The title of my new album Transformation means several things to me. There’s personal transformation, something I’ve chased for over fifty years, through the hell realms of a spiritual cult and recently, more happily, through Vispassana meditation.
Transformation also refers to the good old alchemy of the blues, in which through music, fear, sorrow, and anger can flower into trust, joy and even love.
The third meaning of my title Transformation is in the sense of Musical Development. Wikipedia says-“In music, development is a process by which a musical idea is transformed and restated in the course of a composition.”
By the time I got to college in the fall of 1968, I’d been playing guitar for six years, had performed as a folkie and played in several bands. Rock was in its heyday, a new mind-blowing album coming out every month. The closest I’d come to classical music was in the Christmas carol sings I accompanied on piano. (As I couldn’t read music, I pretended to follow the music as I pounded out chords.) A survey course, Music 101, exposed me to
Bach’s B Minor Mass, Beethoven’s 9th and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Though my career path might have been simpler without that input, they were sounds I’ve never be able to unhear. My musical north star of the Beatles, Jerry Garcia, and Joni Mitchell began to compete with another, much older compass.
Bach turned me onto counterpoint. I found precious few examples in pop music but as I started writing songs I felt an instinctive need for counterpoint, putting notes other than the roots of chords in the bass so that the melody and bass formed contrapuntal lines. And though guitar was the instrument i was good at, I started writing on piano where two hands can more easily do two different things at the same time.
Beethoven introduced me to musical development, of which he was the undisputed master. In 1969, when I heard the Grateful Dead perform the medley from Live/Dead I had another touchstone moment. Though improvised, this music took the same kind of exhilarating journey as a Beethoven symphony. Joni Mitchell’s “Down to You” from Court and Spark in 1974 was the best example in pop music of a theme that underwent serious transformation. And not just of the musical sort. As Joni and a piano evolve into a choir and lush orchestra you can hear her feelings changing, sadness expanding into beauty.
As pop music made more and more money, it lost its sophistication and musical ambition. Things like development were left by the wayside.
There are many motivations for making music. You can seek fame and fortune, or good times that just keep rolling. (And good luck to you!) You can want your deepest feelings to be heard. Like me, you can make music to put food on your family’s table. Those are external, social things.
It’s the inner experience in the moment of creation that keeps me making music now. And that experience is truly transformative. I find frequent access to the state of flow, absorbed in the music to the exclusion of troubles, and pain, and even thought. I’ve always had trouble accessing my feelings – not only what I’m feeling but sometimes even the fact that I’m feeling at all. I don’t know how it happens, but somehow when I write a piece, after making ten thousand choices of notes, sounds, and articulations, I play the finished work and I FEEL all this stuff I wasn’t aware of as I worked. And dark or light, those feelings are alive.
But on the purely musical level, there’s something else. Perhaps the purest motivation for creating music is so you can listen to the piece that you want to hear. My ideal piece has got all the folk and rock DNA that I came up with. It’s also got counterpoint and development. I don’t hear anyone else doing these things, even in the classical realm. While the contemporary classical stuff I hear has gotten past the worst of mid-century atonality, it’s still infected with the lesser sins of minimalism. It sounds timid to me, frightened of complex thought or feeling. And I don’t hear a hint of development.
If I want to hear the piece I want to hear, I have to make it myself.
