As a younger edgelord aspirant composer (I was aspiring, mind you, to both), I set out to make a sequence of pieces about my personal vices. I only got two deep: a violin concerto (alright obligato, but I was young and thought big) called Bad Coffee Serenade, a survey of all the local fast food establishments’ coffee offerings; and my ill-fated Nicotine Sinfonietta, intended to be as long as a few drags on a cigarette. After these, I quite wisely ceased my broad confessional (the next titles were not quite as ready for public admission.) That is, until the Hapless Songs. But I have been for decades tuned in to the idea of vice/virtue as a composer, and felt too many composers were working the virtue side in their work so I could carve a lane on the other side of the street, the vice side, the dark end, the place of Blakean Experience (because I still think big I guess?). All this of course leads to drugs, in this case caffeine.

I could enlarge on Camus, but this is a pipsqueak of a song is about coffee. I could drift into coffee trivia—Balzac’s purported 40-50 cups per day, say, or Kaldi the Ethiopian Goatherd of legend who noticed his goats bristling after eating a certain plant—or I could go on about the Marquis de Sade or something, or trot out the quote I am pretty sure Bach never said: “Without my morning cup of coffee I am just like a piece of roast goat.” I could list fellow coffee enthusiasts to prove the brute strength of my legacy, lightweights like Beethoven, Voltaire, Margaret Atwood and David Lynch. Or I could get into the weeds, asking if coffee itself even qualifies as vice.

Instead, I will here enlarge on someone else’s note about a wholly other piece I (sadly) did not write: David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing, a piece I certainly love, but a piece whose program note changed my own direction. At risk of copyright violation, I here reproduce it in full:

A couple of years ago, I started thinking about how so often when classical composers write a piece of music, they are trying to tell you something that they are proud of and like about themselves. Here’s this big gushing melody, see how emotional I am. Or, here’s this abstract hard-to-figure-out piece, see how complicated I am, see my really big brain. I am more noble, more sensitive, I am so happy. The composer really believes he or she is exemplary in this or that area. It’s interesting, but it’s not very humble. So I thought, What would it be like if composers based pieces on what they thought was wrong with them? Like, here’s a piece that shows you how miserable I am. Or, here’s a piece that shows you what a liar I am, what a cheater I am. I wanted to make a piece that was about something disreputable. It’s a hard line to cross. You have to work against all your training. You are not taught to find the dirty seams in music. You are not taught to be low-down, clumsy, sly and underhanded. In Cheating, Lying, Stealing, although phrased in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. There is a swagger, but it is not trustworthy. In fact, the instruction in the score for how to play it says: Ominous funk. — David Lang

Mind you, my prior vice sequence came before I knew of David’s blistering work of such an intent, but neither he nor I are hardly the first to come up with this idea. I mean, before there was either a Lang or a Felsenfeld, there was a Moliere, a De Sade and a Burroughs, just to name the most obvious vice-buskers. I am, pace the brief of the unedited realm that is Substack, drifting a little afield of course, but coffee, the consumption of same, and the moral internal reckoning to which we are all somehow responsible is sometimes considered vice, sometimes virtue. So with my own “Ominous Funk” I continue what I have always done, boasting a proud tradition behind me with little hope, save for this flailing and failing essay, of entering that (ig)noble continuum. I just wanted to depict me at my worst or weakest, because I think people get better at their worst or weakest, and even before there was such a thing as the internet let alone the Instagram deceptions we see daily, I suppose I wanted to at least present one counter, use no filter.

And now I am ennobling myself undeservedly in the wake of a one-page song. Sheesh.

Here in this Hapless Song—and in the Hapless Songs writ large I suppose—I chart this specific vice with a trace of temperance, admitting another cup of coffee is is “probably a bad idea.” Here you see me in real time thinking it through—a very short, but very real slice of time. Of course thinking fails, because the harmonies indicate the other cup of coffee was indeed had (it was) and the ending reveals it I was right to think it was a spectacularly bad idea (it was). Or, as Baudelaire has it, “the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.” So perhaps my late day coffee, being drunk under the thin veneer of self-criticism that this piece vaunts to admit, is not the depth of vice I imagined it. After all, one view of vice is that it is a seam (pace Lang), a crack, a weakness. But maybe that is indeed how the light gets in. And so here I am, coffee in hand, pondering, again.

Hey, If you think this volunteer project is fun or funny or worthy or execrable, consider subscribing.

Now here I claim my own hypocrisy: I am occasionally (well, too often) a poor emailer. I try and fail. I try again and fail worse. Not that there are that many people clamoring directly , but how many times have I let something linger and then sink into the “hope they write me again” guilt vortex? And as it withered into ashen memory, I felt relief, causing someone else the same sadness? Well, write your own Hapless Song about me. I dare you.

Douglas Rushkoff calls our present predicament “Present Shock,” the “the paralyzing state of being trapped in an endless, hyper-connected, real-time “now.” ^[1] And while a few inexpert comments on tech pervasiveness and invasiveness (especially on Substack?) is well-trodden terrain, I cannot think of a more accurate snap than Dan Taberski’s on his vital podcast Dan Taberski’s Manifesto. Here, he responds to Apples execrable, solipsistic despicable (yet culture-trajectory-changing) “Think Different” campaign:

You want me to “Think Different?” Oh, I think different alright, I can’t think at all, how’s that, motherfucker? My focus is shot; my iPhone is hunting me, with pings on my earpods and dzzzt on my apple watch, not to mention the actual hump I now have from hunching over my 13-inch MacBook pro, the, what, ninth or tenth laptop I’ve bought from them in the last 30 years? Oh they own me alright.

My iPhone is HUNTING ME.

So yes we all miss emails, and we all get missed in emails. We all miss texts, slacks, snaps, DMs, calls, and perhaps the occasional mailer. And yes it contributes to our overall heartbreak—the inclusion of a new feature on Apple Mail wherein you are reminded of an email you sent and received no response several days later sends me a little nudge further down the darkness chute.

I have tried to front-end this with as much muster-able sincerity by placing the following disclaimer in my sig file:

I do understand your time frame is not my time frame, your work day is not my work day, and what is urgent to me may not be urgent to you. So please consider this a low pressure email, and respond if and when you can. Thank you for your time.^[2]

And I mean it. But I also mean it that it makes me a little sad when an email is set adrift and never reaches shore. Ergo this song. And for the record, the person in fact did respond, just not in anyone’s idea of reasonable time. As an artist, I am quite quite quite quite accustomed to tossing my pennies (if they are even that valuable) down the mythic well. And yet, decades and hundreds of entries later, the sting remains fresh.

Thank you for reading. Please do not feel compelled to respond. I do understand. I own no part of you, but am here, still here, a boat against the ginning current, borne as we are ceaselessly back into the present.

^[1] For purposes of the modest argument, this is in fact a summary done by Claude. The book, according to my pal Claude, breaks the symptoms of the epidemic disease into the following: Narrative Collapse, Digiphrenia, Overwinding, Fractalnoia, and Apocalypto.

^[2] I did not come up with this wording, but for the life of me I cannot remember who did. I do believe it (or something like it) was someone in conversation with Sarah Marshall on You’re Wrong About, but that could be absolutely wrong.

We were discussing a musical they’d performed, one that, while they were terrific in it, falls short of insight—honestly, is what the kids today might label “a little problematic.” And in this conversation, I—the composer of the tiny, complaining execrable Hapless Songs, so yes, a little disconnect here—found myself spewing a shopworn cliché, one I intend to amend presently (hence this entry). I said something to the effect of “Sure this had some problems, but really one cannot expect a musical to speak fluently and profoundly to the Human Condition.” These words came out of my mouth. And as they did, I immediately knew I was limply giving voice to an unfortunate (and in my mind radically debunked) prior, believing that, what, something built for popular consumption inherently, based on its intended cultural destination, lacked…something. Something profound, I suppose. That a musical was and inevitably would be lacking, some kind of concession with one’s higher self, and we should en masse apply different standards to it, forgive its fripperies because said fripperies—any fripperies—were priced in as shallow? Because what can withstand the market is inevitably shallow? Unable to plumb? There I was, an enlightened person of the 21^st century, a teacher and consumer and principled artist, knee-jerk spitting inherited (and damn smug) Modernist Project definitions of words like “depth” and “meaning” and “profundity.” I had clearly made decisions over who could possibly enlighten, a category of course into which I, without pause, persisted in inserting little old me.

But not without cause: I am a Trained, Degree-Certified Classical Composer, and as such we tend, reflexively, to value the likes of Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky uber alles. We derive our fluency from mastery, and our mastery from the canon, and the canon from a handful of talented people who continue to point the way for us all. And yet, as gifted as they were, we tend to assign them (not their work, their personages) a overheated capacity for Blakean experience above anyone else, and their work, their genre, a place where the top-level insights are situated. And here I go, “we-ifying” this, because what I mean is that atavistically I—I—do this. And I think it is a damning mistake. We carve them into the side of our mental mountains, and as we do we remove the fragile personhood from them, and from their work. And for those in the training trenches, it is stick not carrot to our development. This of course puts me—puts a lot of us—in a delicate position, because when we come (as we absolutely must make no mistake) to de-canonize, to either rethink or expand the perimeters of the Great Historical Metanarrative, we do so at a loss. It costs. And when things run to expensive, we need strategic reserves and are given few: the canon will simply have to do. So we label this “knowledge” and keep the gates in such a way that literally nobody, not even we mortals who want to, who work to do so, can achieve it. “Higher minds” or “Educated Audiences” or, perhaps worst of all, “Tradition” are literally impossible to wrestle with, to situate oneself within, and rather than value the wrestling we benight a few marbly individuals and inevitably fail to measure up. Talk about expensive.

As no human then or now is able fully to wrap their arms around the totality (which ought be a process, but in capitalism, running on Mark Fisher’s Business Ontology, only results matter) and so we, boats against the current, smugly and fearfully cling to those alabaster, Promethean examples enshrined in academic lore (PR). Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky. Maybe Schoenberg. Certainly Boulez. Wagner (I know, I know). Mozart. The Indisputables. A Justice Leage of Musical Geniuses, here to save us all from our own quotidian selves, suitable for framing.

Let me be clear: The Indisputables moved some aesthetic mountains, crafted some abiding magic. Or at least their work moved people, me included. I got into “this” “business” because I heard Beethoven’s towering Ninth and wanted it to go on forever. Stravinsky is a composer who tickles and alights, often by making me laugh. Wagner, troubling as the legacy is, has sent me since I could just thrill to the music, legacy be damned (and boy was it). Ravel. Debussy. Puccini. Both Schumanns. Brahms. Britten. These mere mortals made work that has turned me on. Not because any of them were great; not because genius defined humanity and they being geniuses were tapped into Western Civilization Defining Forces; but because they were really really good at writing music. That to me was and still should be enough. It just plain sounded good to me.

Now maybe along the way the Good Music of these Good Composers came to define and explain and de-complexify the world, where I remain a citizen in good standing. Maybe they caught wind or fire or whatever element matters most; maybe when we look to slice the flux of history by examining it via art (a true “therefore by their fruits you will know them” situation) that equal-parts demystify-er and complexifier, something instructive and imperishable fruited. Probably so. I do not want to undervalue this—in fact, what I want to do is loft, here on the human plane of imminence, rather than imprison things in some dull Cloud Castle in the even duller sky. The work of the Indisputables deserves far better than visages cast in plaster. Because some of that work stands a chance of pointing the way. But there is of course far more to the story than these happy few.

How we come, as thinking creatures, to at least feint at understanding ourselves, is the project of philosophy, science, and art. And it is a big untenable project, more in the attempt than in the achievement in my view. Because when we look to the end we miss the middle. And allow me to loft even more when I say that the analysands of trends (me while presuming a musical cannot speak to the human condition) fancy a linear endgame so much gets lost that the end becomes the ideal and not the game. To quote Kathy Acker, referring to the Hegelian philosophers including Hegel himself: “They assumed that human history is going somewhere, that is has an endpoint, a goal.” Forest not trees. And when that is the mien, when that is how we view any work of art, we silo and stanch and think subtratctively, and drop from view potential sources of wisdom that don’t gibe with the metanarrative. Are we therefore not doing ourselves a massive disservice when we expect wisdom only to flow from a tiny set of sources? Do we expect actual tangible (meaning of use) insights of only certain sorts of artists? Is this merely a genre or market question? Obviously—fucking obviously—not.

To help unpack, I invoke that fustiest of sources, literary critic Harold Bloom, who wrote a whole book entitled simply (“simply” eh?) Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I like Bloom’s work a lot of the time—I love, right or wrong, his level of seriousness and the even outsized value he places on literature, and his too-rare willingness to not just canonize definitively but to explain his reasons for said canonizations. Hell, he even ventured a book called The Western Canon. It is there for ribald mockery and preening co-signing, for cancellation attempts and expansion arguments and vicious takedown. But it is there, and to me that comes with it a certain level of courage. In this way he reminds me of T.S. Eliot^[1] or Schoenberg who made their cases bluntly and therefore, in their unfortunate Hegelian end-of-history way, at least cited their sources and submitted their papers for consideration in the Wisdom Project.

And I often disagree with Bloom. But, having read all his books, I find him a valued member of what was once called the “principled opposition” (remember that?). In his mind, there are standards; his work is explication and inclusion, who and why? He does not go in for that anti-alterity paradox wherein he claims high standards are his by nature of the fact that he holds them. He does rather, as an inveterate and deep and practiced reader, admit his whys and wherefores and therefore his whole entry in the Wisdom Project is available for agon. He does not declare himself or his opinions be the arena,^[2] but he has entered it and is prepared to fight—and he, as is said today brings receipts. I like this in a critic; I like this in an artist. Bloom spent his life working to a definition, a theory, of what not just makes for good literature but rather a theory of the case of humanity, and how literature does not just reflect but in fact creates the Human Condition. “The mind,” Bloom wrote, “{always returns to its need for beauty, truth, and insight.” To him, this was all to be found in language. ^[3]

But to again agon his title Where Shall Wisdom be Found? I answer(ed): why on earth ought it not be found in a poppy Broadway musical? Here exists a massive chasm between Bloom and myself. He, like Adorno and Schoenberg and Eliot and Hegel and too many others, not just eschews but flatly and snobbishly rejects anything outside of the ordained Wisdom Industry. Without mentioning who in fact is responsible for the ordaining. “Wisdom writing,” he says, “has its own implicit standards of aesthetic and cognitive strength.” That there, good people of the Haplesscene, is the very model of a Kept Gate. And he thickens his argument: “Debasements of wisdom traditions flood the marketplace: pop divas flaunt red strings that purport to be Kabalistic, thus invoking the hidden lore of the Zohar, the masterwork of Jewish esotericism.” Here he speaks of Madonna (the once straw woman of boomer academics—I have stories) and her Kabbalah studies. Now perhaps hers was tourist venture into West Coast Spiritualism lacking Bloom’s immersive study of the mystics, but who among us when seeking wisdom elsewhere has not retrofit it a little and had our own personal humanity altered? Is not that why we venture? Is that also not why we make art of any stripe. And is not Madonna capable of finding something in Zohar, even from a presumed comparatively shallow study, and bouncing the idea back into a work of art that can encapsulate it? Because she is popular does that mean she is incapable? JF Martel, in his essential book Reclaiming Art, he says: “art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms.” The “we” in this is doing all the work, and it is there for everyone and from everywhere, genre or other fading parameters be damned. We are all of us part of we? Including, potentially, Madonna?

Much of the Modernist Project was a deliberate closure, or at best an enclosure, a binary of the ably bivouacked and the barbarian nomads ever in danger of storming. And while much of philosophy is built on defining certain binaries (self/other, inside/outside) those are mere guideposts, and then the real work is either in the betwixt (the “squishy part” as Douglass Rushkoff so often calls it) or in going extraterritorial and redefining and reconfiguring ourselves. Thus, wisdom comes from so so so many sources. High and low, or rather “high” and “low.” Martel often says, on Weird Studies, that the problem is not modernism, but that we weren’t modern enough. Wholly agree.

Contra Bloom and his accursed and impossible (and now to me largely frail or at least on life support) quest for Wisdom, can we not all imagine things that were beyond meaningful that made it to commercial radio or the Summer Blockbuster, to the romance novel or the comic book? To network television? I mean, can we not learn an obscene amount from The Office or The Hunger Games or The Simpsons? To say nothing of The Good Place? Have not broad human ideas been rehearsed and applied in vastly popular contexts? “The love you take/is equal to the love you make” “California coming home” “It wears me out” “There’s a place for us / somewhere a place for us” “Mississippi Goddamn” “Freedom’s just another word / for nothing left to lose” “I want to knit you a sweater / I want to write you a love letter” “I wanna be the one to walk in the sun” “Femininominon” “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / and tenement halls” (Thanks for making my point, Paul Simon). And have not allegedly unwise pop divas and drag queens and filmmakers and novelists, underground artists and punk progenitors and pop-artists and folk musicians &c. found not just delight but power and made good use of everything from modernism to the avant garde, with examples too numerous to mention? ^[4] Who among us is, by rights and course of study and immersion and degree certification, able to catch the elements and help people out in deciding on well-lived life? Or, as so labelled by my friend philosopher Simon Critchley, the “Garage Philosopher” Philip K Dick said in Valis, “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. (Or so I told myself.)” Take that, Zohar.

Make no mistake: I am not advancing any sort of argument for the power of one source of wisdom over the other, nor am I trying to say all things are equal always. That is actually the point here: we can locate meaning and explication in Shakespeare, in Proust, in Wilde and Blake, sure, but we can—also or equally or just differently—find it wherever we seek to look, because wisdom is not a privileged asset, it is in fact there for the finding. That in my view is a true and radical decanonization—not just a begrudging acceptance of more to the upper pantheon, but rethinking what a pantheon is, which to my mind is just a place one can begin according to someone who has spent some time thinking about it. And as such, the words of the prophets are indeed written on the subway walls. To give one personal anecdotal example: when nearing the agonizing completion of my opera Exposure, I was stuck. Like really could not figure out what I wanted to do. And so, venturing to a coffee shop, on the stereo there was a song I absolutely loathe. ^[5] Overproduced yet sickly. And yet there, in the overheated moment that forms the tune’s climax, I found my solution, a simple progression of chords. A version of myself more hopped up on the Wisdom Project would have spat at the idea that someone as credentialed and aspiringly profound as myself could find solution and even succor in such a flawed and shallow source, and yet it cracked me. I finished the opera that night. I deserve no praise for this, but it did clue me in that in the so-called gutter one could look at the stars. Or at least there were a lot of good ideas out there and that as we lattice them together as artists, why not have more available to us at this bountiful buffet.

To return to my not expecting something as garish as a pop musical to have any say in the Wisdom Project, I am pleased to report that my next sentence was an immediate corrective, something along the lines of “why the fuck should we not expect that?” And as such I was able to engage my child in a meaningful conversation, admitting rather than forgiving how the piece had simply fallen short on many levels. It mattered. And I suppose, to redirect this conversation to the Hapless Songs, that is what I am trying to do here: not to reverse engineer profundity or insist that in fact the Upper Pantheon is to be avoided or is in some way equal to the Lower Depths, but more trust Wisdom itself it as a precept, conceptually, ontologically. It is there. It will materialize. Or, as the brilliant writer Sophie Strand says, “I often think that in fairy tales, the smallest creatures offer the greatest boon…it’s always your downfall when you don’t give the crumb to the mouse or when you don’t help the old woman. Because at the end of the day it turns out it was the fairy king, of the angel or, you know, the most powerful being” It is there, she means. And the smartest and most self protecting and culturally valuable and kindest thing to do is take the offer. Why spend a lot of time learning and seeking and growing only to distrust the resplendently available sources? And perhaps I might be fleetingly lucky enough to catch it. We all can. And if not someone, somewhere, sometime will—and we do not know what train they will take or who they are or what credentials they possess, none of it matters. Because none of us actually know. Or, as Leaonard Cohen said famously: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” We are allowed our opinions, our loves and likes and turnons and distastes, but it is at our peril that we ignore things just and hold up some dusty, patriarchal “implicit standards” and we in turn narrow the conversation and make it far dumber. And things are dumb enough.

NOTE: Photo Credit above to my friend Sarah Marshall

^[1] I know, I know…

^[2] Though a spirited takedown of him once said, hysterically, “if he were any more ex cathedra he would be a cathedral.”

^[3] I am not here to debate the morality of the author. I admit there was an accusation, and I admit I did not read too deeply into it; and that in this rare instance the source of the accusation has become one of the worst and least trustworthy voices, a Bannon/Trump enthusiast. Does not mean she is wrong.

^[4] We could do an entire, lengthy list of novelists and filmmakers and composers who have used so-called “pulp fiction” or “noir” aesthetics to great effect. Just that one genre.

^[5] “MacArthur Park” if you must know.

Oh lord, I am doing it again. I am Second-Personing this. Another scared scare quote. I am saying “You” not “I” when what I mean is that I (“I”) made this decision, I had reservoirs of uncanny emotion, and I made the potentially disastrous choice to try to get to a position—artistically and professionally—where I could write some operas so that others, other extant “I”’s, could thrill to them. Where my tales could not just fly but fucking SING.

And then, well, reality, over decades, sets in. For one, like it or not, everything is a business, or everything becomes a business. The always-right anti-caplitalist philosopher Mark Fisher, in his imperishable book Capitalist Realism, calls this “Business Ontology,” the simple but real notion that all things under capitalism tilt businessward. Here I quote the man himself":

Business Ontology as I understood it was simply the idea that everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms. The problem is that Business Ontology has no place for anything like ‘the public’. It’s time to reinvent the concept of the public and also for workers in public services to start to drive out business interests and business methods.

It creates a complexity (as do all worthy precepts) because yes, one needs money to make large art—opera is slightly less expensive than war, and that seems to have limitless state funding—so how can one divorce from the ontology, and yet when the only visible good, the “bottom line” is meted out fiscally, well we have a problem do we not? And another question here: is art a “public service”? I will take no questions on this one.

How, you may well be asking, does this tiny screed relate to the fourth of the Hapless Songs? Or maybe you’ve stopped reading because above this there’s a pull quote of a marxist philosopher and a middle-aged man making a leftist philosophical point in a tiny Substack post is among the more tiresome things the internet has to offer? Either way, I promise to get to some reasonable conclusion here shortly. And even if I do not, I will attach a photograph of a cute dog as a tax for some modest but indeed mealy perseveration on Art & Commerce.

Point is, I did not want, on that evening, to attend an opera, and I love opera. It was to be honest the composer of the piece, whose work leaves me often very cold (and I will reveal the name of this person for a princely fee of $250,000; if you need my Venmo information please let me know privately) but I went because I thought it would be good for me professionally on some stupid level. And was it? Hard to say. Is it ever? Again, even making or feeling compelled to make that calculation leaves me a little stunted.

But I do believe the main point here is the troubling swiftness with which I was able to do this, and how these calculations individually don’t really rate even a mention in one’s diary, but how collectively they can sand down our love, our deep-seated emotional ground zero reasons we (dammit, “I”) made the impossible choice in the first place; how that, net, can be a trial, a dark loss. So much more to say on this one, but I have at this point pulled a full French Deconstruction 1990s thing wherein the secondary text far outweighs the primary. But maybe I deserve a little credit for mentioning exactly zero members of the Frankfurt School?

But mostly I remember teaching on Zoom, and above all my child learning—or rather “learning”—on Zoom. It was heartbreaking and stupid and heartbreakingly stupid. My own kid was in Fourth grade when things shut down. They never had a normal year until Middle School. And we muddled through.

Some institutions fronted better than others (here I acknowledge the places that helpfully employed me: Juilliard and The Walden School, Curtis and the New York Philharmonic, all of whom took the reins and managed with grade a situation impossible to manage gracefully; for this I am always grateful) but we all knew that what we were doing was The Best We Could, but also that “school” runs on a different set of principles and this was under not even these extreme circumstances anything that this was at best a simulacrum. But in the age of simulacra, what else is one to do?

I cannot remember for the life of me what occasioned this song. But as none of these date from the pandemic (I could simply not write in that whole time, about which more in a subsequent post) frustration no doubt boiled over. However, here I must skip to some enthusiasm for the podcast Weird Studies (I am to put it mildly an avid listener) because on it the hosts—the inimitable JF Martel and my new friend Phil Ford—introduced me to the essay by Carl Jung “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” which has in it this galling quote:

“The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex.”

Now while I love this image, I also secretly hope that my Hapless Songs are nobody’s idea of an Autonomous Complex, because that means this level of dedicated whining is being somehow achieved from within me either with tyrannical might or the subtle coming nature itself, and I would not wish that on anyone. ANYONE. But the work itself toddles on. In some kind or other of ZONE.

Mostly I’ve been spared, but I feel for those in the literary academic profession, whose every faculty meeting has largely been devoted to this topic. I feel for the spiritual and political and economic podcasters who dot the land, coast to coast, who need to weigh and weigh and weigh in. But mostly I feel for fellow artists, who are constantly having to assess and rate and re-assess and re-rate the threat to their livelihood. And while this is not really touching much of what I do (yet) the looming ontological disaster hovers and lurks and, frankly, bores.

Now I like to follow wiser people than myself, and few are wiser on these issues than the inimitable Cory Doctorow, especially his new book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Same Douglass Rushkoff on his “Team Human” podcast. I cannot sum them up (not smart enough) but I can say that Doctorow says, of Large Language Models:

This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive.

And Rushkoff, well, he has much to say on the topic, particularly in how he views the oligarchs who make such contrivances (his book Survival of the Richest is a hysterico-terrifying romp through these serial killers’ ways) by suggesting that they do all they can to enforce the idea of how deadly AI will be for us all because they need it to be that powerful, a kind of “stop me before I kill again” machismo that we all know they are capable of. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?

My opinion: we have to wait and see. I am not anyone’s idea of an optimist. But I do not see this as the next Atomic Bomb. In the mean time, my own glibly rendered Hapless Song on the matter.

Now I do not want to scuttle or mock the excellent work theory teachers and theorists do—I actually, politics aside, found incredible use for the ur and aus of my many semesters of Schenkerian Analysis as a graduate student, and I use precepts of voice leading in just about every lesson (not as even an overtonishly-derived property or propriety, but rather as a composer setting the rules for their own pieces). And some of my best friends are Theorists of varying sorts. But I do genuinely believe, amid the cross between the mid-20^th Century rush to over-scientize the humanities (High Modernism’s mostregrettable contribution, fear of our own intellectual shadows) and the need to have a comprehensive University Curriculum legible and passable to any and all music students for degree certification, we overprioritize four part harmony and teachable forms at the expense of raw and weirdo creativity. Perhaps in the name of a kind of unachievable fluency. And we are not, obviously, the only Modernist-dripping discipline to do so.

Now I do not want to scuttle or mock the excellent work theory teachers and theorists do—I actually, politics aside, found incredible use for the ur and aus of my many semesters of Schenkerian Analysis as a graduate student, and I use precepts of voice leading in just about every lesson (not as even an overtonishly-derived property or propriety, but rather as a composer setting the rules for their own pieces).

I have a lot to say on this but will part here with my own entrenched opinions on this impossible topic: here I slip—unnecessarily, one might hasten to add—into a lamentably defensive posture. Old wounds. So forgive a soupçon of explanation, dear reader: overkill, perhaps, but it is my Substack, and I can cry if I want to…

Over the years (oy who doesn’t love a paragraph that opens with that there cliché?) I have fielded lamentations from private students far and wide about their utter lack of theory knowledge. They’d perhaps taken the requisite Four Semesters of Theory (University Standardized Trademark) but seemed to envision four other, hidden terms wherein if they could only absorb The Appropriate Amount of Dodecaphony and analysis of Bartok then—somehow—they would have access to The Secrets of Composition. That these well-kept and entirely fictional gates were in fact the problem; pierce the veil, scales would fall and symphonies would emerge.

This is in some way my—our—fault. Because for years we told them that this kind of atavistic, ur-fluency was the desired result of such Classical Training, that much like a language one needed to be able to conjugate an endless series of verbs in order to write poetry in another language. When what one knows is that the way of learning lies when you fall in love.

What a bloated explanation of why I, exasperatedly, wrote my second Hapless Song “Blear.” But that is in fact the reason. And so, reader, it is yours. Thank you for taking it off my hands.

To be fair, I had applied before, so perhaps they just have a roving notion that anyone who applied last year would in fact want to apply again (fair enough I suppose) but in this era where rejection letters are less and less frequent (hard to find out you were not selected; I am still avidly waiting to hear from some things I submitted for during the Biden Administration) this one stung a little. But only a little. Because those stings hurt a little less as my skin leathers and my nerves fray.

So yes I wrote Hapless Song 51 (the beginning of Book I!) and yes it came quickly. Maybe that is because, like all of these neurotic little offings, sadness brews beneath. Like real world and hard-to-manage sadness. The idea that so many of us are so often beholden to silent committees who, in the age of AI (to vaunt cliche) don’t even train their LLMs on generating rejection letters, presuming, I presume, that we all are tuned in to Social Media (hey another cliche, I am on a damn roll here) and therefore require no direct communication.

This leads to a genuine plea, a cri de cour to my own industry: spend some time on those who do not ascend. When once I was taped to write a rejection letter for a concern in which I was involved, I really took the assignment to heart, spent most of a weekend on it. Good news can be scrawled in feces on their door; bad news, when one loses, requires more tact and grace, more consideration and thought.

And then do not send those letters to those who simply did not apply. Because it stings regardless.

My lone regret is that I did not date these songs—not because history (whatever that is, times being what they are) will care, but it would be interesting to chart the exact moment that would lead me to issue such a cri de couer, especially as it was the first song. I do not remember if I had 100 in mind; I do not remember writing this (save that it did happen in my office at Juilliard because a student cancelled, the derivation of so many of these tiny offerings). But I do still relate and relate hard to the feeling. I loveteaching, but sometimes, the long stretches can feel like time has been relentlessly unforgiving.

I also began a tradition of texting these images to friends, peculiar little conversation pieces. And when I sent this one to my brilliant friend Dalit Warshaw, she commented “and yet somehow never enough work.” That about says it all.

Dedications

The entire cycle will be dedicated to soprano Britt Hewitt and pianist Andrea Christie, the amazing Happlesseers who have performed these songs in concert settings. But I am pondering dedicating individual songs to people I do not know. Because why not. They’re my songs. Any thoughts, dear readers?

And if you are of such a mind, if you sing or play, I encourage you to perform these songs. I do not plan on copyrighting any of this material; consider it open source and do what thou wilt. I do not believe in sacred texts, but even if I did, these would hardly qualify, so knock yourselves out. And should you want a copy of the entire score, you need only ask.

To the Substack of it all: of course, pay if you like—the wolf is at everyone’s door and the growling is loud—but honestly I am just happy you are here. I will never judge a non-payer.

The Journey from Drawn Out Dramas

Like many a Generation X person, I believe the inheritance of my own cynicism can be traced to Mad Magazine. I read it religiously, often knowing the movie parodies before I ever knew the movies, if I knew them at all. And in and among that talismanic publication were tiny little marginal drawings, called “Drawn Out Dramas,” made by the inimitable Sergio Aragones. One shot scenes that interrupted the flow of the magazine in the most glorious way. I consider my own Hapless Songs to be these. When Mad arrived in my mailbox, I they were always the first thing I read.

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

What Happened to Dead Culture?

My original plan for this ‘stack was to write about people I had lost, people I knew personally (however briefly) who had left their mark on the world and, more directly, on me. I have entries on Stephen Sondheim and Tom Robbins with drafts about Paul Auster, Robert Coover and Timothy Leary, all people I had more than a passing interaction with, some of whom I was honored to number among my friends and even collaborators. But honestly, times being what they are, it got too sad.

So What the Hell is This Then?

Begrudgingly (sort of) I have been writing. Tiny little songs I call Hapless Songs. I hesitate to call it a project (at least I did at first) but rather a fun window, a complain-y and often frazzled window, but don’t we have enough to be frazzled about, aren’t there reasons for complaint?

What is a Hapless Song?

I do not remember how it began, but I do remember that this was not my idea. My friend Gabiel Jenks—perhaps the most singularly gifted person I know, a brilliant composer, mutli-instrumentalist, writer, thinker—said something (and I am likely mythologizing here but is not that the root of anything worthy?) along the lines of “I am writing something called Hapless songs, each of them short, will take an hour to write, maybe we could do it together?” This was several years ago.

And so it began. But what of it? What power could this it possibly contain?

I do not remember how many Gabriel wrote, but I decided to run with it. And so over this stretch of time I have now finished 50 of them (Book The First) and plan to do at minimum 100 (Book the Second, but that you might have been ably able to surmise). The rule is simple: from the time I begin to the finished score can only take an hour. No more. And so, in these short songs I find and refind my footing. Maybe you will be able to relate.

So What Now?

Herein dear reader (singular for the moment but hopefully…) I will share with you these songs. But I will share things beyond, other pieces, ideas, urbane witticisms and ideas for better use of fireworks funding, potential flaws in the system. Little essays, little letters, photographs (some destined for the ultimate printed score of all 100 Hapless Songs) tales from the crypt, woes and triumphs, caffeine notions, musical whimsey, and hopefully not try your collective patience.

So thank you for journeying into this widening gyre alongside me. I look forward to this renewal.

(Above Image: Hapless Song

So every year, with flags a-flying and beer a-drunk and low-grade meats a-bbq’ed, I think deeply to what I love most about America, and every year, while this can get harder and harder to manage, more impossible to arrive at, I think deeply about the music. The diverse, powerful, radical, fascinating and gorgeous music that only this country can provide. I think a lot about Nina Simone, about Charles Mingus and Jimi Hendrix, about Charles Ives and Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland, about Amanda Palmer, about George Russell and Stevie Wonder, about David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Woolf, about Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Schwartz, about The Roots, Jay-Z, Chance, about Ethan Iverson and Iris DeMent, about Bruce Springsteen, Nicole Atkins, and Frank Zappa, about Lee Hyla, Captain Beefheart, and Richard Thompson, about Meredith Monk and George Rochberg and John Corigliano, about Leonard Bernstein and Reggie Watts, about Kendrick Lamar, Paul Simon, and Tom Waits, about Rosanne Cash, Danny Elfman, and George Gershwin, about Bernard Hermann, Aimee Mann, Joan LaBarbara, Townes Van Zandt, Sxip Shirey, Jon Brion, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

The above list is radically incomplete. I challenged myself to write it in under two minutes, and omitted a lot.

But while you are pondering what to do this Fourth, I recommend finding those little American Islands and delving in, reminding yourself what can and will be excellent and powerful and potent about this complicated country, this ungainly place. Listen to some music, read some poetry, watch a film, because this is (at least in my dim view) quintessentially American.

Still crazy after all these years, I suppose.

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Hello Substackers and those who Love Them

Like so many I exhausted myself with social media.

But like so many thusly exhausted I find myself in need of some outgoing and incoming communication, so here I am.

I am a composer who writes, a teacher who composes, a writer who teaches and writes music. I read to distraction, I love culture (what passes for “high” culture some might say, though those meager distinctions are something I campaign against—more on that later) and try to find beauty wherever it exists, the usual under-the-cobblestones-the-beach nose for news or that which is in some way new.

MY INTENTIONS: I plan to do two posts a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays; I plan to do reviews, give thoughts, conduct interviews, and display sections of two books in progress books. I promise never to write about my “creative process” but will offer whatever musical insights I can manage. I will talk about parenting, about mental and physical health, about tattoos, about my dog Wolfie (a beautiful but volume-heavy Havanese), about politics only a little, about prestige television and books and music, about New York City and California, about food and being Generation X and whatever. I will talk about the art of friendship, the art of failing, the art of being humane. I will talk about music, but may restrict any criticisms to that made by the dead.

I will also try to listen.

And while I would love it if you would purchase a subscription, I also understand that not all of us are in the position to do so, so pay or do not, this Dead Culture is yours for the taking.

Push this button and welcome to the carnival…

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