About the photo

1. My academic resumé

2. The real story

A Young Prof (about the photo)

This was how I looked when I started my university teaching at 23. One day I asked one of my classes (Contemporary Musicianship & Improvisation) to come without their regular instruments; for several classes they could bring only found objects that had a nuanced palette of sounds which might be suitable for improvising. By chance, a couple of students brought wine glasses; in the subsequent class there were two more players with glassware of all kinds, including a home-made marimba with home-made keys of cut glass. This initiative gradually developed into the highly successful touring and recording ensemble, The Glass Orchestra. They have been active since 1977.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/glass-orchestra-emc

For the concert pictured here (The Royal Ontario Museum) I was their guest performer and it was a great pleasure to improvise in public with my students. As a newbie prof, I was so pleased to see that a creative assignment could launch this group to world touring and recording. I had never considered the possibility of such a practical and exciting outcome. I then realized that we cannot really know the results of our intentions and our work. It changed my feeling about teaching! … And what wonderful music!

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My academic resumé

Please skip to the next section for the ‘real’ story

 Casey Sokol is currently Professor Emeritus of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts* at York University (Toronto), where he has been teaching courses in piano, improvisation, movement and musicianship since 1971. He received a B.A. from SUNY Buffalo and completed graduate studies in music at the California Institute of the Arts, where he complimented his pianistic and improvisational training in musicianship and ethnomusicology with intensive study of South Indian (Carnatic) classical music. After beginning studies in Carnatic rhythm and mridangam with Tanjore Ranganathan (1970) and Trichy Sankaran (1972), he furthered practical and theoretical studies in rhythm and drumming in India, and then again in the early 1980s with percussionists throughout Southeast Asia.

Having been given the green light to mount a program at York in improvisation and experimental music, he felt the need for more first-hand contact with those who were leaders in the field. At SUNY Buffalo in the summer of 1975, he worked with John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman and performed their music with the resident Creative Associates. During this time, he also studied and performed at Antioch College (Ohio) with the members of Musica Elettronica Viva (including Frederic Rzewski and Anthony Braxton). From 2000-2006, Casey immersed himself in concentrated studies of Dalcroze Eurhythmics—movement and improvisation—at the Longy School of Music (Cambridge), Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh), Oberlin College (Ohio), and several other centres with senior international teachers, including Anne Farber, Lisa Parker, Marta Sanchez, Herb Henke, Annabelle Joseph, Stephen Moore, and Madeleine Duret.

Casey has been directing and composing for dance and theatre since 1968 and has produced over a dozen large-scale musical presentations. In 1979 Casey collaborated as music director with N.Y. director André Serban for the adaptation of the medieval mystery play, “The Clown of God.” With the support of the contemporary ensemble, Sound Pressure, and the participation of 150 performers, he conceived and co-produced “Cagewake,” (with James Tenney and Udo Kasamets)—a music-circus marking the passing of John Cage in 1992. He also produced and co-directed the North American premier of Cornelius Cardew’s eight-hour epic based on Confucius’ text, “The Great Learning,” in 1994 with Martin Arnold. In 1995, Casey composed and produced a multimedia performance of the first multi-lingual Renga (a traditional Japanese collaborative poetic form) which featured the participation of Tokyo’s UNO Man Butoh Troupe. More recently (2013), to mark the one hundredth birthday of John Cage, he produced “CageSpace,” incorporating students, faculty and alumni representing 40 years of alumni from York University’s Fine Arts Faculty. Since the 1980s he has produced ongoing monthly community-participation improvisation soirées both at York University and in downtown Toronto. Throughout all this time, Casey has been an inspiring workshop leader for music teachers, dancers, actors and musicians.

As a performer of classical, improvised and contemporary chamber music, Casey has been involved with a variety of musical styles and groups since 1971. Outside of Canada, Casey has toured extensively as a soloist and ensemble player in Europe, Japan and North America, performing at numerous venues of note including the Pro Musica Nova Festival (Bremen), the Avignon Festival (France), the O-Kanada Festival (Berlin), Seibu Yao Hall (Osaka), le Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Expo ‘86 (Vancouver), the St. John’s Sound Symposium, Kanadishe Täge in Stuttgart, and at numerous other venues throughout France, England, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Germany, Austria, Cyprus, the United States and Japan.

In Canada, he has performed over a thousand concerts of classical, contemporary, folk and improvised music with groups such as The York Winds, the CCMC, New Music Concerts, Sound Pressure, Oliver Schroer and The Stewed Tomatoes. He has participated in over seventy interviews and broadcasts on radio and television here and abroad. Casey has been involved in performances of over forty world premières and premières of seventeen commissioned works by Canadian composers—pieces either commissioned personally or through the Sound Pressure Ensemble. Since the early 1970s, he has performed and collaborated with many artists from Canada and abroad including Christina Petrowska, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Michael Snow, Matt Brubeck, Peter Chin, Carlos del Junco, bp Nichol, Misha Mengelberg, Henry Kaiser, Lucas Ligeti, Trichy Sankaran, Evan Parker, John Zorn, James Tenney, David Mott, Andrew Craig, and Peggie Sampson.

Most of Casey’s compositional work has been realized as ‘free’ improvisational performance (both live and on recording) but he has also written for various ensembles. In 1985, he was commissioned by the INDE ’85 Festival to write a twenty-minute piece for three pianos, based on the award-winning fantasy novel, “More Than Human.” The music is titled, “Species,” and was recorded and broadcast on CJRT. In 1992 he conceived a form and process for a twenty-four movement dance composition for five improvising musicians titled, “Renga.” It was commissioned by Glendon College President, Rosanne Runte and was performed in 1992 with Oliver Schroer, Richard Armin, Robert Bik, David Mott and Casey Sokol with the Uno Man Bhutto Troupe of Tokyo. More recently (2011), Casey composed and published “Duets with Oli”—an eighty-page book of thirteen original concert pieces for solo piano, based on the melodies of Canadian fiddler, Oliver Schroer. The second edition was printed under the title, “Covering Oli—Duets for Solo Piano” and has been available since February 2016, when the book was launched in concert.

Casey’s discography includes both improvisations and performances of contemporary repertoire. Between 1976 and 1980 he released LPs with various musicians on Music Gallery Editions—M.G.E. #3, #4, #6, #11, #15 (3 LP set), #22, #23. Volume #9, a duo LP with Eugene Chadbourne titled, “Music from Acoustic Piano & Guitar,” was released in 1977. In 1991 he composed and performed original arrangements with Oliver Schroer on “Whirled” (Big Dog Music) and on “Oliver Schroer and the Stewed Tomatoes,” in 1995. “Pressure Points”—a CD of premiers commissioned by Sound Pressure—was released in 1993 on Soundprints. Casey contributed a multitrack piano solo, WinterRise, to “Stuck on a Cold Steel Pole,” a 1995 compilation CD published by MCA/Universal. He performed on Robert Aitkin’s premier of Nira, also released as part of the 2012 CD, “new Music 90,” with the New Music Concerts Ensemble. Casey’s music has been broadcast on CBC, CJRT, CIUT, FUJI-TV (Japan), PIK-TV and PIK Radio (Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation), KUSC-FM, OECA-TV, WBAI-FM (NY), and on other stations throughout North America and Europe.

He is one of the founding members of the CCMC Music Gallery in Toronto (1976) and served on its board through the 1980s. He launched Canada’s first university program in free improvisation, comprising courses for both piano and ensemble.

Casey Sokol was the recipient of the 2001 OCUFA Award for Excellence in Teaching, and after 50 years of university teaching, he still considers it to be an amazing way to spend the day.
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An attempt to tell the real story: How did my life happen this way?

I’m fairly sure that I didn’t make myself. And I don’t think that I made my life. I seem to have done little else but to follow some inborn instincts and capacities and to work with what was made available by parents, teachers, friends and family, as well as genes and cultural happenstance. Looking back on over seven decades, I was never aware of a master plan, nor do I imagine that I could have followed a plan if someone had actually formulated one.

So my life feels more like a treasure hunt than anything else: one clue leading to the next.

This bio is a fly-over of the early experiences that led me to take an interest in music—that is, in studying music and creating my own. As a narrative of ‘early’ experiences, many of the most important influences and experiences are not yet included here: marriage, children, performances (recording, touring), and all that. I don’t consider my life to be remarkable and I’m not undertaking this personal bio out of some conceit: to tell you how interesting my life has been (and you should all know about it). Quite the opposite. I feel that many, if not most, of my experiences are paralleled by many people who, as adults, decided to devote the necessary time and effort to become musicians or to pursue some other craft or art form. Your experiences were undoubtedly somewhat different, but I assume that many will resonate. My hope is that reading these snippets may remind you of things you may have forgotten, and that you can reconnect with those pleasurable memories. Of course there are many other anecdotes to tell, but I am choosing these because they had a decided influence on my life, especially those that led to the entanglement with a music career. They are neither like Zen teaching stories nor the moral-capped fables of Aesop, but there was certainly a kind of lesson for me in just about each one. I include them because I feel that they must have been somewhat universal, and so my hope is that, in essence, they are probably shared experiences.

The Sadness of Forgetting:

One day, long before my parents finally (Finally!) each went their own way, I asked my dad if he remembered my Davey Crockett outfit … you know, dad, the cowboy one with the leather fringes. Who gave that to me, and where is it now?

I saw, for the very first time, a look of sadness sweep across his face, and my question seemed to bear responsibility for that. He finally said, you know, I just can’t recall who gave it to you and I have no idea where it is.

Over the years, I came to know that my dad felt he had a miserable memory. And I later began to feel that I inherited it. I had many such moments of sadness because so much of my life seemed to disappear into the darkness. It might have been the result of a childhood that was heavy with parental fighting, sometimes late into the night or in the most inappropriate places. I experienced embarrassment as I went out the back door and realized that all the neighbours could hear the lunacy taking place. And then there were also some very disturbing sounds and images and many reasons to learn to forget. Through playing the piano, I was more or less able to drown out the unsettling sounds coming from upstairs. My music became a real haven. And perhaps I acquired a spotty memory also as protection. I really don’t know, but I have worked at my memory, committing long paragraphs of difficult language to memory, or memorizing the roster of the 150 students in a class or the names of the 130 conference participants so I’d be better able to remember each one as soon as we were introduced. Some of this success has transferred to common daily memory and I realize that working the memory is as important as working the muscle tissues of the body. So I will try to write something coherent about my musical trajectory: how I got here. Perhaps it will help someone else recall some forgotten moments.

Dad’s computer

One day, when I had come home on university break, he took me to the basement of his new home and showed me his new computer. It was the first computer I saw—an Apple—and he was very excited to have it. He loved to write and asked me what I thought he should write. Without any hesitation I suggested that he write his autobiography. That sadness flushed across his face once again and he told me that he had lost most of his memories. And when he finally left the apartment where I grew up, he left everything behind. He said that he took no photos, no memorabilia—not even match books from weddings and family functions, which he could have used to reconstruct the chronology of his life. In short, he didn’t think he could write anything remotely like an autobiography.

Still hopeful, I asked if he could write just one thing that he remembered. Did he remember anything at all? When he said yes, I suggested that he write that experience … and then write what happened afterwards. Or before. And that he could hop/skip through the years like that, leaving as many gaps as naturally occurred, and then go back to connect what could be connected. A full year later, he gave me a stack of computer paper—that old style of perforated paper that continually folded itself as it came out of the dot-matrix printer. It was many inches thick and was divided into three sections: three groups of 22 years each. I was astonished and very impressed at his resolve. I still have not read through the whole thing, I think, because it can be overwhelming to read all the things about one’s one parent that were entirely unknown as a child. However, the idea was very appealing, as I saw how much he really recalled once he set it as a personal task. And he did it for me. I too have often found that it’s somehow easier to do certain things for someone else than for myself. So I’m doing this for you now. But only in terms of my life in music. It is related to the journal assignment I have given all my students for many years: to write about what they hear, how they hear, how they practice, why they practice, and all the rest. You’ll come across samples from Student journals elsewhere on the site. They’re really great reading.

Earliest piano memories: Mrs. McNerny

There was no piano in the apartment where I grew up. It was a ‘garden’ apartment with paper-thin walls—a special low-rental development which New York State created for veterans of WWII. I used to play the upright in my grandma Sadie’s place and my parents could not help notice my attraction. My father didn’t play piano but he taught me a couple of cool duets which were easy to play—melodically interesting and rhythmically alive. My parents soon had grandma’s piano brought to our apartment. I was over the moon. But even before that I played the upright in Mrs. McNerny’s house. She was my baby-sitter or guardian during the day because both my parents worked all day. It was at Mrs. McNerny’s house that I made my first my first musical discoveries, among which were encounters with patterning and auditory illusion.

Auditory illusion:

During this time, I was very attracted to books that had pictures with hidden objects that I was challenged to find (pre-dating Where’s Waldo, but like that), and I especially loved optical illusions. I was fascinated by things that were on the page if you looked at it a certain way, but then they could also disappear or change entirely. The stack of cubes looked one way if the light seemed to come from one angle, but they could sort of turn around when the light suddenly seemed to shift the direction of its source. I frequently tried to shift it intentionally so I could see the transition and I tried very hard to see both perspectives at the same time … but I don’t think I ever succeeded at that. They made a lasting impression: not only the illusions but the interest in making them happen intentionally.

At Mrs. McNerny’s house, I discovered my own auditory illusion and it stayed with me for many years, finally maturing into a more concrete perception and sophisticated application. One of the things I loved to do on her piano was play with two alternating index fingers. I liked to play with alternating right and left hands on ||: E C D D :||, spanning a major third. I liked playing it quickly and never tired of the contradiction between seeing my fingers continuously playing the identical pattern, while the music unexpectedly changed. Without changing anything, ||: ECDD suddenly became either ||: CDDE :|| or ||:DDEC:||, or even ||: DECD :||! What I realized years later, when I recalled that experience, was that it was my perception of the pattern that shifted, so that another of the four notes sounded like the starting note of the group. Still later in my musical life I learned that it was sometimes called rhythmic displacement and, along with the refining of this interest, I discovered the subgroup of minimalist music sometimes called “pattern” music. I also discovered one of the techniques they often used, sometimes informally called “phasing.” Thus—the music of many composers such as Reich, Riley, Glass, Andriessen, (and one of my university colleagues, David Rosenboom) entered my awareness and, in part, my improvisations. I could feel that this intentional displacement, this phasing, challenged my attention and created a stimulating sensation. But that was much later, in my teen years.

 I think that I was generally fascinated by and attracted to the “unexpected” and, from that point of view, I’d guess that almost everyone has found enjoyment and stimulation that attends moments of surprise. How babies love peek-a-boo games and don’t seem to tire of them (as quickly as the adults would like): Beethoven’s sudden orchestral fortissimos, Mahler’s deft and unexpected reharmonizations, Milford Graves’ turning the beat around, Aretha’s magnificently slow glissing upward with such controlled steadiness that one could not, on first hearing, know on which pitch she’d finally land.

The Spelling Game:

When I began to learn the letters of the alphabet and could spell simple words, I tried to spell the various sounds that I heard. My dad played many sound-oriented games with me and they tickled me deeply. In one of them, I’d ask, Hey da..What does this spell? And then rattle off some random string of letters as fast as I could. And he’d really do his best to pronounce them. But he’d perform them, as faithfully as he could, pumping into each word the humour latent in all the whacky combinations and letter pileups. He’d say, ‘Well that spells, “Tchagavodddzwuiwuikebonkergiminopty.” I’d crack up and literally fall off my chair laughing. And as I crawled back onto the kitchen chair, I’d fire off another string and he’d comply with another realization. Which found me again on the kitchen floor. There was a clear sense of how much emotion could be conveyed by sounds—even ones that were random and silly. The immediacy of feedback along with his obvious effort to make an accurate and emotion-filled realization gave me a real sense of collaboration: I was making it up and he showed me what it sounded like. I did not think in adult categories at that time but now I see that he was the performer and I, the composer. Throughout my musical life, this dynamic occurred in more formal ways. I was sometimes the composer and sometimes the one bringing a composition alive in the world of sound. But then as an improvising musician, I realized that it was possible to be both at the same time.

The Magic Book:

My dad was a really good storyteller and he also loved making up a story on the spot. He always read a book to me at bedtime—the very last thing I heard before going to sleep. While it wasn’t my favourite story, my favourite book was the one that he called the “magic book,” and when my dad read it upside-down, as he sometimes did, it would somehow be a different story every time. All my other books were the same on every reading. I was not yet able to read, so for me it was magic. And the stories would be utterly unpredictable. I particularly liked “Popper and Unpopper.” It was full of nuance and unexpected narrative curlicues, but the gist of it was that, in a jar on the supermarket shelf, there were two kernels of popping corn who had become fast friends ever since growing up on the same ear in a corn field. Once the jar was finally purchased by a family, the corn was all popped. Popper, who had popped just fine, was eaten, while Unpopper—a dud— was tossed in the yucky smelly trash bin in the family kitchen. Thus ensued a long and winding story, that had them finally meet up once again in the belly of a fish, which then miraculously wound up being cooked for dinner in that very same kitchen … and so on. I slowly began to observe that events might unfold without any necessary or obvious correlation to anything else … certainly not a detailed correlation.

Wekords:

 I absolutely loved the phonograph that my dad built for me, and I loved my record collection. Before I had my own player, I loved going to parties where there would be records playing. I didn’t particularly like parties but if my parents told me that there would be records, I would simply say, “Wekords? Okay!” And I’d happily go.

At home, I had Liberace playing the Grieg Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IuziZRHdKk, which I later played myself as a young teen. I had Meade Lux Lewis playing Boogie Woogie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdf0zSOsk0&list=RD1pAJEC_kcpc&index=28 and I just loved Percy Faith’s Swedish Rhapsody. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtw78l0LO0k The Grieg transmitted a sense of nobility and musical drama; the Lewis disc was my introduction to the down-and-dirty physical music of Boogie Woogie; and the Swedish Rhapsody gave me my first sense that music could soar. I loved music that made me move my body and I would dance all over the house til my parents came home from work.

I had one of the little yellow vinyl records of the Mozart Rondo alla Turk (another of many childhood pieces that I later learned to play well), and one day I accidentally set the turntable on high speed—78 rpm. I could hardly believe what I heard. It was fun to hear it like that because, while it was still the same piece, it was in fact my first direct exposure to larger musical form; the music went by so quickly that the individual notes didn’t make much of an impression. What I heard was the flow of one phrase after another (they were more like sound gestures) and the succession of what are called musical “periods.” It was an insight to realize that the whole piece could be thought of all at once, something like how we view a painting or a piece of architecture. The eye can move leisurely thought the forms and colours, but it can also be seen all at once as a total shape. I had a budding realization that music was also like that.

My favourite records:

For a little while, my two most memorable records (but not for their music) were The Magic Record and the immensely popular Julius LaRosa. The “magic” record was a vocal with instrumental backing and the singer told me that the record could be anything … sound like anything. Sure enough it was a truck, a train, an opera aria, an orchestra … v ery amazing to the ears of the young lad I was. And then there was a rather big surprise. Just before the end of Side A, the voice sang that if I put the needle down again at the beginning to play it again, it would be different. All my other records would always be exactly the same if I played them again… but…. A bit hesitant, I put the needle back to the beginning and—amazing!—it was a completely different record. That kind of thing, that ‘magic’ really slayed me. How did it happen? Well, when I was about ten, I found the vinyl record and tried to puzzle out how it worked. I held it up to the sunlight streaming into my bedroom window and I finally saw the concentric grooves that allowed the needle to fall into any one of about four different spirals. The mystery was solved, but it didn’t matter. The magic had already taken root. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsV-oSdvips,

Music is made by people:

The other record that had a strong memory for me was with LaRosa singing one of his hallmark upbeat 6/8 tunes, “Hey Cumpari.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSPkD5uMUjg

It was one of those cumulative object songs that named an instrument, asked how it sounded (Ma come suona), and then he imitated it with four punctuated vocables at the end of the phrase: short long short long. The next verse added a new instrument to the list and each was named again with a vocal imitation. So the listener finally had an inventory of sounds: la violine a pling-a pling-a, la trombone a foom-a foom-a, la trompette ba-baap ba-baap, and so on until after 8 increasingly breathy phrases of instrument imitation, he came to the flute. For the flute he simply whistled in that same iambic rhythm. But the whistle did not come out. And then he LAUGHED! This guy on my record was laughing! But he continued singing. I realized that the whistle didn’t come out because he had begun to smile. But when I heard the laugh, I realized for the first time, that it was an actual person singing that song, and it somehow got onto the record. It had not occurred to me that all the music I had been listening to on records was actually made by people. And some of them might be having a lot of fun playing and singing.  That altered my whole orientation to all of my records and to all the music I heard on the radio. They were ordinary people, just like the people I knew. Maybe just like me. As it turned out.

First notion of improvisation:
My dad was often whistling, especially while cooking me breakfast. One day I was struck by the beauty of the melody and so I asked him what melody it was. He didn’t even realize he was whistling so he paused, thought back, and said, “Oh, … I was just making it up.” I said, “What do you mean ‘up’?” Naïve little questions like this slowly accumulated in my young mind.

I would soon also be making ‘up’ music on the spot, often in A-minor and often tinged with the feeling of the Jewish music I had begun to absorb from holiday singing and from my four years of Yiddish school. I loved to make up music and, so far as I recall, it didn’t take long before those tunes, with the simple harmonic support I could manage, began to sound quite coherent and expressive. One of the most positive experiences I had as a youth was that my father, upon hearing me start to improvise or practice, would come and sit in an upholstered chair placed just to the right of the keyboard. He’d relax into the chair to listen. I never got the feeling that he was checking up on me or sitting there to support my work at the piano—though he was so supportive. It was plainly obvious that he was there because he was enjoying listening to his little guy play music. His enjoyment transferred to me and increased my own enjoyment. His listening supported my own listening. And I was able to give something back to my dad. How many parents fail to take the opportunity to enjoy their children’s artistic efforts? But it’s not something an adult can easily conjure. To really enjoy the child’s work is to enjoy their effort and growth and not simply hope that the music is also enjoyable.

By around this time I was more involved in my lessons and I practiced regularly. My parents never had to ask or remind me to practice. I was always happy to come in from playing punchball or whatever in order to sit and play, read, practice, memorize, transpose, and any of the things I was beginning to learn to work on. I didn’t practice with any expectation or any specific imagined outcome. I never pictured myself becoming a stage performer, a recording artist, or even a teacher. I just practiced because it was such an engaging activity.

One morning I got up early and found my dad at the kitchen table with large legal pad of lined paper. His handwriting was tight, quite uniform, and very attractive. He could even write the same way on unlined paper but this large piece of yellow legal paper made the handwriting look especially impressive. And I could see that he’d already completely filled more than a dozen sheets.

The quantity of writing made me very curious. What are you writing about? I don’t know yet, he said. Well if you don’t know what you’re writing about why are you writing? I’m writing to find out what I’m interested to writing about. That seemed odd so I asked why he was doing all this. I’m practicing writing. That seemed very odd. Why do you practice writing, I asked. His return: Why do you practice piano? And that question has stayed with me for my whole life. Why do I?

Rests: The Presence and usefulness of emptiness:

I have no idea if my dad’s assistance with my new tile game played into an adult interest in cosmology, Zen, silence, and esoteric thought, but it certainly made me aware of the difference between space and the stuff ‘in’ it.

My dad brought me a little game of moveable tiles housed in a two-dimensional square frame. There was room for nine tiles—three rows of three each—but one was missing. They were numbered and the idea was to move them until they were in order, one through 8. Each tile could only move up or down, left or right. After a while, I found it not so difficult and, seeing my enjoyment, he got me another one which had 16 tiles: 4 rows of 4 tiles each. But I could not work it at all, and I could not understand how to go about it. Nothing moved! So I asked my father how to make it work. He apologized for neglecting to tell me to take out the specially marked tile, so that only 15 tiles remained in the frame. He had a way of explaining things such that the explanation was always much bigger than the issue at hand. His explanations felt very ‘mobile,’ very easily transferable to other activities and other domains of information. He said something like, “You need to have some empty space in order to allow the tiles to move.” It was just a small piece of advice but, again, there was always something in the way he said things that made them into big explosions of insight. Space, emptiness, was also real, and it was the compliment of the stuff that was “in” the space. It didn’t take long for this insight to transfer to the complementarity of sound and silence. Silence was an integral part of music and it had to be “played” with the same care and attention as I addressed the sounds. As I thought about this later in life, I began to acknowledge that the explanations we offer to our children or our students are themselves material for our own development.

Later in life I would come to know that in Japanese music, the term “ma” suggests the space in between sounds that a performer must master. Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them. In a similar vein, Miles Davis said, “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” I realized that there was a difference between treating a rest as stopping the music and counting the passing time, as compared with internally “playing” the space. Then I realized that I could often see how musicians physically manifested this sense of space in performance: string players, vocalists, conductors, … They filled the rests with a palpable something, maybe a posture or gesture or a breath, a weight shift, but anyway something more internal, a flow of rarified energy—perhaps creating the texture of musical attention. I sometimes found myself telling a class that musical rests are not best understood as the absence of something as much as they are the presence of nothing. I appreciated this spontaneous formulation and I started to listen to myself more closely. Apart from the cornucopia of dumb things, some of the things I said to students carried some real value … some kernels of wisdom. It began to dawn on me that teaching is an amazing form of learning.

The Richness of Random:

My parents moved our new baby grand piano such that the keyboard lined up perfectly with the exit from the kitchen into the living room. The family mainly used the kitchen door to get in and out of the house. It was a brilliant placement for the piano because every time I came into the house, I would walk parallel to the keyboard and run my right hand over the keys from the upper treble downward. Sometimes I simply played a glissando, but I more typically walked from treble to bass while two or three fingers quickly cantered down the keyboard, hitting random keys that happened to be where they landed. So my fingers would skitter across the keyboard in some random rhythm that was the result of the pace of my walk-by. Sometimes that was all that happened but frequently I would hear something really interesting in that random walk. I’d quickly sit down on the bench and try to find it again. It would usually be a very energized bouncy rhythm with varied intervals. And so I began to be engaged in the relationship between random occurrence and intentional rediscovery. As often as not, I would wind up improvising for half an hour. This dichotomy between accident and intention has, in recent decades, become one important source of discovery and even a performance technique for improvised music concerts.

I am more than occasionally reminded of this when I need a strategy for entering a creative frame of mind. Sometimes, when I am on stage to play a concert of improvised music, I am bereft of a starting point—no point of inspiration. Then I might usoe one of several techniques intended to introduce some unintentional (semi-acciental) material. One of these I call “feathering”—an ultra-light speedy touch running randomly across the keyboard, which actives piano keys randomly. It reminds me of my young body discovering the joy of such movement and the stimulating sound of a random sequence. I also began to realize that what people call ‘random’ may simply be an order too complex to stabilize long enough for a clear explanation or even a clear name. And much of what I enjoy in life is infused with a healthy component of an aspect of spontaneity that is a close cousin of ‘randomness.’ The appeal of not-knowing is sometimes irresistible.

Earliest lessons and my first piano teacher:

I still remember the day, date and time of my first piano lesson. I was really excited. A ‘grownup’ (as we kids called them), named Walter Anson, arrived and, in just a few moments, put me right at ease. He was probably my dad’s age, since the development in which we lived was specially intended for WWII vets. He never came to my lesson empty-handed and, while we learned from the pieces in the various books, he always came with a personal arrangement of something that was clearly prepared specially for me. He took an interest in what I listened to during the week and always asked about it. One day I asked him if he knew the Mickey Mouse Show. He told me that he had three sons, and of course he knew the show. Did I want to play that song: The Mickey Mouse Song? I lit up and said yes, I would love that. He said no more but showed up the following week with an arrangement of the song perfectly suited to my small hands and limited reading. With so much personal motivation, I practiced and played a lot. One day I asked him if he heard of a guy named Louis. Which Louis do you mean? I said it was something like Lucks Louis. He thought a moment and asked: You mean Meade Lux Lewis? Again I lit up that he recognized what I meant. He asked me, ‘So you like boogie woogie?’ I asked if I could play some boogie woogie and in my next lesson he gave me one of his trademark 6x9” pages in blue mimeograph ink (that wonderful smell!) with a boogie arrangement, and I practiced it until I actually felt comfortable substituting some notes for the written ones. We were both delighted. Those experiences carried through till the present and I modelled after him, crafting new materials for my university students. I always tried to base it on what I knew would capture their natural interest.

Walter not only gave me contemporary popular pieces but tunes from the 40s and 50s, like Hernando’s Hideaway, Deep Purple, On the Sunny Side of the Street. It was a great diet of material. But he treated everything also as an experiment to give me some food for thought. He only started teaching me theory after many encounters with theoretical questions. He didn’t particularly answer them in theoretical terms until I was a bit older. For example my first piece was a little 5-finger scalar piece in C major: block chords in the LH and two phrases in the RH. Then the music invited us to play the melody in the LH and the block chords in the right. In my second lesson he saw that I was playing it with ease and confidence. So he asked what would happen if I moved both my hands up four notes higher and played the same piece starting on ‘F’. I had no idea what would happen, but as soon as I heard the B-natural in both the melody and the chords, I must have made a face. He asked, ‘what’s wrong?’ I didn’t know, so he asked me to find the problem. Once I located the B-natural as the problem, he asked me to try to fix it. How? Well … find a note nearby that might fit better, he said. It didn’t occur to me right away to use a black key because everything we did till that point was on white keys, but I eventually found that the Bb was the solution in both hands.

 What I appreciate so much in retrospect is that he didn’t right away start yattering at me about scale structure, major vs. minor scales, semitones vs. whole tones, chord inversions... None of that. He left it in my hands so that it might permeate a bit and to see what I’d make of this encounter. Because I was motivated and allowed to explore on my own, I was probably much more involved than I might have been if only following instructions about scale and triad formation. This was an approach that I instinctively carried into my university teaching. A good teacher has to take into account the native intelligence of a student, their natural curiosity, their capacity for experimentation and willingness to work independently. He saw me clearly and taught to my real interests and abilities. It’s not easy to do this in a class—in group teaching—because giving too much attention to individual needs can undercut the progress of the course. And vice-versa, of course. It’s the same kind of mistake to walk in to a class to present your brilliant curriculum. You can end up teaching your curriculum instead of teaching your students! It’s easy forget all this, but I always tried to keep these things in mind, and to remember that each student was the result of a different set of circumstances.

 Another thing about Mr. Anson’s teaching was the way he drew me in to the process of teaching and learning. He had been giving me his own ‘lead sheets’ for pop tunes of the 30s through the 60s. I loved each of them and we put them in a three-ring binder that fit the 6x9” sheets perfectly. (I still have it, of course.) One day he gave me a new tune accompanied by an apology. There were missing note-heads in the bass and some of the chords were missing, leaving only their names. Some of the bass notes substituted an “R” or a “5” for an actual note-head. I was confused. Apparently, he did not have time to finish the arrangement (so he said), but he thought I could help him finish it. I was thrilled that he asked me to help him. So naturally I asked what the “R” meant, and he said that it just meant I should play the root. What’s a root?, I asked. Instead of telling me, he asked what I knew about roots. I said that a plant has a root. Where’s the root?, he asked, and I said it was the part in the ground so that it could hold up the rest of the plant. So the root is usually on the bottom, he asked? Yes. So it’s like that in music too. It ‘holds up’ the chord; he added that it “supports” it. It gives it a place to be. The root can be placed anywhere in the chord, but its most natural place is on the bottom. So this is the root of which chord, I asked? He told me that it’s the root of the chord that comes on the next beat. I looked at the chord and he asked, “so what’s the bottom note of that chord?” “G, I said! So it’s called a G chord?” “Right.” He added that chords were usually named by their root. So I asked, well, which G should I play and he said that I should try each of them and see which one I was happy with. Which one will sound like a good bass note—one that would ‘ground’ that G-chord?

And he showed me how to figure out all kinds of things and how to make a decision on the basis of how things sounded and how it felt to move my fingers and arms to the right spot. Chopin’s pedagogy was very similar and was probably inherited by Mr. Anson through his (and my) teacher, Leopold Mittman—also a student in the direct line of Chopin. He was teaching theory as closely allied to practice as he could imagine, and I was learning about it by going from practice to theory, instead of the more common direction: from intellect to body. I had wonderful years of lessons in this vein but I don’t write this just so you know about my early years of learning. I tell you in the hope that you may make your (already creative) lessons even more creative, more engaging, more deeply penetrating.

Fear of secondary beams and too much black ink:

As I have already written, my parents never had to ask me to practice. It was totally my own thing. However, one day I did very reluctantly ask them to call Walter to tell him that I wanted to stop my lessons. They must have been shocked but they didn’t show it. They treated me with an amazing degree of respect. They only asked for my reason. Well, I explained, Mr. Anson is giving me these sonatinas, and they have so many notes and there are so many beams and they’re a bit scary and they don’t sound good unless you play them really fast. And I can’t play them fast because I’m just not interested in practicing them that much. Could you call him and tell him?

Well, they’re your lessons, they said. So really I should be the one to talk to him. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I didn’t want to insult him or make him feel badly. Finally they agreed to make the call and then they’d give me the phone. Walter asked what was the problem. I said that there are too many notes and the page is filled with black ink, all the double beams, and so many scales. It was a bit scary; I couldn’t even find the melodies. To my surprise, he totally agreed. He said that he also had problems playing those pieces because they didn’t sound good until they were played at a quick tempo. I briefly recalled my experience years before when I accidentally heard the Mozart rondo played at double speed and I felt that, were I able to play that fast, these pieces would probably sound great. But I wasn’t interested.

So Walter simply said that he agreed with my feelings and that I should stop playing those pieces and just play what I had been enjoying. If I ever wanted to try those pieces again, he’d certainly help me. I felt very relieved. I hung up and went about my business. But the next day I found myself opening the music to those sonatinas and plunging into them with fresh eyes and an unfettered energy. Then I loved them. 

I am so grateful to my parents for supporting rather than pushing. For bringing into the apartment an upright piano and then, when needed, a small grand piano. For listening to me practice, even in such a small apartment. What a gift! I know from listening to stories of my own students’ home life how rare this kind of support can be.

In the lineage of Chopin?

Walter felt that after five years, I had progressed to the point where a more seasoned pianist would be more appropriate. I was told that my new teacher, Leopold Mittman was in the Chopin lineage, (through Mikuli and Michaelowsky), but it did not sink in. I was young and intimidated. He was older and had an eastern European accent, and he would have been intimidating on that account alone, but he was Jewish, super friendly, and his wife put out a bowl of freshly boiled chick peas with butter, salt and pepper for us all to share. They were delicious! Here I was, taking lessons in someone else’s home, and so the whole experience was new and vivid. And now I could really understand who my first teacher, Walter, was studying with. I could feel the continuity of transmission and it felt good.

I fell asleep in the first row of the audience as I was waiting for my turn on stage. My teacher, Leopold Mittman, had arranged a public concert of his students. Until I went to SUNY Buffalo, where I studied with Prof. Seymour Fink, Mr. Mittman was my major musical influence. I was so nervous in that front row, that I guess my reaction was to blank out a bit, and I fell asleep. I eventually woke up, went on stage, and began to play. I was in the middle of the Appassionata Sonata of Beethoven when I suddenly awoke in another sense. I began to sense a lot of people to my right. I didn’t dare look over because I might be distracted. Who were they; why were they there? And what was I doing there, anyway? It finally dawned on me that this was a concert and I was playing in front of a large audience. But what was I even playing? Which piece was it? It sounded so familiar as I watched my hands and fingers tear through arpeggios, octaves and massive chords, let alone navigate through hundreds of notes belonging to different scales. But how did the music go after this? What was on the next page? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember the name of the piece I was playing or who wrote it, and here were my hands, busier than I could imagine, playing something or other. I began to really worry about where the music went from here. I was playing from memory so I did not even have the possibility to glance up at the notation.

The experience did give me some sense that the body and feelings were quite capable of playing music without conscious thinking, but it was my first taste—distaste, really—of public performance. When a bit later on I played a full solo concert at a hall rented by my parents, I did much better, finding some enjoyment in it all. The audience was all family and friends. I played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with my teacher playing the orchestral reduction. I played the Khachaturian Toccata, some Bach Preludes and Fugues and smaller pieces by Borodin, Albeniz and others. I was still awfully nervous but at least I was present for the whole event. As a teenager Mr. Mittman arm-twisted me into playing for the WQXR competition and I really did not want to do it. There was only one person in the audience in a very large concert hall. It was Harold Schoenberg, the music critic of the NY Times, and it was super intimidating. I actually played extremely well but I had a slight memory lapse—a hesitation—in the middle of the Toccata from Debussy’s Pour le piano. It was less than one second in a 12-page cascade of unrelenting sixteenth-notes, but that’s a no-no in such a competition. However, I was so glad to be out and to feel free of all that.

At around this time Mr. Mittman asked me to improvise for him. He told me that as an 8-year old he was earning money playing piano, sometimes improvising in European brothels. I didn’t know what a brothel was but it was clear that it was sufficiently nasty that he didn’t want anything like that for me. He did say that I had talent at both improvisational performance as well as repertoire, but I should choose, because I’d never excel at both. It was my first moment of feeling like a grown up because I told him quietly and confidently that I didn’t want to excel or be the best at anything. I just wanted to enjoy playing repertoire and continue improvising; I wanted to have a good life. I really didn’t care about being the best—rising to the top. And that was one of my guiding principles for the rest of my life.

Money: The opportunity to get to know my values. Television vs. cash (Pay for TV)

My parents both worked during the day and needed to sleep in on the weekends. Being an only child I had to entertain myself quite a bit, but at least we had a television set. On the weekends I’d get up even before the Farmer Grey cartoons were on, so I’d watch the agricultural documentaries. But then there were hours of cartoons, and during the week there was a big selection: Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, the Ed Sullivan show, and on and on. Being an only child, my parents understood my television watching, and they began to be concerned about the hours I spent in front of the screen. But instead of merely forbidding access or limiting my time, they devised a plan.

I had a reasonable allowance for a young boy, but one day they gave me a beautiful leaf-shaped hinged dish … polished silver. It was beautiful. They told me that this was my new weekly allowance. I think they had been giving me 25 or 50 cents each week. I opened the dish and it was overflowing with white, red and blue poker chips. I was puzzled but they told me that the blue chips were worth 50 cents or an hour of television. I’m no longer sure of the values, but the red were maybe a dime or half an hour of t.v. and the whites were either a nickel or 10 minutes. Whatever it was, it was clearly generous because I could see that I either had a lot of television time or a lot of money. I asked how I could make sense of it and so my dad brought over the T.V. Guide—a booklet that listed every show on every channel from early morning til late at night. I was to check off all the shows I really wanted to watch and when I finished, he added it up and told me that I could watch all the television that I checked off and still have a dollar allowance. He let me sit with that for a couple of minutes, while I was still impressed with the generous arrangement: all the tv I wanted and even a bigger allowance than before. Then, the moment they were probably anticipating arrived. I asked, so what if I didn’t watch Elliot Ness? You’d have another 50 cents, they told me. That was cool. I scratched it off the list of programs that I wanted to see. I said that I didn’t really like it that much, and I also crossed off a few others. How much more money would I have if I crossed them off? Within a few minutes I had ditched all the programs that were time-wasters for me and I had another few dollars. They were really smart to do that. By empowering me to engage in my own decision-making, I clarified something important about my values. That helped me prioritize various activities and expenses later on in life.

Making money with my music

But I did also make quite a bit of money. Baby-sitting was lucrative and I loved it. I did some shoe-shining at the corner of Bell and 73rd. My dad constructed a shoe-shine kit for me to use. It was beautiful and I still have it. But at some point I was asked to play piano for Ms. Grimaldi’s ballet classes. She gave me little clipped off excerpts from Schubert and Schumann and others. It was so satisfying and, when I tired of playing the same melodies week after week, I began fooling around a bit: first introducing some simple embellishing figures, then making up little changes in the notated melodies and then, because Ms. Grimaldi was not objecting (or not noticing?) I started making up entirely different melodies … and finally even making up new harmonies and textures in the left hand. I was really improvising and getting paid a very handsome wage! It felt so great! She came over to the piano one day and told me that, yes, she knew what I was doing and that it was fine – and better than having the kids hear the same thing week after week.

It was my first paid improvising gig. And, together with baby-sitting, shoe-shining, and the new arrangement with my allowance, I began putting more money in the bank. My spending preferences did not change but I enjoyed being able to treat my friends to candy store fare like Lik-m-aid and stick pretzels with mustard from the corner deli.

Junior high-school

I loved my “junior high school” years. I had wonderful friends. I worked in the computer room and fed attendance cards to the machine each morning. I was in quite a few theatre productions such as, “You Can’t Take It With You,” and I did love that aspect of being in performance. I was the pianist for some musicals, like Brigadoon. Probably because I had no siblings, I really thrived in the community outside the house, and theatre was prominent for a while. Taking the part of the King in “The King and I” was a threshold experience for me: learning lines, playing a role, singing and dancing … they all involved a demand for a level of extroversion that I had not yet accessed. I found that I enjoyed it and it really helped me grow “up.” I played in Mr. Cahill’s school band, where I learned to play trumpet and several saxophones, including the “C Melody” sax. I really liked playing my part and hearing how it sounded—blending or colliding with all the other parts. I didn’t quite realize until much later that most piano players become musical ‘loners’ and never get to have that ensemble experience. It prepared me for my high school band experience where I also played clarinet, oboe and baritone sax. I do regret that all my non-piano experiences were with winds and brass; I never found out what it was like to play a string instrument and really have to tune each note.

I think that, with the help of these experiences in ensemble, I was becoming aware that the sum of the parts was more than an accumulation; something could arise that was of a different order. This certainly began to play into my interest in the cosmos and my own body, both of which had so many parts. But what were they as a whole? What was the universe for itself? What was the relationship between all my separate parts and my whole self? I read all kinds of books on psychology and cosmology and was often trying to imagine the whole of it—the whole universe. One night I had a dream in which I was able to see a planet, following which, I began zooming out until I was taking in a great expanse of the starry universe. When I was older, the Ontario Science Centre had a film called,“Powers of Ten.” It began with close-up of a fly on the body of someone sunning on the beach, and the camera then began zooming out until it included the whole of the visible universe. I was developing a passion for knowing more about this ‘everythingness.’ I suppose it was a bit like realizing the whole of the Mozart Turkish March in one swipe of thought.

I loved Mrs. Farber’s grade 7 class in Earth Science and I would have gone into science, if music had not been already so developed. My mother worked as an electrical engineer, doing ordinance inspection for the U.S. Navy. She worked at places like ARMA and Sperry Rand on gyroscope-based navigational systems for the Polaris submarines and missiles. One day she bought home a white plaster-of-Paris model of a submarine, which she placed on the back window ledge where it always caught my attention. When I occasionally asked about it, she simply said that the guys at work gave it to her. Her work was classified, so I never really knew what she did. Even when I would pick her up at work, I was not allowed near any buildings. Meanwhile, though, I was a long-haired hippie who participated in peace marches. I was at the Pentagon for one of the particularly large protests. That’s the one where many of the girls were gently filling the muzzles of the military rifles with flowers: stems first. My mom totally sympathized with my anti-war sentiments but felt that it was better to go to jail than move to Canada. I didn’t agree but I was glad that she didn’t want me to get in harm’s way in Vietnam to protect interests that were not at all our own. And now I find myself settled and happy in Canada for the past 50 years.

Dance or Music? 

I loved the dance sessions at summer camp. They were mostly of Israeli origin but mixed in with eastern European dance traditions. The leader, as I recall, was a choreographer named Mutti Ehrlich, and he could see the exuberant receptivity that some of us showed. It encouraged him to teach more than the steps, patterns, and attitudes of traditional folk dances, and he choreographed some really interesting things that I had never come across. He invited some of us to continue working in New York City after the summer and he choreographed a duet, Sailor’s Dance, for an upcoming festival. It’s a boy-meets-girl narrative dance; we try to impress each other with our skills and energy and finally, mutually infatuated, dance off the stage together. I got to learn a number of very acrobatic steps and was so surprised to find myself dancing on stage with my crush, Audrey Cohen, in front of thousands on the Carnegie Hall stage. Soon after this I was invited to join a semi-professional dance troupe which would have been the highlight of my life at that point. But I injured my knee dancing during a music gig in Manhattan, and all that was put on the back burner. Time quickly marched on and the opportunity was lost. I just figured I’d continue with my music—not having thought for a moment about career. It seems to me now that I never thought about career.

Brief descent into philosophy: otherwise called thinking too much

I think this section needs to be deleted or reconsidered and rewritten.

I had discovered the wonder of marijuana and I loved getting high. As much pure fun as it was, I was much more attracted and intrigued by the shift in perception that ensued and the change in how I evaluated all the impressions of the world as well as of myself (having graduatlly discovered that I too was part of what I thought of as ‘the world.’). I was quite amazed at how different things could be when under that influence, and certain experiences, like listening to music, were so much more layered and so much more intense, that I wondered why I did not experience this normally. What was missing? One day, in the midst of an acid trip (LSD) I was in the country and saw a sign that read, “Private Property.” I recognized it as an ordinary expression of something, but I could not quite recall the gist of it. What did that mean: “private?” I knew in general what it signified but I could not quite locate the notion of ‘private.’ I knew that it was possible to own land privately, but then I could not quite recall what it meant to “own” land. The land was here and, for a while, people are also here, but how could someone “own” land; how could they own a part of the planet? I suppose that it was a first experience with the ludicrous notion of private property. I just could not even ‘get my head around that.’

Later in life I came to this same question when it came to ownership of a song or a piece of music. Of course, many musical pieces were created by someone, but the more I knew about composition, improvisation, variation, and all the delicate tendrils of reciprocal influences in the world, the less I could really believe in the notion of personal creation. There are many lawsuits over song ownership, and they raise some serious questions, almost all of which are situated on very shaky ground, so far as I can determine. What can someone really ‘own’ in a musical composition like a symphony or a song? Certainly there is a great deal of personal contribution involved but what exactly is decidedly private property?

So I’m imagining that improvising provided me with a conceptual/philosophical way of avoiding some of those issues. On the one hand, the act of improvising might have us believe that we improvisers are each independently functioning creators. That is, we are each our own ‘source.’ The premise is that, while improvising, we are finally free of association … that is, free of acting fundamentally in accordance with past associations (preferences, tendencies, habits, …). But this is not quite believable. It is not my experience. Improvisation moves too fast to consider that it all results from intentional actions initiated at the (or in the) moment, that is, independent of one’s past knowledge, training and experiences. Improvisation proceeds largely at the same tempo as one’s reactivity. And it seems that reactions are as fast as they are because they avoid any in-depth collaboration or confirmation with our other functions. An emotional reaction is usually experienced and perceived as such because the action arises mainly out of a single brain centre. An emotional reaction seems to be an experience that does seek correlation or confirmation from the mind or the body. Having arisen, it does not normally call upon thought and sensation in any substantive way. The same goes for a reaction that has arisen in the body.

I have come to see that reactions are not bad just because they’re reactions. Without all our reactions, starting with those at a cellular level, we might not last very long. What does any particular reaction serve, if anything? An instrumentalist cannot mentally recall the individual fingering for each note of a descending Ab-harmonic minor scale. A vocalist cannot try to reconstruct the sound of a descending Major-sixth in order to sing the chorus of “Down By The Riverside.” It has to be internalized in order to facilitate easy and quick access. Music demands this, because it takes place in “real time.” For me, certain units of musical behaviour or units of action are only of use if they are accessible with an easy and reliable immediacy. And the thing is that, whether those units are a/habits and reactions, or whether they are b/intentionally created streams of action (as those resulting from disciplined practice), the very fact of their almost resistance-less access renders them easily conflated with each other; what is accessible through deep learning can often be mixed up with reactive ‘choice’; one becomes the other, almost without anyone actually noticing. A musician necessarily slaloms in and out of mechanistic and creative behaviours and, again, these shifts often occur without anyone noticing—neither the listeners nor the players.

However, what ensues from each of those two close ‘cousins’ is inevitably going to be of a different—possibly opposite—character. The awareness of these twists and turns—at least for those who observe this tendency—produces a distinct tension. It produces an internal demand for the player to recognize the value of each kind of functioning. We need to not only value each but to recognize that conscious decision-making will always be mixed with and will always require the contribution of habit and reactive decision making. In other words, the creative artist must accede to the presence of unconscious behaviours, admit them, include them, even lean on them … all in the service of pursuing the new, the as-yet undiscovered.

So the improvising musician also has to practice, to learn and inculcate new material, but without neglecting to marry them to all the previously learned elements from years of training. How to go about this? Can it be done ‘consciously’ or does it simply have to be allowed to happen? So when newly arrived students are asked to say why they’ve come to study improvisation, they often say something like, “I just want to be in the moment.” This is very understandable, and worded in many different ways, it seems to be at root of everyone’s impulse to improvise. To be spontaneous; to be free; to be playing in the moment. 

I will elaborate on the following question some other time …

new: but what do we mean by ‘the moment?’ The British pianist/conductor Clive Wearing suffered from a virus in 1985 which left his hippcampus devastated. He had almost no memory at all. He could not recall

It seems to me, from personal and general observation, that there’s no choice about it. We are all living in, and perhaps ‘stuck,’ in the moment. Where else can we be? So, first of all, what do people actually intend or hope for when they affirm their desire to be in the moment? Is it something real and practical? Personally when I experience what I think of as ‘in the moment,’ the experience seems to be one of absence as well as presence. What are absent are the long-standing resistances and obstacles, some of which are self-created from personal history and others that are acculturated. Am I good enough? What are we looking for? What am I looking for?

 =          =          =          =

………………This is a whole other section. It might include reading Krishnamurthy, Ouspensky, the group, playing for movements.

=          =          =          =

This question, not so much in the foreground of my teens and 20s as it was one of the constant background questions, informing the way I evaluated things and made decisions. I also began to observe that my conscious decision-making process was largely an illusion. It seemed to me that my decisions were already largely formulated and I was merely deciding to do what “I” had already decided to do. Yes, this is a question about the existence of “free will” and “conscious” behaviour. Of course, I could, for example, decide to put my left leg into my pants first instead of my habituated right-leg-first, and I could even remember to do so for a week at a time (which also soon became a habit) but those are not the kinds of decisions that I’m writing about. How did I decide to play this instead of that? Why go into the minor mode? Why harmonize this melody note as the minor 9th of a dominant-seventh? Why more sustain pedal? Why play detaché articulation? Some decisions existed on a very low level, and they all felt like running over old territory. Almost like squeezing a sponge again, long after the water has been eliminated. But sometimes it all felt new. Where did that come from? Again, to be honest, nothing was ever entirely new. The contingency might be new. The placement or sequence might be new. My listening might be new. But I’ve played all these notes before; all these intervals and scales, all these chords and rhythms. Was I in fact looking for originality? Not really. Originality never interested me per se. I think I was more focused on authenticity. I did not want to play exclusively from outside influences. Even though it can be an important part of one’s musical education, I wasn’t in search of producing music that I already knew. It’s already done so well; why would I seek to imitate something—especially since the imitation rarely surpasses the source.

So was my improvising merely a matter of reconfiguring past knowledge, past skills? Shuffling the cards? Recirculating the air? When someone said that they wanted to ‘get better’ at their improvising, how to relate to that—especially as a teacher. What did they mean by getting “better?” And now, finding myself a full-time university professor with two improvisation classes and a musicianship class, what was most appropriate to teach. What would be most useful and of what consequence was the manner of presentation?

Learning About Teaching:

I soon realized that I had received no training in any of this teaching business. My wife and daughter had education licenses and they earned them with many courses and in-class experiences. None of my colleagues had studied curriculum development or classroom management or any other courses critical for successful teaching. And I saw some horrendous examples of bad teaching. I also saw some brilliant lectures but which fell on largely deaf or inattentive ears, because these profs were teaching their curriculum instead of teaching their students. And I saw how easy were those traps. I saw how even a group of two or three students could not really be taught the same way. So how to deal with a class of 20 or 150?

Some students could be strongly drawn in when the material became more personal as, for example, with the inclusion of anecdotal material from the prof’s past. Other students found this kind of thing to be a distraction from the material at hand, a waste of time, perhaps because they failed to make the intended connections. Some students respond mainly or only to verbal instruction but could not lift written words off the page to make them operational. Some students only learned from the written words, because it allowed them to read the ideas at their own pace, with their own emphasis, and to reread as many times as they needed. Some students seemed to need a strict professor with extremely specific requirements for assignments while others responded very positively to a relaxed manner. I loved teaching but I realized that I was not as adept and flexible, not as observant and predictive as I needed to be. So much to observe! So much to learn!

I had a super chatty first-year musicianship class one year. I really liked the students. They were talented and interested, but they never shut up. It was distracting to me, mainly because I thought it was rude and that they were not listening to what I had so carefully prepared. I wondered what they were talking about. I began to surprise them with individually directed questions to see if they were actually paying attention. At the conclusion of one class two students approached me. They always sat next to each other and chatted intermittently. They were both stellar students and very talented musicians. I could tell that they had it in for me and I was going to get some criticism about something or other.

The older student, a man who had courageously returned to university as a 30-year old, spoke first. He looked a bit put off. He said that he knew I was occasionally singling him out to see if he was following along with the class. He said that he really loved the class and tried not to miss a beat, but he felt that it was condescending of me to try to catch him off guard. He simply said that it was annoying and asked me to stop doing it. He was paying attention, and his tests, assignments and classroom responses proved it. I turned to the younger one (presently a successful jazz performer, composer and recording artist) expecting to hear the same theme with variations.

I said, so you feel the same way? The two of them looked at each other in a peculiar way and I began to feel that they had not planned to come up together. So the younger student finally said that he didn’t feel the same way at all. He said, “If you don’t call on me at least three times in each class, I feel ignored. I need to be roused awake by surprise questions, just as you’ve been doing.” They looked at each other with some surprise, and then we all tacitly became aware of how difficult it can be to teach more than one person at a time.

Still, I wondered what the class was always buzzing about and whether I was somehow to lax and too friendly. The classes always seemed wonderful but the constant buzz bothered me. Was I too relaxed and too casual? So I started a subtle experiment. The class met three times a week and for the next class I put on a white button down shirt. In the subsequent class I wore a regular shirt but I added a sport jacket. Then I wore a white shirt and a dressy vest. Then a white shirt and tie with jeans. Then a dressy sweater with neat wool slacks. Over a few weeks I dressed up more and more until I was in a three piece black suit and tie with dress shoes. Over this period of time, I avoided sitting on desks and avoided any casual postures, such as leaning on anything; I stood up straight. To my surprise (and delight) my dress and altered demeanor seemed to quiet the class down. Then over another few weeks I gradually dressed and behaved more casually until I was wearing an old pair of jeans with a slightly torn tee shirt, not tucked into my pants—pants that I had obviously used for painting—and paint-smeared running shoes. I went to class without shaving for a day or even a few days. The class very clearly got noisier each day. And I was finally convinced that their behaviour was strongly influenced by how they saw me. If I looked like a typical prof, they were quieter. However I also began to realize that they were more up-tight, more intimidated by their automatic associations with the appearance of a “prof.” And it did not take long to see that they did not learn as much or as thoroughly when they were outwardly more quiet. I had to bite that one, because my personal preference for a quiet class did not establish the kind of class I really wanted. So I made adjustments in my attitude and learned to appreciate what seemed like chaotic inattention. Everyone seemed happier, including me.

How to be a professor.

So I was very raw for the first few years. My classes were wonderful. I quickly learned how to fill two or three hours with varied challenges and high energy activities and discussions. But while I led good classes, I felt uneasy with establishing a clear curriculum. In musicianship or improvisation, how far along should the students be after 8 months? What could be expected of them? And not every group seemed to have the same potential. So what could I use as a model to establish reasonable expectations, and how to get there in the allotted time frame of two semesters?

Every so often one of my senior colleagues, Bob Witmer, came into my office. He was a prof I very much admired because he seemed like an experienced teacher, a published researcher, a symphonic bassist, and a gigging jazz player. He would sometimes come in to give me something to read that he had just written. I was honoured but, not having the depth of academic background that he had acquired, I could not understand why he wanted feedback from me. But he invited my participation and so I complied. One day I thought I’d ask him about his philosophy of teaching. I told him that I knew that my classes were informative, well-paced, clear, exciting, and that they offered relevant information and skills concerning how to navigate a musical life. But I did not possess anything resembling a general philosophy; I didn’t know how to establish year-long goals for the students. So I asked him how he approached his classes … not any specific class, but how did he organize himself to teach for two semesters and end up somewhere.

He simply said, “I just try to make myself obsolete as quickly as possible.”

We shared a short laugh and I turned to go into my office. As I sat down at my desk, I thought it was brilliant advice. Give everything I have, but take care that the students do not become dependent on me. I have carried that with me as consistently as possible, and into as many roles a possible, including my role as parent, where so many subtleties are lost without that measure.

I am the teacher

I seemed to have been a valued accompanist in my department. I always made myself available to faculty and students who needed support for rehearsals and concerts. I always had a stack of music to learn and I enjoyed the challenge. One of the more contemporary pieces, however, gave me trouble. I was not clear about the notation and had a lot of questions about how to play it. I pondered quite a bit, trying to use logic and prior experience to figure it out. There was no internet at that time. I felt that I was on my own. As I pushed open the heavy steel doors to exit the Common Room, I decided that I would simply ask my teacher at my next piano lesson. I suddenly stopped short, door half open, and became still for a moment as the realization hit me: “I AM the teacher.”

That recognition was certainly simple but also stunning in its ramifications. I had colleagues but I no longer had my teacher. I no longer had that kind of support, and among the swirl of thoughts was the recognition that I had to learn to trust myself to find the best solution; I could also learn to trust my colleagues, hoping that they wouldn’t think I was an idiot for asking questions that (I assumed) everyone else no longer needed to ask. I realized that I would have to fill this role for the many students who were in my charge. I also slowly recognized that almost everyone probably has this experience. And the question that slowly formulated itself was, “What can I trust in myself to find an adequate response?”

There’s no punch line here. I do suspect that every living thing goes through such a transition, even if they don’t possess an intellect that can reify their experiences to form ‘thoughts’ about them. Every being must somehow grow up and reach the point when they must ‘separate’ from their past in order to continue. I’m guessing that this might be true for a paramecium, a snail, a fruit fly, a fetus, a seed, all mammals, maybe even a virus. And it may well be true for newly formed stars, planets, and various other cosmic units.We all probably have some ‘skin’—some kind of ‘coating’—that needs to be shed in order to grow a new one. I even suspect that building this website is part of such an act.