About Ghosts of Our Former Selves - chapter 3 (ugly looking boxes)
Chapters 1 and 2 start the story and each is short. If you have the time, please start there.
About the inspiration for the album, Ghosts of Our Former Selves
Chapter 3 - Ugly Looking Boxes
This project really could only have been completed in 2020. The thematic threads have percolated for years and just recently truly come together. There is another reason too. This difficult historical moment happens to coincide with a golden age for music technology. Even as a composer known for electroacoustic music, I have always struggled with and cursed the technology, its opportunities and its limitations. All the while, I have watched things shift and become more usable, transparent, and much more widely available. The original studios, such as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, were built from expensive, bulky equipment (the RCA Mark II synthesizer, required its own room). With current technology though, one can record, layer, manipulate, mix, and master sound entirely on a laptop. That we have already started to take this for granted is evidence of just how profound a change this really is. It is this accessibility that has finally made it possible for me to bring all the corners of my musical worlds into conversation. Ideas from anywhere can collide in one workspace and I can hear the results in real time, shaping sound almost like creating sculpture, with a fluidity that was impossible not that long ago.
Eric with the RCA Mark II Synthesizer, 1996
My discovery of the tape recorder was life changing, as it had been for the pioneers of electroacoustic music a generation earlier. But I was slower than some on the uptake. I had my first encounters with a tape recorder and then a synthesizer in the late sixties. I now recognize that there was a pattern; first the excitement of exploration as I attempted to coax interesting sounds from some new, mysterious machine, then frustration at its inability to comply. Later in the studio, I would witness technical displays of virtuosity with envy. For me, it always started with the music I was imagining, and the machines were not willing partners until I had spent countless hours persistently pursuing a few seconds of sound. Mel Powell recounted a story that resonated for me. He and Bülent Arel had spent all night in the Columbia studio at 125th street, only to end up having made what Bülent described as, “the sound of a flatulent rhinoceros”. “Don’t worry”, he told Mel as they left that morning, “one day, Max Matthews will want to make the sound of a flatulent rhinoceros, we will show him how!”
There is one big pitfall to the proliferation of music technology that has my full attention as a composer and teacher. With such a rich array of hardware and software, it is incredibly easy to be distracted and forget to focus on the music. This is especially tough in a society that so worships technology. It is fiendishly difficult to discover what music might be enabled and expressed by some new “instrument”. And while developing the tools is not easy, it is far easier to get people excited about a new device than about a musical idea. Developing a musical idea requires striking a delicate balance; learning enough technique for the project at hand, while preserving the bulk of the time for musical imagining. No amount of explanation of technique, process, or instrument design is going to substitute for having actually made interesting music.
To even start to develop a musical idea, a composer has to be, above all, an attentive, astute listener. Yet, even if one does manage to avoid the distractions of the “musical toys”, developing the ability to listen has never been more difficult. Finding a quiet space and the time for concentration is hard in our world of myriad distractions. I spend more time than ever now helping students strategize how to create a good work environment. Someone once told me that more than half of the information processed in our brains is visual. What we might hear has to compete then, against the odds, with what we see. Perhaps this is why we musicians often close our eyes to give ourselves over entirely to listening. I find it helpful to remember Pauline Oliveros’ daily Deep Listening meditation, "Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening."
My search for a space where I might notice small details and listen carefully started early. During the first few years that my family lived in Whippany, I developed a habit that has served this purpose ever since. Whenever the chaos in our house escalated, as was inevitable with six kids and a menagerie of pets, I would escape to the quiet of the woods. Our yard abutted what seemed, to my six-year-old self, a vast forest. In reality, it was a small stand of trees screening the neighboring farm from our small development, but it quickly became my refuge – special because I had discovered it and could explore without seeing or hearing another soul. In a short time, I came to know the position and configuration of the trees as if each was a familiar friend. So when the bulldozers arrived one day and began to flatten my forest, I was mortified and heartsick. Powerless to stop the ever-expanding asphalt, I anxiously searched the neighborhood until I found another wooded plot down at the other end of the street. But it wasn’t long before I arrived to find those trees flattened too. This pattern continued, inevitable and indifferent to the lives of the trees, until all that remained was a vast, characterless line of houses. My antipathy for suburban sprawl and so-called development hardened into an anger that is still ignited today whenever I recognize greed masquerading as progress. That happens so often lately that it’s impossible to keep track.
This love of the forest set off a chain reaction of life choices that I could never have anticipated. I developed a small circle of like-minded friends who joined the Appalachian Mountain Club, bought guidebooks, and set off for the hiking trails of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. When it came time to apply to college, my friend, Randy was looking at colleges in Maine, a not so distant state that still boasted a wilderness. I decided that was for me too.
I arrived at Bates College in 1973 partly as a deliberate choice not to major in music. At the time, Bates had no music major, so I would be safely shielded from the gravity of music that I was sure was pulling me into a life of poverty. Along with my hiking experience, my time in Key West and Bermuda had instilled a deep curiosity about the natural world and even though my brilliant scientist father exerted a silent influence rather than a deliberate pressure, I decided I would study biology. I did well with those studies and in my senior year was allowed out of the classroom to live in Boothbay Harbor, becoming, I thought, a marine biologist. The town during those winters was sparsely populated and as frigid as it was beautiful. I braved the biting coastal winds to collect and study crabs, clams, and when the weather finally started to warm, a wonderfully strange little species of nudibranch or sea slug.
Flabellina verrucosa
As much as I thought I was escaping music by moving to Maine, events conspired to pull me back. Bates started a music major shortly after I arrived, four or five of us became the pioneers, and I was suddenly a double major. There was no hiding in such an intimate environment. When I met with the three faculty members of the music department, they told me, each in their own direct way, “you’re a composer” and arranged for me to start studying with Elliott Schwartz over at Bowdoin. Musicologist, Ann Scott added in a concerned tone, “you have a lot of work to do”.
