Analyze This!

A number of weeks ago, I attended a Slip show at the Wetlands in New York City. It was my first time actually listening to the Slip -- having never really had the chance to hear them previously for whatever reason. As I normally do the first time I am hearing a band, I edged up towards the front of the stage and without really thinking about it, folded my arms together against my chest. I closed my eyes and attempted to lose myself in the music.

However, as luck would have it, the venue was getting pretty packed. Every few seconds, I'd feel a slight push on my backside or lose my space a bit. I moved myself over to the side of the stage where there was more room. Standing there beside me was a girl I'd recognized from other shows in the area. I introduced myself to her, and she smiled sheepishly.

"I know you," she giggled, "you're the girl with the red notebook!"

I must have looked real confused, because she went on to explain herself:

"You like the Disco Biscuits, right?"

I nodded.

"Well, then it's definitely you! I see you at shows, you are always writing in that red notebook of yours. In fact, remember Irving Plaza? My friends and I were really intrigued by how much you could write in that thing during a show...How do you pay attention to the music?"

Needless to say, I was shocked by this conversation. I glanced inside my bag, and sure enough, my red journal lay inside. I knew that she was pretty accurate with her observations. At most shows that I had attended up until that point, I'd scribbled notes about the shows into that journal. It had gotten to the point where I would feel as if something were missing in my experience of the actual show if I had not brought my book with me. Incidentally, before that point, I had never given it much thought.

I smiled at her. "I pay attention to the music, and I write down how I am feeling as it happens." I continued to explain it to her as best I could, but I could tell that I was frustrating her a bit.

"Doesn't that take away from your enjoyment, though?"

I shook my head. I had found it mildly intriguing to look back on my notes from previous shows and see chord structures, sequences, and statistics written down as they had happened. She shrugged, and eventually I returned home -- with nothing scribbled in my journal that night from the show. It only hit me a few weeks later that I could have been making a terrible mistake, and that the girl was quite accurate in her questioning.

My analyses of shows come from a habit I possessed even as a young child. I was born with perfect pitch and was classically trained on the piano since the age of four. Without really knowing it at the time, I was trained to use my ear to hear chord structure and theoretical aspects of music. I was told that it would shape me as a pianist and more generally, as a musician. This 'advanced' knowledge would then give me the necessary foundation to perhaps further an eventual career if I had wanted to do so.

Structure always intrigued me to no avail. I would take long pieces of music to practice on the piano, and immediately want to know how chords fit together. It was amazing when I'd grasp a new concept or understand a particular theoretical form. After a few years, my piano teacher had decided to retire. I was sent to work with somebody else, and our sessions together became nothing more than real frustrating processes.

She was an intelligent, well-taught, former professor of music from the Juilliard School. Every week, we would work through the repertoire and she would get very angry with me.

"You are not feeling this! You are not feeling the music!" she'd cry out. I'd be mortified. Of course I was!

She'd accuse me of depending too much on my ear. I was not practicing enough, rather, I was relying on theory to help me through. I was not interpreting the music on my own terms. Instead, she felt I was just listening to other musicians' interpretations; not allowing my own feelings and emotions to make my view of the pieces unique.

A number of years later, after two or three more piano teachers, I stopped taking lessons. I had become terribly frustrated with the piano. An accident had left one of my fingers slightly impaired, and my technique had suffered because of it. I had also stopped practicing. It truly annoyed me that I was being made to learn pieces, enter contests, and attend recitals. My mother told me much later that the years to follow after I had stopped had brought sadness to my home; the constant sounds of my music were missed dearly.

I began attending school at the University at Buffalo in the fall of 1995. I was a Music Education major, with a concentration in voice. I had seriously contemplated becoming a professor of music theory and a choir teacher. However, the University had undergone some major changes during the years I had attended school there. Because of budget cuts and the loss of funding towards non-academic areas of the school, the music department was the first to suffer terrible losses. I transferred soon after, leaving all hopes of a music degree behind. I took with me an even greater knowledge of music theory, though. Through a very strict theory program, required for all music majors despite their focus, I found myself immersed in structure again and excelling in the ear training courses.

After seeing many shows over the years, including but not limited to Phish and the Disco Biscuits, I had begun to take careful notes in that journal. Most of the time, the notes would consist of said chord structures-- as they truly were fun to analyze as the shows progressed. After shows, I would then speak with my friends about what had just transpired. Sometimes, the conversations would go like this:

Friend #1: "That jam out of Piper was intense!"

Friend #2: "Yeah! Although, I really enjoyed the bouncy feeling of tonight's Chalkdust Torture..."

Me: "Did you notice how they kept going back to the EM7->AM7->EM7 theme, even during the ambient My Left Toe jam?"

Friend #1: "What are you talking about?"

Me: "Well, like, during My Left Toe, Trey teased the structure from Chalkdust, and so I knew it was coming later..."

Friend #2: "Uhh.. ok."

And so on.

During my constant analysis, I had completely forgot to just enjoy the music for its magic and power, rather than just for its form. Of course, there were times where I'd felt the beauty of transcendental travel during a particular show of sorts (Phish - 10/8/99, Biscuits - 10/28/99, moe. - 10/31/99 to name a few) but, not coincidentally, hardly anything structural was written in my journal for those days.

Indeed, I needed to learn some sort of balance -- where I could successfully take myself away from the structure I had been brought up to observe, enough to simply take in music for what it truly is there for.

While many bands today do encompass wonderful structures and theoretical gems, if it were only supposed to be about chords and notes, experiences would be pretty bland, wouldn't they? Magic is just as important, if not more so. One just has to be open to it in order for it to happen. And if not for that reason alone, I've put my book away some more.