The Steel Guitar Forum

Mike Perlowin wrote:James are you saying that people like Joshua Heifitz, Itzak Pearlman, and Anton Rubenstein are not artists?

I don't mean to be pedantic, but as a person whose own name is frequently misspelled, I want to mention the correct spellings of those names:

Jascha Heifetz
Itzhak Perlman
Artur Rubinstein

(Anton Rubinstein was a pianist and composer in the 19th century, but I suspect the reference here was meant to be to Artur (no relation), a much-recorded pianist of the 20th century.

How much money a musician makes and where the money comes from is totally unrelated to the initial topic.

James, you asked a very important question in your last post which deserves an answer.

Why ... is classical learning held sacred? Why is it uniquely privileged?

Because education is better than ignorance. That's why.

Maybe not always necessary in all fields, but always better. More education is always better than less, and I don't care what discipline is being discussed.

I'm in a band with three horn players. Excellent readers and excellent jammers who can look at a chart they get at the beginning of a gig and can play the ensemble parts perfectly the first time out. The band sound would be monumentally less impressive without their skill as readers.

We don't all have to be doctors, but when we need them, we really need them to be educated.

I'm not angry. I don't think your posts were belligerant, just self-serving and short-sighted; not seeing the larger picture of the entire world of music in which we all participate.

FYI, in your definitions, I fall into category #3.

I've found it best to withdraw from threads such as these, so I bid you all a fond adieu.

Herb Steiner wrote:How much money a musician makes and where the money comes from is totally unrelated to the initial topic.

James, you asked a very important question in your last post which deserves an answer.

Why ... is classical learning held sacred? Why is it uniquely privileged?

Because education is better than ignorance. That's why.

Maybe not always necessary in all fields, but always better. More education is always better than less, and I don't care what discipline is being discussed.

I'm in a band with three horn players. Excellent readers and excellent jammers who can look at a chart they get at the beginning of a gig and can play the ensemble parts perfectly the first time out. The band sound would be monumentally less impressive without their skill as readers.

We don't all have to be doctors, but when we need them, we really need them to be educated.

I'm not angry. I don't think your posts were belligerant, just self-serving and short-sighted; not seeing the larger picture of the entire world of music in which we all participate.

FYI, in your definitions, I fall into category #3.

I've found it best to withdraw from threads such as these, so I bid you all a fond adieu.

Herb, I am all for education. I attacked the method of education much like a creationist would attack Darwin or vice-versa. No one is saying there should be no schooling. I would love to see every child educated in music. That would be great, but there would surely be splinters about the methods used. Doctors do need to be educated, but the western medical tradition dismisses much of the eastern medical tradition. I wonder if they are able to discuss the merits of each scientifically without falling back on sacred mentality of "don't go there".

This is something that I wrote to Mike Perlowin that should be posted here.

"I respect what you are doing with the steel guitar. It needs to be taken into other genres. It must be annoying to have someone like me around with dissenting opinions of the method. I say "method", because I love the product. I love classical music, itself.

I almost went the route of ethno-musicology but decided to get a computer science degree for practical reasons. I have a great appreciation for the vast world of music and often dismiss the classical world as being dismissive of anything that doesn't use their methods. This is a far greater crime than anything I have said. I know, two wrongs don't make a right, but I would say the average well-read classical musician knows far less about the vast world of music than I do about classical. If it's not transcribed, it is often dismissed.

So, while I centered my argument on classical notation, I have to admit some of my feelings on the subject are more about the western-centric perception that we are "learned" and they are not. It bugs me just as much when I hear an ignorant musician say, "the blues is the basis for 90% of music out there".

Really, I do appreciate that you are furthering the pedal steel guitar. I, myself, want to use it to play eastern melodies (Carnatic) and flamenco singing. Because of the fact that the most of the notation would be written as accidentals and mircrotones, (and the fact that the rhythym notation can't capture it) classical notation will not be a method that I employ. It won't even be available."

James, are you familiar with Dave Easley's playing? He plays and practices regularly with Aashish Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's son. He currently even has a regular gig three nights a week playing pedal steel in a New Orleans Indian restaurant - "earn to learn", there! Unfortunately, Aashish is notoriously gun-shy about recording, having founded a band called "Shanti" with Zakir Hussein in the early 70's and then having the wind blown out by a certain band named "Shakti" a few years later.... Dave has been a big influence for me, as much as I can find.... We talk scales sometimes. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, he might be the only steeler you could just set adrift in a New York club jam. He's a forumite, though he rarely posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI19M5cZ4rk
(that next song "Have you Met Miss Jones" has the first jazz usage of the "Coltrane changes", in the bridge - 1937....)

http://steelguitarmusic.com/music/daveeasley.html

I don't want to get "too" deep into this for obvious reasons - starting a topic like this as a "rant" is fairly off-putting because rants tend to get shrill and polarized. The premise of this thread comes off as being dismissive about "formally schooled" musicians for what - being dismissive? I think it would be much better to use much more controlled language.

I can see both "sides." I have known and heard many formally schooled players over the years who were, in my opinion and to my tastes, fairly "musically constipated". I think there are also similar numbers of fairly unschooled players who were absolutely brilliant from any point of view I would choose - if you want more examples, try jazz guitar greats Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow - and no doubt many more. But there is also plenty of formally trained brilliance plus spark, and emphatically no lack of untrained hacks without any real spark - IMHO. Being "natural" doesn't imply being "creative".

In general, I think formal education is useful for most of us - how does one get intuition? Formal education is one important way - OK, not the only one, but not everybody just intuits everything. Like anything else, it can be applied well or poorly. But most of the time, I prefer to hear musicians with a reasonable grasp of fundamental musical concepts. Primitive can be great in certain contexts, but it's limited.

Why ... is classical learning held sacred? Why is it uniquely privileged?

Because education is better than ignorance. That's why.

Maybe not always necessary in all fields, but always better. More education is always better than less, and I don't care what discipline is being discussed.

Since we're talking about "classical learning" or "formal education", I guess I'm gonna disagree with the "always", and especially the "more education is always better than less." I dunno, man. As someone who has never really known when to stop getting degrees (I'm serious), I think it is possible to overdo this kind of thing. To me, formal education beyond a certain point needs a purpose. If you are talking about lifelong learning, of course one cannot have too much - but there are many different kinds of learning, not all of it is formal or "classical".

I also agree with James' analogy between western-music vs. non-western-music and western-medicine vs. non-western-medicine. They each have very different methodologies and each have their place. To be blunt, I think "non-western-analytical practitioners" have been significantly more accepting of western-analytical approaches than the reverse, and I think this is to our (I am definitely of the western-analytic culture) detriment - and this translates to a lot of areas besides music and medicine and I think is showing a bad trend for western culture.

Personally, I consider non-written, intuitive understanding every bit as important as written formal-analytical understanding. They are each part of real understanding. This gets deeply philosophical at a certain point, but there are limits to classical western "positivism" or "logical positivism" - e.g., see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Again I say that knowing how to read helps me play by ear better, and being able to play by ear helps me me to be a better reader. Rather than being mutually exclusive, the two skills compliment each other.

Mike, I find that statement very hard to argue with. I don't think reading or formal education is remotely "obsolete", but I think an appropriate level of formal education depends very much on what one wants to do with it.

This heart of this discussion goes to one's musical value system. If your value system is classically western, focused on organized, complex, and cerebrally analytic structures, you don't need to ask why to frame classical western music theory and reading complex parts as a critical part of music. But if that isn't fundamentally what moves you, it may seem largely irrelevant. I don't see how to resolve such differences, but they will certainly not be breached by polarizing "rants" - let's rant less and talk and especially listen more.

My opinions.

Matt Rhodes wrote:I'll bet them classical musicians (the "readers") get paid better than them alliterate st-steelers.

James Mayer wrote:They are at the very pinnacle of "readers" and they make a good living. The pinnacle of rock and country make far far more money.

I seriously doubt that the backup musicians who tour with big name country acts make "far far more money" than your average orchestral player. I've never seen any evidence that any steel players beyond a small handful of Nashville studio cats make a "good living" playing music.

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Mike Perlowin wrote:James are you saying that people like Joshua Heifitz, Itzak Pearlman, and Anton Rubenstein are not artists?

Brint Hannay wrote:I don't mean to be pedantic, but as a person whose own name is frequently misspelled, I want to mention the correct spellings of those names:

Jascha Heifetz
Itzhak Perlman
Artur Rubinstein

Thanks for posting the correct spellings Brint. I should have checked them before I posted.

This heart of this discussion goes to one's musical value system. If your value system is classically western, focused on organized, complex, and cerebrally analytic structures, you don't need to ask why to frame classical western music theory and reading complex parts as a critical part of music. But if that isn't fundamentally what moves you, it may seem largely irrelevant. I don't see how to resolve such differences, but they will certainly not be breached by polarizing "rants".

- Dave Mudgett

I don't see any reason to "resolve" them. More than one thing can be true at once - they are not in any way exclusionary. This is an argument that had been over and done with by the 90's, I thought? Look, I have three books by Western musicologists on Indian music. They each have their own "system" for classifying and organizing microtones. One says there's 22 notes per octave, another says there's 96, another says there's 48 but that they change according to whether they're ascending or descending - what they all neglected to do was actually ask the Indian musicians what they were playing. The Indians will tell you that the microtones depend on who your teacher was, what village you're from, the planting season, the time of day - as well as the specific raga. I know that recently, recording, radio & TV have somewhat homogenized this in India, but Indian audiences used to recognize just what village & family a musician was from by what how played.

The problem was, these older musicologists were still looking at it through the prism of colonialism, where they were going to "figure out" what the ignorant savages were doing and help them out by writing it down - and the "savages" had thought they were doing just fine.... but Western music just doesn't DO microtones well -
hey - MAYBE THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED "MICRO". So what? You can still read music, and you you can still listen to, and learn from, microtonal musicians.

There have been a number of attempts to generate microtonal orchestras, quite unsuccessfully (Except for Balinese, and again they're only "micro" cause some ignorant professor guy said so). In classic Indian music and in blues, you need a very sparse harmonic background to use microtones effectively - listen to SRV, listen to sitar players. Root & fifth drones.... There is a tradition of orchestral Indian music, (Ravi Shankar wrote a lot of film scores) but they wisely stick to the usual suspects to write harmonies - 4ths, 5ths, 3rds, 6ths. I'm a big fan of the 1999-2000 edition of McLaughlin's Remember Shakti band, with U. Shrivinas (and no vocals!), but they all had frets - they know they weren't playing microtones, but they're using the rhythms and structures of Indian music with Western harmonies.

(killer Berklee Performing Center concert, here):
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/Reme ... stonMA.asx

BTW, classical Indian music is also "focused on organized, complex, and cerebrally analytic structures" - and improvisational as well. People who think it's just a bunch of notes can't hear what's going on, same as any other kind of music that "just a bunch of notes". Listening takes training - I ask my students to write out the chords of a classical piece, they're like "what chords?" Then I point out that Tchaikovsky stole the chords for his D Major violin concerto from "Hey Jude", and they get it. If you can't remember past 10 minutes and count to 160 or so, Indian music won't make sense either.

There has been criticisms of Gershwin for "stealing" blues notes from black people to write "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Porgy and Bess" - politicizing music... but mixing minor and major 3rds goes way, way back, listen to the finale of Beethoven's Fifth, for Pete's sakes. Western music notation isn't supposed to write blues notes, but so what? "Rhapsody" is still a great piece of music, it's not meant to be gutbucket blues. Does anyone listening actually think it's blues?

My point is, you can read music, listen to music and play music from the "reading culture", AND listen to, appreciate and play music from everywhere else too. Maybe somewhere out there, there are still people who feel that "writable" and only writable music is somehow superior to "non-writable" music, but I don't know anyone like that - like I said, I thought that was settled a long time ago? However, it's equally ridiculous to assert that only non-written music is superior. And as in the example above, it's perfectly useful to use some elements of one type mixed with some elements of another. Is anti-Western snobbery any less snobbish just because it's not riding in a limousine licking caviar out of a starlet's bellybutton....

I don't see any reason to "resolve" them. More than one thing can be true at once - they are not in any way exclusionary. This is an argument that had been over and done with by the 90's, I thought?

If this argument had been over by the 90s, we wouldn't be having these types of discussions. I don't think it's over at all. I believe many formally trained musicians treat non-formally trained musicians with contempt, and many non-formally trained musicians treat anybody with sheet music or even charts onstage the same - "whassamattayou - can't play without sheet music in front of you?" We've had lots of threads like this on the forum, and it's been my general experience also.

To me, "resolution" would not necessarily involve getting anybody to change their approach, but to see that both approaches are legitimate.

More than one thing can be true at once - they are not in any way exclusionary.

Uh - that was one of my main points. But at the same time, I think it's legitimate to take one or another approach in isolation. I think there's a reasonable place for classical or popular musicians who work strictly from a score, a different place for musicians who argue that the only place for a "score" is in a Red Sox vs. Yankees game, and then others who bridge both worlds.

Maybe somewhere out there, there are still people who feel that "writable" and only writable music is somehow superior to "non-writable" music, but I don't know anyone like that.

Oh, they're out there. You've never run into "classical snobs"? That was the environment I grew up in, and they're still out there in quantity, IMO.

Look, I have three books by Western musicologists on Indian music. They each have their own "system" for classifying and organizing microtones. One says there's 22 notes per octave, another says there's 96, another says there's 48 but that they change according to whether they're ascending or descending - what they all neglected to do was actually ask the Indian musicians what they were playing. The Indians will tell you that the microtones depend on who your teacher was, what village you're from, the planting season, the time of day - as well as the specific raga.

Typical western analytic approach, doomed to failure, IMHO. I see the same types of people try to do the same thing with blues. Forget it - the western analytic structure doesn't work. For example, if one doesn't "feel" how to play blues, it sounds phony to me. Hasn't it ever occurred to them that, for the most part, the music simply wasn't developed that way, and there are no such "analytic rules" for it? Things are done for emotional reasons, what sounds and feels right - who cares about any stinkin' rules?

This will not probably ever get "resolved" on a global scale. But I would hope that here, on this forum dealing with the most interesting microtonal instrument on the planet (IMHO), we could try to understand that these two basic approaches to music are each OK by themselves or together.

<center>I usually play western music by ear, on the C6th neck.

For country, I use the E9th neck. That about covers it.



Oh yes, and I can read well enough to hurt my playing.</center>

As far as I can tell, the sites for posting tab are expanding, not becoming obsolete. Likewise the Forum requests for tab for certain phrases or songs. That is written music. It's incomplete without the timing, but the best tab has standard notation showing the timeing written above the tab. There are computer programs which do that.

Even though some tab comes with sound clips, it is still considered useful for many people to have the music explained by tab. When you think about it, a sound clip is just as incomplete as standard notation, and for the same reason - on guitars and steel guitars, there are so many different places to play the same note or chord.

I am working on my own pedal steel arrangements of a few classic country, jazz, and classical pieces. One frustration is that, once I have something complicated worked out, I forget it if I don't play it often. So my ultimate goal is to someday write them down in tab with standard notation. That is the only way to preserve the arrangements. Recording these pieces is also a goal; but, as explained above, listening to the recording doesn't convey exactly how it is played. Maybe a video would, but you would need to use an elaborate three or four camera setup to show each hand, the pedals and the levers.

Doug Jernigan and a few others have published pedal steel instruction tab with standard notation above it. I think it is fascinating to see what pedal steel playing looks like in standard notation. Hopefully, someday some of the great steel solos of the past will be transcribed into tab and standard notation, the way that has happened for some of Charlie Parker's and Coltrane's great improv performances.

One interesting technical development James M. mentioned is the ability of computers to scan standard notation and convert it into listenable midi music. I don't know if you can get steel guitar glisses that way, but maybe someday that will also be possible.

Now, mechanically converted midi music is functional mainly for practice, not for performance. In the past there have been links on the Forum to these mechanical conversions of jazz pieces. It is not very listenable. You really need the personal expression of a real musician. But, contrary to James M's opinion, written music does not have that limitation. Audiences can appreciate the nuanced, expressive reading of an artist compared to the plodding, mechanical rendition of a hack.

David Mason wrote:James, are you familiar with Dave Easley's playing? He plays and practices regularly with Aashish Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's son. He currently even has a regular gig three nights a week playing pedal steel in a New Orleans Indian restaurant - "earn to learn", there! Unfortunately, Aashish is notoriously gun-shy about recording, having founded a band called "Shanti" with Zakir Hussein in the early 70's and then having the wind blown out by a certain band named "Shakti" a few years later.... Dave has been a big influence for me, as much as I can find.... We talk scales sometimes. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, he might be the only steeler you could just set adrift in a New York club jam. He's a forumite, though he rarely posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI19M5cZ4rk
(that next song "Have you Met Miss Jones" has the first jazz usage of the "Coltrane changes", in the bridge - 1937....)

http://steelguitarmusic.com/music/daveeasley.html

I'd love to pick this guy's brain. He's doing what hope to be able to do.

Dave Mudgett wrote:
You've never run into "classical snobs"? ... they're still out there in quantity, IMO.

Indeed they are. There are some classical musicians who are the absolute worst. In another thread I mentioned that the reason I dropped out of college in the 60s was that one of the music professors proclaimed with great authority that the Beatles didn’t have any musical talent. Her reasoning was that truly talented musicians played classical music or sang opera, and anybody who played pop music was a talentless hack.

I have some other stories of a more personal nature, but they are so unpleasant I’d rather not relate them here.

HOWEVER, There are also many classical musicians who do not feel that way. The conductor of the San Fernando Symphony also plays guitar in a local rock band and does bar gigs like the rest of us, and most of the members of the band are also members of the orchestra.

The cellist in my trio also plays with a local singer/songwriter. Carole, the groups leader, has not previously been exposed to roots music, but just as she’s teaching me a lot about classical music, I’m teaching her about Doc Watson and Reverend Gary Davis, and she truly appreciates the beauty and artistry if these musicians.

She turned me on to the British composer Edward McDowell. I turned on to the great blues guitarist Fred McDowell.

I feel like this is finally getting somewhere. It took David Mason and Dave Mudgett to get the conversation out of the rut that my strong language got us in.

When it comes down to it, I chose steel guitar as my next instrument to learn because I wanted to be able to play things that are better suited to a human voice, a bowed instrument, etc. The piano is the last instrument that I would ever learn. I love the sound of it, but playing it really emphasizes how square it is. Hard limitations in notes available without notes between the notes, no vibrato, etc. Of course there are things you can only do on the piano. It has it's amazing strengths, no doubt, but it is not fit to capture the majority of music in the world. I think this instrument, the piano, summarizes my point with classical western notation pretty well. I don't know the history of how notation was developed, but I can make a guess that it was developed with the keyboard in mind. So, am I still ignorant if I say that the music that I want to play can't be played on a piano, therefore it can't be notated well in the classical way? The pedal steel is the perfect micro-tonal instrument because it can also play complex chords. It's the prime candidate to cross the border and meld different worlds.

Another point of strong language that I used was "sterilized portal". I could have explained it in a nicer way. Transcribers attempting to record "other" music will often just remove the parts of the music that can't be written well. Attempting to transcribe flamenco compas results in compound time signatures that the transcriber must surely have known was completely wrong. Not an approximation, but completely incorrect. Leaving out micro-tones or "ethnic" ornaments was surely apparent at the time of writing. This clearly demonstrates the elitist disrespect for "folk" music. Furthermore, that notation eventually BECOMES the music if someone is a strict reader. It's like musical propaganda. Then, along comes a respected classical guitarist who records an album that misses the whole point and names it "Flamenco". This is not the evolution of music that I would like to see.

I own an Indian violin book. I kinda felt like it was a waste of money as I don't have recordings of the songs that it was attempting to transcribe. If I had those recordings, I would use the notation as a tool to get me in the ballpark (much like a fret marker is used on a steel guitar) to make further adjustments that better match what I am hearing. As it stands right now, I could play a song from that book to a tee and it would surely sound sterilized and lacking in any sort of Indian accent.

All this talk about neither the ear nor the notation being mutually exclusive is aimed at me. However, I've repeatedly said that I use notation as a tool, followed by "there are tools that can do a better job". Classical training only takes into account a subset of sounds we actually hear. Notation is perfect if you want to play classical but somehow it has become the standard language of music, even with it's obvious limitations. It seems to me that a new language must be written.

HERE is something interesting that I've never seen before. This is far from widely used. Even so, I'm tempted to learn it and discover it's strengths and weaknesses.

James Mayer wrote:

Mike Perlowin wrote:

James are you saying that people like Joshua Heifitz, Itzak Pearlman, and Anton Rubenstein are not artists?

Please tell me I'm misunderstanding your position.

I don't know enough about those players to make a comment. Are they composers?

Well (and certainly with no insult intended), that should'a been a tip off about how deeeply you're into music.

There are progressive rock bands that write music that rival the most complex classical arrangements. Metallica's "Master of Puppets" could easily be arranged and played by an orchestra and the traditionalists would eat it up until they found out who composed it.

(As Larry The Cable Guy would say...)

"Now, I don't care who you are, that's funny right there!"

Thirty seconds of distorted twin guitars does not a symphony make.

(Next time, use Queen as an example. They may not be up there with Bach and Beethoven, but they were certainly light years above anything Metallica ever did as far as arranging and orchestration.)

Learning to read music is not a negative thing in any way. That's like saying "I can already talk, why would I need to learn how to read a book?" Learning to read music is one of the building blocks in learning music as a craft, it in no way makes any musician "worse". Most of the really good players I know either read, or wish they could.

Donny Hinson wrote: Well (and certainly with no insult intended), that should'a been a tip off about how deeeply you're into music.

That is simply unfair. You have probably never heard of half of the people who I admire. Ever heard of Anwar Brahim? Raphael Fayes? That doesn't mean that you are ignorant or not deeply "into music".


EDIT: removed post explaining how nothing Queen has ever done (I know their catalog) is more intricate than the Metallica LP that I mentioned. Was going to take the argument into Jethro Tull's "Songs From the Wood" territory, but remembered that this is the kind of sidetracking that I wish to avoid. Comparing who we know or know not in our catalogs proves nothing. You don't know the most important figures in every genre, nor do I, nor does anyone.

I always thought that, aesthetic issues aside, Metallica was a pretty good band. For interesting compositions, though, I'd take Radiohead or Ponytail over either of them.

I can't believe there are 5 pages on if it's a good idea to read music. Those who don't, haven't the foggest idea of what they are missing.

Ken Lang wrote:I can't believe there are 5 pages on if it's a good idea to read music. Those who don't, haven't the foggest idea of what they are missing.

I can't believe it either. Maybe because it's not true. No one, including myself, said it was a bad idea to read music.

This is the greatest thread on the Steel Guitar Forum.

James Mayer wrote: No one, including myself, said it was a bad idea to read music.

Quite true. If I understand correctly, your point is that there is more now than ever (e.g. from YouTube and from various rock stars etc) that is not worth writing down. How could anyone argue with that?

The original post and title of the thread have been heavily edited and modified, the subsequent posts relating to what was said in the initial post have lost a good deal of their significance.

Those rebutting the intial post were responding to a rant about the obsolescence of sheet music and the necessity to read notation. That rant no longer exists.

Brint Hannay wrote:

Mike Perlowin wrote:.. Joshua Heifitz, Itzak Pearlman, and Anton Rubenstein are not artists?

...correct spellings of those names:

Jascha Heifetz
Itzhak Perlman
Artur Rubinstein

What a grinch. Give him one right (Anton) out of the 6.