Behind the Editor’s Desk

Every few weeks, I receive a letter from another prison inmate requesting free Berklee Press books. These letters are always handwritten and polite. I have a folder of them.

I’ve tried several times to fulfill these requests, but there are complications, and I’ve found it inordinately complex (impossible, so far) to make it happen, much as I want to. Maybe, someone out there will have some ideas of organizations that can help me navigate this. I really don’t have the time or resources to make this happen, myself. I feel badly about saying no, though.

Consider, what better way can an inmate spend their time, besides making music? It not only relieves the tedium and the tension, but it develops a skill that can make the world a better place. Studying music in prison creates a diversion that might keep prison guards safer. Learning music is a forum for introspection and an exercise in self-control. A music book in a jail cell could put some light in a dark place. So, when a prisoner begs me for book about how to learn guitar, I want to make it happen. Even if he’s a murderer.

There are some complicating factors, though. For example, there are many rules governing what kinds of materials inmates can receive, and they vary by institution, and by state. Many prisons don’t permit CDs. At some institutions, only the librarian can request books. Other institutions don’t have libraries, and so different administrators are charged with such decisions. The bureaucracies tend to be Byzantine, figuring out the proper procedure for a given institution.

There are hurdles on the Berklee side, as well. Berklee College has a long list of people asking for free stuff from them, and others (rightfully, in my opinion) take precedence. Inner-city kids, for example, or musicians struggling in New Orleans. Wonderful Berklee efforts such as City Music provide incredible outreach and service to communities worldwide.

It’s no surprise or criticism that we take better care of  young musicians still struggling with the Katrina aftermath than in incarcerated murderers, pimps, drug dealers, etc.   There are so many opportunities to help more deserving constituencies that we never get to, it’s really not such a good allocation of limited resources to send prisoners free books.

Still, though, the prisoner requests keep coming to me.
As I see it, two things must happen in order to get inmates books.

1. Someone official at the institution must administer the request, not the inmate. This requires about five rounds of communication, judging from my past experience. Unfortunately, I don’t personally have the administrative capacity to undertake transforming inmate requests into institutional requests. Do you? Or do you know of an organization that does? A couple hours per request should do it. (Maybe less, once you get the hang of it, and develop some form letters.)

2. An entity other than Berklee College must pay for the book and administer the process. You, maybe?

Let me know if you have any thoughts about how to make this happen. I’m out of ideas (and time to think about it), myself.

Secrecy and pretense have been a part of music education since at least the Middle Ages. Cliques have had their own notation. Masters have been reluctant to share their techniques for fear that they would lose their competitive edge. Textbooks were written in an overwrought, highfalutin academic style, perhaps to create a sense of awe and mystique around the author. But that doesn’t do the reader/student much good. I hope that we’re growing out of that now, in this age of sharing information.

You’ll see this if you compare several works discussing the same subject matter. At NEC, we had a seminar devoted to this. We looked a counterpoint and harmony books by Schoenberg, Piston, and some others, and compared their styles. Some were clear and helpful. Others were as dense as mortgage documents. But the ideas were the same. A fugue is a fugue. Why then, not compete for the clearest explanation? The reality of what’s published is far from that.

In my editing, I find that some authors put a lot of effort into putting on such airs and trappings of academia. This is especially common in two groups: highly educated musicians born before about 1950 and people who grew up very poor, in rough or highly rural neighborhoods with poor schools. The result is long rambling sentences, awkward and esoteric words, and a condescending affect.

Yuck. Clarity is so much more helpful to the reader.

So, the laborious process goes, of profound, deep editing. When editing gets severe, an unfortunate consequence can be that the writer’s personality can get lost. This is a danger with all writing that is very far from the mark of what’s appropriate or helpful for the reader. The life gets edited out of it. The baby goes out with the bath water, and it can be tough work getting it back in.

Which brings me to the Westminster dog show. Congratulations to Uno the beagle and all those who played a part in awarding him his Best in Show victory on February 11, 2008. As I am part of a two-beagle household, with my beagle in-law making three, this is big news around here, and I will confess to probably spending too much time reading about this grand event. A beagle hasn’t won Best in Show before.

Particularly of note are some of the details regarding Uno’s performance. Not only was he considered the noisiest in show, but he also reportedly nibbled on a brand new sign and nipped a microphone during an interview. This is important news: it means that he is a proper beagle, not some over-groomed robot dog, bred for chasing ribbons rather than rabbits. Uno is a dog’s dog. I will tell you from experience: real beagles destroy furniture and toys, bark and howl, and lick even clean dishes in the dishwasher. They are like Uno.

Uno had a good bath, and likely a pedicure, and was on his best behavior for the show. But he was still Uno the beagle. The result was that the crowd gave him an uncharacteristically enthusiastic standing ovation. Despite being on his best behavior, he was still himself. That’s what won the day. He was the perfect dog. And he was still a beagle.

As writers and editors, let’s take note. There are many ways to present concepts. Truth and clarity are our ideals. But the human element—in Uno’s case, the “beagle factor”—that makes it unique and fosters an emotional tie with the reader.

I am reminded of a project by a highly beloved educator, who was just a terrible writer. In his first draft, he came across as condescending and rambling, and inclined towards useless information, redundancy, and digressions. It was such an obnoxious first proof.

After four years editing his project, which included two different editors who eventually gave up in disgust, the project landed on my desk, and I had the directive to either save it or kill it. I had seen the first draft and knew how it started. Then, I read the latest edited version, and saw that it had become a lifeless lump. It was utterly without any beagle factor left. Mostly inoffensive, but b-o-r-i-n-g. And it was about two hundred pages too long.

I met with the author and found him to be extremely charismatic and engaging, in person. He was also really, really smart, and kind, and seemed to care that I understood the concepts he was explaining to me. And he was sooooo funny! If he was a dog, he’d be a beagle, and his overly edited manuscript was a pale reflection of himself. Who knows why his writing was so off, but the editing mostly moved it sideways, rather than up. The grammar was cleaned up, and the offensive bits were removed. But, well, yuck again.

Here’s how we saved it.

I went through the book, chapter by chapter, and came up with lists of questions about the content. When there was a concept missing, I formed a question to generate the right answer about it. When something was boring, I’d ask for an example. When something was condescending, I’d ask him to explain it again. He was so fed up with the project at that point that he didn’t really remember much about what was in the manuscript and what was not.

Rather than asking him to write again, I interviewed him, doing a one-hour session per chapter, based on my lists of questions.

In these interviews, he was his usual charming self. He told jokes and stories, he used time-tested teaching strategies to explain difficult theoretical concepts. He swore like a sailor, as was his wont. He’d go off on tangents, but then the questions would bring him back. They were delightful sessions because he was such a fun person. To him, it was really a process of chatting about a subject that he loved, rather than writing a book.

I transcribed these interviews, and used what he said there to fill in or replace what was in the original chapters. Some of his stories were really not appropriate for print, but others became useful metaphors/examples, especially after some gentle modifications. Some of them wound up exemplifying points that were besides what originally prompted them, but they were still his stories. In other words, we captured his “schtick.” I gave him the chapters, which he felt were in his own voice in a way that his own actual writing never was, and he made small technical adjustments, but overall was very happy with how it turned out.

The result was a clear, concise book that is now getting glowing reviews. People comment how they like his warm style, and feel like he’s right in the room with them. His past students commented that they were so happy to have his teaching in book form. He went back into his book, and it became alive again. The book is clear and informative, but it’s also got that beagle factor.

There are many ways that writing can be good. If publishing is your goal, remember the importance of the beagle factor. On this eve of Valentine’s Day, let’s remember that it’s the beagle factor that makes the difference between like and love.

Enrollment is now open for the next semester of my Finale course, which begins January 7, 2008.

“Music Notation with Finale” is a 12-week course available through Berkleemusic, the continuing ed division of Berklee College. It is required for various certificate programs and also an elective. In twelve weeks, students become extremely proficient at creating professional-quality notation, using Finale. I’m proud to report that some of my former students are now working as professional engravers. In fact, one of them just contacted me yesterday, in a panic! But it’s for everyone, and teachers, performing musicians, church choir directors, composers, songwriters, and many other types of musician have found it extremely useful.

There are some new videos. I just beefed up the drum notation lesson, including adding some unique strategies for entering drum notation without a MIDI keyboard. I’m also covering drum mapping in more depth, these days, now that I’ve given up on the PAS standard taking over the world. Much of this is actually in response to a request from the online arranging department. Happy to oblige; we’re all about real-world relevance, over here! I also discuss how to do cue notation (such as “kicks over time”) in greater depth. I used to think that the Ossia tool was the way to do this, but I’ve recently changed my mind, and now teach a better method.

Here’s some more info about this course.

Here’s a marketing piece we did about it a while ago. (Gosh, it’s five years old! Have we really been teaching music online for five years?!)

Writing books tends to drive musicians bonkers, particularly towards the end of the process when we’re fussing with minutia, reviewing proofs, cleaning up the final punchlist of details, and awaiting the final endlessly long march to the printer. Authors get crabby. There are two primary reasons why, in my opinion:

1. Books are persistent artifacts of an author’s best work and best thinking, and so getting books exactly right is intertwined with perceptions of self worth. At the end of the project, we feel stuck with its limitations, and are running out of time to make it the perfect, most holistic statement of who we are.

2. Musicians need to create actual music. Writing books about music is not the same as making music, and towards the end of the process, we get antsy because it’s been such an incredibly laborious distraction from what we need to be our primary life focus: making music.

(I won’t offer a third reason: that they are getting fed up with me torturing them…. That couldn’t be the case, could it?!)

An antidote to the first one, about identity, is to plan to write a series of books in your life that will collectively articulate a part of your persona, but more importantly to realize that no book could ever possibly do a soul justice. Books just don’t have that capability.

An antidote to the third one, if it exists (and I’m sure it does not), is to know that I will leave you alone very soon.

The middle one is what I really want to discuss. This past weekend, I took my boys to visit Sue (Gedutis) Lindsay and her family. Sue is a friend, musician, and fellow editor of Berklee Media projects. Here are Annie Lindsay and Forrest Feist munching on French fries, before we went to Plimoth Plantation.

We were catching up, and I was complaining about being generally crabby, and I mentioned feeling a bit far from music these days, when I seem to spend all my time talking and writing about music, rather than actually creating the real thing.

She offered a bit of wisdom that I feel is important to pass on. Cynical Sue said (and I paraphrase), “Musicians are special people, and we need to be creating music all the time, to feel normal.” She discussed her own journey through various distractions that were almost, but not quite, music, including writing books, research, teaching, and so forth. It’s not that these aren’t worthy, fun, and even necessary undertakings. We must call them “pseudo-musical activities,” though, and doing the real thing is where it’s really at. We must carve out time to create real music, for sanity’s sake, and be ferociously protective of this time.

So, I’m looking at life, and counting directions. I have my family (including two little boys), an old/maintenance-needing house, endless yard work, I serve on three town boards (chairing one), there’s my full-time gig at Berklee Press, part-time teaching Finale online, a variety of neglected hobbies, a few assorted other obligations, plus protecting my flock of chickens/ducks/geese from that hungry fox….. Quite a lot happening here, which all conspire to create distance from that spiritual life engine called music, which is the primary force that can keep me relatively sane and whole, but which is now at arm’s length. And I feel it poignantly this November, as days grow short and the world grows cold.

Prioritization is increasingly a necessary life’s skill for me, and I would venture, for anyone, as life developments bring increasing directions without offering us more hours in the day.

Arthur Cunningham, my first composition teacher and life mentor, once said to me, “I promise you that if you write every day, you will improve.”

So, here’s my thought/recommendation:

Create music every day.

Even if it’s for five minutes, you need to touch that fire, no how busy you are, and no matter how deeply your daily life is embroiled into pseudo-musical or non-musical activities. An hour would be great, but five minutes is better than nothing. Recognize that pseudo-musical activities (writing, teaching, studying, copying parts….) are not the same as making music, even though they might be delightful experiences in their own right. We need to be constantly warmed by that real core energy of musical spirit.

Commercial success and even inter-human communication are secondary to being warmed by the fire of creativity. Consider it a life imperative to touch the real thing. See progress over weeks, months, and years, not over the course of a few minutes.

If this rings true to you, please stop surfing the ’net, and create music for five minutes RIGHT NOW. Close your door, then play your guitar, beat your drum, improvise, scat sing, write a lyric—whatever the real-deal-essence-of-what-music-is-all-about-closest-to-center activity is for you. Then schedule a time when you will do it again tomorrow, and repeat. Just five minutes.

Let me know how it goes.

A “pickup measure” is a running start to bar 1. Pickup measures contain fewer beats than a complete measure—often just one quarter or eighth note. Essentially, it is “measure 0.”

Measure numbers start after the pickup measure so that there is an intuitive relationship between bar numbers and musical phrases. If you’ve got a 12-bar blues, the first phrase is most intuitively referenced as measures 1 to 4, not 2 to 5. Or, in a 16-bar form, your chorus should start at bar 9, not bar 10. Most popular music is constructed in 4-bar phrases, and it is usually clearer for the measure numbers to support the song form.

In Finale, set a pickup measure via Document > Pickup Measure, and then choose the duration of the pickup measure. This will set the measure numbers correctly so that you don’t have to control it via Measure > Measure Numbers > Edit Regions.

Set a double barline between the pickup measure and bar 1, just to signal to the reader that the first physical bar is actually a pickup measure.

If your pickup note begins off the beat, perhaps on the eighth note at 4+ (subdividing sixteenths 4e+a), it’s helpful to your readers if you also give them an eighth rest, just to clarify that the pickup is off the beat. (Note that the measure number for bar 1 is generally omitted; I’m including it for illustration purposes only.)

Another issue at “measure 0” is whether to have an opening repeat symbol if the whole form repeats. Though you’ll find many examples in the field where this is omitted, best notation practice is to include it. This way, the reader has an immediate indication that the form is going to repeat.

Don’t leave it out, as below. Though you’ll see this done even by smart, caring writers, it’s not as clear as the above example.

In recent Finale versions, the contextual menu for the Repeat tool has made adding repeat symbols so easy. Just Control-click a measure or highlighted measure region, with the Repeat tool active, and choose the symbol you want.