Freedom & Music Part I - Slave Orchestras, Toxic Music Education & Jazz Music’s Punk Moment
Why my formative years as a classical musician functioned as both the catalyst and the oppressor of my creative liberation, and other musings
As I’m writing this post I’m listening to Nala Sinephro’s Space 1.8 album:
Currently, I’m working on a composition for my upcoming album Out Of The Blue.
The track is called ‘Reformation’ and will be the second track on the album (I’ll share the demo version I recorded at the end of this post).
I’m writing this post as a means to document my thoughts on the creative process that brought me to compose more freely and my search for transcendence in musical expression.
When starting to write for my new album, I found myself intrigued by adventurous styles such as avant-jazz and free jazz.
I was mostly attracted by the nonconformism of free jazz and I had the feeling that these styles could help me find my own voice as a musician in some way.
As a musician, I was always intrigued by improvisation, instead of relying on black dots on a page.
I felt like the ideology of free jazz could help me define my musical vision more clearly.
Defining that vision was necessary because, as a musician, oddly enough I never liked playing my own songs.
Whenever I was both the composer and the performer in a mainstream band I felt ‘enslaved’ to my own compositions.
For example, after recording the songs for my debut album Spirits In Revolution, I never felt the urge to play them again, because playing them again would mean I had to put on the role of the performer that is obliged to perform the piece ‘as if’.
While a lot of my peers would die to tour with a big band, to me these bands would be the modern-day equivalent of a slave orchestra.
On the concept of the slave orchestras; I came across the concept of slave orchestras while researching the borders between classical and blues.
Here’s a part of a painting where a slave orchestra is performing in Nagasaki, Japan:
The slaves are from Ambon, Malaku (Indonesia).
An estimated million or more Indonesians and other Southeast Asians were sold and traded by the Dutch. (Original at The British Museum: Museum number 1944,1014,0.22.)
Interestingly enough, it looks like Classical music and blues have more in common than they probably would like to admit.
Musically, I aspired to move to a place where the performer has all the freedom, so I wouldn’t have to feel like a monkey performing a circus act when performing my songs.
So when I started writing for my album Out Of The Blue, I looked for nonconformist ways to break out of my old beliefs and habits surrounding music.
While I was experimenting with loops and more free-form ways of creating, I found myself at the same time listening to classical music a lot.
What I found upon introspection was that my musical upbringing served both as the catalyst, but also as the oppressor of my current work.
And while I’m happy to have received my formative years in the classical world, I always struggled with the often toxic attitude about music in that environment.
For example, during my fourth year of piano studies, my teacher told me I couldn’t participate in the yearly recital because I didn’t practice enough.
My parents were at the time divorcing and you simply don’t practice in a living room where there’s fighting.
A clear lack of empathy from the piano teacher’s side (hint: if kids are crying during your music lessons, maybe you should ask them what’s up), made me drop out of piano lessons.
But still, years later I found myself musically inhibited when composing.
And while, of course, there are many great teachers teaching at such classical institutions, many music traditions today are still rooted deeply in a binary view of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’.
I studied classical piano for four years (I started classical piano at 7 years old), but my parent’s divorce and my own lack of conformity to the system drove me in another direction.
During my teenage years, toxic teachers, and my parent’s divorce formed me into a punk.
But as painful as it was, my parent’s divorce opened up some great possibilities.
For example, when I was about to travel to Spain with my girlfriend at the time, we broke up before the trip.
It was my dad that suggest I could take my sister instead, who at the time was fourteen.
Before his divorce, my dad made a bigger, and most of all stricter, contribution to our upbringing.
Being raised by a very strict dictator-like father himself, when he felt in the dark about parenting he became more conservative than his personality really is (he is amongst the most good-hearted people I know).
In an attempt to break away from his past, divorcing my mother served as a stepping stone for him to form an identity.
He found that identity in the Mediterranean atmosphere of the South of France.
He didn’t move there, but he embraced the lifestyle as a way to get away from his militant upbringing.
My mother instructed him to move to a nearby campsite where he lived in a camper car in an attempt that he would come to his senses.
Instead, his newfound love often joined him at that campsite, drinking red wine until it was time to call it a night.
When it became clear that the relationship with my mother was beyond repair, he moved to a house right around the corner from our house.
The first day I and my sister went there, his new girlfriend was already there. She couldn’t leave him one second with his kids.
It became clear that she suffered from morbid jealousy, as she later cut the laces from my sister’s shoes and made clothes disappear when we weren’t looking.
She wasn’t mentally healthy and clearly saw me and my sister as a threat to her relationship with my father.
The co-parenting schedule that my parents worked out dictated that every 14 days we had to spend the weekend with my dad.
But it’s not that these weekends were all rainbows and unicorns.
Often times he was at work (he worked at his desk in the living room) and we had to find a way to keep ourselves busy.
One day I brought my electric guitar and my small practice amp. With all my pride from practicing every day, I set myself up in his living room and started playing my best Metallica riffs. He got furious.
The clash of the generations was real. While their generation could upset their parents by playing the Beatles, metal was the crossing line of what my dad conceived as music.
Because he lived only a hundred meters away from my mothers’ house, we often returned back to that house on those weekends we had to be with dad.
But my mother was fighting her own battles and often said: “when it’s your dad’s weekend, you can’t come here.”
So every other weekend we felt homeless in a sense. We weren’t welcome with father and we weren’t welcome with mother.
In defense of my mother, the reason why she wanted space was that she was always giving a 100% to her children and her work at school.
And of course, she felt the hurt, not only from what my dad put her through but from her own unhealthy childhood, which is another story.
But even though our upbringing was fucked up, I don’t feel regret at all.
Because as messed up as things were, there were a lot of good things coming for us as well.
For example, when my dad divorced and entered his days of romantic renaissance, he also became more accommodating to our lives.
Instead of being ever-present in our upbringing, we only had to deal with him every 14 days.
So I spend my teenage years sitting on the street with my friends, skateboarding, and blowing weed.
In the ’90s, you had two types of households. The first was deeply rooted in Christianity, where the parents locked their kids up, and spoiled them with video games and other perks, in order to not make them fall for the evils of drugs, booze, etc.
Then you had the household of the free-ranging kids, where the parents didn’t know what the fuck their kids were doing. Thanks to my dad’s midlife crisis I could have such a life.
Together with a dozen friends we roamed the streets in order to cope with our boredom.
Rage against the machine managed to sum up our aversion to the system. Not only the band, but the entire notion of their message was what we embraced.
The idiocy of giving into a system that was designed to subtract the earth from its natural resources with higher efficiency and to enslave its habitants with more effective forms of control.
The irony of working your ass off to save for a golden retirement that you’d never collect (my uncle died of a heart attack during my teenage years, he was just 52).
The reality was that we were amongst the luckiest generations that ever lived.
Amongst all of the shit from parents and teachers we wholeheartedly rejected, we were lucky to mess around as much as we did.
We were probably the last generation that could roam in everything life had to offer, instead of living in a curated version of the world carefully selected and controlled by parents.
When I was fourteen I wanted to go to a rather big music festival, but of course, due to their age, none of my friends could go from their parents. But my mom, the hero that she is, told me I should go by myself.
So fast forward to today, where I’m making up the balance of my influences and upbringing.
When I started the writing process for the new record, I felt in the dark about what musical direction to take, because I had so many influences.
The electric guitar turned out to be my weapon of choice and looking back to my teenage years, this shouldn’t come as a surprise after I realized I could drive my dad bonkers with it.
Moreover, the guitar became a way of expressing the hurt that I felt as a teenager. So that instrument stuck with me because of that. That’s also the reason why I specialized in blues guitar playing because I liked the expressiveness of the style.
The non-conformity of punk is another thing that really spoke to me during my teenage years.
When I started rehearsing with our Drummer for the new record, I felt like putting all of my influences together, but at the same time I felt like ‘fucking things up’.
That’s around the time I stumbled on how the punk movement of the 80s was in fact inspired by free jazz.
How Lou Reed expressed his inspiration through people like Ornette Coleman.
When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence- Lou Reed
I’m of course exaggerating when I said I felt enslaved to my own compositions.
I still like the songs I’ve written for my 2013 album Spirits in Revolution.
But I didn’t really want to perform ‘songs’, even if they were my own since for years I felt very attracted to improvisation.
So when I started composing for my new album Out Of The Blue, I felt reluctant to write a collection of nice-sounding songs again.
The antidote to this proved to be exploring the musical styles of artists such as Antonio Sanchez.
This is the drummer who wrote the score for the movie ‘Birdman’. The entire score is just him playing drums... on a detuned drumkit (the sound of the tuned drumkit sounded ‘too pretty’ for the movie, hence the director).
These are artists who, in my opinion, managed to free themselves from the oppression of good versus bad, which is what became very appealing to me.
But saying ‘fuck you’ to the system like those musicians, didn’t come naturally at first and I had to dig deeper into my beliefs around music.
While the piano teacher drove me away from music at the intersection of my parent’s divorce, a few years after quitting the piano I started on guitar.
I had a lot of guitar teachers over the years, ranging from all over the world since during my twenties I started traveling back and forth to Chicago to study guitar.
The slightly toxic attitude I experienced in my early classical music studies was something I found to be ever-present with one guitar teacher I studied with.
Here’s, for example, a former guitar teacher of mine, who found it necessary to tell Facebook “I can’t play”:
If you don’t reach dutch: above is a Facebook post where a former guitar teacher of mine can’t stand the fact that I’m enjoying some success as a teacher myself, telling Facebook that he knows ‘what I CAN’T do as a musician’.
In essence, he believed that he needed to show the world I wasn’t a ‘good’ musician.
As a person, his post is testimony that he is coming from ancient, binary thinking. This, to me, is the burden that some of these institutionalized systems of teaching music still have.
It’s exactly the reason why I didn’t want to go study at a conservatory (I choose to study interior design, where I didn’t have a lot of study work, so I could spend more time practicing my guitar).
I knew if I would study music, and there was a toxic teacher teaching there, he and I would clash.
Maybe this would make me give up music.
Or maybe, even worse, I would have given in to the reduction of music into a religious battle of who’s hot and who’s not, and what’s right and what’s wrong, instead of the beautiful form of art it is.
And again, there are plenty of good music institutions with great, sincere teachers. But it only takes one bad apple and, sadly, there are quite a few.
As a teacher, it is clear that he focused on my shortcomings, instead of my strengths.
The struggle I found myself in to free myself from my own learned, ancient way of thinking about music, was what became the starting point for my album Out Of The Blue.
Only by going deep ‘into the rabbit hole’ '(hence the first track on the album) into my own psyche, was I able to create creative momentum again.
While both this piano teacher and guitar teacher were formative, they also were oppressive in my development.
And I did learn from other guitar teachers later in life, ranging from good to great as well, but when looking inside, these two particular oppressors functioned as roadblocks to my creativity.
In order to overcome my writer’s block I found it productive to pedal back to my interest and talents.
For example, as a little 7-year-old boy, one thing I was thrilled about was using my reverb pedal on the piano.
But my piano teacher soon shut this down as she told me that I couldn’t hold down this pedal all of the time (because ‘it’s not on the score’).
And in all fairness to her, she was just doing her job of teaching me how to play ‘from the score’.
But at the same time, these institutionalized dogmas (‘if it’s not on the score, don’t play it’) imposed on my early creativity are what I had to overcome to find my own voice as a musician.
That’s why musicians such as Hanai Rani are all over my Spotify playlists:
I think she composes from a state of freedom, instead of obedience to the system.
This obedience is what I hear a lot in contemporary musicians and their lack of adventure in musical works is of little interest to me during my daily listening sessions.
Most commercial music starts with the question; “what do I want the listener to feel?”, “what emotions do I want to touch as a composer or songwriter?”.
What I had to regain before I could write something that aligned with my musical vision was the notion of “what do I feel?” when writing music.
This authenticity in music is not at all unique and, at least to me personally, it became the main denominator that separates commercial music from alternative music.
From the onset of commercial music in the 1920s, music started to become centered around conventions and control.
The main purpose of music theory revolves around the prediction of what emotions the listener will feel (when for instance a certain music theory concept is used).
That way the composer can hold the listener in their hand like a master of puppets.
I believe this notion of looking at the listener this way comes across as a bit brutal to me. To believe your listeners are slaves that feel what you as a composer want to express.
I do understand that this way of looking at music is very efficient if you’re writing a symphony and you want to translate your intentions as efficiently as possible to your audience, but it wasn’t the kind of direction I wanted to take my music in.
But before I could unchain myself from my old beliefs around music, I needed to dig deeper into the alternative.
That’s when I started thinking more deeply about the notion of music.
Especially how music and sound are different became an interesting starting point to ponder.
Is the separation between sound and music learned and spread by institutions rooted in binary ways of thinking (sound is either music or it’s not, and we as members of the institution are going to tell you what it is)?
Here’s a little thought experiment I started delving into:
If an empty can of soda is hit on the streets, is it music?
Most will say, ‘no’.
Now, if that same can of soda is hit in a concert hall, is it music?
Most will say, ‘only if one of the musicians is hitting it’.
That is to say that, in order to make music you need part of an elite club.
Because the same sound in the same environment is considered music if it comes from one person, but coming from another person it is not music.
I find this elitist mentality toward music troublesome because it is threatening the essence of creativity and free expression that forms the basic joy of playing music.
Moreover, it can form the basis of an unhealthy mentality toward music.
It was not a healthy mentality when my piano teacher told me: ‘you aren’t allowed to play at my recital, because your sound is not considered music by me’.
And it wasn’t a healthy mentality when the guitar teacher had to tell Facebook I can’t play proclaimed: ‘you aren’t allowed to say you are a teacher, because I think you can’t play’.
By the way, the time between his toxic outing on Facebook and our lessons together was 13 years(!). So when he wrote, “I gave this guy 20 lessons, so I know what he can’t do on guitar…” he must have believed that there is no possibility I could have become better in all this time.
Again it boils down to this fixed mindset mentality: you either ‘have it’ or you don’t. The sound you make is either music or it is not.
Here’s another interesting thought experiment:
If a bird sings is it music?
I would wholeheartedly say: Yes, especially, but not exclusively if it’s on Nala Sinephro’s record.
And I do respect other opinions on this matter, but only if they don’t negatively affect my self-worth as a human being.
Here’s the demo version of track 2 titled ‘Reformation’ for my upcoming album.
The track features only one chord, which is testimony to my breaking away from traditional songwriting:
The simple riff and melody came to me in an hour-long session where I recorded the entire album as a rough demo outline for guitar only.
In the last minute of the recording, you can hear me experimenting with adding drumkit sounds.
When I started rehearsing with our drummer months later, the track took on another life:
Here’s a rearrangement of the track that I made for clean guitar:
Thanks for reading (and listening)!
In two months’ time, we will be hitting the studio to record the album.
To be continued...