While exploring my relationship with music this year, I’ve thought often about the alignment/misalignment of the value you create, the money you make by creating value for others, and the time you spend creating value.
In my teenage years, I was convinced that the optimal relationship among these three ideas was to specialize in creating one type of value for the world, to only choose a type of value that people would pay money for, and to spend all of your time devoted to creating that one type of value. My mother, a passionate venture capitalist, had taken such a route for her own life. She would often tell my brother and me how much she loved her work, and she encouraged us to pursue what we love and make that our life’s work.
With time and different life experiences, I’ve realized that this framework doesn’t fit the place where I currently am in life. For one, I have learned that I want to create multiple types of value – I want to do work that makes a difference, and I want to support and enjoy time with the people I love, and I like having hobbies outside of my primary work. For another, I’ve learned that value and money are not always simultaneous, and that it’s possible to create significant value without making huge profits.
In the music industry, the contrast is stark. I’ve been moved to tears time and again by powerful songs and pieces, indicating just how powerful the value of music can be, yet I candidly don’t pay for most of my music, because most of it is available for free online. (I do contribute to specific artists, but the number is few, and the bar is high.)
Nine months into this exploration, I know for sure that there is something in the space of music, stories, and people that is the value I want to create. I also know that my technical academic background and work experience is in high demand and low supply, and that using those skills is a much straighter path to supporting myself financially, at least until I grow my creative skills further. So it looks like the value I create, the money I make, and the time I spend will continue to be misaligned for awhile.
Thank you to Nick for introducing me to Dana Fonteneau’s work and perspective, which inspired me to write this post.
listening broadly and listening deeply both inspire new ideas. listening broadly exposes you to variety that you can incorporate into your own work; listening deeply gives you insight into how to capture a specific idea in your work. i’ve found that the art of listening deeply surfaces across many fields:
in drawing and design
craft matters, but drawing classes aren’t just about hand motions. if anything, my drawing and design classes have been focused on helping me deeply see – how are light and shadow meeting on this building edge? how is this color made? being able to look for and build intuition for these questions is what makes my charcoal more accurately match the world, my paint more vibrant and true.
to draw well, see deeply.
in product management and leadership
speaking well matters, but good communication isn’t just about choosing the right words and saying them confidently. if anything, my experiences as a product manager have been focused on helping me deeply listen – why is my coworker feeling troubled about our approach? what is this user really thinking when they use the product? being able to listen for and ask after these questions is what makes highly effective and empathic leaders.
to communicate well, listen deeply.
in music and conducting
how you move your arms matters, but good conducting isn’t just about precise motions. if anything, my conducting class has been focused on helping me deeply listen – how are the violins in conversation with each other? how is the viola adding depth and color, or the bass driving the harmonic transition? how does the timbre of the string articulation affect the emotion? being able to listen for and account for these questions is what makes a conductor connect with her musicians.
Practice is a habit – Try committing 5 minutes a day every day for 3-4 weeks. It is more important to solidify this core habit (and eventually increase practice time) than to practice long hours intermittently.
Go to live shows and perform in them – Watching great musicians infuses you with fresh motivation to become better / more like them. Having to perform your work, especially solo, also significantly drives the desire to improve – using your fear of humiliation constructively – and often brings gentle validation of your progress, too.
My favorite of his suggestions is that one should find a partner, mirror, rival, and goal.
A partner is someone you practice with. This could be someone with whom you physically practice in the same place and at the same time (like a gym buddy), or someone going through a similar experience with whom you can regularly review practice progress (like discussing your practice session with another musician each day).
A rival is someone whom you see as your equal, against whom you can compare yourself. When the relationship is healthy, the rival activates your competitive instincts toward growth.
A mirror (or critic) is someone who gives you feedback about how well you are doing. A good mirror is someone whose opinions you value and trust, and who isn’t afraid to be candid with you about both the positive and negative aspects of your work. Teachers can be good mirrors. You can also become your own critic if you can reduce your personal bias; a good way to do this is to record yourself and watch/listen.
A goal is someone whom you aspire to become like. (While we personally know our partner, rival, and mirror, we often don’t personally know our goal.)
When I initially began working on creative projects, I felt the intense desire to operate alone. Solitude still has an important place in my creative process, but I’m much more aware now of how community affects my sense of motivation.
EDIT (2018-06-30): A few compositions later, I look back on this list and see clear gaps! There’s no mention here of video game music, japanese pop/rock, or the great american songbook, all of which have shaped my view of music significantly. Perhaps this list can evolve over time.
I came across the following chart in Brock McElheran’s text on conducting, Conducting Technique, and found it quite curious…
McElheran uses this chart to demonstrate one spectrum of values that could apply when you decide how to interpret a piece, and that a) being overly committed to the composer’s original time and place, or b) subjecting the composer’s work to personal whims, are both potentially dangerous. I think it’s a fair point.
Growing up, my piano teacher encouraged something closer to the modernized-subjective approach (“Use your musicological knowledge to decide what the composer probably wanted, and select or reject his ideas at will in building your own performance”). I still fall into this camp, though I’m learning to more carefully watch for the significance of the presence or absence of certain markings in the score as a way of listening for what could make the music most beautiful. But at the end of the day, if my aesthetic sense conflicts with what I think the composer wants, I usually choose my own desires over the composer’s.
I get the sense that much of the classical music world – at least, the orchestral/symphonic world – falls into a more historical-objective camp (“Re-create a performance the composer would have considered ideal in his own day”).
In contrast, the jazz and popular music worlds seem very much to have embraced the modernized-subjective approach (“Use the printed notes as a source of material for your own creative ability, using full modern performance resources”). Jazz is all about spontaneous improvisation on top of a theme. Pop music is rife with covers and fresh takes.
All this reminds me of a conversation I had with a new friend who’s a music director and pianist for musical theater productions in New York. Musical theater composers, he said, often care a lot less about whether you play specific notes, and more about whether or not the audience is affected in the way they intend…so there’s more room for improvisation there, too. Curiously, though, he also said that in musical theater, the composer is king. In the classical music world, I’ve heard it’s the maestro, not the composer, who’s king…
“Listening is something you receive,” my conducting teacher said, recalling this poem as I practiced conducting the beginning of Wagner’s Prelude from Tristan und Isolde. Fitting, now that I spend much of my days listening to and learning to create music. Fitting, too, that I am now rereading Difficult Conversations.
“L’embarquement pour Cythère” (The Embarkation for Cythera) by Antoine Watteau, which inspired Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse.” Cythera is the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love.
Written in January 2011. Listen to the piece here, as recorded by Vladimir Horowitz.
…the aural work of Claude Debussy, musician of suggestion and atmosphere, not explicit emotion or story. If one perceives a song as a mirage only, how can one faithfully capture the music in words without involving assumptive interpretations? This is my challenge as I listen to Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse,” or “The Island of Pleasure.”
The first listen, eyes closed: This piece sounds like something I have known before—I have not heard it before, nor have I heard anything quite like it, but my soul feels a nostalgic familiarity. The experience seems like walking through a misty dream, or hearing the texture of soft white light. The trills, the escalation, and the dissonance create a tension that holds over me throughout the piece, never leaving until the very end.
The second listen, still eyes closed: The same musical ideas return over and over—the pervading trills and downward trios, the fleeting call and response, the passionate melody—but each time, they are new again. Yet, they are new not because of the modulations, nor is it the dynamics, nor are these musical designs returning in the way a pop song cannot stop repeating itself. Once heard, the ideas—not the notes, but the inkling of the tension their pattern oncecaused—are more powerful the second time, the louder time, the time it appears in a different key, but not because of those facts.How is a repeated idea new, but not because of what makes it different, but because it is repeated, which should make it no longer new?
The third listen, eyes open so I can record what I feel, section by section: There are suspenseful trills and trios, graceful and playfully light ups and downs, dissonance with harmony, elevating motions, grand arpeggios across the keys. The glorious breakthrough of the melodious theme, consonant yet uncertain, mellifluous, surreal. This music makes me want to move; this music moves me. Dissonant reprises, sprinting scales, spinning out of control to a sudden STOP, then a steady growth. A glorious culmination—intense warmth, then a chill, runs through my body as the poignant theme returns, the jarring 5-on-3 rhythm of mismatched notes only adding to the magnificence. As in a pas de deux,¹ with a man’s powerful whirling grand jetés across the dance floor, sweeping the lady into a motion that spirals outward to the universe. Finally, return to the tensive trills, tremolo, crescendo, accelerando, expand—and done.
The fourth listen, viewing the musical score: Debussy demands the impossible of his performer. How can one articulate piano, piu piano, and pianissimo—differences in volume that the human ear can barely perceive?²The interpreter must use his own judgment to let the dynamics expand beyond the given narrow range, if he wishes to convey the full color of the piece’s dynamic tensions.
The fifth listen, eyes closed again: The middle melody, bold yet wistful, is an altogether different species from the main themes. Do you know the precious feeling of waking up beside your lover? The gentle smile, the tranquil rays sifting onto the sheets, treasured in his arms, an internal yet explosive passion? That is how the melody cherishes me. In movies, there is a romantic image of running downhill through a large grassy field, the wind through your hair like silk on your skin…this characterizes the post-melody. And now, imagine the desire for an idealistic, eternal love fulfilled. This love seems but an illusion, for love is mercurial, complex, vague; the rapid repetition of motifs perhaps exudes apprehension, anxiety, tension; the confusion we find when enveloped by love; the surprise color changes, like the sudden march-like major chords leading to the climax, might capture love’s vicissitudes; the tender singing voice of the second theme captures the high of being one with one’s love. “L’isle Joyeuse” could be a snapshot of the turbulent emotions of love, both the reality and the dream, both the insanity and the reason.
The sixth listen, now paying particular attention to contrast, in order to explore how Debussy manipulates the tension: he fills his work with contradictions: the juxtaposition of grating trills with playful up and down arpeggios, and of cacophonous note mixtures with smooth, measured melody; the coexistence of consonance and dissonance, superimposed rhythms; uplifting brilliance contrasting with quietude; lack of definite scale or scheme, surprise bursts throughout.“L’isle Joyeuse” inspires in me an overall sense of happiness and peace, but deep and jumbled feelings. Debussy calls it an “Island of Pleasure,” but much of the piece is particularly intended to sound discordant and tense, if not unpleasant. The pleasant and unpleasant exist alongside, swapping roles of harmony and melody, articulation and dynamics, rhythm and speed: the sweet melody of the second theme is placed with bitter rhythm, the violent harmonies leading up to the climax are paired with classical-style swelling of both loudness and velocity.
The seventh listen: Music of the classical and romantic periods established the norms for evoking emotions: the minor key is for doleful nocturnes, the major key for grand, sweeping pronouncements of delight. Debussy, however, does not commit to any key for his description of pleasure; he even uses the blindingly positive major chords of C and Eb for a fleeting two measures each to rudely interfere with the recapitulation’s dissonant chaos. Until the finish, Debussy never entirely relieves the listener from musical tension; he allows dissonance to give way to consonance, or halts the countless reiterations, or lets the voice to descend to lower pitches, but never all at the same time. To describe his pleasure, Debussy instead seems to capture the stress that comes before it. Indeed, right after the final appearance of the melodious theme, the dissonant chaotic repeats itself again and again until there is resolution to the tonic chord, and the mind can relax. However, the pleasure is not only at the conclusion, but throughout; the powerful melodic theme, the mischievously swinging ups and downs, the haunting trills, still linger in the mind after it is done and the pleasure is gone. One finds pleasure in the process of achieving pleasure, yet this process is riddled with what is not purely pleasurable. To evoke pleasure, one necessarily searches for the displeasure, the stress, the tension; and only with that contrast does one find joy.
Footnotes
1. In ballet, a duet performed by the principal male and female, often in a romantic context.
2. piano is Italian for ”soft” in volume; piu piano and pianissimo are both Italian for “very soft.” Because piano and pianissimo are the standard dynamic markings for volume, and because piu piano is used only relative to piano, the pianist typically infers that piu piano is louder than pianissimo, but only negligibly so.
A scene from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors. Photograph taken by the author at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 2017.
There is a beautiful work by Ragnar Kjartansson in which eight musicians are filmed in eight different rooms of a mansion, all independently playing the same song, using a colored-pencil score, all in one take. The result is striking, moving, wondrous, and left me with a gracious envy and desire for musical connection.
Thank you to Tanay for recommending the work and to Sang for experiencing it with me.
EDIT (2023-03-20): The Visitors has returned to the SF MoMA and will be on view through June 2024. My emotional experience was just as deep the second time. I can’t recommend going more highly.
A personal growth plan is a document that helps you figure out your personal and professional goals, map out the path to get there, and ask for support from the people around you. In a personal growth plan, you set aside the objectives and plans at your current jobs and engagements, focusing instead on yourself and your career development.
For me, seeing consistencies and changes in my personal growth plan gave me the clarity I needed to decide to focus my next year on growing as a creative musician. My first personal growth plan a year ago was centered on how I could succeed as a product manager. My second personal growth plan a year later helped me see that although my short-term goals had changed, my long-term goals hadn’t. I had stronger ambitions for how people would perceive me than I had earlier dared to express. And my increasing desire to explore music wasn’t necessarily just a fluke or a hobby; it was actually deeply enmeshed in my desire to create experiences that move and matter.
I never fully finished my second personal growth plan. What’s below are the key pieces I had written when I paused, realized that I knew enough that I wanted to direct my life differently, and began to take action.
At the end of the day, I’m incredibly fortunate to have had options. I considered continuing to explore my musical side with 10-20 hours a week, as I was already doing, and to see if anything took off before I took more drastic action. I realized, though, that I could give myself the luxury of a year to focus on exploring music with much more of my time and energy, and learn more about myself sooner. I decided to take that path. We’ll see how it goes!
Personal brand I want to be known for…
Creating experiences that genuinely move and matter to people “Wow. That was a powerful experience.”“Listening to that gave me the chills.”“I felt like I was floating.” “Her subtleties transform what could be cliche into something beautifully nuanced and breathtaking.” “Her work made me think about my life and relationships differently.”
Leading toward ambitious goals with both inspiring vision and practical execution “She helped us believe that we could achieve this crazy awesome goal by showing us how awesome it would be. By introducing X, Y, and Z, she then directly helped us to reach that goal.” “She oozes competence.”“I can always rely on her.”“I’m excited to follow her lead.”
Caring deeply about helping people achieve their goals “I faced an important life problem, and she helped me figure it out.” “She helped me get that opportunity. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her.” “I know and feel that she truly cares about helping me achieve my goals and dreams.”
Expressing authentic vulnerability and passionate joy “Her self is evident in her work.” “She shares her true self with me. I know that I can trust her with my real thoughts and feelings.” “She looks really happy and engaged right now. You can tell that she’s totally in her element.”
Long-term objectives Years and years from now, I want to…
Continue building close relationships and a caring family
Do work that helps people become more confident, caring, and thoughtful
Create, direct, and perform beautiful, moving music
Short term objectives
In the next 6–12 months, I want to…
unfinished
Goals(6–12 months)
Can be product, career, personal, skill development, etc
Skills/Experiences
What steps must I take in the next 6–12 months to achieve this goal?
This article was originally written in response to a barbershop music event, and was intended for a barbershop chorus music leadership team. I’m sharing it here, as I think many of the ideas are more universal.
The case for an increased focus on entertainment and showmanship.
The ideas below are “strong opinions, weakly held” — which means I’ve phrased many of them in a direct and opinionated way in order to encourage dialogue, but I’m not actually married to any particular ideas, and I’m very curious to hear what you think, including where you might disagree or have deeper insight. Let me know if you’d ever like to chat about this!
Know, as you read, that I love our chorus and SAI¹ dearly. And, I think it’s important to be candid about things that can be improved, and that’s why I’m writing.
[0] What triggered me to want to write this?
If you’re like me, you prefer singing to watching other people sing. 😉 One of the things I really appreciated about this barbershop music workshop, however, was that she not only focused our attention on watching international barbershop chorus packages, but also juxtaposed them with videos of musical theater performances like Ain’t Misbehavin’ and West Side Story.
This is an embarrassing thing to admit, because I sing in two barbershop choruses and love the art form dearly, but to be totally candid, I found the musical theater performances much more entertaining than most of the barbershop chorus performances we saw. Granted, I could chalk it up to professional vs. amateur performers, or to targeted vs. generic filming, or to familiar vs. unfamiliar genre (I’m still fairly new to barbershop). But it got me thinking:
What makes a performance excellent, in general?
Are there inherent factors about the form and genre of barbershop choral performances that make it hard to be entertaining?
Can we, a versatile and multi-genre performing artist, adopt best practices from performances in other genres?
[1] What makes a performance excellent, in general?
To me, an effective performance is an experience that moves you in some way:
intellectually — e.g. you see a life situation in a new light or with clearer focus. Beautiful
An effective performance also entertains you. You’re captivated, in the moment of the performance; your attention never leaves. There are three factors that I’ve noticed consistently entertain me:
story — often this means plot; sometimes it’s also character, or capturing a mood or a moment within a broader story. e.g. ballet, opera, and musical theater almost always have plot.
for a barbershop example, Ronnige’s Magic to Do was stunning — they could have easily performed the same song as a much faster uptune, but instead they turned it into a slower and sultrier thing. Their choreography is all about creating a sense of mystique and magic. The music and the performance feed off each other.
contrast — contrast equals interest. just as the eye is drawn toward places where the lightest light and the darkest dark are juxtaposed, we need change and contrast in our performances — whether that’s harmonic, dynamic, rhythmic, visual, storywise, or otherwise — to keep us engaged.
for a barbershop example, I’ve always been a fan of Harmony Celebration’s Dancing in the Streets of New Orleans. you’re taken on a wild ride of dynamic and color changes paired with choreographic motion that enhances the excitement of the story. the song is never too much of the same thing.
talent & skill — you have to be good at what you do, no question; otherwise you won’t be effective at telling the story. for us, this means there are no shortcuts to good vocal production and sync — those things are a given.
[2] Observations about barbershop and SAI that affect our performances
A lot of barbershop music sounds similar
I actually personally think there’s a lot of diversity in barbershop music, but many others have told me that a lot of barbershop songs sound very similar. All those seventh chords, after all. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s worth thinking about how this relates with the need for contrast in order to successfully entertain. There’s a reason why SAI only requires 1 out of 4 entertainment package songs to be a fully traditional barbershop tune.
Barbershop societies rely on judging scores
High scores are often, but not always, correlated with moving performances. Signature’s performance of Dance with My Father has been shared as one of the most moving ballad performances in history — but if you look at the comments, you can see that some people are confused about why their singing and music scores are so high:
“I don’t really understand how it got the highest score of the contest in the MUS and SNG categories. Putting aside how moving it was, there seemed to be other arrangements in this contest that were more perfectly in the barbershop style and were executed with fewer issues…”
“An emotional impact this strong is certainly enough to outweigh other factors in the performance category, but should it really be able to outweigh the other factors in the MUS and SNG categories?”
My candid reaction is — who cares?!? This is one of the most moving performances ever. That’s what matters, not whether they got high scores, or shouldn’t have gotten high scores. So, be aware — a focus on scores can distract from a focus on moving performance.
Also worth asking ourselves — who do we care most about entertaining? Other barbershoppers, or people outside of the barbershop societies? I’m personally more motivated to about the latter, in part because it’s a broader audience — though I think we can do both.
SAI places heavy emphasis on choruses over quartets/soloists
BHS² has three rounds of quartet contests and only one round of chorus finals, plus a youth quartet competition. SAI has two rounds of quartet contests and two rounds of chorus contests, plus a small chorus competition. Notice the difference? Yup, there’s a bigger emphasis on quartets in BHS than in SAI. (If I had time, I’d look up quartet membership and chorus membership ratios in both organizations; but I’m pretty sure I know the rough answer.)
I’ve also noticed that many women in our Region are afraid to sing pickup tags and quartets. Sure, you might chalk it up to women’s cultural conditioning to be more interested in socializing and less interested in tagging — but, I wonder (and maybe it’s politically incorrect, but I’ll just be candid) whether it might also be that SAI people are less confident and more self-conscious about singing on their own than BHS people. I hope we can help to change this part of the SAI culture.
The thing that’s weird to me is that in most traditional music genres, the chorus number is often a special occasion, not the only feature. In Handel’s Messiah, after soloists’ arias and recitatives, the chorus explodes into the climactic joy of “Glory to God in the Highest” while the trumpets blare. Masquerade from The Phantom of the Opera is a colorful cacophony of costumes, creating a festive atmosphere. And even when choruses are more common, soloists are critical. The company in Hamilton is involved in nearly 60% of the numbers, and plays a critical role in filling out the tonal quality of the musical, but people need individual characters like Washington and Eliza to latch onto. Without those individuals, the story wouldn’t be nearly as engaging, and there wouldn’t be contrast in who’s taking the stage.
One sort-of-exception to this rule is symphonies. But even symphonies often have brief solos and contrasting musical textures with different instruments brought out.
Stories need faces
I still remember when someone in the audience mentioned that one of the performances of a “wagon wheel” barbershop song was less engaging because the camera never zoomed into the individuals’ faces. Faces are immensely powerful for storytelling; when people watch a compelling performance, it’s not just the music, but also people’s faces, that moves them to tears. When I watch a barbershop chorus perform, I’m usually not watching the whole chorus — I’m usually watching a few individuals at a time.
[3] What best practices could we adopt to become more performance-focused?
“Performing” isn’t an afterthought. It’s embedded into the music part of rehearsal.
Character shouldn’t be something you only think about in the last two weeks that you’re working a song. What if we discussed the message of the song at the same time that people first start learning and listening to their music (even if the chorus can’t necessarily execute that expressiveness quite yet)? What if the director regularly shared with the chorus how the message of the song shapes their musical and expressive decisions?
I also think we can dedicate some more rehearsal time and energy toward visual engagement, choreography, and staging. We know this is a growth area for us; let’s put our time where our goals are!
Create coherent sets that tell a story
For the past while, our shows have been a mix of songs in our current repertoire, chosen for general contrast (good), but without an overarching story (less good). What if — like we’re doing for Harmony Classic — every show we did had a central theme? What if we chose our show repertoire months in advance, just like we do for competitions?
Also — dumb, or maybe not-so-dumb, idea — in college, a lot of a cappella groups use hokey but funny skits in between songs to thread through the set, provide continuity and plot, and keep people laughing. What if we did a classier version of this?
Make every song a special performance
I’m thinking again of Ronnige’s Magic to Do and how they infused it with meaning, from the musical choices like tempo to the costume / choreography / staging choices. That song wasn’t just a song; it was a production, all in service of one artistic vision. What if we made each and every song we do that special? What if every song in our set could be someone’s favorite song from our performance?
Choose set ideas that really resonate with people
I think it can be argued that you shouldn’t create art for the sake of catering to the masses — that you should create art only for yourself, and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t resonate with others. In my view, however, if you want to create art that is truly relevant for people, then you need to listen, and respond to what you hear. What if we thought carefully about what the people in New York City want to hear about, want to laugh about, want to dance to? What if we used that as a basis for our set and our story?
Contrast = interest
If the song is sounding too much the same, how can we create musical contrast — in the tone, in dynamics, in specific phrases? Instead of performances with only a large chorus structure, how might we work in small ensembles, quartets, duets, and solos? How might we choose repertoire that allows us to move people in different ways, but still with a sense of cohesion?
Core skills, of course
We should never stop growing core skills of vocal production, sync, etc. We need that in order to tell an effective story. But we should also agree — moving and entertaining is better than perfect!
Other
Singing for us vs. singing for them
We are not just a performing artist, it’s true. We are a community, and being a community is a critical part of our identity. When we sing, we should be singing for our own enjoyment. But, ambitious as we are, that can’t be our only goal. A performance isn’t a performance unless we also successfully convey something meaningful to our audiences.
¹ SAI = Sweet Adelines International, i.e. the women’s barbershop organization.
² BHS = The Barbershop Harmony Society, i.e. the men’s barbershop organization.
