So I suppose my name's still Evan Tucker: a self-hating nice Jewish boy from Baltimore, Pisces, five-foot four, he/him, and a not particularly professional composer, violinist, singer, writer, and journalist. I don't make money from music, I lose money, and any chance to recoup costs will be well into my dotage and perhaps well thereafter. This is my fourth NMG, third panel, and second presentation.
As is the LD way, I've put off writing this for months only to encounter writer's block, and therefore crammed the writing into a 72 hour coffee marathon which set my hairline an inch back. It was torture of an entirely different form than the even more tortuous process of last year's speech, before which I was six-foot three.
Last year I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and all I needed to do was take dictation from a text that seemed read into my mind by someone else - which often seems the only way anything of mine gets done. The torture last year was the vulnerability of giving the speech. I was an emotional wreck for two weeks before and a week afterward. I have a video of that speech which I will post to my blog: evantucker.blogspot.com, or to my bandcamp website: evantucker.bandcamp.com, run by my invaluable engineer, Mat Lefler-Schulman, without whom I'd still just be hearing musical shadows on a wall.
But the result of last year's presentation was that the great Sarah Bob, guardian angel to young composers everywhere, was in the audience, immediately went about hearing my music, and responded so enthusiastically that she immediately programmed it. I feel a bit like Conan O'Brien after Lorne Michaels decided to make him the Late Night host: I have no idea how it happened, I just know my life has changed immeasurably for the better by her championship.
Last year's experience was yet another example of the New Music Gathering being one of my life's great blessings, and I'm sure there are hundreds who'd say that. Without NMG I can almost guarantee that hardly a single composer would even be aware of my existence. 5 1/2 years ago, I stumbled upon NMG in Baltimore on the very week I resolved to be a composer again, it seemed like fate, and I resolved that NMG will have my lifelong loyalty as long as they'd have me.
I'd really prefer to speak about anything else. Unfortunately, my debilitaitons are a large part of why I'm here, so the subject is annoyingly unavoidable. So I regretfully must give a bullet-point version of what I said last year: extreme intellectual facility from the earliest age, even more severe learning disabilities in late childhood, severe emotional debilitations by early adolesence, deceived into a cult in my late teens, leading to a lifetime of cognitive delusions. It is only through obsessive consumption of culture that my Mach 3 delusive spirals ever slow down.
When it comes to the most basic tasks, like 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 lets me understand implicitly; not arriving anywhere an hour late, depositing a rent check, cleaning a house and not hoarding, I have the same ability to manage tasks I had as a child and can only fulfill them with the most severe anxiety, depression, tics, even delusions. I needn't tell you, this renders jobs and romantic attachments nearly impossible, and I've certainly tried. And even were a relationship successful, I must abandon hope of raising a family or even pets... And yet just in music, I have perfect pitch so absolute that I can identify the missing note in an eleven-note chord, I can write out a plurality of standard rep in full score by memory, and can write out any recorded avant-garde improv. My life would be much easier without useless abilities like these. But Voltaire said that God is a comedian playing to an audience too scared to laugh. So here I am, coerced by fate to laugh as best I can, every day of my life.
It finally occurred to me on Thursday why writing this presentation was difficult: 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 hamstrung in capacity for self-advocacy. We can't even explain how we're organizationally challenged, because if we understood the problems, we could master them. So how can I tell you what to do to help? There is no way for the severely learning disabled to band together in advocacy as others understand it - not even because of organizational difficulties, though those obviously would be hard... but because, whatever ancillary gifts in our brains, the nature of learning disabilities is that we're incapable of understanding what's happening to us, even after living with these difficulties our entire lives, and because we are incapable of understanding them, so too is everybody. There literally billions of people who operate toward the learning disabled in the worst conceivable faith, and believe that our deficiencies are an absence of character rather than neurons - which then, of course, depletes people like us of morale and convinces millions of us that even the attempt to make something worthwhile of ourselves is guaranteed to result in still more humiliation. .
To be sure, there are larger problems than what I endure, and if public servants ranking the problems of under-ministered people like me at priority #400 enables the world to take care of Global Warming, preventing war with China or Russia, stopping mass extinction and voter suppression, ending pandemics, what sane person wouldn't say, 'my life is so trivial compared to all that.'? But if other demographics are demanding systemic change and redress, so must the Learning Disabled, because any justice that does not include the easing of learning disabled lives is not justice.
As a White Male I'm not the best ambassador for systemic change, but were I anything else I thoroughly believe I'd be 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 homeless? Imprisoned? Mental patients?
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.
I can't speak to what it would take to make a profoundly disabled composer into someone with a chance of making a living in the currently constituted field of classical composition. I could barely explain the forms of help I received, and I obviously haven't made any living in it. But, rather than bring LD students to the music, is it possible to bring the music to LD students?
'What is composition?' is not only a complicated, loaded question, it's also a very different question now than it's ever been before, a question with so many different answers from what it ever was in 1900, and all those twentieth century answers would have been to the better except that almost all the new answers trended in the direction of more organization, more preparation, more repetitive skill, more academic training. However small the windowsbefore World War I for classical musicians to be creatures of the moment rather than planning, those window was shut.
And as classical music grew ever more planned, the new presence of electronic recording allowed the improvisatory music of untrained musicians to be etched permanently without need for any printed music at all - so what used to be ephemeral music for a folk community of a hundred became popular music for a consumer audience of millions. And classical music became ever more subsumed by erudition and training during the very era when spontenaiety was more required to hold the attention and love of its audience.
We are 120 years into the age of musical recording, and thus far, 99% of everything classical music ever did with recording has been a reaction to the record rather than an embrace of it. We thought of the 20th century as a revolutionary century, but it increasingly seems as though we were the arch-conservatives. We burrowed ever deeper into traditional forms, and even revolutions like atonality, 12-tonality, polyrhythms, were only revolutions if you already knew the musical tradition being revolutionzed. All the while, we've been staring at the biggest revolution of all and doing everything in our power to ignore it. 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, and the tool which we, with classical training, could do the most with.
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 both in creation and performance, because soon there may not be gatherings for us to perform at for much longer than a year. And yet at the same time, there will be more need for musical community than ever before.
I've reluctantly come to believe that the answer to all these problems lies in electronic, reproductive music. Electronic reproduction already revoluionized everything else about the world except for classical music.... But here it is: a literally unwritten field on which the rules of composition can change as they have not since Machaut showed what could be done with four-voice polyphony. Meanwhile, we're still discussing musical analysis in the same way Debussy had to at the Paris Conservatoire.
A neurotypical person thinks in linear terms, in which thoughts are followed unidirectionally to a logical conclusion that makes sense on its own terms. And to this day music is almost always composed in linear terms, in which music either makes sense as a world unto itself, or in relation to lyrics in a way that makes the form even more linear - just a verse, chorus, and bridge. But I'd venture that most learning disabled people think in quantum terms. They associate not by logic but by metaphor - this is like that, and hold their entire storehouse of knowledge in their heads at all times and cannot dissociate one subject from the totality of what they know, and so they make completely disparate connections between seemingly unrelated fields that would never occur to neurotypical people. So rather than thinking of music terms of linear, cellular, syntactical terms, the incorporation of different sorts of learners involves a wholesale embrace of conceptual, interconnected, semantic thinking.
In electronic music, a brain that thinks in quantum terms can now be face-to-face with a quantum musical technology. In electronics, music can now be organized by extra-musical themes, onomatopoetic sounds, juxtaposition and collage rather than cellular development - and therefore not by the exquisite order of four-voice polyphony, but the beautifully diverse chaos of a thousand voices. A wholly new music for a new millennium.
Classical music always dances around embracing the conceptual and electronic. But now, in an age of infinite sounds, there is no limitation to what instruments produce. Composition has a golden opportunity to get in on the ground floor of what it might eventually have to embrace anyway - commiting to electronic music for consumption elsewhere than a concert hall, and commit to it as an equal partner to acoustic and instrumental, written with a bare minimum of traditional notation. Such a music would not only include the learning disabled, but people of every unprivileged demographic who did not have the opportunity to learn how to master classical music from the cradle.
Arnold Schoenberg used to say that he was not a modernist - he was an arch-conservative forced to become a revolutionary. I'm probably the only person at this conference who'd say he has simple, uncomplicated love for the classical canon. I've listened to more contemporary classical music than I could ever know what to do with, but my daily bread is Schubert. It's because I love this music dearly that I advocate we need to blow the whole thing up in order to save it. The inclusive progress we seek in classical music will only be made if we create an entire track that does away with the very fundaments of music as we've thus far thought of it with exponential of funding allocated to electronic music from its current totals. Traditional classical musicians can still learn by traditional models, but other types of musicians need to be incorporated into classical music and taught anew how to write music while throwing out old models altogether. Paradoxical as it sounds, people of musical ability but non-traditional background need to learn just the technology of how to compose in a way that doesn't involve traditional harmony, form, and counterpoint, because with such a revolutionary technology, new musical rules completely rewrite themselves, and learning disabled musicians may be the ideal people to figure out what the new rules are.
I thank you for your time, your ears, and your generous presence. Please try out my music at evantucker.bandcamp.com, that's evantucker.bandcamp.com, and let me end with a very brief prayer that may we all be able to listen to each other in person next year and that whatever music is in the future, we all make it there together, in one piece, able to find appreciaive producers, performers, audiences, and able to make livings from our music.
Amen.
