Part 2
Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?
My trombone is pretty core to everything I do - played no music before it and I’ve played it for 27 out of 37 years, so it’s kind of how I relate to basically anything involving music. Euphonium has also become a pretty core part of my work because I love the slow and thick sound it can create - it also contains flexibilities that aren’t so natural for the trombone so it’s helpful to have different instruments to turn to when searching for a type of sound.
Outside of that, a few mutes that filter the sound in a way that I really love and a tuner are pretty core to my work. The tuner isn’t so much for “am I playing in tune” but just to help me trust my own ears as to what’s actually happening in the sound which allows me to think about and work with what is inside the sound a lot more comfortably.
The other really important tool is my microphone. I spend a lot of my working time playing amplified so I can really focus on the details of the sound - getting some good mics and making them part of daily life has really changed how I can explore sound and shift my sonic perspective.
Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
It varies rather a bit based on teaching days and when I’m traveling, but I’ll focus on the days that have the kind of pacing I most enjoy.
I wake up pretty early with my child and we spend the morning together before he goes to school. Once we’re done with drop off I either head up to CalArts to teach until late at night or head home and do some training with Socks, my child’s service dog and then play trombone for an hour or so. I love the trombone, but it takes so much time every day to make it sound right and feel comfortable, so that’s a lot of everyday. After that if I don’t have any gigs, I normally respond to the emails that are weeks overdue then I try to do actual work rather than just maintaining my playing.
I do my best to carve out time every day to just sit in my practice studio and just make sound. To listen to and try to understand the sounds I can make and chase the ones that have been alluding me. I do that as long as I can then my partner and I go to pick up our kid from school. Once we’re home I won’t do any more work till after bedtime - I tend to his sensory needs, make dinner, read to him, or we play Breath of the Wild together. After our child goes to bed I do some more maintenance training with Socks, clean the house, and normally try to catch up on audio editing. Most of my work involves fixed media, so, like emails, I’m always behind on it.
A lot of days are much more hectic and involve driving or planes, but I like the days I can have this routine the most.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
This particular upcoming album was the start of a really exciting shift in process from making music for just myself towards making music in duo with the space I am playing in and allowing the space to be an equal partner in the process rather than a place where sound is simply made.
When I initially went into this session I had a lot of plans on how a giant water tank would sound and what I could construct in there that really quickly proved themselves to just put me in conflict with the space. When I put the music I’d written back in my bag and just started making sounds, listening to how they sounded in space, and responding to that, the session really opened up and became an experience where I felt like I was actually hearing how things sound rather than worrying about how I make them.
I’m really interested in acoustics and organology and how sounds are made, but that often leads me into getting lost in the process - it felt like more of the few times I could really let go of that and just be present with sound.
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
I really need both in my life. I find I learn and develop things slowly and I really like having the time to tinker and let new sounds and techniques have the space for us to develop relationships on a time scale that works for both the sound and myself, so in that regard working alone is a really meaningful and peaceful part of my practice.
However, I can also get really lost in that process and become overly myopic and I really need perspectives from people I know and trust who can push me onto a deadline and get me to change the way I’m conceptualizing things. Essentially to make me get a bit less precious and just make stuff.
My biggest creative relationship is with Weston Olencki who is my duo partner in our group, RAGE Thormbones. We have really similar ways of thinking about sound and process but different (and very well balanced) approaches to how to actually make work that really gets both of us to make our best decisions. We both are very devoted to developing new ways and approaches towards making sound so our collaborative work of being able to push each other forward has infinitely improved my own work. It’s pretty hard to understate just how much our musical relationship has pushed me forward and helped me just give myself permission to make things.
I think especially as a musician mostly working with brass instruments we always want to work with other players but it’s very difficult to find like minded people so it’s really easy to doubt your choices and having a relationship like this has really grounded my practice in a fundamental way that’s let it grow much healthier than it was before we met.
I also just really like harmony, so I really like working with other people because harmony is a difficult and often exhausting thing to make on the trombone by oneself!
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
Honestly, I really don’t know. I find thinking about such a big picture is pretty overwhelming and makes it difficult to make work. I just try to make space to create what I feel really compelled to make and put it out in the world for other people to develop their own relationship with.
Making creative work helps me move through a lot of things and I hope it’s enjoyable and useful to other people, but I just try to focus on making what feels honest to me and letting it go so other people can have their own relationship with it, if they would like to.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
Almost all of my work is entirely dependent on the inharmonicity of the instrument I’m playing - of its own peculiar version of the overtone series, its acoustic cracks, and my bodily relationship to it while playing. So the connections between, and the inseparability of, music and science are really fundamental to how I make and conceptualize the sounds that are the most meaningful to me.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
I think, for me, the big difference between something like making coffee, which is my main vice these days, and a pursuit of creative work has to do with my goals and focus.
When I make coffee I’m just aiming to consistently make a good cup. I like to explore different beans and such, but I’m also happy with making the same coffee over and over and will enjoy it as long as I make it well.
With music I’m alway trying to grow and develop - to not make the same pieces multiple times but to always keep exploring new ideas and sonic space. It’s a place where I’m ok with things “failing” as long as I keep exploring and tinkering.
I’m very much a person who needs routine to function - music is the space where that isn’t the case and, for me, that’s what makes it different from everything else.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
That’s a hard one to answer because psychoacoustics and aural phenomena are such a core part of my life that my brain goes in too many directions to feel coherent because the whole notion of sonic functionality, individual perception, and the spectrum of vibration it exists on is so incredibly expansive and endlessly fascinating. But I do think that there’s something really significant to the fact that so many parts of sound don’t actually exist in the air, but only exist on our eardrums.
Our relationship to sound is such a deep set part of our physical functionality that I find it a lot like how vinyl records work - the actual explanation is fairly simple, but the fact that it actually all works and conveys sound in the way it does never ceases to fascinate me.
