'The Speech'

So I suppose my name is Evan Tucker: I'm 38 and looked exactly like this at 18, I'm a Baltimorean, extremely Jewish, a semi-professional musician, semi-violinist, semi-singer, semi-composer, and semi-sane. This is my third NMG. I completely stumbled upon the New Music Gathering in Baltimore on the very week I'd resolved to begin my musical life anew as an adult composer. It was, perhaps, as we say in Judaism, Bashert, a predestined meeting. And as an icebreaker to prepare you all for the level of honesty in this talk please let me confide in you that while it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I snuck into that whole gathering with a Johns Hopkins ID I hadn't thrown out ten years after I was a student there and still owe the NMG money for my participation that weekend, which I am happy to contribute whatever I owe as absolutely soon as this speech is over if related parties provide the venmo or paypal account.

For better or worse, if one can consider that humor then that's the extent I have to bestow. Because I come before you with open arms as both a complete outsider to your world and a complete insider to the world of classical music, and must beg your indulgence for a plea I entreat you born of decades of profound desperation. Please don't think of this plea as registered on my own behalf, but on behalf of the thousands of musicians over the generations, represented in every demographic, who should have been at gatherings like this yet were prevented by neurological conditions. I am most tremendously grateful for the existence of New Music Gathering, because had I not known of it, I doubt any but two or three other composers would ever have known that I exist. And in order to tell you why, I'm afraid I must relate to you some of the circumstances of my life, circumstances which I always seem to be telling as a way to explain what people are dealing with when they deal with me, because whenever I conceal them, that way disaster inevitably lies, but please try to believe me that however often, I have never, ever spoken these tales with anything but the greatest reluctance, and have been utterly exhausted of re-relating some version of this story for thirty years now. 

I am one of you, I am a composer and musician, and all I have ever wanted from my life is the ability to be a practicing musician, because as Clergy is called to serve god, so too was I called to serve music. Those who have achieved little can afford to be immodest far more than those who have many achievements to parade, so please forgive anything here which sounds pathetically boastful. Another famous Jewish saying is "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and to this day I have little answer to that question.

I don't know if I would have qualified as a prodigy, but there was no question that music chose me at the earliest possible age rather than my choosing it. At two or three, I was discovered to have perfect pitch, and to this day can identify every note of a hexachord and exactly which note is missing in any eleven note chord. At four or six I was harmonizing songs on the piano without a single lesson, by eight or nine were I asked I could probably write out dozens of orchestral scores in piano reduction, and to this day I could probably write out a reasonably decent facsimile of a vast plurality of the standard classical repertoire in full score, and quite a bit of early music and contemporary music too. From the earliest age I was reading generally at a comprehension past all but the highest achieving high school students and hold in my memory vast swathes of text, and an historical database of dates, places, and names that come to me with instant neurological availability, I've lost a trivia game twice in my adult life - it's not even fun. And through all this learning, I was barely ever directed. I discovered it all on the engine my own curiosity.

And yet I am utterly not one of you, and never could be. Most people at this gathering probably have a veritable infantry of music degrees and grants and awards, while I have a musical degree from a university whose course offerings, at least at the time, were paltry enough that when it came time to apply for a masters or doctorate in composition, I was told by university after university that my educational background rendered continued education impossible unless I began my musical education anew from the very first term of a bachelor's degree, a musical degree which itself I obtained because I was mostly left to my own devices. While my teachers always seemed sorely tempted to tell my battery of issues to shove it, I think they did on some level realize they were dealing with a savant who was either learning everything on his own or unable to learn anything at all. At the end of four years I held a composition recital in which twenty-six musicians took part, along with a forty-five minute pre-concert lecture and demos on both my compositions and on music history, and for the extra effort to which yet another organizational maelstrom almost killed me, I gratefully received five honors credits. 

Because, you see, any musico-harmonic terminology which I successfully learned, I learned as a very small child, and any technical terms thereafter of harmony, form, and counterpoint were somehow beyond my capacity for comprehension, and I therefore would have been, and very much was, laughed out of audition for any serious music program. It took me two years to learn any music software, and to this day I can still barely use it for anything but the most basic notation. And as for the organization required to mount performances of my own music - how possible is that for a guy who could not learn to tie his shoes until he was ten years old, who has not learned any math past the algebra he also apparently mastered when he was three, who would certainly have failed out of both high school and middle school but for full-time parental help, and who now has the capacity at thirty-eight for organization, time management, and spatial reasoning, which is roughly at the developmental stage of a small child. So too was learning and comprehending music as other musicians understand it impossible, the comprehension of which my own personal musical encyclopedia should have rendered irrelevant to any music program who ever took five minutes to realize that they were dealing with an incompetent of a completely unique variety. 

I have come to believe over the years that surely there must a God, because only a supernatural force could render tortures so exquisite. I, the person who once apparently was Evan Tucker, told from first consciousness that he was some kind of freakish changeling whose intelligence could change the curvature of walls, am in fact a person with the most profound mental impairments and disabilities. Thirty-one years ago, I was told I was the smartest person anyone had ever met. Thirty years ago, I was told I was in fact the dumbest, and would be so for the rest of my life. A sentence to life imprisonment within a brain of wide and deep comprehension and no ability to demonstrate that comprehension within any classroom or work setting as it has yet ever been structured. I spent a year studying politics at Johns Hopkins, and got myself accepting by sneaking in through a tiny back door that I was only made aware of due to luck, and the stress of organizing course work put fifty pounds on me and caused a chain reaction that landed me a stay in a psychiatric hospital.

A few years ago I taught music history at an adult education program. On the last day of class a student was was literally so moved that she cried, a second told me what he learned in my class had routinely become his family discussions, a third told me that one day I would be world famous. But due to administrators wanting not to deal with my organizational requirements, I was only offered six weeks of teaching for the next year and the administration excused themselves by telling me my classroom performance was sub-par.

It is not my obligation, nor have I time or desire to tell decades worth of tales of daily humiliation, bullying, and guidance quackery. But they surely happened on virtually every day of my late childhood, the entirety of my adolescence, and all too many days of my adulthood. 

But of course, from those learning disabilities grew emotional disorders that only grew more profound as the years wore into decades. In my early teen years, the most severe emotional discombobulations, the details of which I will spare you, and in my late teen years the most severe psychotic delusions, the details of which I will spare myself. But for the past three decades, I have looked ten years past my actual age, three decades of daily battles with severe depression anxiety and psychosis can do that to anyone, so too does medication that at times causes one to be a hundred pounds overweight, as does a late Picasso's worth of unpreventable facial tics, a Heifetz worth of hand tremors, a Sandy's worth of hyperventilation, all provoked by anxiety which comes without warning, along with recurrent neurological psychosis, and the daily chest pain and accelarated pulse of a man my weight but a quarter century my senior. 

The possibilities of jobs as other people hold them, long-term romantic attachments as other people experience them, fulfillment as other people derive fulfillment, is something which human as I am, I cannot help but continue to pursue as I can, but I have come to pay dearly for any appearance of paltry success I have yet achieved in my life, with a tornado of unresolved organizational storms, and yes, emotional storms too, which others are perhaps understandably reluctant to take upon themselves once they understand the the risks' enormity. 

I am, as you can see, a white male, and thank god for that because were I of any identity more distasteful to the forces of history, I firmly believe the difficulties would quite possibly render a person like me deceased. There are literally millions of my disadvantages without my advantages in every generation left to the worst fates with no safety net beneath them. 

Whether I am anything but the least sympathetic demographical representative for them, the most severely learning disabled are too an underserved minority, and, one must add, extremely distinct and far less numerous than those of minor disabilities whose functionality is sufficiently unimpaired to live relatively uninterrupted careers and family lives. And furthermore, by definition, our community is utterly hamstrung in our capacities for self-advocacy. We cannot even explain to you the ways in which we are organizationally challenged, because if we explained them, that probably means we could understand them sufficiently to master them. The arts and classical music already have so much to answer for how they've left so many of their most devoted servants to rot, but we too of this demographic are of those who demand answers and reform, but by definition we are the ones least likely to know how to implement effective reform. 

So where have we been in a thousand years of musical history? The mentally ill of course have an honored place in artistic history, some of course would say too honored. And it's a little too easy to armchair diagnose the eccentricities of an historical figure by saying 'well, maybe Mozart had ADD...' Maybe hyperactive geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven were sufficiently abused into developing the necessary skills for composition in spite of their deficiencies, but how many great musicians were beaten that didn't develop the necessary skills to translate great improvisation into composition? We'll never know, and obviously an unfortunate genius like Beethoven was lacking in the one skill more crucial in music than learning. But the true blue learning disabled? Well... maybe there's Mussorgsky, for whom even the most historicism minded reader would tempted to render a modern LD diagnosis, and maybe there's John Cage, but otherwise?... It's difficult to imagine that anyone with the most severe learning issues could withstand the battery of complex tasks traditionally presented before the life of a composer.  

And yet the learning disabled are otherwise no less talented, many neurologists even speculate that their brains have compensatory skills, and yet their specific contributions to music history are probably lost to the sands of musical pre-history, because the only way many of them could contribute was through the oral continuum, so I suppose it likely that they became folk musicians of one sort or another, or they became performers who cleverly hid their deficits, just as Pavarotti concealed his inability to read music, but there was no chance of viewing the full gamut of musical talent which lay dormant until the microphones of the 20th century showed the palace of music to have more rooms than Mozart and Beethoven dared to dream. And one hundred forty-three years after the first acoustic recordings, classical music has yet to catch up with the discoveries or recover from the shock. In the span of the hundred-twenty years during which recorded music's been widely available commercially, music has evolved more than it ever did in the thousand beforehand. It was a cultural quantum leap from which we, who'd devoted a millennium to obsessively honing our musical skills with ever greater specificity of conceptual intent, and have still not made our peace with the idea that a person can simply play an instrument with absolutely no beforehand planning, and the results may in fact turn out more profound than had you worked on the piece for thirty years. 

When I was sixteen, I would be trapped in a school for three years that was basically a cult from which maximal mental pressure was applied to make sure no one left - a school for troubled teens who believed all learning issues are a function of a person's moral character and therefore all failures to comply with demands, no matter how strenuous nor unreasonable, ought to be met with various forms of corporal punishment. Instrumental lessons of any meaningful type were impossible during that period, preparing auditions for music schools was not even questionable. I would imagine that nearly everyone else in this gathering began their lives listening more popular forms of music and worked their way out to classical, but I knew barely anything of any music but classical music until I was sixteen, and then was thrown into a sink-or-swim situation where the only way music could be of any use was if I took my violin and turned it into a fiddle, noodling my way around a bunch of high school guitarists, one or two of whom were quite skilled and became pros themselves, but most of them only knowing three chords - playing their five-hundredth rendition of wagonwheel or wonderwall or we will rock you, and having to find yet another way to take a violin solo over the guitar chords that would impress poorly behaved teens who often came to the school as bullies who beat on kids like me. I had to find a way for myself in music that was completely disconnected from the music I'd discovered at the earliest imaginable age and no peer of mine had anywhere yet seemed to discover. 

Fast forward fifteen years. Classical or popular, I was never a huge musical success, but I discovered I had some gift as a violin improviser, and found some tiny way forward in music with my violin putting an improvisational spin on a number of genres, and around the age of thirty I found myself the violinist in what a briefly popular local band of Balkan folk music - I suppose I was an f-list local celebrity impressing his friends by how often he was recognized on the street as a musician not only in Baltimore but also in DC, and branching off to do my own klezmer side project. But like all bands, the amount of work it takes for a band to become successful is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes before the band members stop getting along. And since these two bands had mostly the same musicians, when I lost one band, I lost both, and that was almost the least of my worries during yet another annus horribilis. 

What saved me was a project that I had despaired for more than five years I'd ever be able to bring to fruition, the idea of which came to me on one of my many manic highs - to set all hundred-fifty Biblical Psalms of David to music, and to do so because of an engineer I'd met in my sojourns into popular music. And for those who do not know the miracle worker of Baltimore: Mat Lefler-Schulman, he should be used as an engineer for any and all musical projects around the globe so long as they don't impede on mine. For the last five years, I've used whatever extra cash I have on-hand to arrive at the studio once a week with barely even an outline of the music, and do my damndest to record, improvise, and electronically shape music completely unwritten out into text. Work is agonizingly slow, and in five years, we have just barely completed seventeen psalms. But if we're both around another forty-five years, we should be able to complete the project. 

This is concrete music, unable to be reproduced in any capacity but private consumption, but in the era of pandemic when live music is still a theoretical speculation, there's a truly unfortunate possibility that musique concrete may be every musician's future. 

Such are my own incapacities that I will always be unable to understand the technical means by which I make my own music. But musicians whose capacity to absorb tech proficiency are much wider than my own will be able to create music by our processes much more cheaply, more quickly, and more fluently.

But in the meantime, my plea is simple: the world of music composition can be so vast. For thousands of years, talented musicians with disabilities have most likely been unable to contribute what could have been a vast storehouse of great notational music to the world, if only people were there to assist wherever they fell down. It is perhaps precisely their disabilities which may have given them completely different conceptions for what music can be, and just as the unwritten music of the potential great women composers and composers of color is a loss to the world, so too is the lost music of disabled musicians. By definition, cannot ascertain the nature of our problems, but if you ever gave us the time of day, you can, and you would, and the reward would be yours as well as ours. 

Even so, I regret to tell that my life is most likely an advanced scouting report, either for your lives or your students' and children's. My trials by fire are the trials writ small which classical music must now undergo in the viral age. Classical music has still never truly adjusted to the presence of the microphone while hundreds of other musical forms are only made possible by the microphone's presence. Mechanical reproduction changes everything about the human relationship to music, both creative and consumptive. The next generation will undergo the biggest retrenchment of values at very least since the transition to homophonic common practice tonality, and quite possibly since the invention of polyphony itself or even the invention of modern musical notation, and made all the more difficult for the fact that the retrenchment is well over a hundred years overdue as previous generations of classical musicians have leveraged credit for which their societal futures must foot the bill just as entire modern societies have. This payment is blood itself, and its pain is almost unendurable, but just as I have survived, so too will you, battered and bruised, devalued and demoralized for years at a time, on a completely different and far more arduous journey than we thought we'd have to take, but also possibly, far more meaningful, and far better equipped to light beacons through darkness so that future generations may continue to walk paths that we are the generation who set.  

I thank you for your time, your ears, and your generous presence. Please listen to the results of my music when you get a chance at evantucker.bandcamp.com and I particularly recommend the Psalms beginning with Psalm 11, and just so you know, the Billy Joel quote on my page is a joke because I fucking hate Billy Joel.