craft
a case for the scratch made mind
Where else to spend the first Sunday morning in Tokyo but at the Sunday Bake Shop? This little place turns out lovingly made pastries alongside great coffee drinks, and while perusing the handwritten menu as you stand in line with half of Shibuya, you can watch the small band of white-aproned craftspeople working at the big ovens and counters behind glass windows.
It’s a cool, soft morning, and there’s a small part of my brain functioning well enough to feel happiness at being back in Japan. Honestly, the jet lag is real and so far untouched by my first espresso. Thankfully, if history’s any indication, I’ll be recovered enough to fake competency at my job tomorrow afternoon. I can’t wait to reunite with ten of last year’s Studio singers and meet the five newbies, to greet my colleagues and try out some elementary Japanese (signs so far are not promising - this morning I managed to tell the bake shop employee that my order was for here, then confidently said good night instead of thank you).
And mostly, I can’t wait to do the work of music for another day, to be in fellowship with others who are training body, mind, and heart to spin sound out into space with intention and beauty. These traditions of study are passed on by humans to humans, and these transactions transform the givers and the receivers together. I think about this all the time lately while simultaneously marveling at the myriad tools available to help us study and prepare, tools that just weren’t around when I was coming up. I spent my long flight from Dallas studying the two operas I’ll coach here, their bulky scores transformed into files on my light, slim tablet. I listened to recordings fed from that same tablet through Bluetooth into my headphones. I reviewed the Zoom recordings of my Japanese class too. Those lessons will continue while I’m in Tokyo, connecting with my teacher in Kissimmee, her morning and my evening brought together across the wide Pacific - it’s amazing, sugoi.
Lugging a suitcase full of music, exchanging money at every border, avoiding international phone charges and going weeks without the voice of a loved one - it’s hard to remember these things even though I did them for well over a decade before new technology trickled down into my little life. I think about this all the time lately, too, as the price of this connected convenience becomes increasingly impossible to ignore: as institutions line up to give us the AI hard sell, as citizens in Memphis cry out about the poisoned air they breathe in the shadow of the latest chatbot factory, as water-poor citizens in Arizona watch LLMs drink their milkshake, as the under-supported international students who feed our academic machine use AI to keep up, as our home-grown students use AI hoping that their overstretched adjunct professor will lack the bandwidth to react or the courage to risk a bad review, as our own government blithely turns out AI slop and as its supporters and enemies alike gleefully spread it over the world’s screen without a thought beyond the jolt of their own reactions.
As we shrug our shoulders and say, well, it’s here, what can you do?
Music is transformative, but it’s not magic to make music - it’s craft, something we can teach and learn. Machines can learn it too. In a theater class I played for years ago, the teacher said that there were only about a dozen plots in human narrative. The doomed love, the triumphant love, the hero’s journey, the child lost and found - we repeat stories all the time, in our lives as well as in our literature. And musicians! my sweet lord, they’ve been stealing from one another for centuries. It’s not surprising that predictive text programs, fed the entirety of our creation, could spit it back out to us in a way that feels recognizable, and maybe even human.
Now every industry is crowing about how AI will do all the grunt work for us, freeing our minds to, idk, roam the fields of inspiration and innovation. We forget the days before all of this, not very long ago, when we built our minds on the grunt work. Reading, writing, rewriting, practicing, experimenting, correcting, failing, learning, improving - what happens if we surrender that work? Who leads us next? What minds will care for this world, built on what training, what learning, what insight, gained where?
The speed of our systems and the cynicism of our leaders overwhelms us. There is no time to wait for you, they seem to say, and this work isn’t that special anyway. Use this program to do the boring stuff, which is so formulaic that it’s beneath you. Save your precious brain for the big ideas.
Don’t fall for this. Your work is everything, whatever it is, from the ground up. We are what we do, what we practice, at every moment. Although this belief hasn’t made me wise enough to treat every moment and action as precious, I believe it with all my heart: it’s through doing things that we become who we are.
Craft comes from the German word Kraft, which means strength. In English, it can also mean cunning, skill, or art. It can refer to a vehicle, something that takes us from one place to another - something that transports us. I remain dedicated to the craft of music because it makes my mind and shapes my heart. It is a skill that transports. Living in the world, I understand the necessity of finding labor that has value to others. But at its core, this craft and its labor are valuable to me, indispensable to my human life. It can never be stolen, even if the things I create can be.
I’ve never spent one moment in a room with another musician that didn’t give me a glimpse into that musician’s humanity. We’re as messed up as all the world’s people, but our practice contains this opportunity, to perceive the soul of another damaged human in the moment of mutual respiration and touch. Take a breath, strike the keys, speak the words, sustain the phrase, draw the bow, and make the music, which makes us in turn.
Sean Robert Powell’s excellent book The Ideology of Competition in Music Schools adroitly describes how cynicism is part of what allows a system to flourish. Rolling our eyes about musical competition, for example, gives us the luxury of holding the system at arms’ length while taking no risks to change it. Going a step further, the author also demonstrates how atomized resistance can actually strengthen a system; individual, piecemeal protest can be easily and cynically dismissed, which may serve to inspire support for the mainstream. I wonder if we can and if we will organize, whether we will take real risks to stem the rising tides of AI, of unaccountable government, of all movements that devalue humanity.
Tomorrow, I’ll sit with people whose language I can barely begin to speak, and they’ll be kind to me and help, and I’ll gain a tiny bit of understanding into how this language shapes the way they see the world, and how we are therefore different even as we find commonality in working on the words and music of yet other languages, other centuries, committing ourselves to the pursuit of understanding. And it will change us, little by little. And it will be real, breath by breath, syllable by syllable, note by precious note.
It is not enough, in itself, to practice this craft or any other. But the skill, the art, the cunning, the strength, and the transport - we’ll need it all.
Otsukaresama desu. Thank you for your hard work.
Also: there’s more writing on the way!
My next VAN article is coming soon, watch this space. Here’s the first one from a while back; the second continues the theme of support for collaborative pianists.
Accompaniment in America is officially coming in July! Pre-orders start on July 2. Our peer reviewers all said they would use this in their collab classes, and I hope that happens - I can’t wait for the whole community, pianists or not, to read the stories and ideas contained in this book. Yay Chanda, Elvia, and Jean, and the army of colleagues whose minds and hearts are part of what we wrote.
I highly recommend Sean Robert Powell’s book referenced above. If the topic interests you, I wrote this essay about competition a while back, the first time I cited his book.
Thank you for your support!
thanks for reading.
“it’s through doing things that we become who we are.“
Thank you for putting to words what so many of us are feeling lately. It’s important to remind ourselves and encourage each other to keep doing the hard work. It’s worth it.
Dear Kathy,
I feel your pain regarding AI, but I am assured that it was the wave that was coming and is now here to stay, if anything only eventually to be displaced by something even more advanced. CMS just hosted a series of webinars on AI in music and, while the focus of the one I attended was on AI and composition and not performing as such, it was gratifying to know there’s intellectual property laws governing the use of AI and that, in fact, AI can be a powerful creative resource. Performers, of course, have traditionally felt threatened by mechanized sound (the pianola, recorded sound, computer-generated sound, etc.) but the truth remains that audiences have always attended public performances just as they have always enjoyed acoustic instruments or experimented with musical instruments and techniques of the Renaissance and baroque eras. Besides, nothing has ever replaced the immediacy of interacting with another live performer, so that compositions making use AI, same as those written for interaction between live performers and computer-generated sound resources, end up being something in themselves. It is true that, as is well known, the tape deck put an end to a lot of ballet studio piano just as electronically sampled sound undid what used to be the studio or pit string section, for instance, but musicians adapted, they sought out work in cognate areas (even of performing), they retrained where necessary, and so on. And, as they retrained, they found it possible to re-enter the field better equipped to work with the tools and resources of today. Nowadays, a pianist sometimes cannot be hired to work in an academic setting without achieving a bottom line of computer literacy! For me, the advent of AI will probably not affect any of the structures currently in place for performing musicians but prove a valuable resource waiting to be pressed into service. After all, it’s really the nut behind the wheel that’s making the difference! I honestly feel that our response to AI should be one of openness and resiliency, not resistance.
Performers haven’t just felt threatened by mechanized sound - recordings have replace live music in the majority of venues across the country since the 80s. Numbers of performances and attendees have plummeted in the last two decades. AI is clearly being used to generate so much text and sound, at the expense of our environment and creativity. I don’t see how you can take the position that our current structures for musicians, which are demonstrably failing, will simply continue to exist in an economy that is already sacrificing human-held jobs to AI, even before it’s proven to be reliable. I will resist this theft-driven, environment-wrecking thing with all of my might.
Dearest Kathleen, thank you for your eloquent and profound words. Couldn't agree more with you on importance of all steps in honing one's craft. And I cannot wait for the book! Have a wonderful time in Japan.