Watchwords
Reflections on a Year of Graduate School
By Richard Bruner
Image: Cypress Hall, Music Department at California State University, Northridge; and something of my second home for the past school year.
Note: This reflection essay was posted on my facebook page at the end of my second semester of graduate school at California State University, Northridge. I am also posting it here on my website so that people I’m not Facebook friends with can see it, as it is not limited to that audience.
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I started my graduate work in music composition at California State University, Northridge this past fall, in the Fall 2023 semester. Here we are at the end of the Spring 2024 semester, and it’s hard to believe it has been a full school year, and also hard to believe I only have one more to go before I finish this program and earn my master’s degree! I figured out at some point that the reason why a 2-year program is enough to get a “master’s” degree is because it’s really the end of a 6-year program between undergraduate work for your Bachelor’s degree (4 years) and then 2 more years to get a master’s degree. It’s a little weirder coming back after so long a break, 11 years after getting my bachelor’s degree at Berklee College of Music in 2012.
I could just talk about the classes I took this year, or the activities I was involved in, but I’m not sure that would actually be an adequate approach to summarizing the year. Instead, I think a more interesting approach will be to explore three “watchwords” I keep coming back to over and over in my reflections, and in the work and activities I’ve been doing this year. The three words I’ve chosen are “Human”, “Kinesthetics”, and “Pattern”.
I know I’ve had a different experience in this first year of my program after going out and starting a career in the music industry before returning to get my master’s degree than I would have had if I did it right after my bachelor’s degree, or even within a year or two of that. The world is different, I’m at a different place in my life, I have a lot of experience “in the trenches”, and probably a better sense of what I want to do and why I’m doing this program than I would have had at 22, or even 25 when I started idly thinking about going to grad school (that was 8 years ago!)
It’s also quite different coming to this program two years after going through COVID-lockdown for 15 months, which is one of many reasons I had for going back to school and changing my career focus at least a little bit. COVID-lockdown had several ripple effects which led me to this, between the isolation, clarification of some of what’s important to me, a reminder that we only have a limited time in our lives to do what we want to do, and also acting as an extreme experiment that showed me that several things I thought I wanted I actually don’t. This leads me to the first of my three watchwords for the year, which is “Human”.
Many of you know me primarily as a creative artist - a composer and a performing musician, but I’ve also been a technical person for most of my life. Both of my parents were technical behind the scenes staff at TV stations in Chicago when I was growing up. My earliest memory of computers is knowing that we had a “Windows 3.1” machine (I think it was a Dell of some sort), when I was about 4 years old in the early-mid 1990s. I played computer games even before that, but that’s my first memory of a computer as a kind of machine. I got my first email address as an 8-year old, and we had plenty of “kid’s guide to programming” books - I remember one about QBasic, and one about how to hand-code a website directly by typing HTML in a word processor. In my pre-teen and teen years, I got my ham radio license (at age 10), and then I got into music technology for composition and music production, and ultimately went to Berklee to learn about film scoring and synthesizers among (many) other things. This in turn led me to Los Angeles where I am today. I like my computer music studio, and playing with electronic music is always fun. I also do studio tech work from time to time for friends and commercial clients.
All this is to say that I used to think that if we did more things with technology, that would be great. If I could do anything, anywhere, through the internet from the comfort of my home, that would be perfect. Then COVID happened and we tried that, and it turns out it’s actually terrible, at least in the extreme form we had to live in for 15 months. Being able to do anything lead me not to an explosion of activity, but rather to choice paralysis, and I discovered that if I could watch concerts from any group I wanted and they were all playing online all the time, I was much more likely to watch none of them than to watch any of them.
By the end of the lockdown period, I was going a little nuts from forced isolation. I had started living on my own, and worked full time from my apartment with only the occasional Zoom activity and phone calls with my family and sometimes from my friends to keep me company. Those things probably saved my sanity during that time, but they were only stopgaps until life could start again. I am very grateful that no one in my close family or of my friends got extremely ill or died from COVID, and I realize that things could have been much worse than they were for me (and they were much worse for far too many people); but the mental health effects of the isolation were real too, and I rejoined my performing ensembles as soon as they restarted over the summer of 2021. It turns out you can be on your own too much, and even as a relatively introverted person I still need some (ideally in-person) human interaction.
This year, “Human” has come to mean several things to me. I’ve really enjoyed the social aspects of being back in school and around people again - even something as simple as people smiling and waving at me in the hall has had a big impact on my morale this year! Hanging out with friends and talking shop for sometimes hours has been amazing as well 🙂. A couple of the other students in my composition program stayed after our composition seminar class on Wednesdays and we did a free-improv jam session and would chat until we were wiped out from that, and it made for long and tiring but extremely satisfying Wednesdays!
I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed playing in the CSUN symphony this year - I learned a lot and became close friends with the other 5 viola players in our section this year. We’ve shared a lot (5 hours of rehearsing per week will do that for you!), and the opera last fall was some of the most intense rehearsing and playing I’ve done in my life, even if the music wasn’t the most technically demanding music I’ve ever played. 17 hours for tech week of rehearsing and performing (just at CSUN, plus some other events), including the single longest rehearsal/performance day of my life - almost 8 hours of rehearsals / concerts on the first day of tech week between the opera rehearsal and another concert I had that night, with my longest break being 40 minutes to drive between them and grab a 5 minute dinner! (And if you’ve ever driven in LA, you know how much of a “break” that was!)
This leads to another use of the word Human - music making is an extremely physical activity. I’ve become more aware of myself as an embodied object in the world as well as a mind. It’s easy to overlook how physical it is if you just play for an hour or so per day, though even that can be tiring sometimes. But the kind of concentrated and very long rehearsals we had for the opera tech week were more like a marathon. It wasn’t that hard to get through one of them, but I was concerned about getting through the last show by the end of the week. We made it though, and I’m really glad I got to do it! (And a virtual hat’s off to the people that can do that with the Wagner Ring Cycle!) The other concerts have been fun as well of course, and seeing the different rehearsal methods of the 3 conductors we worked with at CSUN this year was very interesting, as was learning from the experience of playing for our student conductor. Even with as much playing as I’ve done before, I still learned a lot from doing this orchestra this year.
[Update to add: I mentioned in this paragraph that music is physically taxing, and that’s certainly true in a context like this, but music is also mentally taxing as well. I’ve been studying piano again the past few years more seriously even before going back to grad school, and reading a lot of books and watching a lot of videos where they talk about piano playing (and really all music-making) being partially about physically learning to use your body to play the instrument, and partially about mentally thinking about the music in the right way to get yourself to use your body the right way to play the instrument. When practicing, just mindlessly repeating a physical motion for a passage without thinking about what you are doing might just be ingraining the mistake you are making and not fixing it, and sometimes if you change how you think about it, you can practice the physical motion less and still learn it better.
Likewise, for the opera rehearsals, it was true that I was getting physically tired from playing that much throughout the week, but we drilled it enough that I was able to play everything just fine by the performances. I didn’t have any significant mistakes in the performances, but the relatively minor mistakes I did make were more due to a lack of focus after a long week of mentally as well as physically exhausting rehearsals and performances, making it hard to maintain my concentration for a 3 hour long performance situation. All of it plays into the human aspect of music-making, but it’s more than just a physical process, though it certainly is that too.] /End Update
Another manner in which “Human” came up this year was in my musicology class on the history of the Classic Era (just after J.S. Bach’s death through Beethoven, though of course nothing is ever that black and white in practice. But roughly 1750-1825). In this class, one of the themes was giving context to the life and work of both the “great” composers of the era and all the other people that were writing and performing music at the time.
One of the things we discussed was how much of the music that was written in that period was written for specific performers to match their personal abilities on an instrument, and particularly for specific singers in opera. One example I found for an instrumental musician was in the Mozart opera La Clemenza di Tito, where there is a big clarinet obbligato part in one of the arias, and it turns out that is because the clarinet virtuoso that Mozart worked with (the one he wrote his Clarinet Concerto for, Anton Stadler) was playing in the orchestra for that opera. If Stadler hadn’t been there, Mozart wouldn’t have written the aria that way. Because of the technology of the time, pieces of music written or printed on paper have survived to today while they didn’t have audio recording technology, so the performers of the time have not survived in public consciousness the way the composers have. But in that era like in this one, the performers were at least as often and maybe much more so the stars compared to the composers (and there was much more overlap in the classical music world between composer and performer in that period).
Several elements have caused our perceptions of the period to warp compared to the experience of people alive in that period, and it seems to me that some people have tried very hard to make some of the composers into “gods” rather than humans (especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven of the “High Classical” period who make up the “First Viennese School” in music history classes). I find them much more interesting though as people living and working in their time and place like everyone else, and it’s good to be reminded that even the “greats” are people too. We have a similar phenomenon in Los Angeles or “Hollywood”, where you can meet some of today’s stars in various aspects of film and television and it turns out they are all just people too, in all the ways both good and bad that people can be!
On that note, the topic of the lecture component of our composition seminar this semester was actually famous concert composers in Los Angeles, and the intersection of art and film music. We looked at composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Erich Korngold, all of whom lived in LA at some point in their lives and wrote art music and had some relationship (not necessarily good!) with the film music scene. But we talked about places they lived and went, and it was cool to realize they drove the same streets I do today! There were times when I was as “star-struck” as when I first came out here about 12 years ago 🙂. It really did humanize some of these composers, who again sometimes seem to be treated more as “gods” than as people (or if that line is too strong, then at least we focus on the high level of craft they applied to their art and don’t tend to associate other aspects of a normal human life with these people). One line that stuck out to me was when one of them (I think it was Stravinsky?) would sometimes be invited to Palos Verdes to play chamber music with Benny Goodman among other people, I guess like you do here in LA? I didn’t get to do that (wrong generation 🙂), but I have been to parties with friends in Palos Verdes, and played chamber music with some rather interesting people around town from time to time! I remember when I first came out here and saw all the big production studios and I realized I really was in the place where it all happens, and apparently you can get used to that because I haven’t felt that way for a while until this class. Every now and then the kid from suburban Chicago gets to come out and be excited about being in Los Angeles again!
The final use of the word Human that I had this year was in reaction to the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI). I’ve written quite a bit about my thoughts on that subject in my Life Tips guide on my website, so I won’t go into too much detail here about that. In the Philosophy of Music Theory section of my Life Tips guide, I have a series about whether AI art is really art - not sure if I’ve really said what I want to there, but that’s currently under Tips 9-13 in that section as of this posting. (Update: That set has been moved to this link now). I also have one in the General Tips section of my Life Tips guide about why we should still write even the rough drafts of college papers ourselves despite the existence of ChatGPT etc - see General Tips No. 10 in the Life Tips guide (also on the same page listed above). But the rise of such systems has put a new focus for me on what is important about being human and why specifically human work should be important (at least to us as humans!).
I don’t think we should necessarily ban all use of Gen AI, but I do think it’s important not to lose too much of our humanity to those machines. I’ve always taken pride in being a thoughtful and reflective person - I’m pretty much always thinking about something deep, or at least interesting (to me), and I’d much rather use my mind than just my brute strength to do things in the world. The rise of Gen AI has cast doubt on how much longer even work of the mind will be economically viable, though from the current state of the systems I don’t think it’s an immediate threat to many of us (maybe to some of us though, depending on exactly what job a given person has). I haven’t really been able to tell how to gauge this, though, as most of the doomsday / brilliant breakthrough scenarios (depending on your perspective) seem to be talking about where these systems could go in the future, and I don’t know what the odds are they will get there or how soon that might happen. But these systems have made me think hard about what I think is important about being human, and being a human artist in particular. [Note that this section was written before a string of announcements the past couple of weeks from the big players in the commercial AI field right now, and I haven’t yet had a chance to assimilate the changes and see where they leave us right now].
I’ve also gotten a lot out of the coverage that The Verge has been doing of the field, particularly many episodes of The Vergecast podcast, and that Ezra Klein has been doing with The Ezra Klein Show podcast at the New York Times if you want more thoughtful coverage of the Gen AI space. One of my favorite recent episodes actually kind of combines those shows - Ezra Klein had Nilay Patel, the host of The Vergecast, on The Ezra Klein Show a few weeks ago for a deep dive into some of the effects of AI on writing in particular, and I quoted from that episode in the General Tips point listed above. I also recently read an article from The Atlantic called “Would Limitlessness Make Us Better Writers?” by novelist Rachel Khong that resonated with what I’ve been thinking about from a musician’s perspective.
My second watchword for the year was “Kinesthetics” - learning by physically doing things with your body, as opposed to “aural” learning by hearing things [in this context usually referring to listening to lectures, though in music specifically of course there is a whole subcategory of “aural skills”, aka “ear training”, taught as part of musicianship classes and instrumental/vocal lessons), or “visual” learning, looking at visual aids of some sort. This one came up primarily in the context of tutoring musicianship classes for the undergraduate students at CSUN, which has been one of the most rewarding parts of my program so far. It has been fun to work with the students this year, and nice to see their progress over the course of the year! Hopefully they can see it too. Some of my students asked me how I’ve gotten as good as I have at these topics - sight-reading / sight-singing, melodic and harmonic dictation, and rhythm counting / playing. We also did a lot of reflection work in my Teaching Music in Higher Education class in the Fall, and those two things together are what inspired all of my explorations and reflections about music that I’ve grouped under the umbrella of “[Capital-M] Music”.
One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve worked with the undergrads and watched them try the assignments is that kinesthetics played a much bigger role than I had realized in my own development. Berklee’s primary musicianship class is called Ear Training, and I’ve always thought of my advanced ear training skills as being about hearing sound, which of course they are in large part. But I also play a variety of instruments, including my primary instruments of violin / fiddle and viola. Berklee also had two other classes I’ve come to think of as a Musicianship suite along with Ear Training - String Sight Reading Lab, and String Improv Lab. Both of these, along with my private violin lesson drilling of scales, arpeggios, chord progressions, etc, really helped me to develop my overall musical ability, and worked all of those areas thoroughly.
One of my other instruments has been piano, and getting my hands on the keys of the piano also played a big role in developing these skills. Learning how to physically play in various keys, and the hand shapes that are made for the different standard inversions of chords was very useful, as was seeing how the notes move across a chord progression (voice leading) - these are all things that keyboard playing brings that you don’t get as much with other instruments, or at least not that directly, and you get them both by seeing them laid out on the keyboard in front of you and by feeling them with your hands and fingers, and connecting all of that to the resulting sound. I call this “mapping the instrument to music”, which also applies to the technical exercises I mentioned on violin (and viola). Playing fretless string instruments and singing are also very useful for pitch matching and intonation (not a thing you have to worry about on a keyboard - you can’t do anything about it anyway while you are playing). And again, with singing in particular (but also strings), there’s a physical component to it - feeling what it feels like in your body to make the sound your ear/brain tells you is correct. This is why we use singing in ear training classes (much to the chagrin of certain students!). I wrote about all this in the “main” Capital-M Music paper I put up on my site back in February, under the Musicianship section of that paper.
Another aspect of kinesthetics that I hadn’t realized was important to me until this year is handwritten notation. From pretty early on in my composition practice (as far back as 8th grade in a “serious” way), I’ve been writing with a computer. I had a professor at Berklee who tried to argue that you couldn’t write “real” music with a computer, only by hand. You could make it look nice on the computer once you’d composed by hand, but not during the writing stage. I disagreed with that assessment then, and I still think it’s silly to say you can’t write with a computer. But I’ve taken notes by hand with handwritten notation all along - at Berklee, all my “notebooks” were binders with manuscript pads, and I would just write words on the manuscript paper as well as music notation. These days I’m using an iPad with Forscore and Goodnotes and my apple pencil stylus, but it’s still handwriting, and I do have a manuscript paper template in Goodnotes. I learned to write by hand from the beginning of my theory lessons with beginner piano back in my grade school days.
After watching some of my students trying to do ear training dictation exercises with their computer software (Auralia), clicking notes into place, I’ve come to realize that actually physically writing out the notes is an important skill both for its own sake, and also will really help develop your ear-training specifically in a way that clicking notes on a screen does not. If you write the notes by hand, they feel different - different rhythm values feel different to write, and even where the notes lie on the staff feel a little different; but on the computer they only look different (clicking the mouse on a half note or on a quarter note or eighth note is still just clicking the mouse), so you are losing one of your senses when it comes to getting better at all of these skills - another tie in to the physical “human” element! Most of the students have been writing the dictation by hand before they put it in the computer (some after a nudge from me!), but I’m still trying to convince some of them that this is actually important. Again, more on this in my Capital-M Music paper.
The final watchword I’m considering here is “Pattern”. In my music making, and particularly in my tutoring, I keep emphasizing that music is made of patterns, not notes (this concept is all over my Life Tips guide, particularly in the General Musicianship section at the top and the Philosophy of Theory section). This topic has come up in the Music Analysis class I took this semester where our professor described it as the music being in the relationships between the notes rather than the notes themselves, and I first got a version of this concept back in my first semester at Berklee. One of the other students in my Berklee Sight-Reading Lab came to the realization that “if I see a scale, I should play a scale”, and this cute, simple-sounding quip actually opened my eyes to a much better approach to reading and playing music, and thinking of harmony and other theory concepts. Another way I’ve seen this put is to think of groups of notes rather than individual notes. As I say in the Life Tips guide, this is the closest I’ve ever come to a secret that unlocked music for me, and I don’t think you can actually become a fully competent musician without coming to some version of this concept. I say a lot more in the Life Tips guide, so I’ll leave this point there for now, but this idea comes up in some form or other in most of my tutoring sessions and every time I make music today, whether playing, composing, or improvising.
It has been a great year, and I’m looking forward to more fascinating revelations next year and as I continue my journey in this amazing world of music, hopefully with all my friends, new and old. See you all down the road!