So I suppose my name is still Evan Tucker: a self-hating nice Jewish boy from Baltimore, a Pisces, five-foot four-and-a-half, go by he/him pronouns, and a not particularly professional composer, violinist, singer, writer, and journalist. I don't make money from music, I lose money, and any chance I have of recouping costs will be well into my dotage and perhaps after my death. This is my fourth NMG, my third panel, and my second presentation.
As is the want of the learning disabled, I've been putting off writing this for months only to encounter writers block at the moment best reserved to write this talk, and have therefore crammed all the writing into a 100 hour coffee fueled marathon during the last few days after which my beard has twice the gray hair and my hairline is an inch back. It's an entirely different form of torture from the even more tortuous experience leading up to last year's speech, before which I was six-foot three.
Last year I knew exactly what I wanted to say from the moment I applied, and all I needed to do was take dictation from a text that seemed read into my mind by someone else. The torture last year was the vulnerability of giving it. The speech was so personal that I was a terrified emotional wreck for at least two weeks before I gave it, and even a week afterwards. I will post a video of that speech which Jascha and Lainie were nice enough to send to my bandcamp page, evantucker.bandcamp.com, run by my truly invaluable engineer, Mat Lefler-Schulman, without whom I would still just be hearing musical shadows on a wall.
However, the result of last year's presentation was that the great Sarah Bob was in the audience, immediately went about hearing my music, and responded so enthusiastically that she immediately programmed it. Sarah is a guardian angel of new music whose achievements in programming and performance should and do inspire awe in all who've encountered her. Within six months thereafter my work got three performances in Boston - so now I get to say that my music is really big in Boston... Maybe after this year's speech my music will catch fire in Dorchester or Sturbridge. But in all seriousness, I feel a bit like Conan O'Brien after Lorne Michaels decided to sponsor him to follow David Letterman on Late Night: "What the hell does this person see in me that I missed?"
Additionally, last year's experience was yet another example of how the New Music Gathering has been one of the great blessings of my life, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd say that. Without NMG I can almost guarantee that hardly a single composer would even be aware of my existence. Five-and-a-half years ago, 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 almost seemed like fate had a hand, and I resolved thereafter that NMG would have my lifelong loyalty for as long as they'd have me.
The largest problem of this year's speech is that I am trying desperately to not make a simple retread of last year's material, but I fear it impossible to not cover much of the same material about a childhood in which extreme intellectual facility was manifest from the earliest imaginable age, leading to the discovery in late childhood of learning disabilities that were even more limiting than my cognitive ability seemed limitless, which then lead to the most severe emotional debilitations by my early teens, which then led to being hoodwinked into attending an abusive cult which misleadingly called itself a boarding school in my late teens, whose often terrifying environment seems to have lead me to a lifetime's worth of obsessive cognitive delusions. It is only through obsessive listening, reading, watching, and consumption of all manner of culture that my Mach 3 delusive spirals slow down for any manner of time at all.
Rather than speak more this year of my rather unfortunate biography, and, again, you can find that presentation at evantucker.bandcamp.com and I'd also recommend you listen to Psalms 11-14 particularly... I would really prefer to speak about anything else - like about how I'm very good at going in reverse in my car, or why isn't postum coffee substitute a more popular drink... (it is underrated...) But unfortunately, the authenticity of my debilitaitons is a large part of why I'm here, so the subject is all too annoyingly unavoidable.
There are of course major benefits to playing a composer's music because of a relatively difficult biography like mine, you just might like it, but it has the unfortunate side effect that whatever the reality, we never feel judged by our merits objectively, because the side of us being judged is much more the side who 'went through the shit' than the musician themself. Perhaps 'the shit' is often what makes artists good and unique, though there's a newly common belief that the suffering of artists is a poisonous prejudice. Whatever the reality, the thought can't help but occur to a perhaps outsider composer like me that everything else about us is un-germane to the person whose music attracts attention, even the music itself, because while the artillery of music degrees we face as we give this presentation seem judged for the music they make, the music of someone like me is often listened to as a reflection of a difficult life story, and were the story not attached, nobody would be listening - or at least so people with a story like mine fear. My music has no performers and no visual component, and is therefore much more difficult to find championship on programs unless people go to my bandcamp page and hear it: which is evantucker.bandcamp.com, that's evantucker.bandcamp.com - listen to Psalms 11-14 and all your dreams will come true.
My situation is a bit like the famous Borges story, Borges and I, Borges y y o. One part of me is Evan Tucker, the other part is me. I love music from around 1910, herring in wine sauce, urban parks, the movies of Jean Renoir, Yiddish insults, the plays of Chekhov and the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer; Mr. Tucker shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns into the attributes of an actor. It would not be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship, but I live, I go on living, so that Tucker may contrive music and writing like this, and these modest creations justify me. I am destined to perish, but however unlikely, some tiny instant of myself may survive in him to posterity, though I am quite aware of his distortions of who I am.
The reason to entertain this intellectual bullshitry is that the ultimate problem of the learning disabled in music school and work is probably not how to accommodate us. When I finally sat down to write this presentation, what I quickly realized is that as a profoundly learning disabled person, I am the very last person able to give advice on this subject. By definition, the community of severe learning disability 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. Even if my ability as a composer is hamstrung by disabilities, I can say very matter of factly that my writing is not, I'm a great writer, at least great of a specific and limited type, and I have a sponge of artistic memory that is nothing short of savantine - just in music, I have perfect pitch so severe that in an eleven note chord I can identify the missing note, I could write out many works of classical repertoire in full score by memory in reasonable approximation, and I would be able to write out any recorded avant-garde improvisation with little trouble. Would that I didn't have the type of brain with rather useless abilities like this, my life would be much easier to endure. But when it comes to the most basic tasks, like simply figuring out how to use music notation software, not losing sheet music or files; remembering the actual terms of harmony, counterpoint, formal analysis which my musical memory allowed me to understand implicitly; showing up to any appointment any time before an hour late, remembering to deposit a rent check, or keeping a clean house and not hoarding, I have roughly the same ability to manage such tasks as I had when I was a child and can only fulfill adult tasks with the most severe of anxiety, depression, tics, and even delusions. I don't need to tell you, this renders day jobs and long-term romantic attachments nearly impossible, and I've certainly tried with those few who would have me. And even were a relationship successful, responsibility dictates I abandon any hope of raising a family or even pets...
Why is all this? To this day, I haven't at all the foggiest clue, it simply is and has always been, and even a writer capable of reading 2-300 pages a day and remembering it with little trouble has no idea how to explain it. Evan Tucker can talk a colossal tornado of verbiage around the problem, of my problem itself Mr. Tucker can only be as silent as the God who seemed to create me without providing any explanation for why I endure. Voltaire said that God is a comedian playing to an audience too scared to laugh, and my life might be construed as a joke nothing short of cosmic. So here I am, coerced by fate to laugh as best I can, every day of my life.
And therefore, musical friends, how could I possibly tell you what to do to help? There is no way, none at all, for the severely learning disabled to properly band together in advocacy as others understand it - not even because of organizational difficulties, though those obviously would be much harder for us... but because, whatever the ancillary gifts of our brains, the very nature of learning disabilities is that we are incapable of understanding what is happening to us, even after living with these difficulties our entire lives, and because we are incapable of understanding them, so too are others, and because we don't have means of explaining what we endure, so too are there literally billions of people who operate toward the learning disabled in the worst conceivable faith, and believe that our mental deficiencies are an absence of character rather than neurons - which then, of course, depletes people like us of morale and convinces miliions of us that even the attempt to make something worthwhile of ourselves is a fool's errand, guaranteed to result in still more humiliation. And then, there are just the bullies looking to exploit people's weaknesses without any opinion on our condition or character attached, the world is always full of them at every age, and the weaknesses of people like me are quite transparent.
To be sure, there are larger problems than what people like me endure, and if public servants ranking the problems of under-ministered people like me at priority #400 enables the world to care of Global Warming, prevention of war with China or Russia, giving developing nations a real chance to grow their opportunities, stopping mass extinction and voter suppression, ending pandemics, what sane person wouldn't say, 'no, the problems of my life are so trivial compared to all that.'? But if other demographics are demanding systemic change and redressment, so must the Learning Disabled, because any semblance of justice that does not include the easing of learning disabled lives is not justice.
I realize that as a White Male I am not the best ambassador for systemic change, but were I not born to that privilege, I thoroughly believe I'd have been dead twenty years ago; and just in our own time, how many millions with similar experiences to mine can only advocate for our issues from the grave? How many have developed insurmountable mental issues from the stress that renders their lives homeless? In jail? In mental hospitals? With insurmountable difficulties passed onto their children of both heredity and environment?
It all starts with the still fundamentally unanswered question: what do you do with the kid who doesn't understand? It's the Fermat's Enigma of the brain. Solve it, and there is no limit to what you might alleviate.
So please forgive the paradoxical speculation of a person whom, by being best equipped to speak of his problems, is in fact the worst. I cannot speak to what it would take to make a profoundly disabled composer into someone with a chance of making it in the field of classical composition, and experience tells me it's absolutely impossible. But I do wonder, rather than bring the student to the music, is it possible to bring the music to the student?
The question, 'what is composition?' is a vastly expanded question from what it was in 1900, and that would all be to the better except that we forgot to bring the audience with us... so please allow me to posit one reason as to why: in the 20th century, the new forms of music tended ever more toward the extremely organized and controlled. Music is written on the air, but the presence of a microphone allowed us to catch music in a bottle. So many other forms of music improvised virtuoso feats around a very simple formal structure. Our music retrenched itself in formal structure, and expanded its requirements - greater impositions required from the composer, the performer, and the audience. Meanwhile, everybody else just played their music, put it on a record, and millions could hear what a couple hundred used to.
What this means is that we, as classical musicians, have done without the very tool that would make us most distinct in the age of mechanical reproduction. This whole time, we've been writing basically acoustical music for concerts when when we could literally be recreating the experience of music itself from the very root.
Whatever the systemic problems are now, the system is likely about be uprooted as it has not been since living memory was in its childhood. If COVID is just the first in a long series of world tragedies, and it may be, the system we've always known is about to disappear, and there will sadly never be concerts in the lifetime of many people here as we've ever understood them before. Every genre will have to rethink what music is at its very foundation - both in creation and performance, because one day soon, there may not be gatherings for us to perform at for longer than a year, perhaps much longer. And yet at the same time, we will have more need for musical community than ever before.
I believe the answer to both this, and to the problems of earning disabled musicians, lies in electronic, reproductive music - a field of infinity upon which composers should have been the undisputed leaders from its very inception, and yet whose opportunities most composers have barely even begun to entertain in 120 years into musical recording and reproduction. It is a literally unwritten field on which the rules of composition would change as they have not since Machaut showed what could be done with four-voice polyphony. Meanwhile, we're still discussing muscal analysis in the same way Debussy and Ravel did at the Paris Conservatoire.
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