to the end is two to two-and-a-half hours. Only an hour of that is game time, which is interrupted for various reasons for varying amounts of time. During those interruptions we’re either getting some kind of commentary on the game, or we’re getting commercials. Add up the total time devoted to the game and commentary on the game. Add up the total time devoted to commercials during the broadcast. What’s the ratio between the two? My guess is that game time would be the larger number, but I’d guess the ratio is closer to 3/2 than to 2/1 in favor of game time.

So, I guess we could say that the commercials exist so that we can watch the game. But it could easily go the other way. Of course, if you’re a football fan, and so heavily invested in the game, that that’s certainly your priority. But if you’re not a fan, then it could almost go the other way.

Which brings me to the real reason for this note: the commentary. That fascinates me. I’m interested in it as a perceptual and cognitive activity. As I understand it, we generally have two commenters, one commenting on the action (play-by-play) and the other commenting on this and that. I believe the second is doing color commentary.

The play-by-play commenter is expected to comment on what’s happening as it happens. That requires them to have had a great deal of experience watching football games, more experience than I’ve had. You have to be able to instantly recognize hundreds of different patterns of activity and associate them with appropriate verbal comments. This is not a time for careful deductive reasoning. It’s an associative process. The commentary must be so fluid as to be of a piece with the perceptual act.

I wonder how long it takes to develop this capacity to the level we see in professional commentators? 10,000 hours? I don’t know. Let’s do a quick calculation. Ten thousand hours works out to something less than 5000 games, somewhere between 4000 and 4500. Let’s say it’s 100 games a year, two games a week. That’s forty to forty-five years. That’s possible, but I think the pros get in the game well before that. So it’s not 10,000 hours. It’s less than half that.

And then there’s the color commentary. That doesn’t have to track the action moment by moment, so it’s not constrained in that way. But still, it’s not an occasion for deductive reasoning. The commentator has to have access to a large range of relevant information about the players and the game, past and present, and come up with relevant bits and pieces in a matter of seconds. So it’s still pretty much an associative process.

And THAT, those last three paragraphs, that’s why I’m writing this not. As for the rest, why note? It’s context.

Sayesha Chowdhury TABLA WIZARD

From the YouTube page:

A Tabla duet by Pt. Pandit Keshab Kanti Chowdhury & Sayesha Chowdhury (grand daughter & shishsya at age of 7) performing on the occasion of CA TV California Festival on 15 Jan 2023 in the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles under the direction of Shuvananda Puri Maharaj Ji who heads the media broadcasting channel CA TV California.

Thanks a lot Shuvananda Puri for giving us this opportunity to showcase Delhi Gharana original Tabla in a duet form.

Sayesha Chowdhury, age 7, is learning Tabla since the age of 1.5 years and have been performing for the last 3 years in national and international level. She has been awarded by CATV California, Sarb Akal Music Society Calgary Canada, Born to Shine ZEE India, Sangeet Kala Kendra Agra and many more.

Listen to the vocables that they utter while they're playing. 

Why is Rachmaninoff so difficult for pianists?

The first Rachmaninoff I ever heard is his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Here's a performance by Yuja Wang:

Vladimir Pleshakov has some interesting remarks on Rachmaninoff over at Quora:

We have three answers so far. They explain well the physical difficulties of large stretches that were easy and natural for Rachmaninoff’s hands. His virtuoso technique, which had no weak spots allowed him to write for himself, in the sense that it was easy and natural for him to play his own music, while other pianists had to work much harder to get the music going.

But there are other aspects of his music which make it difficult to interpret. In a subtle way at first, and in later compositions much more overtly, he was a post-romantic, a modernist, if you wish, disguised in the cloak of a Romantic. He is closer at times to being a neo-classicist and even an expressionst rather than a neo-romantic.

Playing Rachmaninoff’s music with sentimentality is musical suicide. Playing his music fully objectively is musical betrayal. His music reflects humanity. Rachmaninoff’s sources of inspiration are very diverse: pre-tonal church chant dating centuries back, highly distilled folk song, visual art, literary allusions, subtle influences of the oriental Russia, of Ravel, Faure, Gershwin, highly distilled American jazz, and other influences he never talked much about (such as family, friends, self-imposed exile).

He walked a pathway parallel, but never too close, to Arensky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and more distantly, Chopin and Liszt. He never imitated, consciously or unconsciously, any of them. He was interested in ballet, in American musicals, in Stanislavsky-type theater. He loved the human voice, and it permeates like a rare fragrance all of his music - orchestral, vocal, and piano. He was also a superb conductor, and a superb orchestrator, transferring both of these skills into his piano music especially in terms of rhythm and color, but never for cheap effect. One can say that his piano music, for all of its apparent explosion of notes, is actually sparse and austere. In some ways, there is not a single superfluous note - the texture has been carefully pruned by the composer.

Finally, he was a Russian composer, without adhering slavishly to the nationalist concept and creed.

A pianist who can understand and unravel all of these numerous strands will solve the riddle of Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff himself felt that only two or three of his contemporaries understood his piano music correctly. He also felt that only a few orchestras and conductors were completely on the correct wave-length. Stokowski, Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra were his ideals.

Tyler Cowen talks with Coleman Hughes [trombone technique and the nature of improvisation]

Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity (Ep. 211), May, 2024. The scope of the conversation:

Coleman Hughes believes we should strive to ignore race both in public policy and in our private lives. But when it comes to personal identity and expression, how feasible is this to achieve? And are there any other individual traits we should also seek to ignore?

Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.

I'm only part-way into the conversation, but I assume the whole thing is worthwhile as both interlocutors and interesting and intelligent. I was struck by remarks that Coleman made about J.J. Johnson:

COWEN: Now, before we get to your book, I have just some random questions for you. What have you learned from J.J. Johnson?

HUGHES: What is most interesting about J.J. Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist. What people don’t realize about J.J., at least people that aren’t deep connoisseurs, is that most of his solos on his records were prepared. To an extent, that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc. Most of their solos were truly improvised. Like if you go to the alternate takes on those records, it’s a different solo. If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo.

I think that, rather than be a bug, that was a feature of his success. Because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument — which nobody thought was possible before J.J. Johnson did it — it’s a catch-22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians.

COWEN: Are most of your trombone solos prepared?

HUGHES: No. But, in a way, I benefit —

This is why you can’t compare modern players to players of the past. I benefit enormously from having studied and learned all of, or many of, J.J. Johnson’s solos. There were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonists, which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him.

COWEN: Physically, what’s the hardest thing about playing the trombone?

HUGHES: It’s actually not the slide. The slide, in my view — that’s what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves, and that’s what makes it distinct. But the slide motion is not actually the trickiest thing about it. The trickiest thing about it is the same thing that’s tricky about every other brass instrument, which is the embouchure. That’s what separates great trumpet players from poor trumpet players.

In my view, the finger technique is not nearly the hardest part. It’s always the small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively.

I'm curious about Coleman's statement about the embouchure being most difficult aspect of trombone playing rather than the slide. As a trumpet player I understand about the embouchure. However, Hughes makes that statement just after having discussed J.J. Johnson, where he points out that Johnson seems to have prepared his solos so meticulously that "most of his solos on his records were prepared. [...] If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo."

So, just what are "the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument"? I would have thought it had to do with the slide, not moving it back and forth, but rather getting clear articulation between notes at a very rapid clip – a requirement of bebop. When you're playing a valved instrument there's a break in the air stream between one pitch and the next, so it's easy to separate them – unless both notes have the same fingering, which happens often enough. That's not the case with trombone, where the airstream is uninterrupted. In order to play rapid bebop lines cleanly I have always assumed – I've never talked with a jazz trombonist about this – that it was necessary to introduce some kind of tongued articulation and that's what's difficult, the tonguing AND the coordination of the tonguing with both slide movement and embouchure changes. I just did a search on "jj johnson double tongue." If you look at what comes up, you'll see lots of mention of tonguing.

As for improvisation and jazz, I think that's tricky. Back in 2018 pianist Ethan Iverson interviewed Carla Bley. She talked of having met Louis Armstrong:

I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising.

Thus, it seems that when Armstrong performed, the solos he played are more like un-notated composition than "true" improvisation. Back in 1973 Joachim Berendt suggested, on the basis of recordings, that un-noted composition was common in the big band era (The Jazz Book, pp. 193, 132-33) and Gunther Schuller made similar observations (Swing, pp. 165, 173-176, 445, 481). Thus if you listen to various versions of “Take the A Train” that Duke Ellington recorded, you’ll hear Cootie Williams playing pretty much the same trumpet solo. Was he doing what Armstrong had done, playing the solo he liked, or was he simply playing what the fans obligated him to play because they wanted to hear what was on the record? As far as I know, the issue hasn't been properly investigated, though I haven’t looked into it in awhile.

Note: The stuff after JJ is from a blogpost: Some varieties of improvisation, from New Orleans, through bebop, to Cage, and to K-Pop.

Michael Moschen performs THE TRIANGLE

From 2007:

Master juggler Michael Moschen performs his incredibly famous, jaw-dropping piece where three balls and a triangle become a musical and visual work of art. From PBS Great Performances produced by Skip Blumberg. To book Michael Moschen visit WWW.BELENZON.COM or call 858-832-8380. Join the Michael Moschen mailing list at www.michaelmoschen.com/fans.html.

I've been quite critical of the MacArthur Foundation's Fellowship program, the so-called genius awards, and have argued at some length that it mostly awards the same-old same-old. Every once in awhile, however, the award someone of genuine talent and originality. Moschen is one of those. He's in the class of 1990.

Play-by-play commentary as a cognitive and linguistic act

I’m not much interested in football, or in sports generally. When I was in secondary school, I spent five years in marching band and, as a consequence, went to every football game. Since I was there at the game, I watched it of course. What else was I to do? And since I was there to support my school’s team, I rooted for them. I figure that’s, say, a third to a half of my exposure to football. The rest is through watching a game here and there on TV and a movie or three. In recent years I’ve seen fragments of fictional games while binging Friday Night Lights. But that’s pretty much it for my football experience. Oh, one thing, in gym back in school we’d play touch football.

But yesterday, Superbowl Sunday, if figured, “Why not?” So I decided to watch the game. I got the time wrong and entered at half-time, but then I watched the rest of the game, including the overtime. I also played solitaire now and then on my smart phone.

But this isn’t about the game. It’s about real-time commentary. These days the talk is accompanied by replays and drawing lines and circles on the TV screen to point out what’s going on. Very interesting.

What’s really interesting is that it’s all happening in real time. My actual experience of the game, as I’ve indicated above, is rather thin. While I more or less know the rules of the game and what the players are trying to accomplish, I don’t see the action with the detail and precision of a good play-by-play commentator. Those guys – it’s mostly guys, no? – have spent thousands of hours watching games and so have built up a rich repertoire of perceptual schemas which I don’t have. That’s what allows them to see the game in such detail.

By way of comparison, I am a very skilled jazz musician. I’ve spent thousands of hours listening to and playing jazz (and other music). I’ve built up a very rich repertoire of schemas that allow me to hear the detail in great detail. I can pinpoint things that others miss, even people who know a great deal and have listened a lot, but are not players. It’s pretty much the same kind of thing as those play-by-play commentators, just in a different arena.

And then there’s the commentary itself. They have to pick up what’s happening on the field, comment while it’s happening, and then amplify and extend those comments between plays. How do they do that? Practice, years of practice. I imagine that when they started, they weren’t nearly as fluid. But, with time and practice, fluency came. That too is like jazz. It takes time and practice to build up a repertoire of riffs, motives, and strategies you can use in crafting a solo.

I’m thinking that this is all Kahneman’s System 1 performance, fast and intuitive. THAT’s what this post has been about.

Rick Beato interviews Béla Fleck [+Rhapsody in Blue(grass)]

About Fleck (from YouTube_)

Béla Fleck is a renowned American banjo player, often considered one of the most innovative and banjo players of all time. Born on July 10, 1958, in New York City, Fleck was named after the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. He was drawn to the banjo at a young age, inspired by the television show "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Fleck's musical journey has been marked by his eclectic taste and a willingness to blend different genres. He began his professional career in the bluegrass world with the band New Grass Revival and later formed the genre-bending group Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, which combined jazz, bluegrass, rock, and more.

Over his career, Fleck has won numerous Grammy Awards across various categories, showcasing his versatility. His collaborations with artists across different genres, from classical to jazz to African music, have further cemented his status as a musical pioneer. Notable collaborations include his work with the Marcus Roberts Trio, Edgar Meyer, and Zakir Hussain.

Fleck's influence extends beyond his virtuosity on the banjo. He is celebrated for pushing the boundaries of the instrument, bringing it into new musical contexts, and inspiring a new generation of musicians. His albums, such as "Drive," "Throw Down Your Heart," and "The Impostor," display a vast range of musical exploration and creativity.

Béla Fleck continues to tour, record, and collaborate, constantly redefining the banjo's place in the world of music.

Why this interview interests me

1. General principle: I'm a musician, this is about music. More specifically...

2. This is about affordances of the banjo (to use a term introduced by perceptual psychology J.J. Gibson and then generalized by Don Norman and others) in relation to the technical requirements of music. In America banjo playing became most highly developed in blue grass music in the first 3/4s of the 20th century. That was a highly arpeggiated style. Then Fleck and others began adapting it to other style, more scalar styles. Fleck explains how that was done. Other things as well (e.g. polyrhythm).

Revenge for the slap [Media Notes 85]

Jason Zinoman reviews the Chris Rock Netflix special, Selective Outrage, in the NYTimes, Mar. 5, 2023.

You can read the whole review for yourself, I'll just quote the part about the slap:

A commanding theater performer who sets up bits as well as anyone, Rock picked up momentum midway through, while always hinting at the Smith material to come, with a reoccurring refrain of poking fun at Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z before making clear it’s just for fun: “Last thing I need is another mad rapper.” Another running theme is his contempt for victimhood. His jokes about Meghan Markle are very funny, mocking her surprise that the royal family is racist, terming them its originators, the “Sugarhill Gang of racism.”

On tour, his few jokes about Smith were once tied to his points about victimhood. But here, he follows one of his most polished and funny jokes, comparing the dating prospects of Jay-Z and Beyoncé if they weren’t stars but worked at Burger King, with a long, sustained section on the Oscars that closes the show. Here, he offers his theory on Will Smith, which is essentially that the slap was an act of displacement, shifting his anger from his wife cheating on him and broadcasting it onto Rock. The comic says his joke was never really the issue. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me,” Rock said, using his considerable powers of description to describe the humiliation of Smith in a manner that seemed designed to do it again.

There’s a comic nastiness to Rock’s insults, some of which is studied, but other times appeared to be the product of his own bottled-up anger. In this special, Rock seemed more raw than usual, sloppier, cursing more often and less precisely. This was a side of him you hadn’t seen before. The way his fury became directed at Pinkett Smith makes you wonder if this was also a kind of displacement.

There's more, there's always more. But that's the core.

* * * * *

My post about Will Smith's autobiography, Slap! I’ve just read Will Smith’s autobiography.

Hilary Hahn doing the work [Season 6, days 43 & 46]

#100daysofpractice
Season 6, day 43.
Play-through day. Increasing physical and mental endurance ahead of my Bach recitals. Anyone who’s planning on coming to the shows, drop a comment below! pic.twitter.com/3mmGIYodU5

— Hilary Hahn (@violincase) February 12, 2023

Been listening to Karl Richter’s Toccata & Fugue. It’s rock and roll and exquisite at the same time, and organ voicing in fugues is ear opening when you start to layer it on top of these solo works.
Also worked on a Two-Part Invention on piano this morning.

Side note: I intentionally post without doing extra makeup, and I don’t stage my practice sessions. I notice that men seem to be more comfortable doing this than musicians of other gender identities. There are many, many reasons for this, and they run deep.

Here to remind you that it’s the work that counts, and that if you feel comfortable with the idea, it could matter to be seen doing the work. 

* * * * *

Check out an old post: Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance.

* * * * *

Beethoven was a supremely gifted improvisor – From the testimony of his contemporaries [the past isn't what you thought it was]

My own encounter with improvisation was indirect, fitful, indirect, and almost accidental. I started taking trumpet lessons in the fourth grade. Initially I was in a group lesson with two clarinetists, my friends Billy Cover and Jackie Barto. We were grouped together because each of us played an instrument pitched in B-flat. I remember that before long I was starting to fall behind the other two.

Then I started taking individual lessons. My teacher was blind. He’d come to the house once a week. That went on, I don’t exactly recall, for a year, when I switched to Mr. Dysert. I stayed with him until my senior year in high school. Somewhere along the line I started making up my own tunes. Thus when I joined the marching band, I made up march tunes. I’m pretty sure I didn’t think of this as improvisation.

I know, I know, hold your jets. I’m getting to Beethoven.

I supposed learned the term “improvise” when I became interested in jazz at about the same time. Improvisation is what jazz musicians did. What I did, read music, was right HERE. What they did, improvise, was over THERE, in alien territory. What I was doing when I was making up those march tunes, that didn’t fit into this scheme at all. It’s just something I did. I also made-up bluesy lines and tunes, like what I heard on some of my jazz records. But NO, I wasn’t improvising, because, remember? improvising is over THERE.

As far as I can recall the first time I was both improvising and (subsequently) thought of it as improvising was in a rehearsal of a rock and roll band I’d just joined, The Saint Matthew Passion. We were rehearsing “For What It’s Worth” and were riffing at the end. I decided to add some more elaborate riffs. Once I started the band liked it. From that moment on I had a solo at the end of that tune. I took solos in other tunes as well. From that time on I was an improvisor.

The point is simple. I lived in a culture where regular music was music you read from written notes. Improvisation was this mysterious process done by these other people. It was also special, special, mysterious, and OVER THERE. 

* * * * *

That’s not how it was in Beethoven’s musical culture. He lived in a milieu where advanced keyboard players were expected to improvise, where, indeed, the last slot on a concert program was often left open for improvisation, which was expected to be the best music on the program. It’s only recently – yesterday if you must know – that I knew that. Oh, I’ve known that Beethoven was an improvisor for a long time, like Mozart and Bach before him. But that improvisation was so highly regarded, I hadn’t known that. Given that, one would like to know: Why’d they stop improvising? I’m reading about that and want to read some more before I blog about it.

Right now I want to tell you about what Beethoven’s contemporaries thought about his improvising. I’ve taken these examples from, O. G. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries (1926, 1954).

Mozart, 1787

Mozart was a renowned improvisor and toured Europe as a six-year old, dazzling the powdered wig set.

Beethoven, who as a youth of great promise came to Vienna in 1786 [really in 1787], but was obliged to return to Bonn after a brief sojourn, was taken to Mozart and at that musician’s request played something for him which he, taking it for granted that it was a show-piece prepared for the occasion, praised in a rather cool manner. Beethoven observing this, begged Mozart to give him a theme for improvisation. He always played admirably when excited and now he was inspired, too, by the presence of the master whom he reverenced greatly; he played in such a style that Mozart, whose attention and interest grew more and more, finally went silently to some friends who were sitting in an adjoining room, and said, vivaciously, “Keep your eyes on him; some day he will give the world something to talk about.”

Johann Schenk (1792)

He was Beethoven’s teacher in counterpoint.

In 1792, His Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian, Elector of Cologne, was pleased to send his charge Louis van Beethoven to Vienna to study musical composition with Haydn. Towards the end of July, Abbé Gelinek informed me that he had made the acquaintance of a young man who displayed extraordinary virtuosity on the pianoforte, such, indeed, as he had not observed since Mozart. [...]

Thus I saw the composer, now so famous, for the first time and heard him play. After the customary courtesies he offered to improvise on the pianoforte. He asked me to sit beside him. Having struck a few chords and tossed off a few figures as if they were of no significance, the creative genius gradually unveiled his profound psychological pictures. My ear was continually charmed by the beauty of the many and varied motives which he wove with wonderful clarity and loveliness into each other, and I surrendered my heart to the impressions made upon it while he gave himself wholly up to his creative imagination, and anon, leaving the field of mere tonal charm, boldly stormed the most distant keys in order to give expression to violent passions....

Johann Wenzel Tomaschek (1798)

A Bohemian organist, teacher and composer.

In the year 1798, in which I continued my juridical studies, Beethoven, the giant among pianoforte players, came to Prague. He gave a largely attended concert in the Konviktssaal, at which he played his Concerto in C major, Op. 15, and the Adagio and graceful Rondo in A major from Op. 2, and concluded with an improvisation on a theme given him by Countess Sch... [Schlick?], “Ah tu fosti il primo oggetto,” from Mozart’s “Titus” (duet No. 7). Beethoven’s magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days....

I heard Beethoven at his second concert, which neither in performance nor in composition renewed again the first powerful impression. This time he played the Concerto in B-flat which he had just composed in Prague. Then I heard him a third time at the home of Count C., where he played, besides the graceful Rondo from the A major Sonata, an improvisation on the theme: “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman.”* This time I listened to Beethoven’s artistic work with more composure. I admired his powerful and brilliant playing, but his frequent daring deviations from one motive to another, whereby the organic connection, the gradual development of idea was put aside, did not escape me.

Evils of this nature frequently weaken his greatest compositions, those which sprang from a too exuberant conception. It is not seldom that the unbiased listener is rudely awakened from his transport. The singular and original seemed to be his chief aim in composition, as is confirmed by the answer which he made to a lady who asked him if he often attended Mozart’s operas. “I do not know them,” he replied, “and do not care to hear the music of others lest I forfeit some of my originality.”

*Known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Mozart composed a very famous set of variations on this unassuming little tune.

GPT-3, the phrasal lexicon, Parry/Lord, and the Homeric epics

GPT-3 and Homer? You’ve got to be kidding. No, I’m not. What’s the connection?

First, I look at large language models, mostly through tweets by David Chapman, who suggests that we examine Joseph Becker’s idea of the phrasal lexicon (as a Heideggerian ready-to-hand of speech communication). I then consider the Parry/Lord argument about the oral nature of the Homeric poems, and conclude with some discussion of what Homer knew that GPT-3 does not and likely cannot. 

Note: Here's a more recent post (March 2026) that talks about the LLMs as a possible model for oral narrative:  In some ways, some contexts, LLMs may provide a useful model for human language.

Large Language Models as Text Generators

A couple of days ago David Chapman posted a tweet in which he noted: “In 1974, Joseph D. Becker pointed out that rigid rationalist Chomskian linguistics was an emperor without clothes, and explained how syntax actually works. Rigorously ignored for decades, his theory seems powerfully confirmed by current AI text generators.” The post was the first in a string that contained screen shots from Becker’s paper. In a later series of tweets he said:

Your already-said is a resource available in the context for coming up with the next bit you are going to say, along with a stock of routine flat language patterns.

This is a central insight of ethnomethodological conversation analysis.

It’s also how current AI models work…

My expectation is that sciencing the early layers of current AI language models will reveal an enormous repertoire of cliches, idioms, parameterized “mad libs” patterns, stock phrases, joke patterns, song lyrics, snowclones, etc., as Becker suggested…

And plausibly a mid layer will include thousands of language pattens for stitching together two otherwise independent bits of text.

Since DL networks are quite unlike brains, verifying this would tell us very little about “intelligence,” but a great deal about language!

I was intrigued and went looking for Becker’s paper. Once I found it I took a quick look. SHAZAM! a light went on. I ran up a quick post, The phrasal lexicon [System 1 vs System 2 for language], where I mentioned Parry/Lord, and hence Homer, at the end, but without discussion. This is that discussion, or the beginning of it.

The phrasal lexicon

Let’s take a look at Becker’s paper:

Joseph D. Becker, The phrasal lexicon, TINLAP '75: Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing, June 1975 Pages 60-63, https://doi.org/10.3115/980190.980212.

He begins by noting that that all languages contain phrases known as idioms, such as, 1) “raining cats and dogs” or 2) “see the light,” – examples from a dictionary, not Becker. We do not understand such phrases by composing the meaning of the components into the meaning of the whole. The first has nothing to do with either cats or dogs, though it often, but not always, is about rain, while the second is unrelated either to our sense or vision or sources of photons in the visual range. We grasp the meaning of such phrases whole. Though they have the formal properties of phrases, semantically they are single lexical.

Becker proposes that our phrasal lexicon, rather than being a smattering of idioms here and there, is in fact quite pervasive and is central to speech. The phrasal lexicon is central to the real-time, rough and ready, business of conversational interaction. He goes on to list six classes of such phrases (p. 61):

Class I – Polywords: “oldest profession”
Class II – Phrasal constraints: “by pure coincidfence”
Class III – Deitic locutions: “for that matter”
Class IV – Sentence builders: “(person A) gave (person B) a (long) song and dance about (a topic)”
Class V – Situational Utterances: “How can I ever repay you?”
Class VI – “Better late than never”

He then goes on to sketch out the implications for an account of language production (p. 62):

It implies to me that the process of speaking is Compositional: We start with the information we wish to convey and the attitudes toward that information that we wish to express or evoke, and we haul out of our phrasal lexicon some patterns that can provide the major elements of this expression. Then the problem is to stitch these phrases together into something roughly grammatical, to fill in the blanks with the particulars of the case at hand, to modify the phrases if need be, and if all else fails to generate phrases from scratch to smooth over the transitions or fill in any remaining conceptual holes.

My guess is that phrase-adaption and generative gap-filling are very roughly equally important in language production, as measured in processing time spent on each, or in constituents arising from each.

Later:

All in all, we must conclude that the phrasal lexicon is very real. Even excluding long verbatim texts, we probably know as many or more whole phrases than we know single words (and I suspect the disparity would be even greater for the under-educated, i.e. almost all of humanity, since book-learning adds more words but few social situations to the individual’s experience.

He goes on to list 37 such phrases used in the paper itself and after a bit of discussion he notes (p. 63):

Second, nothing in this paper says that so-called “generative” processes do not play an important role in language production. I assert that their role is equal to or less than that of phrasal processes, but that does not make it zero.

Thus he’s not suggesting that we toss syntax-based grammars out the window, not at all. They are important, but are not the only thing, as standard linguistic theorizing has assumed. Such rules, he suggests, are more important in writing, noting that we only learn to write well after we’ve been speaking fluently, that such learning “takes us years of strenuous effort” and “most of us never learn to write very well at that.”

Oral epic

And that brings us to the Homeric texts, Iliad and Odyssey, which have come down to us in written form. The basic problem of these texts is that we don’t know who created them or how. “Homer” is just a name that’s attached to the texts, but not to anything else. Moreover, they are repetitive, inconsistent, involve multiple dialects, seem like they were multiply authored, and maybe they were oral and maybe written, and so forth and so on. Coming on into the middle of the 20th century scholars didn’t know what to make of them.

This is certainly not the time and place to go into all of that. But Albert B. Lord laid it all out in a modern classic, The Singer of Tales (1960), which is available online (though you have to move through it either page by page or with an unmarked scroll bar without flexible independent access to different chapters). Lord in turn was following a line of investigation initiated by his teacher, Milman Parry. Their work is based on two things: 1) fieldwork in contemporary oral epics in the Balkans, and 2) painstaking analysis of the Homeric texts. The upshot is that they clarified the nature of oral composition and performance and determined that, yes, the Homeric texts had originated and evolved in an oral culture. There was no Homer; there was only a tradition. Just how the texts came to be written down, that we do not know, but we do know that they did originate as oral texts.

One of the strongest arguments against the idea that they are oral is that they are very long, with Iliad being almost 16,000 lines long and Odyssey about 12,000 lines. How could anyone possibly memorize that much? was the question. Wrong question, for it implies a fundamentally literate conception of the text, a conception that doesn’t apply in oral cultures.

What is this literate conception? On what does the identity of a text depend? If I have a text of, say, The Wizard of Oz, what test must that text have to pass in order to qualify as being a valid text of The Wizard of Oz? It must be word-for-word identical to the original text, whatever that has been determined to be. As long as all the words are there and in the right order it doesn’t matter how many pages they’re printed on, it doesn’t matter what font they’re printed in, the color of ink is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter whether or not it is nicely bound in boards or paper. None of that determines identity. Identity is determined solely by having the proper words in the proper order and, of course, with the proper punctuation.

Given that conception of identity, memorizing texts such as Iliad and Odyssey would be a prodigious feat. But – think about it – if the texts didn’t originate on the written page, then how could anyone tell whether or not one particular telling was word-for-word identical to some Platonic urtext? Just what are you checking the performance against? Your memory of the text? How do we know that your memory is accurate?

No, the identity condition of an oral text simply is not the same as it is for a written text. The words change from one performance to another but the characters and their actions and interactions are invariant. That’s where identity is lodged.

Lord tells us (p. 63):

Stated briefly, oral epic song is narrative poetry composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write; it consists of the building of metrical lines and half lines by means of formulas and formulaic expressions and of the building of songs by the use of themes. This is the technical sense in which I shall use the word "oral" and "oral epic" in this book. By formula I mean "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea." This definition is Parry's. By formulaic expression I denote a line or half line constructed on the pattern of the formulas. By theme I refer to the repeated incidents and descriptive passages in the songs. [...]

We shall see that in a very real sense every performance is a separate song; for every performance is unique, and every performance bears the signature of its poet singer. He may have learned his song and the technique of its construction from others, but good or bad, the song produced in performance is his own. The audience knows it as his because he is before them. The singer of tales is at once the tradition and an individual creator. His manner of composition differs from that used by a writer in that the oral poet makes no conscious effort to break the traditional phrases and incidents; he is forced by the rapidity of composition in performance to use these traditional elements. To him they are not merely necessary, however; they are also right.

It is the presence and pervasive use of those “formulas and formulaic expressions” that warrants the comparison with Becker’s phrasal lexicon. They may consist of several words, but they function as single units in the poem.

Lord devotes a great deal of attention to the poets he and Parry worked with in the Balkans (the online text includes recordings), for that’s where he gathered evidence about the procedures of improvising oral epic – for that is what is involved, improvisation, improvisation constrained by the requirements of the story. He doesn’t even get to Homer until chapter seven, of ten, with the tenth chapter being devoted to Medieval French and English epic.

Most of Lord’s exposition is about larger structural patterns rather than an examination of formulaic phrases and lines – he cites Parry’s work on that – and so is not directly to Becker’s point. Nor is this the time and place to analyze or summarize that work. But I would like to address a general question: What’s in a story, any story, not just classical Greek epics, beyond words and phrases?

Beyond words and phrases

What’s beyond words and phrases? The stories themselves, which consist of characters acting and interacting. Those are not defined by the words and phrases through which they are realized. Literary critics and, anthropologists, folklorists have devoted considerable work to identifying the “grammar” of stories, going back to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale early in the 20th century. During the “classical” era of symbolic computation, students of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics worked of story grammars, and this work continues to this day, often in connection with computer gaming – for a recent review, see Mark Riedel, An Introduction to AI Story Generation (which I discuss here).

Does GPT-3, or any other large language model (LLM), know anything about characters and actions, about plots? I suppose that the judicious answer would be: We don’t know. But I strongly suspect that, no, it does not. Why do I believe that? Because it’s not trained on characters, actions, plot points, and story arcs. It’s trained on words. Those things are realized through words, implemented by means of words, but they are not defined or characterized by words.

The notion of implementation is crucial. Word processing programs, for example, have various functions: cut and paste, outlining, formatting, and so on. These functions have to be expressed though routines written in some high-level computing language, but it doesn’t matter which one; moreover a given function can expressed in various ways. These are two levels of organization, domain-level function and execution-level operations.

Stories are like that. Characters, motivation, actions, plot points, those are domain-level functions. Specific words and phrases are execution level operations. What does word-level training of LLMs allow them model to ‘learn’ about domain-level characters, actions, etc.? One extreme answer is: Nothing. Another extreme answer would be: everything, provided the corpus is large enough and the model has sufficient parameters of the appropriate architecture. I suspect the answer is closer to nothing than to everything.

We know that the text generation prowess of LLMs is limited to relatively short texts. While it is reasonable to expect that allowing for wider context during training will increase the effective length of generated texts, I doubt that that is sufficient to support the creation of coherent stories even a quarter or a tenth of the length of the Homeric texts. Getting texts of that length would require that an explicit story grammar be coupled to a language generation module. Independently of the problem of linking a story grammar to a text generator (which surely is being done), I doubt that we have story grammars capable of Homeric richness.

This is not, I realize, a complete argument. It is only the skeleton of one. That will have to suffice for now.

Two parameters: Mechread and parset [plus a note on E-flat]

For the last two years I've been corresponding with a friend of mine from the old days at RPI, Bob Krull. Bob was in communications and did a lot of empirical work on patterns of attention in watching TV. But that's not what we talk about. We talk about music. He' banging away on keyboards and I'm tooting away on trumpet. Here's two notes that I've written to him.

* * * * *

Mechread and parset

And now for something like a model. Actually a pair of them.

One we’ll call mechread, for Mechanical reading. The other we can call parset, for parameter setting.

Mechread: How do we play music from a written score? Unless one is very experienced and skill, one uses mechread. The score gives you a representation of a series of pitches and note values. You call on memory and translate them into a sequence of movements that activates your instrument. The result is a sequence of pitches each of the proper duration. But it doesn’t sound much like music. Too mechanical.

Parset: How is it that I can hear a tune – not any tune to be sure, but many – once or twice an be ready to blow on it fluently? I may even be able to play the melody ‘from memory’? I call up an appropriate ‘engine’, one attuned to the style of tune I’m listening to, set a half-dozen parameters, and I’m reading to go. Picking up those half-dozen parameters is much easier than actually memorizing (via a mechread procedure) the tune. It requires much less information. Of course, the model whose parameters I’m setting, that contains a great deal of (pre-compacted) information.

The thing is, in order to give a musical performance of a written score, you’re going to have to do something like parset. Sure, you can lather on some expression, some of which is likely marked in the score (crescendo, accel., rubato, etc.), but that’s just another layer of mechread. It smooths over the rough edges, but doesn’t breath life into the sound. For that you need parset. Thus when performing effectively from a score, you’re treating the score as a source of prompts to parset.

So now we’ve got mechread and parset going at the same time. And I’m sure mechread is going when I’m listening to a tune in a jam session so I can blow on it three choruses later. You don’t have to have a written score to use mechread. I figure we use a version of mechread to ‘transcribe’ the sounds we hear into ‘inner music’ which we can then ‘pass’ to parset [if we have and have developed the knack].

Now consider this improvisation I did on a Japanese tune, “Kojo no tsuki.”

I worked on it a bit before I recorded it, but never wrote anything down and never deliberately set anything to memory other than the melody. I play the melody, in tempo, fairly straight time. Then I improvise a chorus, freeing up the time here and there. Then I go into a medium swing tempo an continue improvising, going through a couple of choruses until I reach a climax and than, after a very short break, collapse back into the melody, in time, and finish. I’m interested in that first improvised chorus. I can hear it in my mind’s ear as I type. I can conjure it up at will. If I were to pick up my horn and play that tune, I’d have no trouble playing that melody. In fact, I’d probably have to exert a deliberate act of will to play something else. Let’s assume I let well enough alone and then switch into a medium swing like I did in the recording. I’m pretty sure I’d do some/many of the things I did on that recording. But I don’t know how close I’d come to what I’d recorded. Don’t even know if I’d play the same number of choruses. But I don’t think I’d deliberately avoid playing many of those riffs. That would be too difficult, and a bit pointless.

That’s more or less how unnoted composition happens. I think.

Bonus: E-flat

Learning to play in Eb

I’ve been working on the key of Eb (trumpet, Db concert), 3 flats. The fingering are not particularly difficult, but I gather I’ve not spent much time playing in it. It wouldn’t come up much in Out of Control, which favored sharp keys because of the guitar. And for some reason, not otherwise.

Not that I’ve kept log of what keys I’ve been playing in and for how long. Rather I deduce that I haven’t played in it all that much because getting really comfortable in it has been taking a lot of time.

A couple of years ago I created a blues in Eb. Why Eb? Beats me. Likely I was just noodling around and when I had a lick that I like, well, it turned out to be in Eb. So when I developed it into a tune, the tune was in Eb.

Anyhow, I developed the tune itself but didn’t do much with it. Then I laid off the horn for a couple of years on account of a neighbor who didn’t like me practicing. The neighbor moved out a couple of months ago, so I started practicing again. That’s when I started working on this Eb blues. This time I decided to really work on it, which means improvising. That’s when I discovered that I wasn’t really fluid in that key. So I started shedding.

What’s that entail? It comes down to two things: 1) improvise, improvise, improvise, and 2) off the cuff exercises. The exercises are patterns in Eb, scalar patterns and arpeggios. I’d pick a figure and then start at the bottom of the horn and work up and then back down. I’d move back and forth between improvising and these little patterns. It’s been taking me WEEKS to get REALLY comfortable.

What’s that, really? If I stick to tried and true pathway, that’s easy enough. But I want to be able to move (potentially) anywhere. That’s tougher. I might be improvising within my comfort zone, but some lick doesn’t quite work out the way I’d intended. I want to be able to go with the new, the unintended thing, the ‘mistake’, and work on it, take it even further out, and then come back. Getting that kind of fluidity takes work. And moving back and forth between improvising and patterns is the way to do it. When I hit a snag in the improv, I turn it into a pattern and work on it. So the pace of the back and forth tends to be in minutes.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be really comfortable in Eb.