How Music Works (5 page)

BIRDS DO IT

The adaptive aspect of creativity isn’t limited to musicians and composers

(or artists in any other media). It extends into the natural world as well.

David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to

fit the environment.3 In dense jungle foliage, a constant, repetitive, and brief signal within a narrow frequency works best—the repetition is like an error-correcting device. If the intended recipient didn’t get the first transmission, an identical one will follow.

Birds that live on the forest floor evolved lower-pitched calls, so they don’t bounce or become distorted by the ground as higher-pitched sounds might.

Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds

of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.

Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that birdsongs vary even within

the same species.4 The pitch of the song of the Scarlet Tanager, for example, is different in the East, where the woods are denser, than it is in the West.V

And birds of the same species adjust their singing as their habitat

changes too. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of

their songs over forty years in order to be better heard above the noises of the increased traffic.5

It’s not just birds, either. In the waters around New Zealand, whale calls have adapted to the increase in shipping noise over the last few decades—the hum

of engines and thrash of propellers. Whales need to signal over huge distances to survive, and one hopes that they continue to adapt to this audio pollution.

So musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And

presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us,

28 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

change their tunes over time. The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it. The musician David Rothenberg claims that “life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.”6

Finding examples to prove that music composition depends on its context

comes naturally to me. But I have a feeling that this somewhat reversed

view of creation—that it is more pragmatic and adaptive than some might

think—happens a lot, and in very different areas. It’s “reversed” because the venues—or the fields and woodlands, in the case of the birds—were not built

to accommodate whatever egotistical or artistic urge the composers have. We

and the birds adapt, and it’s fine.

What’s interesting to me is not that these practical adaptations happen

(in retrospect that seems predictable and obvious), but what it means for our perception of creativity.

It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is

as adaptive as anything else. Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable

and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to

its context. When something works, it strikes us as not just being a clever

V

DAV I D BY R N E | 29

adaptation, but as emotionally resonant as well. When the right thing is in

the right place, we are moved.

In my experience, the emotionally charged content always lies there, hid-

den, waiting to be tapped, and although musicians tailor and mold their work c h a p t e r t w o

to how and where it will be best heard or seen, the agony and the ecstasy can be relied on to fill whatever shape is available.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatu-

My Life in

ations, but the way we do that—the art of it—is in putting them into pre-

scribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some

emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinc-

Performance

tively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

30 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

c h a p t e r t w o

My Life in

Performance

The process of writing music doesn’t follow a strict path. For

some composers, music is created via notation, the written sys-

tem of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a

common language. Even if an instrument (traditionally a piano)

is used as an aid in composition, this kind of music emerges

as a written entity. Changes in the score might be made at a later date by

performing musicians or by the composer, but the writing is largely done

without input from actual players. More recently, music began to be created

mechanically or digitally, by an accretion and layering of sounds, samples,

notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.

Though much of my own music may initially have been composed in iso-

lation, it only approached its final shape as a result of being performed live.

As with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into

the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. In junior high school I played in bands with friends, covering popular songs, but at

some point, maybe after a rival’s friend pulled the plug on us at a battle of the bands, I contemplated playing solo.

After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by oth-

ers in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university DAV I D BY R N E | 31

and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed

refreshing. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. The folk scene was low energy too, as if the confessional mode and folk’s inherent sincerity was somehow enervating in and of itself.

That couldn’t be good!

I decided to perform rock songs by my favorites at the time—the Who,

Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks—on acoustic guitar, believing that some of those songs were written with as much integrity as the folkier stuff people in the café more often heard, and that they might therefore find a receptive audience. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! All I’d done was move the songs to a new context. Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present

his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the

audacity of a precocious teenager. I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I might have even risked scratching some dirges on a violin I’d inherited. It was an oddball mishmash, but it wasn’t boring.

I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one

might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not

comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation—other musicians and even girls

(!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.

Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the

remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt

I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician—that seemed wholly unrealistic.

32 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Years later I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of

Asperger’s syndrome. Leaping up in public to do something wildly

expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me. Maybe
normal
is the wrong word, but it worked. A study in the
British Journal of Psychiatry
in 1994 by Felix Post claimed that 69 percent of the creative individuals he’d studied had mental disorders.1 That’s a lot of nutters! This, of course, plays right into the myth of the fucked-up artist driven by demons, and I would hope very much that the converse of that

myth isn’t true—that one does not
have
to be nuts to be creative. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play. But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well.

When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a

classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion. I dropped the acoustic guitar

and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now had

decals of bathing beauties stuck on it. We played at bars and art openings,

and together we traveled cross-country and ended up playing on Telegraph

Avenue in Berkeley. Busking, as it’s called in Britain. By this point we had a look, too—a variation on Old World immigrant, I guess is how you would

describe it. Mark adopted a more Eastern European look, and I gravitated to

old suits and fedoras. I had an unkempt beard at the time, and once a young

black kid asked me if I was one of those people who didn’t ride in cars.

We played mainly standards. I would sing “Pennies From Heaven” or

“The Glory of Love” as well as our own arrangements of more contemporary

fare, like “96 Tears.” Sometimes Mark would play an instrumental and I’d

strike ridiculous poses—bent over standing on one leg and not moving, for

example. Something that absolutely anyone would be able to do, but that

I—or my “stage” persona—seemed to think was show-worthy. We realized

that in a short amount of time we could amass enough cash to cover a meal

and gas for an old car I’d picked up in Albuquerque. One might say that

the reviews of a street performance were instant—people either stopped,

watched, and maybe gave money, or they moved on. I think I also realized

then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance.

Seeming opposites could coexist. Keeping these two in balance was a bit of

a tightrope act, but it could be done.

I’d seen only a few live pop-music shows by this point. At the time I still

didn’t see myself making a career in music, but even so, the varied performing DAV I D BY R N E | 33

styles in the shows I had seen must have made a strong impression. In high

school around Baltimore, one could attend what were called Teen Centers,

which were school gymnasiums where local bands would be brought in to play

on weekends. One act was a choreographed Motown-style revue, and at one

point they donned gloves that glowed in the dark when they switched to UV

lights. It was a spectacular effect, though a little corny. Another act did a Sgt.

Pepper–type revue, and to my young ears they sounded just like the records.

Their technical expertise was amazing, but it wasn’t original, and so it wasn’t all that inspiring. Being a cover band, even a really good one, was limiting.

It wasn’t only purist folk acts at the university coffee house. There were

also rock bands, some of which had virtuosic musicians. Most would jam

endlessly and aimlessly on a blues song, but one D.C.-based band, Grin,

featured a guitarist named Nils Lofgren whose solos blew the others away.

These displays of technique and imagination were humbling. My own guitar

playing was so rudimentary that it was hard to imagine we were playing the

same instrument. I figured these “real” bands were so far beyond my own

abilities that any aspirations I had in that regard were hopeless.

I caught one big outdoor rock festival back then—in Bath, a town a few

hours east of London. Exhausted after hours of listening to music, I fell asleep on the damp ground. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized that

Led Zeppelin was playing. I think they were the biggest act on the bill, but I went back to sleep. In the early morning I was awake again and caught Dr.

John, who closed the festival. He was in full
Night Tripper
mode, and I loved that record, so I was excited to see him. He came out in carnival drag, playing his funky voodoo jive, and the UK audience pelted him with beer cans. I was

confused. Here was the most original act of the whole festival, dumped into

the worst slot, and he was completely unappreciated by this crowd. It was