china wrap …
This picture is of pianist Vicky Chow and me rehearsing FAITH for the final concert on our tour of China. (Thanks to Vicky’s brother Johnny for the picture, via Vicky’s Facebook page.) With his back to the camera is composer/saxophonist Demetrius Spaneas, who joined us on the Beijing/Hong Kong legs of the tour. Besides playing FAITH in Shanghai, twice in Beijing and finally in Hong Kong, the tour also gave me an initial chance to try out the Prelude to MONO in all three cities. It was very interesting and instructive for me.
Particularly at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where the text was projected in Chinese in coordination with my speaking in English, people seemed to be genuinely moved by the piece. My concerns … that the musical materials would seem too simple, or would somehow not work with the spoken text … didn’t seem to be a problem.
What I was aware of, and perhaps can fix in the next few days, is that the way that I handle voice processing in the piece is not really as refined as I’d like. Basically, I’d like to make each looped segment of recorded speech have a unique and somehow meaningful type of processing. At this point, it feels like most of the loops just have various delays, echoes, pitch shifting … but that it’s never really relevant to what is being described, nor does it necessarily reflect the condition I’m experiencing. I think particularly of the place where I mention tinnitus … and right now I have a multilayered delay. Wrong. It would be interesting if I could really ease in a sound which would convey the white noise aspect of what I really hear, without just overwhelming the audience with a blast of white noise. Similarly, when I talk about sounds on my left side seeming to come from a kazoo being played across the street, I should take some time and embody that state of hearing.
I’m due to perform the piece again in New York at the Cornelius Street Cafe on Monday night. I have some time this evening in my hotel in Hong Kong. I wonder if I’ll be able to make an initial pass at fixing these things tonight or Sunday in NYC, in order to have a revised version on Monday?
Another issue which came up repeatedly for me was the problem posed by performing with my disabled ear. Specifically, do I use my hearing aid when I perform (which means I hear everything with a patina of heavy distortion on the left side), or do I turn off the hearing aid (which means I just don’t hear what’s on the left side)? For the most part, I’ve always tried to just put the stage monitor on my right side, and turn off the hearing aid. For several concerts during this trip, though, that wasn’t possible. Last night I had to monitor myself from the house speakers, and I could really only hear the one on stage-right, which was by my left ear. So I kept my hearing aid on, and just dealt with the distortion.
There’s a certain sense in which all of this is very strange. Before the SSNHL performing was all about listening closely to the SOUND I produced. Now, it’s more about imagining the sound, and monitoring what I can to make sure that the sound is what I want it to be, even if I can’t really hear it. It’s very odd, since my internal sense of what I want is so very clear … the timbres, the way the sounds move in space, the fullness of the stereo image … but I can’t hear any of this clearly with my ears. So I’m sort of working off of cues as to what is going out, hoping that I’m interpreting what I do hear accurately. I sort of imagine that it’s what it must be like to do surgery with a remote controlled robotic arm. You don’t have the real sensory input that you’d expect touching flesh with your fingers, but you hope you’ve got enough feedback from the mechanism to do as good a job as if you were there in person.
A few words about touring in China again. While the person who arranged the Beijing and Hong Kong legs of the tour showed an amazing incompetence … didn’t seem to realize that it was necessary to arrange for equipment or figure out the repertoire to be played by the various artists he’d brought, nor take responsibility for coordination of publicity … the composers and performers on the tour managed to fill in the blanks, and the support from the institutions in China was really wonderful. In Beijing Tammy Huang of the Pearl Shell International Cultural Exchange was a warm, professional and thoughtful host, and the club D-22 and the Central Conservatory both provided great support for our concerts. In addition to the concerts, I ended up doing a surprise recording session at the Beijing Film Academy with Demetrius and flutist/cilia performer Bruce Gremo, at the instigation of recording engineer Jürgen Frenz, who heard us improvise for an hour of so at D-22. Hopefully this will become another CD, the first improvisational recording I’ve done since Fish Love That in 2001. In Hong Kong, the Chinese University of HK provided us with the support we needed, even though they hadn’t received any information from the producer about the gig, including tech needs and publicity info, until we sent it 2 days before the concert, when we figured out that the producer had dropped the ball.
The really great part of the trip, as usual, was the interaction with the various people I got to see and meet and work with. And at this point, there are some continuing friendships developing with folks in China. The American and Canadian musicians in Beijing and Hong Kong were a pleasure to work with, performing with Vicky is always a treat. And meeting new friends and contacts in all three cities makes me hope I’ll be able to find ways to continue coming back here.
imperfect pitch …
So, this is my view from the hotel room in Shanghai. My last day here I am finally losing some of the jet lag. For lunch, I headed out of the hotel, dreading going into a who-knows-what restaurant and spending too much for something not so good, because I don’t know what to order. Or more dreadful yet, I had thoughts of heading up to Huaihai Lu to get MacDonalds, because it would be easy. Instead walked down Fuxing Lu, found a noodle shop where I walked in, and despite them no knowing any English and me being able to say little more than “I am alone” and “I want to eat something.” I got settled at a little table on the sidewalk with a couple of Chinese guys who seemed to find me very funny, and helped me figure out how to season and stir up my noodle ramen (which is what it sounded like they called it), with hand pulled noodles being made by a lady on the sidewalk next to me. Incredibly delicious. I’m brought back to the taste of “muslim food” in China, funky tables and stools blocking the sidewalk. Yum. Oh yes, and while I don’t know how much the MacDonalds would have cost, this was a total of 11 kwai, or just under $2. And then I spent another 2 kwai on a delicious sesame covered sticky rice ball from a little hole-in-the-wall bakery vendor for dessert.
Dinner last night with an ex-student now living in Pudong (new eastern extension of Shanghai) and found that his wife has had a similar experience with hearing loss, but as the result of a tumor. As we sat down to supper, she said “I can’t sit here” and moved to the opposite side of the table. I suspected at that point that something was going on with her hearing, and the story came out in our discussion. Then I received a very moving story from another ex-student via email about her hearing loss, resulting from a fall, and her on-going recovery through application of traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong, etc. I’ll begin performing MONO for real next week, and am now really thinking about how I move from my solo prelude into the body of the work.
Final hearing issue: I got a recording of the concert from last Thursday, and trimmed it down and posted it yesterday. Vicky texted me, saying it was low & slow. I went back and listened. Sure enough, the file was somehow playing at the wrong sampling rate, which made it sound like it was a slightly slowed down tape. Took much a big chunk of the morning to fix. But the lesson is that even when I CAN hear, it doesn’t mean much if I don’t use my brain. Don’t know how I didn’t notice that it was at the wrong pitch in my first listen …
down & up in Shanghai …
So, here is my healed foot. It’s 2 1/2 months since the last blog entry, my foot is pretty much healed (you can see the scar if you look closely). It’s on a window sill in my hotel room overlooking Shanghai, where I landed day before yesterday. And this does, surprisingly, relate to my hearing, and to MONO.
I was to premiere the prelude to MONO, which I’ve been working on feverishly for the last month or so, this past Sunday. What happened instead was … 10pm concert scheduled on a Sunday night, in an out of the way East Village club, on the first cold and rainy weekend of the Fall … no one showed up. Imagine that. I couldn’t imagine it, and was incredibly stunned & depressed by the whole (lack of) event. Two weeks after a full house at the Smithsonian, I end up canceling a concert that couldn’t attract an audience to hear a new piece. What goes up, must come down.
What I did notice during the should check was that the pianist commented on the interesting use of stereo in the opening of my excerpt of MONO. Which I’d thought about, and planned for … but of course hadn’t noticed because I can’t hear it. So, I walked away from it with an awareness of two things: first, I need to really go back and make sure that I have made sense of movement from stereo to mono in the piece as it stands now, and second, that in the long run I’m going to need to hire someone to work with me on making an effective use of spatialization in this piece as it develops, since I really can’t hear it … and I’ve been living with this long enough that I forget that I can’t hear it.
I tackled the first of these issues, probably in a temporary way, by doing a little bit of reprogramming on the plane from NY to Shanghai on Monday-Tuesday. Now, in the final couple of minutes of the piece, a droning background and all the speech shift fully to the right side, so everyone else gets the sense of one-sided mono sound. On the other issue I’ve made a first contact with an audio person via email, and we’ll see where that goes. Meanwhile, the concert that didn’t happen will have its most important parts …. the NYC premiere of the MONO Prelude, and a performance of Hammer & Hair by Kathy Supove and Ana Milosavljevic, on my Monday night concert on Nov 9 at the Cornelia St Cafe. So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
Then, of course, there’s Shanghai. I’m still suffering a bit of jet lag. Well, a lot of jet lag. Was on my way out to dinner last night with some friends, and felt it hit me. Had to bail out of a wonderful looking Hunan dinner, come back to the hotel and crash. Only to wake up at 4:45am, when I get to look out the window at this interesting “Shanghai Education Activities Center” across the alley from my hotel. What you can’t see in the picture is how it’s framed against the 30 story+ towers of apartments and office buildings which make up Shanghai’s skyline, nor the shady streets of plane trees which form the French Concession area where I’m staying, near the Conservatory.
Yesterday I did the real first performance of the MONO Prelude for a group of students at the Shanghai Theater Institute. I’m not sure why I was asked to give them a 2 hr lecture, or what they got out of it, though they did have quite a few questions and responses at the end. Then came back to the Conservatory where I got to do a run-through of FAITH with Vicky Chow. Was very encouraging that we were able to get through it OK, and she played it with real feeling … which makes me feel great. We have another run through in about an hour, at 10am, then perform it as the opening of a Bang On A Can All-Stars show at the Festival this evening. Which will be the China premiere of that piece. And which I presume will attract a crowd, and won’t be canceled because no one shows up. Then Sunday Vicky and I head off to Beijing for at least 3 more performances of both FAITH and MONO, and then to Hong Kong.
And finally … it’s my birthday today. 62 years old, and here I am off on the wrong side of the world. I got to have a nice skype with Wendy this morning, and will again this evening. It’s actually more connected than another birthday I remember being away on, must have been 1978, with a crew from IRCAM, performing at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, while Wendy and 3-yr old Chloe were back in Paris. Then I was sick, terribly angry at being labeled part of the tech crew rather than being acknowledged as a performer by the IRCAM heirarchy, and miserable beyond reason. Now I’m a little lonely, but glad to have seen Wendy this morning on skype, and excited about the performance this evening. So hopefully, not a bad birthday.
the sole & the soul …
I’ve been slowly working my way through the initial responses to my request for stories about loss of sensory perception. The responses have been very fascinating … Besides the 13 entries so far on this blog’s “leave your story here” page, I’ve got literally over 100 email responses of various sorts. I’m trying to respond personally to every one, and hoping that out of this initial barrage of information I’ll be able to extract a text to use in the first portion of MONO which I need to be performing in a couple of months … more on that later.
Meanwhile, I’m having to deal with a mini/temporary change in my physical situation. 4 days ago had some elective surgery which is (hopefully) going to alleviate a constant pain in my left big toe. For I don’t know how many years … 8? 12? 15? … my toe has hurt most of the time. It’s worse when I run or walk a lot, and since I thrive on both walking and running, it’s worse a lot. Anyway, after many holistic attempts to deal with it, I was finally convinced that surgery was the way to go. That picture at the top of this entry is my left foot in its bandage, which evidently stays on, as is, for a couple of weeks. Initially I tried to avoid taking the oxycodone pain medication … big mistake. After writhing in pain the first night I reached the doc, who said I was under-medicating myself, and gave me specific instructions. Since then, with the pain pretty well under control, I’m noticing how the restriction of my physical movement impacts how I am psychically and emotionally. Other than being stir-crazy because I can’t really leave the house for a couple of weeks, I find that I can minimize my awareness of the pain and discomfort if I keep busy. It’s sort of been fun not editing my impulses to sedentary pursuits. I borrowed a bunch of videos from Chloe and set myself up in front of the TV. But I haven’t watched a single one of the borrowed videos. What I’ve actualoly been doing is studying Mandarin (getting ready for my October trip to China), studying Spanish (for Mexico trip next year), going through some admin stuff I need to do for the opening of school, working my way through my 100 email responses to my story request, and trying to figure out how to get moving on actually composing the first bit of MONO. I don’t seem to do very well with just vegging out … but I sort of knew that. And if I keep going on these activities that keep my mind engaged, I seem to not need to oxycodone nearly as much, and the isolated time flies a bit more freely.
Between sending out the request for stories and my foot surgery, the other thing which happened is that my siblings and I had a celebration to remember the life of my Mother, Joan Rolnick, who died last April 28 in Missouri. The celebration was in New York City, with many of our spouses, children, grandchildren, cousins and their families, as well as with many of my Mom’s east coast friends from a long life in which she was very involved with people. We told stories, sang songs, ate wonderful food, cried a little, laughed a lot.
The day after the official celebration, a bunch of us went up to Connecticut, walked into the woods behind the house where she and my Dad lived for 30 years or so, and scattered her ashes on the forest floor, on top of a rocky knoll, dappled in sunlight. We passed the bag of ashes around a circle, each taking a few handfuls of ashes and tossing them into the air or onto the ground. The bag ended up with Jakey, not quite 4 years old, and probably Mom’s favorite great-grandchild. Chloe claims that Jakey understood that the ashes were “Mimi Joan,” though I don’t see how he could really understand that. Nonetheless, the moment was incredibly moving and pregnant with meaning. Jake spent a long time going through the ashes, playing, throwing them, finally emptying the last of them onto the leaf-strewn ground. The newest generation emerging from the dust of their ancestors. And as the dust blew around and the ashes coated his little hands, there was a tangible sense that she lives on in him. I’m confident that this is the memorial she wanted. I’ll keep it with me for as long as I live, and I hope Jakey will as well.
out into the world …
Today was Thurs … on Tuesday I posted my request for stories. Starting almost immediately, I’ve been inundated with responses. Only about 9 responses on the blog as of now, but literally dozens coming to me by email. Now, of course, I need to digest them. And there are a number of things which look like they’ll take a while to actually take shape and get to me. All very interesting to me.
Also interesting is the process of figuring out what it all will mean in terms of the piece. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of days trying to imagine the first segment of the piece, which I’ll need to have for concerts here and in China in October. It’s the first time in a long time I’ve had the task of writing for a computer alone. That part is almost more daunting than the task of making the piece make sense in terms of being about hearing loss, or about other sensory changes. Virtually all of my writing for computers over the last 7 years or so has been about the interaction between instruments or voices and computers. So I need to decide whether I’m continuing to work that way with myself as the performer, or if there’s a new direction for me to follow. Am I going back to playing samples from the keyboard, as I did in the 80s? Or recording and processing myself live playing percussion or speaking?
Also, as I’ve been writing more and more instrumental and vocal things, I’ve developed a very personal process of working out and exploring my musical materials … not sure how I’ll do that working with samples … and not at all sure I want to be working with synthetic sounds, or at least not totally with synth sounds.
And then there are all the story responses I’m getting. While I’m thinking of them mostly in terms of long term structure for the larger piece, maybe I need to start right in with one of the stories, using the words, or some paraphrase … ?
Short ear note: today, for the first time in a while, I forgot to put in the hearing aid. Because I was mostly in the studio, it didn’t make a lot of difference (since I turn it off when I make music, anyway). But when I went out in the street a few times to run some errands, I was shocked at the sound, or lack of sound. Where I normally have very loud distorted sound on my left side, particularly on city streets, I now had silence on the left. Chatted with people on the street, and had to turn my head to hear them with the right ear. On the one hand, it’s a void I can feel, physically. On the other hand, the noise I hear through the hearing aid is so harsh and loud, that it’s kind of peaceful to just hear left-eared silence.
moving on …
I’m back, after about 10 months. Even got a new picture, and expect to have more. Because things change. Many things have changed in 10 months. On the ear front, I’ve accepted that I’m likely to have to deal with hearing with one ear from here on out. I continue to hope for a miraculous change. But I don’t expect it. On the other hand, it’s not exactly true that I only hear with one ear now. That little purple crescent with the little clear bud on the end is my hearing aid. It gets sound into my left ear with enough amplification so that I can hear something.
Unfortunately, the ear itself is still fucked, so everything I hear there sounds like it’s being blasted through a big kazoo. It’s useful for hearing speech in an environment where people will be all around me, and for being aware that there is sound coming from the left (useful when I’m riding my bike in Manhattan traffic). But for any kind of musical listening, or focused quality listening to the environment, it’s just unbearable. Like the whole world is a blown speaker. So in those situations, I turn it off. When I first got the hearing aid, I was distressed at how painful, physically painful, it was to play the piano. Then I discovered that I could turn the hearing aid off, and the piano turns back into something more or less similar to what it was when I had two ears.
What else has happened in the 10 months since my last blog entry? My mother died. My 3rd grandchild, Damon, was born. The CD of The Economic Engine was released, got good reviews including in the NY Times Arts & Leisure Section. I’ve gotten progressively more used to performing with one ear. And I’ve finished up two more big pieces, Faith for piano and computer, and Extended Family for string quartet (and no computer). More about those another time … they’ll both be having a number of performances in the Fall.
The real reason I’m restarting the blog, though, has less to do with what has happened, and more to do with what’s coming up. And that’s work on another big project. This one’s called MONO, and I imagine it’s going to occupy me here for a while.
The most direct way it relates to the blog is that I’m using the blog as a place to collect stories from other people who have suffered some kind of loss or change in one of their five senses. The idea is to use material from these stories to create a narrative to hold together a series of pieces which examine how we perceive beauty and meaning even when we have “lost” some part of the way we perceive.
There’s a blog page set up for people to leave stories: if you’ve suffered some kind of sensory loss or change, please tell me about it here. There’s another page describing the MONO project. I’m about to send out a major email blast to try to get people to share their stories with me. We’ll see how it goes.
right ear focused …
Just went through an intense ear week. And seem to have come out OK. Last Wed & Thurs got the Economic Engine band together for rehearsals, did the performance on Sunday (with me on stage for a solid hour and a half), editing Hammer & Hair for the CD on Monday up in New Paltz, then long recording session on Tuesday, and about 13 hrs of editing on Thursday.
It now feels like my gone/white noise afflicted left ear is pretty well settled in. I’m getting more and more adept at just ignoring it when I need to. For example, as we set up on stage last Sunday, I realized that the wierd stage arrangement meant that the speakers were basically aimed at my missing ear. I made a quick attempt to re-arrange things so that I’d be turned around, but the small stage area and the need to accommodate 9 players without any re-setting of the stage during the concert mean that I was pretty much stuck in this unfotunate position. Deep breath, then I figured I’d just hear what I hear, and would have to work with that. A little scary since in the first two pieces I was playing laptop solos, and then was mixing pre-recorded effects, and finally for Economic Engine controlling and mixing real time effects. But the very good (and ever more appreciated) right ear came through, and all seemed to go well.
Mixing and recording in Jody’s studio in New Paltz presented different, but not dissimilar challenges. Jody understands that I can’t hear stereo, so we talk about the stereo for each piece, and he implements that. For the actual recording and mixing processes, it feels pretty much as though I just have to focus my attention to the right ear. With the right ear i can hear the musical relationships just fine, and I think I’m hearing balance of parts and levels as well. At least Jody doesn’t react as though I’m hearing anything different that he’s hearing. Plus, the way the studio is set up, I turn sideways so that my good right ear is aimed at the stereo speakers, and I get to look out the big window at the apple orchards and hills which surround Jody’s house. So that’s a nice side benefit of the unfortunate situation.
One of the things which has been most interesting about this whole processes is that as I share my problem with people, either through this blog or through conversation, I’m becoming aware of how wide spread hearing problems are. Musicians, in particular, have spoken with me via private email or in person, describing various scenarios in which they’ve lost some of their hearing. Perhaps musicians are just more attuned than others to the quality of their hearing. Or perhaps we’re more at risk because of exposure to loud sounds. Or perhaps we’re more at risk because of a general cosmic sense of irony at compromising the sense which we depend upon for our creativing and careers. Whatever the reason, I’ve heard from an awful lot of musicians who have been dealing with some form of hearing loss.
One of the things this makes me think about is a more philosophical issue. We communicate with sound, with words and with music. And that communication depends upon us agreeing on the fact that what we hear is the same for me as for you. But if many of us are dealing with a loss of hearing, then what we each hear may be quite different. Yet we are able to agree on it all enough to be able to talk and to listen to and enjoy music. So how does my experience of hearing differ from yours? I have some sense, because my hearing now is quite different from my hearing before. But I’d be reluctant to say that what I hear now is less real, though it clearly is lacking the dimension of spacial location.
As I look forward, I’m thinking more and more about how this kind of thinking might be reflected in a conscious way in my music. I’ve written up a couple of grant applications recently in which I’ve proposed to create a series of works which will explore this idea, and the general experience I’ve gone through. Quite different from the usual process I go through, where I write a piece for a particular performer or a particular situation. This would be starting out with the thought of trying to reflect and respond to a personal situation, rather than fulfilling a specific compositional task. It will be interesting to see where this goes … probably have time to do this beginning sometime mid-2009. We’ll see.
the way it is …
Went to hear David Little’s Soldier Songs this evening at Poisson Rouge. Very effective music, though unrelentingly grim. Also recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is even grimmer. While the concerns of both Little and McCarthy are very sympathetic to me, I’m not convinced that a representation of the grim toll being a soldier takes on one’s life is really the most effective way to communicate it. I have an underlying feeling that some portion of humor and irony are necessary to keep us really engaged.
Keeping engaged, for me, is also an aural problem. Much more than I’d like to admit, it was just impossible for me to understand the singer’s words. And I have the feeling the fault was in my ears, not in the singer’s voice. Maybe this impacts my take on the music. Or on the theatrical presentation. I’ll never really know, but it is something which scares me about dealing with my own music … particularly finishing up this next CD. Sometimes I feel as though my consciousness slips around the constant white noise … and while I always do hear it, sometimes I forget that I’m hearing it. But then, when I can’t hear things clearly, I wonder if the white noise is just screwing up everything I hear, or try to hear.
Keeping busy and musically engaged does help me forget about the white noise. But then complications come up, and it gets to a point where I may notice it, but I just can’t pay any attention to it because other things require my attention. I’m somewhat here now: Saturday night (i.e., last night) at about 11pm I found out that one of my players for the Economic Engine is ill, and may need surgery next week. Which would mean she couldn’t perform. And since it’s one of the Chinese instruments, there aren’t a lot of subs in New York City. I’ve been looking and contacting all the players in NYC, as well as players as far away as Minnesota and San Diego. So far, no one can do this on such short notice. Sunday night now, we start rehearsals Wednesday evening, perform on Sunday, and record the piece for the CD the following Tuesday. Assuming I can complete the ensemble before the performance.
Of course, everything was set over a month ago. But life (and illness) get in the way and screw things up. Part of me wants to whine about how this happens. But in reality, any kind of long term major project is vulnerable to this kind of problem. The important aspect of any situation like this is not about whether or not you can avoid the problems, but if you can deal with the problems and avoid a catastrophe. Although everyone here in NYC is much more professional than they were in Beijing (as I’d expect), shit still happens and is beyond my control. What’s not beyond my control is the fact that I can keep pushing to make something come together to make the piece work. It’s more or less universal this this is siply the way it is … so the best I can do is deal with it as best I can.
what’s that noise?
Led a student seminar discussion yesterday about noise + music + sound. Ended up talking about how my hearing problem has made me re-think the whole definition of noise, and my relationship to it. It was a nice day, so I had moved the class outside to sit at a table under a big tree. With periodic visits from a very loud construction tractor/front-loader, which was working on a major construction project on the outside of the Arts building. We’re talking about noise. And this noisey machinery keeps chugging up the driveway, completely stopping conversation, dumping it’s load of wood in a huge pile next to us, and chugging back away for the next load.
So there’s the idea of noise which is something which we distinguish from musical sound, and noise which makes it hard to hear the sounds in our environment. Or makes it hard to parse the sounds around us and to make sense of them.
The sense of noise as unconventional sounds, unconventional in the sense that we don’t traditionally think of it as musically relevant, is old news. Ives, Varese, Cage and their colleagues, as well as punk and hardcore bands and hip hop DJs, have all made it so that we can understand any sound or any noise as musically relevant and meaningful. It all depends on how we use it, and the context we put it in.
Noise as sound which makes is hard to parse our sonic environment is another story. That’s more how I think of my left-ear white noise generator. Or the front loader which disturbed my class discussion. Not so benign.
As the discussion went on, I mentioned my loss of stereo perception. I told the students that working with the placement of sound in the stereo field or in 5.1 is an important part of working with electronic sound. I told them that I’d want to talk with them about it in relation to their work in the class … but that I’m not going to be able to hear it. But we can talk about it, and they can all hear it and can critique each other on this aspect of their work. We’ll see how that works out. Maybe they’ll actually focus more on this aspect their music, since it’s being singled out like this, and since I’ll make a point of bringing it up in their critiques.
back at it …
I’m going to try to get back to this. Things have not been progressing in terms of hearing. In fact, over the last week or two, I’m noticing that my tinnitus is seeming louder than ever. I keep being in situations where I’m talking to someone and it seems like half of what they say is buried in the constant white noise. This gets disturbing.
On the other hand, since my last blog entry I’ve spent several days editing material for my next CD. I can hear the musical qualities of the recordings, certainly the playing and quality of performance, whether or not the notes are right, etc. But I certainly have no idea about stereo, and have to rely on the engineer, Jody, for that. Also, with one ear and the constant white noise, I have a feeling that I don’t really know about the ambience or reverberant space we’re putting the performances in. So that’s another thing I need to depend on Jody for. A wierd way to make a CD. On the other hand, it’s music that never existed before, and this is the best I can do to get it out into the world. So I need to try to get the people whose ears I trust to help me as much as possible. I need one more session in the studio to get both pieces where I think they’ll be pretty much done, then I can post them to the players and get feedback from that direction.
Another thing which is being strange is the fact that I’m back teaching. I haven’t brought up my hearing issues with my advanced class yet, but am going to have to tomorrow, probably. When they start playing their work for me, I have to let them know that they need to be thinking about stereo placement and movement of the sound … but I also have to tell them that they need to critique that aspect among themselves, since I can’t hear it. Also, along with the increased white noise recently, there’s been a bunch more kazoo sounds … so I’m wondering how that will impact my teaching. Somehow, with my own music, it’s different: I know what I want it to sound like, and the question in my mind is always whether or not what I hear on a recording matches the internal sounds … or as close as I can get, given my current limitations. With student work, where I don’t know what to expect going in, it’s likely to be different.
One last thought: since my last post I actually heard back from someone with a similar kind of hearing loss (SSNHL), who is also getting the steroid injections. Although I’ve heard a lot from people who have suffered from temporary hearing loss, either as a result of trauma or infection or long-term subjugation to very loud sounds, this is the first time I’ve actually heard from someone with a loss which seems very similar to mine. While I can’t take heart in someone else’s misfortune, it IS heartening to hear from someone else with the same problem. She says she’s going to see a homeopathic doctor, and I’m interested to see what kind of response she has. I’m definitely interested in following up on any alternative treatment which seems like it might be helpful.
