String Theory Media

NEW WEB HOME

After six years (!?) of blogging and posting new work here at www.stringtheorymedia.com I've decided to move my web world and blog over to my new domain www.CraigHavighurst.com. It'a a very flexible Squarespace account that I'm loving for ease of use and design.

The new BLOG, which will retain the name String Theory is connected to the new site of course, but it can be directly accessed at http://chavighurst.tumblr.com/. It's a Tumblr blog so please follow me there or sign up for the RSS feed. I'm hoping it will be a less cluttered, more engaging and connected platform. 

I will be migrating some key archival posts from here over to the new blog, but mostly this will live for about a year as an archive. Then we'll shut her down (sniff) and move on down the web. Please look me up at the new sites!

 

extremely south by ever so incredibly southwest

On January 26, 1788, a cadre of British sailors and naval officers rowed ashore in a bay they’d named Sydney and claimed the Eastern seaboard of Australia in the name of the King of England. Ah, imperialism. Life was so simple then. Apparently (and when I say that it usually means I’ve consulted Wikipedia), the mission was to establish a penal colony – a move made necessary by the loss of a certain chunk of ground near and dear to us Americans called, um, America.

Two hundred and twenty five years later, I found myself sitting at a pizza cafe in Tamworth, New South Wales watching people stroll about with blue flags covering all sorts of body parts as they celebrated Australia Day, commemorating that nation-launching excursion. The celebration coincided with the peak of an annual gathering known as the Tamworth Country Music Festival, a sprawling, cacophonous and unpretentious congress of fans and musicians.

FanZone, the hub of the Tamworth Country Music Festival

We were in the Country Music Capital of Australia to stage the first ever road trip edition of Music City Roots. The regional council that puts on the festival invited us to be one of the rare Nashville voices at an event that’s always been nearly purely about Aussie artists. My take on what happened with the show is HERE. This post is more about my personal impressions and my ramblings at this most unusual event.

animating music: the awesome work of stephen malinowski

See this. Be amazed. Commentary follows.

 

A recurring theme of this blog is me worrying about my culture’s long-term estrangement from serious composed music. Never mind the reasons behind or scope of the problem. My constructive side (he’s smaller than my righteously indignant side, but he’s there) wonders how the craft and genius of composing might be made vivid and relatable to more people, especially those who haven’t had formal music training.

music and my daughter part 9: yes she can can

(catch up on the series HERE)

The Fall rushed toward me and rushed past me like a wind. I’ve not posted here in two months. Egad. But to share the short list, I’ve been editing and co-producing a Music City Roots television series for Nashville Public Television (national distribution planned for spring of 2013), four compilation albums rounding up the best performances of the year for download next month and near-weekly podcast interviews for our Connect series, not to mention the regular weekly show blogs and scripts. Then there’s ongoing documentary work with the Earl Scruggs Center and fiddle master Casey Driessen. I also wrote and launched my live String Theory show - the ultimate combination of narcissism and over-commitment! But at the center of this maelstrom and my world is my small but fantastic family, including the fascinating, complex and adorable teenager FongChong. Our daughter.

She’s been with us now about 21 months, and for much of that time I’ve kept a sporadic journal here of our adventures in music, wherein I’ve investigated my belief that music could play a significant role in our bonding and her assimilation as an American and as a member of our family. While I cringe at the “universal language” cliché, music DOES transcend borders, and I’m more convinced than ever that for all the friction over music lessons, practicing and taste, our musical conversations, literal and virtual, have been vital to our closeness. She never had a father figure before and didn’t know how to manage one in her head or heart for a long time. She’s a girly girl who didn’t think a man, least of all an old white stranger like myself, could have anything to do with her girly world. But over these months things have changed so much, and music’s been a huge part of that. As the literature says, you can’t have attachment without “attunement,” so there, at the core of adoption parenting, is a big musical metaphor. Make of that what you will.

The theme of the last couple of months has been Nashville. Not the town – the television show.

music in real life

My upcoming String Theory live shows at Bongo Java After Hours Theater in Music City (details one post below) are dedicated in equal parts to explaining some of music's amazing inner workings and about urging music back where it belongs - as part of a happy, healthy and roudned life and community. One of the unfortunate aspects of music is that too many parts of it set themslves apart and above regular people and their daily lives, whether the polished remove of pop music, the sometimes arrogant posture of jazz, the sometimes elitist aura of classical. The show is dedicated to anyone who ever was made to feel small by a music teacher and who quit as a result. It's dedicated to anyone who ever felt snubbed by a music store employee or an aloof record store clerk. Music has built a wall around itself even as the media has built a wall around it, but now that can change and is changing thanks to the internet and social media. It's time to define that change, embrace and amplify it. Much of that will come from refreshing our relationship with sound and the aural world. A life in music for the non-professional begins and sustains with listening. Playing is a more natural extension of that sensibility than most people believe.

new thing: string theory (surround sound edition) LIVE!

I’ve been writing about my take on music and our musical culture here for about six years, and some themes and ideas have emerged that I think offer something new to the national conversation. At the same time, I’ve found myself itching to try something new and return to performing, but not as a traditional singer/songwriter. The world has quite enough of those. So instead, I’m developing a one-man show, whose 1.0 version will be called String Theory (Surround Sound Edition), and it will run four weeks (initially) at the storied performance space Bongo Java After Hours Theater. Opening night will be October 23, a week from Tuesday. It’ll run four consecutive Tuesdays, with the exception of election night on Nov. 6. VOTE! *

The plan is for two acts. Part one is called Lessons In Listening, and it’s built on my Spring talk at TEDx Nashville, only with more jokes and more time for digressions. Part two, The Four Chords That Changed My Life, is a personal account of the challenges and rewards of studying music and playing through one’s life. I expect each act to last around 35-40 minutes. I’ll try not to go on and on, and we’ll have an audience vote about whether to have a coffee break in the middle. I'll be singing and picking some too! I’m looking forward to it. I used to play out all the time, and I’ve missed it. So if the usual night out in Nashville is a musical performance with a bit of talking, this is a talking with some musical interludes. There will also be guitar tones, beats, video, readings, strange sounds and vinyl. Before long, I hope there will be guests.  

The String Theory show is by nature experimental and partly improvised. It is after all, largely about jazz. As with jazz, I hope it edu-tains. That’s the only goal. And the subject is music. Come see what you think.

* for Barack Obama

 

liner notes for the time jumpers

Today is release day for the label debut of Nashville's amazing Time Jumpers, and I was honored to write the liner notes for the project. I hope Rounder Records will not object to my posting them here, as long as I state the obvious and say you should buy this recording, even as you make plans to see them live, again or for the first time. Our Music City Roots video unit also shot interviews and live footage for the project's EPK, which is a great overview. My liners follow:

 

Suppose you’ve been granted just one night of your life in Nashville, and that you are wise enough to make the most of it. You’re looking for the most Nashville thing in Nashville – the cosmic opposite of Applebee’s and a movie – a life memory you couldn’t make anywhere else.

You probably see where this is going; you should see The Time Jumpers.

We often struggle to find the quintessence of a place and time, and Nashville has its enduring enigmas. But if you ask me what’s been most exciting and fine about Music City in the 2000s, the reign of The Time Jumpers at the Station Inn would be a top contender. They are all exceptional musicians, brought together by the camaraderie that’s inextricable from being a professional picker here. They play country music incarnate at a time when few do, revitalizing canonical songs and adding new ones to the repertoire. They are also a sophisticated jazz ensemble that enthralls with masterly improvisation and a sonic luxuriousness that enriched the era of Duke Ellington and Bob Wills.

Their skills may be exceeded only by the purity of their motivation.

coming clean about music piracy

This summer, an NPR intern blogged candidly about her life acquiring free music, and a few pious musicians and commentators protested her life of crime. (The exchange and surrounding kerfuffle was summarized nicely in American Songwriter.) It was only the latest flare-up in a long debate. For the entire time I’ve been covering music, music piracy/sharing has been the most sensitive, polarizing and exploited subject in the biz. Record people almost uniformly maintain that piracy blew up their business. There is some research suggesting the harm and good of "file sharing" net out economically. And there are no doubt way too many punk-ass jerks who cavalierly take whatever music they want off the internet just because it’s there.

The most honest and agreeable thing I’ve read in ages about piracy however is this mea culpa / memoir of a downloader (John Brownlee) that was posted at CultOfMac a few days ago. The takeaway:

As a thirty-three year old man, I’m ashamed of the piracy of my twenties, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it gradually helped transform me from a person who didn’t care about music into a music lover, an individual with a true passion for sound, and a fervent believer in buying music.

I liked the piece so much because it engages honestly with the process of becoming a music lover, a too-rarely discussed topic. There’s much more to it than you’ll ever hear about in a Grammy night speech from Neil Portnow. The journeys are as individual as people. But a thread runs through every musical biography I’ve ever heard, and I seek them out professionally. ALL of them encountered abundant and varied stashes of “free” music, in which they could wallow at critical stages of their lives.

music and my daughter part 8: safe and sound

(Catch up on the series HERE.)

We took the summer off from piano lessons. FC seemed to need a break. Her teacher was taking time away. So it just seemed natural. She had come so far on piano and music generally that I thought she’d earned a respite. Still, I tried to keep music flowing in other ways, playing more guitar around her and taking her, with mom, to the Schermerhorn/Nashville Symphony for an all Beethoven program. She claimed boredom at that, but that’s to be expected. It was still well worth it. You can’t hear all that sound in that special place built for sound and not have some latent reaction at least. Next time it will be more familiar to her.

Now we’re back at it, and I’m feeling vindicated, because even though she still bridles at music lessons like most kids, she lost none of her note knowledge or rhythm. In fact, thanks to that mysterious unconscious processing that goes on after the lesson ends, they may be better.

On top of that, the method book gave forth a tune that drew her in just when we needed it. “Whirling Leaves” is a trifle and it comes with completely unnecessary and horrible lyrics, but as a piece it’s kind of enchanting. Or at least it enchanted her. And I do not use that word lightly; it achieved a state of ease and connectedness that I’d been hoping to see for a long time.

solving the digital liner notes problem is easy, but will we?

Last week the Recording Academy announced a new campaign encouraging those who release recorded music to include album credit information – including songwriters, sidemen, engineers, producers – in digital releases. This is the latest stab at remedying one of the true problems of the digital music era, when nearly all download releases come stripped of meta-info and context. I’ve lamented this for years, because for nearly any music super-fan my age, liner notes on LPs and CDs were essential to learning and discovery. So far, there have been a few attempts at enhanced digital releases, notably iTunes LP. But I don’t get a sense that’s become widespread, and I don’t love a system that depends on using iTunes as your music library. A list of iTunes LP titles is HERE. There’s also a quirky but helpful site called albumlinernotes.com that houses notes for a few hundred notable releases.

But funny, just this week I came across an artist making use of one blindingly obvious but rarely used solution to this problem. Just put them on your dang website, as Kathy Mattea has done HERE for her new album Calling Me Home. Not only does she let you see who played on the project, plus lyrics, acknowledgements and songwriter information, she posts the album booklet essay by author Barbara Kingsolver. As a journalist trying to write about this release which I don’t yet have, it was a godsend, but as a consumer IT MAKES ME FAR MORE LIKELY TO WANT TO BUY THE ALBUM. For years, labels and artists have rebuilt websites to conform to each new release, with matching art and a refreshed bio that focuses on the release. But not one in 1,000 releases actually post the content that’s been written and formatted for the album booklet. Perhaps the logic is that could encourage illegal downloads. But more likely it's just neglect. And with it, a lost opportunity to market the project or enhance the experience of those who purchase it digitally.

Of course if the Recording Academy really wanted to make this happen, it could make digital liner notes a requirement to be considered for Grammy Awards. Or they could follow the precedent of their Producers and Engineers wing, which promulgates standards for delivery (to the record label) and archiving of masters, to ensure changing technology doesn’t render original recordings of projects obsolete in a few years’ time. My understanding is those are not mandatory but that they’re influential enough to have become standard industry practice. Please correct me if I’m wrong.