Berlin Diaries- "Facebook Withdrawal Symptoms"- 29.04.2009

Blame my being in Facebook on a former classmate of mine who suddenly reappeared in my life. “Is this Mr. Dorset of Oberlin fame? If so, let me know.” His e-mail evoked memories of warm Ohio summer evenings where we would contemplate the meaning of life together while speeding down rural roads in his ‘76 Mustang to buy Blatz Beer. I wrote a long letter back, telling him about my work in Berlin and asking him what he was up to. His reply was short and to the point: “I’m working at Nokia now. Are you on Facebook? If so, look me up. I’m there.”

“Face-what?” I asked myself, heading off to Google. Not exactly knowing what to expect, I arrived at the doorstep of the website that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life” and felt I was entering a brave new world. I signed up and within weeks my past was coming out of the woodwork, invitations arriving daily in my inbox to become ‘so and so’s’ friend again.

I was impressed. “This is absolutely amazing,” I thought to myself. Understand that one of the casualties in my life, through living in Europe, has been keeping up with my past. Having moved over a dozen times since coming over back in 1990, I often had the feeling that my life has been constantly on hold, waiting for the time when I would finally settle down and unpack my bags. Moreover, when 90% of your daily script takes place in languages other than your own, it can often feel as if parts of your identity slip away from you. Not that I necessarily mind that, but sometimes I feel that in struggling to find some kind of balance between my ‘American’ side and my adopted ‘European’ side I feel like an outsider to both worlds.

Therefore, despite the constant cries that “it sucks,” I can’t damn Facebook entirely, even though I understand critics of the site and have also gone so far as to get myself booted out of the site. Of course Facebook is just a bunch of hype, and of course it’s overrated, overstuffed and just plain over(add what you wish here).. I think so too, but so is pretty much everything else online. Facebook is merely a tool, maybe not perfect, but still- why stick the blame on just one website?

What I find interesting is the psychology that goes along with online social networking. Essentially such webistes are just places where poor schmucks like me land in attempt to make themselves appear more popluar than they actually are, and equally so, where popular people go to have their egos petted. When I first signed up two years ago I was impressed at how some people seemed to have hundreds of friends from across the world- people whose images portrayed cool friends and lifestyles far more interesting than mine. However, as the months passed and I statred to watch my own ‘friends list’ grow I saw a virtual social ladder expand in front of me. And almost like a junkie in need of his daily fix, there were people with whom I desperately hoped to be friends with so as to increase my virtual social status. It’s pitiful, I know. It didn’t matter that this particular person would ever cross my life again- just having my name on his or her list seemed to be a confirmation of my existence. I was hooked.

And yet, as my list expanded, I became more and more puzzled with what was going online. Why were we all wasting so much time, super poking each other with sheep, biting each other like vampires, or testing ourselves to discover our personality in the form of a musical mode? (I’m Lydian, by the way, “more major than major,” and my Chakra point is the Third Eye, with the ability to visualize and be insightful, but also with the danger of slipping into a world of fantasy. How about you?) Moreover, who were all of these people trying to schmooze up to me with friends requests? Many I could barely remember and with one or two cases my mind still draws an absolute blank. How embarrassing. Maybe I was your friend once, but I think I was under the influence of (check one) beer, wine, or vodka when that happened. Does that still really qualify?

So much for ‘connecting and sharing with the people in your life.’ Honestly, I miss the days where I was still getting real handwritten letters in my mailbox downstairs. Some of the tripe I read when I log on make me despair. Things like, “My mind is a mystery!!!,” “i AM ABOUT TO TAKE A LOVELY NAP!!!,” and “Scoopin the cats poopens!!!” are comments that would make Ralf Waldo Emerson, who once wrote “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know” either change his mind or just run away altogether. A friend of mine put it succinctly: “To me, "Facebook," is to "E-mail," what "E-mail" is to receiving an actual letter from a friend, in the "personal-sized" envelope: cheap.”

So, despite my feeling of being trapped inside the system now, here’s my offer to you: feel free to join me on Facebook, but don’t expect much. I won’t super poke you, bite you, or help you plant your garden. Still, if you send me your address and I’ll make the effort to get out my old Parker 45 and stain my fingers with ink while writing you a real letter. You may hold onto it a bit longer.




Berlin Diaries- Member of the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction- (motto: "Leef zoals je wil"- "Live as you like")


“Improvisers constantly strive to put their thoughts together in different ways, going over old ground in search of new. The activity is much like creative thinking in language, in which the routine process is largely devoted to rethinking. By ruminating over formerly held ideas, isolating particular aspects, examining their relationships to the features of other ideas, and, perhaps, struggling to extend ideas in modest steps and refine them, thinkers typically have the sense of delving more deeply into the possibilities of their ideas, There are of course, also the rarer moments when they experience discoveries as unexpected flashes of insight and revelation.”

- Paul Berliner-: Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvisation

This past summer, while sanding down the floors of Hannah's bedroom, I had National Public Radio from Washington on in the background to keep up with the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for president. Although the six-hour time difference made me miss his acceptance speech, there was more than enough coverage of the event, including the historical significance of Obama's speech to his delegates as it was given on the 45th anniversary of when Martin Luther King spoke out “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

There was one story that particularly stood out in my mind. Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR's 'Morning Edition', had invited two guests about King's speech: Taylor Branch, a historian and author of several books about Reverend King, and Roger Wilkins, a civil rights activist and author who was working for the federal government back in the 1960's. The two spoke about the different 'levels' of rhetoric in 'I Have a Dream,' with Roger Wilkins mentioning about how orators like King "build on their own thought as it comes along and build on lines they had used (beforehand) and that had worked." However, it was Taylor Branch's comment afterwards that made my ears perk up:

"King was a preacher in the same sense that a jazz musician went back to things that worked, but because this was such a momentous occasion he had for once written out a whole new speech."

Branch continued, explaining about Reverend King's dissatisfaction with one line he had written, and how he had spontaneously replaced it with what became one of the best known utterances of the 20th Century:

''King did indeed begin to improvise: in the final text he got through half of it, and in fact you can see exactly where it broke off. He couldn't bring himself to deliver this line: 'And so today let us go back to our communities as members of the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction.' This was pompous and he wouldn't do it and instead he launched off into a series of riffs, not just 'I have a dream' but ' Let freedom ring' and 'With this faith'- a series, the best known of which of course is 'I have a dream'.''

Hearing that was like feeling a moment of liberation inside me. Nowadays, so used to the sterility of pre-choreographed perfection, we really seem to be almost impotent of losing ourselves to the delights and dangers of spontaneous thought and feeling, be it in words or in music. This spontaneity is my opinion the very element which makes a performance 'come alive', but too often I experience the opposite.

What is it that has lead us, like sheep, so astray? As a musician, I often see the problem as an unconscious pressure of achieving CD quality when going on stage. Of course my words are exaggerated, I know; all musicians realize that a CD cannot replace what you have in a live performance, but I just notice how technology has changed our perception of music-making in rehearsals. 'Self-discovery' is replaced by 'presentation', 'music making' is replaced by the stress of 'playing together', and everything- from creating a steady tempo and clear articulation to achieving transparency in the musical affects and intonation the intonation- is accurately joined together, filed out, and made to work 'perfectly' before facing the public. They're important things of course, but if you have practiced the art of public performance long enough you get to a point where you go through a routine of prefabricated quick fixes in rehearsals, allowing you to put together a performance more quickly than it takes to build a IKEA cabinet. It works, but is it music?

I suspect the same holds true for many professional orators and writers nowadays. We just cannot help it- the television cameras and internet are there to immediately connect us to millions, and we do not want to make asses of ourselves by screwing up in public. Imagine if Martin Luther King, when speaking back in 1963, had the technology of today but also would have received the same immediate scrutiny and analysis that we saw in the four presidential debates this autumn (I was impressed at how, during the debates, CNN was able to display the positive or negative reaction each candidate's words were having on a select group of undecided Ohio voters.) King, in such a situation, might have not have trusted himself to break off from his script passing before his eyes on the tele-prompter. Maybe he wouldn't have had the boldness to utter "I have a dream," words which, because they were spoken, ultimately carried America to where it is today with Barack Obama as president. Had King had a nice Apple laptop to write his speech on, he might have fiddled around with his lines here and there and smoothed things out, but that decisive moment of taking the risk and breaking away in his own unexpected flash of insight and revelation would have not been there.

Still, in the creative process, a writer is both master and slave to his or her own tyranny. That's what I like about writing- it's a demanding one on one discussion with myself. It's not like with music, where I often have to face with Dr. Jekell- Mr. Hyde personalities- musicians who off stage are perfectly fine but who immediately become impossible to work with as soon as the instrument touches their hands. I've seen too many good musicians- people who I really enjoy being with- so frustrated so much that they decide to leave a group or the music scene altogether. And perhaps I'm joining them by studying writing- I don't wish to be a slave to such people either.

(Still, it doesn't mean that I can hold onto some kind of inner ideal, and it doesn't mean that I'm no longer searching for that ideal ensemble that offers both a decent director and a good bottle of beer afterwards.)

In my CD collection I have several recordings of orchestras and soloists from the 1920's and 30's where you can immediately tell that the musicians were not so concerned in such high standards of perfection. The lines are maybe more jarring and the intonation is somewhat off, but within that lack of immediate polish there are moments of unsurpassed musical genius. And it doesn't have to be old either- it just needs to be understood that perfection isn't everything. I love my Jaap Schröder/Jos van Immerseel recording of the Beethoven Violin Sonatas- in my opinion Jaap, although there are points where his intonation is so 'wow-ingly' off, he still succeeds in delivering one of the most human performances of the sonatas I know of.

Recently I have been reading through the master's thesis of Tord Gustavsen, a Norwegian jazz pianist whose recordings with his trio I really like. His 'Dialectical Erotism of Improvisation' goes into the need of a musician to find a balance between 'inner security' juxtaposed with the desire of 'finding newness' in music making, and relates in an almost Eric Ericsson-like analysis of human needs from infancy to maturity:

“Perceiving the world from one's own standpoint, with one's own needs and desires as a basis, is important. But narcissism is around the corner if one does not simultaneously understand objects as existing outside of oneself, and if one does not see others as separate agents with ontological status of their own... Subjectification and objectivication in relation to our surroundings must take place simultaneously to achieve the synthesis of passionate closeness and lucid distance. One must expand, interpret and integrate one's surroundings in a manifold Lebenswelt of meanings, relations and emotions- and this demands that one dares the movement between the safe and the familiar into the secure and unknown and back, and that one establishes an intimacy precisely in this moment- an intimacy that opens up for real integrated action.”

When carrying this to over to the role of the performer, Guvstavsen continues:

“The improviser must- as we have explored in many ways by now- take chances. Making music is an act of courage, and the great moments often arise when secure at-homeness and risky surprises or breaking of new grounds are mutually enforcing each other. You are safe enough to risk something, and the gratification in successful encounters with the unknown (in sound and in technique) strengthens and expands the at-homeness and readiness for ever new challenges. This ideal situation requires an apparatus of orientation with which one relates to fellow musicians and sounding music out of a combination of sincere, desire-driven subjectification and attentive, differentiating objectification. The feeling feeling of safety requires a certain gratification and a basic subjectification in the playing situation. This safety can in turn open up for flexibility and courage.”

In other words, "I have a dream," and not, "And so today let us go back to our communities as members of the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction." King decided to just get to the point.

An About Face: Turning Tricks with the Living Singing Christmas Tree.

"Here we often find a conflict between avant-garde attitudes on the one hand and neoclassicist ones at the other, where the first party tries to monopolize the definition of novelty- and, in fact, of creativity at large… (One) can claim that it is totally arrogant not to recognize the freshness and newness happening within familiar stylistic boundaries every time a musician approaches the stylistic area with openness and the desire to say something in his or her here and now situation. Basically, one does not have to invent a new language to tell a new story. Anything that is experienced as a creative encounter between a devoted musical consciousness and a musical substance, is in fact fresh newness… and must be recognized as such."

-Tord Gustavsen

While I was studying at Oberlin, I once did a Christmas 'Hits from Handel's Messiah' gig with a so-called “Living Singing Christmas Tree.” It was your typical bad church choir gig, but somebody at the church had excellent marketing skills. Because, the singers were set up on a series of different height podiums behind a large evergreen bushes that were arranged to look like an enormous christmas tree. You could only see the heads of the choir members sticking out of the pine needle branches, and, as it was the season to be jolly, the 'tree' was wired up to thousands of electronically controlled christmas tree lights. As the advertisement for the concert proudly announced, it was not only possible to 'hear' Handel's great masterpiece played live but also 'see' it in all of its glory "with a spectacular light show that is certain to astonish and amaze all members of your family this holiday season." Now it was possible to see the Handel's joy when he wrote 'Oh for to us a child is born' with a dazzling display of mint-sparkling white lights as well as the festive Christmas mood when the choir sang 'Oh thou that tellest good tidings to Zion', set to a choreography of flashing green and red lights. It was just wonderful- all very 1980's. But best of all was the 'Hallelujah' chorus. Here, the lighting team let their fantasies run wild in a bewildering and ever growing crescendo of color combinations that wildly flashed on and off and raced across the tree in a frenzy, up and down, and back and forth. Each new entrance new the choir created new racy color combinations, and by the end, as the choir attempted to sing “And he shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah!” the 'living singing Christmas tree' was literally exploding in an orgy of fireworks that outdid the Eiffel Tower at the turn of the millennium. Add to that the fact that we violinists had to stand up in that moment and put our lighted Santa Claus caps on and my overly sensitive self was so highly embarrassed that I fled to Europe several years later.


My hope of finding more serious forms of music making worked, but in the past several years I have been seeing such 'tendencies' rearing up again, most recently in something called a 'baroque lounge' concert. After Sting performed a live concert of his Dowland recording at the Yellow Lounge in Berlin two years ago, there have been a slew of 'copies' where baroque music is presented as sort of classical form of 'MTV Unplugged.' Actually it's not all that bad of an idea in itself; I actually like the concept of performing in a club atmosphere where the people are actually encouraged to shed the formality and decorum found in most concert halls. In this one situation, we were set up in the middle of the crowd so that the entire formality of 'stage' and 'audience' was broken, creating a very intimate and relaxed atmosphere that was fun to play in. I would love to do such a similar concert concert again, because it felt in some ways more close to being authentic than the stiff formality of 19th Century concert hall atmospheres. In fact, Robert Levin speaks about the kind of audience most likely found at Mozart's performances in an interview titled 'Speaking Mozart's Lingo' and somehow it fits:


"To Mozart, playing a concerto was not an act of communion with a hallowed masterpiece; it was show biz. His letters show that he expected a kind of audience response that would be found today at a jazz club but might get you thrown out of some classical concert halls."

I would have gladly played longer- a proper concert even, with a break in between to mingle with the audience over a drink. However after fifty minutes of music, a DJ wearing a white clown wig came out and started to thump out a sampled 'live mix' of our music over a six channel surround sound system. All of the sudden electronic snippets of Vivaldi and Corelli were racing around the room while being morphed together on top of strange electronic whale-like cries and pop beats.

He was supposedly an excellent DJ, one of the best from Hamburg, but I felt frustrated, so much so that after the second such performance I just left the hall in disgust and took a quiet beer with a friend in a pub on the other side of town.

Tell me- am I missing something here? Are such concerts really 'avant-garde' and the silver bullet that is going to draw the public back to classical music, or am I really so uncool that it hurts? (You don't have to answer that last question...) Isn't it good enough that, like in a jazz club, that we play our sets and the people can just sit around relaxed with their beers and enjoy the atmosphere? Or, if we don't want to play, then why not let a sound system rock out baroque hits like the way the Santo Spirito bar in Vienna (http://www.santospirito.at/) does, with bass levels so loud that you have to scream at your neighbor over your beer. And they don't seem to be hurting for clients.

I would welcome your thoughts here- even if it is hate mail.

In the end, I have no final words, just beginnings and questions. My solace to this whole dilemma is that I was able to end my musical year with an incredible performance of The Messiah at the Concertgebow in Amsterdam. Every time we played there, I am just amazed easy it is to play in that hall, feeling how the sound floats out like silk into the audience. And even though such 'formal' concerts go against my wish to find more ways to to break the shackles of 19th century I am struck at how music making, when it 'works' needs no gimmicks. The creative encounter is, as Tord Gustavsen explains, new and fresh, and when I looked out into the audience, I saw how they were moved by the performance, again confirming the reason why I do this job in the first place.

Please, lets find ways to keep our art as culture without turning it into a form of musical prostitution.