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Notebook Thursday: The Well-Tempered Clavier

6/30/2022

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For the past couple of years I've been working through Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier as a way to build keyboard chops and stave off pandemic cabin fever. I'm proceeding in circle-of-fifths order through the preludes—I don't have the skill for the fugues yet. Though it's absolutely improving my keyboard work and my musicianship, it's slow going; I assumed that was a referendum on my own abilities until I saw Kimiko Ishizaka's estimate that she needed about two thousand hours of practice for her recording. 

What draws me to Bach, again and again, is the geometry of his work. Each piece has its own internal systems and layers, some immediately evident, some requiring more digging, and the order is elegant and inevitable. Once you have a sense of what the piece is doing, you'll know immediately when you hit a wrong note, even on the first pass. It is as precise as the spiral of a fern fiddlehead or the ice crystals in a snowflake.

For me that structure offers a massive sense of calm. It might seem restrictive at first glance—and I think a lot of Baroque music does get trapped by its own forms—but in Bach it opens to something far more expansive. 

Some of this openness might come from the work of learning Bach. I focus on two or three measures at a time (a method that I recently learned was also Yo-Yo Ma's approach to Bach as a child). This is often dull, often frustrating, but it seems to be the only way I can do it, and the very dullness of the repetition is what opens the door for the life of the music to get in. As the Zen advice goes, if you're bored doing something for one minute, try it for two; if you're bored doing it for two minutes, try it for four; and so on.

Steady practice also means that my time at the piano is a reliable indicator of my headspace. I've heard that, for most instrumentalists, there's very little difference in innate physical capacity for playing fast—that is, the guys who can shred on guitar didn't just naturally luck into superhuman finger speed. Most of it comes down to practice and focus. Playing a detailed melody at tempo requires such concentration that I'm noticeably better if I spend a minute meditating beforehand. When I'm preoccupied, it becomes obvious in lags and skips. Equally dangerous is the self-congratulatory lapse, when I notice a difficult passage has gone well and then grind to a halt in the next measure. This holds some lessons for performance with the band—there's automatically an extra level of distraction when you're in front of an audience, and you don't get the luxury of meditating before every song.

Anyway, I don't know why it didn't occur to me before now to look up Bach's first drafts, but it didn't. And oh, I love them:
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This—from the Prelude in C—is so relatable, in a way that I never expected to feel about Bach. I think, especially with the acknowledged Greats, it's easy for pop-culture impressions of genius to get in the way of useful analysis of the processes at hand.  But I really love that this page shows Bach's shorthand, his revisions (the looped insertions! I do that all the time!), his deletions, and his impatience with writing out a melodic motif that, to him, had probably become too obvious to need notation. (There's a more detailed discussion of versions, as well as the family collaboration on Bach's notebooks, at Notes from a Pianist.) As much as melody, this reveals a deeply human wrestling match with the constraints of time and body and tools: a genius borne of persistence.
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Notebook(ish) Thursday: Quatrains

6/23/2022

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Songwriting has been on hold for me since Arthur's death. There are hours when it's still hard to find much of any meaning in the new empty quiet, let alone a meaning clear enough to become song. In May I was working on a couple of songs about hope, which have become particularly cruel now. (I still like them. I'll still finish them. I just can't right now.) 

I have been writing a lot, though—this is one of the ways I rediscover meaning. Maybe it counts.

I've come back to another poem I memorized years ago, by the 12th-century Iranian poet Mahsati. This translation is by Deirdre Lashgari, and I don't think it's nearly as well known as it ought to be:
Better to live as a rogue and a bum,
   a lover all treat as a joke,
to hang out with a crowd of comfortable drunks,
   than crouch in a hypocrite's cloak.

Unless you can dance through a common bar
   with a vagabond's step, you're not going to make it.
This is the road of the reckless who gamble
   their lives; risk yours, or you're not going to make it.
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Notebook Thursday: Jokes

6/16/2022

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David Ogilvy is supposed to have said, "The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." He was talking about marketing, but it's a valid approach for pop songwriting. Low-stakes riffing opens a lot of doors.

In an Unswept rehearsal last year, Charlie referred to himself as cheugy. There was some immediate joking, which carried into the band chat, which...turned into a song.
Then the song turned into more joking.
And we recorded it, so it turned into a proper song. But then it turned into even more joking, which is a fun, productive way to work, for something like this. Maybe a nonsense word opens up the music part of your brain, or vice versa. The fine line between stupid and clever is a good place to hang out.
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Notebook Whatever Day It Is: Em Dash

6/10/2022

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Hidden in the common remark that this is the darkest timeline, there's a secret yearning. If this is one of many options, maybe we're here by mistake; maybe a benevolent deity, any day now, will recognize the error, slap his almighty forehead, and restore us to the happier, kinder, less doomed lives we seem to be missing out on.

So it is with grief, or at least the grief that comes from unexpected trauma. I keep waiting to be told it's all a mistake. Arthur's fine, actually, he didn't die on Sunday, he's about to meet my eyes with his typical impatient affection: What took you so long? The idea that this is my life now, that there are no other options, is too vastly awful to fit inside my comprehension. I don't think it's active denial so much as absolute inability to believe. I am finding quite a lot of substages within the Kübler-Ross framework, possibly including a few that Kübler-Ross never even considered.

These are the times when we turn to poetry: about suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. I can't yet manage Elizabeth Bishop's feigned ease, but Saeed Jones's "A Spell to Banish Grief" offered something I needed. Most of all my brain returns to Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"—which I had to write about in ninth grade and accidentally learned by heart. The words lose none of their truth for being familiar, worn smooth like worry beads. But it's the rhythm that, for me, most conveys the experience of loss. The shifts in meter, the lines thudding abruptly short, the pauses—this is how time and meaning slip around you, as though on badly uneven gears.

To keep this at least semi-relevant to Notebook Thursday, I will add that Dickinson scholars have identified several different dashes in her handwriting. They're variously rendered as em dashes or spaced en dashes in print, though she may have intended a distinct meaning or sound for each. The Dickinson Archive has images of her handwritten pages, though none of them are loading at present (and I've tried! with two gadgets and three browsers! so I do not imagine that link will help anyone!). But an image search can still pull up the last stanza, at least. The dashes there are sharp little penstrokes surrounded by wide spaces. I wonder if those are the serrated breaths of grief, the vast empty pauses of incredulity.
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Notebook Thursday: St. Jerome Success Stories (Guest Post)

6/2/2022

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Thomas Zeitner is one-fifth of the Baguettes and one-fourth of the Loudness War. Scott Tribble is his longtime songwriting partner.

Songwriting is already hard, and everyone does it differently. Collaborative songwriting is the art of dropping two unique processes on top of each other and hoping they mesh. I’ve had the most success co-writing with Scott Tribble, published author/rhythm guitarist. We played together in a band that went through multiple names and roster changes, a la Spinal Tap, from 2000 to 2007. Scott moved out of state, but wanted to keep writing, so we would meet for the odd weekend to try recording new material.


You need to devote serious time to collaboration. Our songwriting sessions were mostly periods of throat-clearing and empty space, while we waited for our brains to hit the same record groove. One thing we had to our advantage was that we had different strengths. Scott’s end was arrangement. Mine was lyrics. We basically pitched half-formed ideas until something lit up on the other side. It works, but it takes a long time for the flint to spark. Not everyone writes “Get Back” on a smoke break.

“Make It Home Alive” had two sonic parents: an orphaned, Gin Blossoms-style chorus that came to me while practicing, and a melody line that Scott had recorded and sent to me, like a voice memo.  Both were at least a year old when we got together in 2008 to record what we labeled the "Tap Sessions." Looking at what we demo’ed that weekend, it was a productive session, but I remember feeling we were losing steam toward the end. Time was of the essence, since logistically our in-person collaborations were few and far between. It might be why Scott decided to revisit his existing melody line (labeled “Honesty” in my iTunes). 

I had heard that piece dozens of times, especially because I played all of his tracks in anticipation of the weekend. But there was nothing there until that moment. I overuse the metaphor of fires of creation, but I promise you, dear reader: on a good day, songwriting is more light than sound. And the room was glowing.

The melody repeats itself a little, which inspired an internal rhyme. “Your dad’s saying that you tricked him. Your mom’s playing the victim/But it’s all a trap for you.” Great. Now we had half a verse. All I needed is another internal rhyme and something that rhymes with “you.” Easy.

Scott, meanwhile, saw that I had something, and was willing to just play the same four chords over and over until I figured it out. “We did nothing ‘gainst the law but I’m the only one they saw/So I’m going to take the rap for you.” There’s a good chance that we might have stalled out there, but Scott was playing in A major, which gave me a segue to the chorus I already had in my pocket. I just needed to slow it down to the mellow tempo, which had an alt-country vibe—like a Wilco or Old 97s ballad.

“It’s all right. It’s okay. It’s better it happened this way/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive./You can call the police. They couldn’t catch a disease/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive.” I sang, muttering chord changes to Scott in between words.  After two hours of nothing, we had one third of a song written in about two minutes. It only took a year!

We paused long enough for me to write everything down. (I’m pretty sure “gainst” was a deliberate choice from the very beginning but there’s a lot of editing on the fly.) It was a strong template. Unless we did something really bizarre for a bridge, the piece was four chords total. Scott kept playing. His part was done. Now we were just painting the house.

I focused on the ambiguity of the first verse. It evoked rumors and innuendo. Details would only pin down two unnamed souls who already had enough working against (‘gainst) them. I somewhat regret using “we’re not here and we’re not proud” as it’s more explicit than anything else in the song. Is “Make It Home Alive” about coming out in a very conservative community? Yes. It’s also about abortion rights, manslaughter, and John Grisham’s “The Client.” The salient issue is that young people have problems they’re not prepared for.
 
Even with internal rhyming, ABCB is one of the most forgiving schemes to write within. The rest of the lyrics were finished in less than an hour.  We recorded a rough, ROUGH demo, adding some country-fried lead fills to temporarily cover some of the musical gaps. The song was much slower than the chorus I started with, and it’s apparent when I hear myself trying to hold a melancholy note long enough. Rough performance aside, it’s a solid song, and a great example of collaboration as a synthesis of two parts.

At some point, we remotely re-recorded it in a faster "Hey Jealousy" style, with me valiantly and painstakingly adding GarageBand drumbeats to propel the song. But it definitely needed the energy of a full band together in the same room. I eventually started a new project in Chicago and brought the song to the group as something that our guitarist Charlie could sing. We maintained the faster tempo, and it worked beautifully. Our original country weeper was no more, but, hey, we can always include it when we release our Basement Tapes, right?
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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