As you might know, I use this space to write in a swashbuckling, man-about-town kind of voice. I enjoy it to some degree—sometimes to a great degree—but in my own writing outside of this wackjob newsletter, I have been trying to pare that down. To be more on the line and real, versus trying to cover tracks in nested parentheses. To simply say it, to the extent I can.
So I want to simply say what it is that we have been trying to do for two weeks every summer at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute. This is not an advertisement about a show, or an announcement of a new thing, or anything of that sort. It is a thank-you for having been included in that summer project for a decade. Appropriate for a thank-you campaign, right? The depth of my gratitude would indeed require an entire campaign to do it justice, but we’ll just start here, with one note.
In 2013, I was working at Princeton University in the writing program. I taught a first-year seminar course in academic writing. Faculty came in from various disciplines, but framed them not around the practice of, say in my case, making music, but rather the process of making an argument about it. It was good work, hard work. It taught me a lot about being in a classroom, about being eaten alive, and it helped me really land medium-ok sentences very quickly. But I wanted to be teaching the craft of composition, not the craft of saying something motivated about it to other scholars.
During a morning prep that spring I got a phone call from Eric Cha-Beach, a member of Sō Percussion. The Sō guys were, to me, absolute wizards in terms of performance and in terms of commissioning new work. I took the call—obviously—and left my office to pace around outside. Eric asked if I wanted to start a composition program at their summer institute—SōSI—and I said yes. Then he asked about money and I said I didn’t care, and it was true, but they paid me anyway and have for every summer since, despite it feeling more like a resource to me than like a service I was performing for a fee. Something I needed. Help.
The first year we accepted six composers. Write some music for Sō to read publicly after two weeks, we said. No restrictions on time or instrumentation or anything, which led, predictably, to my marching these six young people to the concert space, through the summer heat and achievement in humidity, rolling timpani and chimes and concert bass drums and a thunder sheet, the day of the show. Watching Sō read music that they’d seen in final version only hours before the public readings made my head spin. The best that humans could do, I thought.
That was true in a sense. If it is about the human capacity to read a lot of notes and commit to them completely, then yes. There is no further to go. But the place is about something else and something more. After ten years I have come into a clearer vision about it. I tried to talk through in on the microphone at the final concert, at which I was celebrated for ten years of doing this work. I want another crack at it.
Year one, for me, was about tangling with the ideas that Sō offered us. Commit to what you are doing. Collaborate. Invite others into what you are doing, to the extent possible. Things are in flux until they aren’t. Music is important. And then the crown jewels: if you need help, as for it. If you’re asked for help, give it.
I tried these ideas on. I learned from them in my own making of music, and in my own life. They were good ideas, I thought. They were barometers, moral centers.
My orientation to them has been shifting, though, and I think for whatever reason this summer, after the 10th year of doing the work, I got a handle on why. It is because they are not ideas to try on, or ways we ought to be. They are not moral precepts, or things to attempt as alternatives to other things. The distinction came to me as a question, as all space-making things tend to come. The question was simple:
What if it what they had been saying were true?
In other words, what if these were not helpful little guides about a way to live? What if they were actually phenomenologically the way things are? I have trouble articulating this edge of understanding on the page. A few nested parentheses might actually help here, to bury the thread. But I’ll try, and I’ll invoke a phrase from that old Princeton Writing Program job: methodological believing. If we grant that these things are true versus just options or ideals, what would we have to do? Who would we have to be? This is how I have been trying to approach my work, at SōSI and, at level best, everywhere else.
It is a high standard. It is energetically taxing. It is risky. It makes you vulnerable. You will learn things about the way you are that you will not entirely like. You will learn things about what you do to a room because you will train yourself to read that room as well as you read your own inner thought loops, and with as much attention and care. You will write yourself into a corner. But then, in that corner, you will ask for help, and help will be given. The next move, or word, or attitude is not for you to puzzle out alone. And once you see it, once it happens, you realize that it is not just helpful, or idealistic, or a pretty turn of phrase. It is true.
I knew I wanted to wake up this morning, at this Penn Station hotel before we fly back to Minnesota, and say thank you. The idea was to text people’s faces off, as I sometimes do, or email them, or even buy stationery and scrawl it all out. But instead I felt I could try to set it out in a slightly more resonant, private-public, community-centered way. It helps that you all bear witness to this. It makes it a ritual, a marking of an occasion, the ringing of a bell (or a chime on a set that I wheeled for a half a mile on stone paths in the thickest air).
That is the help I needed from you, and that is the help you have given. See? It’s not just an idea. It is always already true.
Til next year, you silly geese,
A