Revisting an old friend, Karen Carpenter

I teach a 13 year-old girl on the Upper East Side. Full of life and spunk, I look forward every Tuesday and Friday to teaching "Stick Tricks," as she dubs herself. Lessons are not ordinary, we work on style, technique, interpretation, but we also study Herstory of drumming. That's right. We explore the feminine perspective of American pop music.

Since, I was a little girl, my Dad thought it important to feature female drummers as sources of inspiration and courage. He knew that after a while, it might seem odd or even discouraging not to find many female percussionists/drummers. So every so often he would pull out Modern Drummer or a vinyl record and play me recordings of fantastic female drummers. Those listening hangs had such a profound effect on my musical perspective and how I valued my artistry beside male colleagues. Needless to say, I believe it is essential for male and female students to hear examples of all styles and artists, women and men. Especially for beginners, having a role model helps guide, encourage, and inspire students on their musical journeys.

Today I brought in Karen Carpenter. Born March 2, 1950 and died February 4, 1983, Karen began playing glockenspiel in high school band, but soon picked up the drums. Playing in college with her brother Richard, they signed their first recording contract in 1969. Originally playing drums and singing, Karen was eventually pressured to stand at the microphone because it was deemed more feminine. As she became more famous, she played less and less drums. Eventually, most of her fans were sadly unaware that she was first and foremost a drummer who happened to sing.

There are a few things that strike me about Karen's playing. First, her technique is impeccable. Clean, fast, and powerful, she had a feather touch and yet her sound was resonant and full. Another things I loved was her smile and energy. She wore the same grin that Gene Krupa did, that kind of presence is infectious and uplifting. But what really gets me is that Karen could sing and play easily.

"Stick Tricks" was not impressed with Karen, she said that she didn't find her particularly inspiring, but I simply replied, "Is it easy to count aloud and play?" "Well imagine singing beautifully and playing all that craziness!" Even though "Stick Tricks" couldn't identify with Karen's music, she still understood the important contribution Karen made and why we were taking a moment to study her.

Who knows how far-reaching these glimpses into Herstory can be. My hope is that if students are confronted with challenges they can look to those who have come before them for guidance and courage. Plus, at the very least Karen and I finally got "Stick Tricks" to count aloud while practicing her 5-stroke roll. :)



For more information about Herstory, female drummers, or lessons, please email me.

The Novelty of a Woman

Tonight I was scoping out Twitter, looking for more like-minded artists. Randomly, I searched "female drummers." I was amused at what I found. A few too many bi-curious girls exclaiming how "haute" chick drummers are and even more men expounding on the subject. Listen folks...people, men and women, have been playing drums since well, forever! There is nothing new here.

I asked myself, "If I searched for male drummers, what would come up?" Take a guess. Well, there were only 4 tweets, compared to the hundreds that pop up with "female drummers."

What does this mean? First, drummers are often assumed to be male. Second, male drummers are not hyper-sexualized, nor is their sexuality more important than their art. Lastly, male drummers do not deal with being compared to female drummers to determine whether or not they are worthy and/or credible musicians.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about finding female drummers attractive. Nor is there anything wrong with being a female drummer. Heck! I am a female drummer. I just find it degrading to focus on female drummers for their attractiveness and sexuality, rather than their music.

Here's what I suggest, the next time you or someone you know encounters a female drummer, take stock of their playing and artistry first. If you have to, close your eyes. Try to listen with fresh ears and reserve judgments. Resist the urge to comment on their gender, attractiveness, or sexuality. Instead, focus on their energy and how their music affects you.

And please do not tweet about your puppy love for female drummers. That's the equivalent of asking Robert Pattinson for a lock of hair at a Twilight convention. Yuck!

Susie Ibarra: Electronic Kulintang

With so few vacation days, teachers try their best to separate themselves from all things work-related. So what did I do with my Spring break? I taught. Practiced. Organized. Visited family. And of course, attended a concert. I had the fortune of seeing Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez aka Electronic Kulintang at the Lincoln Center Atrium.

I say fortune because being in the Atrium is an experience in itself. A long corridor with two walls of creeping, hanging vines and fronds jutting out horizontally. The air is so fresh and the high ceilings and smooth tiles make for deep and reverberating acoustics. On this evening, Susie had one set of pitched gongs, one set of tuned metal plates, one xylophone of sorts, and a drum set, which she shared with Roberto who also played amplified cajon and laptop.

I must say I was impressed. Initially, the trance n' dance electronica loops did not do much for me, but Susie artfully infused filipino rhythms and motifs into the tracks. As each track passed, the beats were more involved, more provoking. Until finally my interest peaked when she assumed her throne at the drum set, her mastery of sound and precision transparent, weaving a seamless groove from brushes merely rapping drum shells in typical minimalist style.

To give you a little background, I grew up hearing about Susie Ibarra. My dad, a local jazz drummer, encouraged me to practice by citing amazing female drummers as inspirations. Among Karen Carpenter, Cindy Blackman, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Sheila E. there was Susie Ibarra. In addition to being a female drummer/percussionist, she is also Filipina. There are not that many of us out there.

I am thankful that these women have paved a path for other female instrumentalists. Inspiring us to take steps towards the music we love and 'going for it.' Especially to Susie, for all her research in indigenous Filipino music and bringing it to our attention. Actually, I hope this December to take a trip to the Philippines to visit family and learn more about the music of my people.

Moving into Stillness

Years and years...literally, I've been tossing the words, "I'm moving to New York." I'm not sure if I ever meant what I said or I was just too naive to comprehend what they meant. But here I am. Moving.

Eric Shiffman...yogi master says the goal of yoga is to move into stillness. That is what I am preparing for. Years and years of chaos, poor decisions, indecisiveness, frustration, and all the rest of those trials and tribulations that accompany growing up are finally paying off! I have never felt happier, more overwhelmed, but more capable than I do now. That's really saying something.

I practice yoga. I eat well. I'm not in school. And I'm leaving California. Its about time. :)

Stillness is where your heart lies waiting to be discovered, beneath the surface... deep inside our core.

CD Review

CD Review of Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase

Music entertains us, touches us emotionally, yet at its deepest level, has the power to speak into existence, that which cannot be formed through words and images. Evoking memories in the collective human psyche, electronica group Boards of Canada in their album The Campfire Headphase has achieved that rare blend of wistful reminiscence and tapped into base human emotions, a potent combination that is sure to affect any listener.

Hailing from Scotland, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin began experimenting with tape recording techniques at the ripe age of ten. In 1986 Sandison and Eoin formed Boards of Canada in high school. Inspired by the National Film Board of Canada’s documentaries, Joni Mitchell, The Incredible String Band, and the Beatles, among many others, the group drew upon the antiquated sounds of analog recording techniques, samples of natural sounds, smooth beats and signature guitar sounds to evoke a 1970s playful and memorable quality to their music.

In October 2005, Boards of Canada released its fifth album The Campfire Headphase, which signals their induction into the highest echelon of electronic music and widespread notoriety. Previous albums, such as Music Has the Right to Children (1998) and Geogaddi (2002), were beautiful in their own right, but only hinted at the evasive quality that The Campfire Headphase retains. As a concept album, The Campfire Headphase is a childhood summer camp musical metaphor and each phase of the album is a different mood associated with the memories of those experiences, which are expressed in the collective human database of familiar sounds used to invoke nostalgia, the continuity in the compositional form of the album, and the repetitious and non-repetitious elements that shift backwards and forwards, giving the listener a sense of displacement in time and space.

Tied together through a combination of vignettes, short tracks 30 seconds to two minutes in duration that set the mood-scape for each section, and full-length tracks, which never seem rushed to finish or arrive at any sense of conclusion, the album’s architecture is a seamless thread of emotions and memories. “Into the Rainbow Vein,” the first vignette, paints the backdrop for the first portion of the album. A children’s toy box or music maker, which is then played backwards and then filtered to create a textured, grainy quality. Nostalgic, warm bouncing beams of sound and light that have no beginning and no end, cascade in a wash of comfort and whimsical nonsense. More over, this opening track alludes to the camping metaphor by using indiscernible, happy melodies from children’s toys, the listener is brought back to that first bus ride to summer camp with playful laughter and the all possibilities of friends and new experiences awaiting your arrival.

Full-length tracks, such as “Satellite Anthem Icarus,” are anywhere from four to six minutes long and employ a series of repetitious and non-repetitious elements. In “Satellite Anthem Icarus,” the opening is just the sound of waves washing up on the shore and an acoustic guitar playing a low, folk melody. The acoustic drum beat enters at a slow, strolling pace and as the track progresses, whizzing and whirling synthetic sound effects bubble to the surface and ambient washes of consonant harmonies shift in and out of the foreground. The repeated elements, such as the beat and the guitar ostinato in two to eight bar loops, provide a pulsing motion to the track, which is in keeping with the natural sound and pace of the ocean wave’s ebbing and flowing. Changing elements, like the samples, electronic effects, and various synthesizers are temporal and constantly in flux, which renders a sense of dynamics and shifting from present to past. Probably the most subtle and significant element in every track on the album, are the sustained sounds or even “white noise”, i.e. synthetic drones, harmonious washes of sound, and static samples, which are the glue, the common thread that unites each track to one another and is the backdrop for the passage of time; without it all elements would seem transfixed, motionless, and gray.

As the listener travels through the album, the tracks become progressively more involved and more emotionally complex. In “Dayvan Cowboy,” the guitar sound is electronic and gritty, the beat is faster and the shaker is on the front edge of the pulse, and the friction between constant elements and differences between timbres create tension. The pitch and harmonic content remaining relatively consonant, the main dissonance and tension occurs between different timbres, such as pure, clean, acoustic sounds versus synthetic, filtered and distorted sounds. When track reaches its climax, the wind-swept ambient sounds against the constant ostinatos and beat are at their highpoint, until the a full desperado electric guitar enters and the beat morphs into a take-no-prisoners series of sampled crashes that are played backwards and forward to add an element of grit and grim to the pristine sustained sounds in the background. After this point, the vignette, “A Moment of Clarity”, releases all the emotional tension and woe. Served as ginger after a spicy meal of sushi, “A Moment of Clarity” is a palette cleanse for your ears, the sounds are pristine and smooth, pure and refined. Thus the each track, while having its own sense of climax and tension and release within its microcosm, has a rightful sense of purpose within the fabric of the entire album.

In the final phase, the vignette “Constants are Changing,” much like its name, is a shift of emotion, happy and consonant, but also sad, it signals that point in which you have had the time of your life and then you suddenly realize that you will be going home soon. It’s inevitable - the end is near. The descendent from the clouds of this dream is slow and gradual. From the tracks “Slow This Bird Down” to “Tears From the Compound Eye,” the beats become slower and eventually non-existent, the quality of ambient sounds is thinner and wispy, and the harmonic progressions are descending and slowly revolving.

The last track “Farewell Fire” is without doubt one of my favorite endings to an album ever. Remorseful and thoughtful, this track is the ultimate expression of nostalgia and the overwhelming feeling of emptiness that fills you as you are leaving. Eight minutes and 26 seconds in length, the first half of the track is a Bach-like chorale of vertical harmonies composed of distorted, filtered, and textured sounds, which move at the same unyielding pace as a dirge, and very gradually decrescendos into almost nothingness. As the track continues, you strain to hear the distant melody, probing the darkness, and finally you discover a faint shadow of the mournful tune, which lingers in the abyss for what seems like an eternity until it eventually fades away forever.

Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase is one of the best electronic albums I have ever heard. Often lyrics and song are necessary to evoke such abstract and ambiguous emotions. However, through their use of familiar sounds, natural and unnatural, acoustic and electronic, Boards of Canada transports the listener to the lost memories of childhood, often cast aside in the throws of adulthood, allowing us once more to recapture the happiness and simplicity of youth.

Gendered style...the Big Problem

Each facet of our outward appearance is another opportunity for analysis. To codify and determine who we are and where we are from. Gender is one of the many ways in which humans are defined. To determine one's scientific sex is to seemingly ascertain some of the most important characteristics of a human being. It is my belief that specifically gender dichotomy is a hindrance...a social pressure that makes us choose who we are or who we would like to be and continues female-male relationships of inferiority.

With that said, gender, particularly in the realm of musical interpretation, poses a significant challenge. In music there is a terminology which is standardized and widely-accepted in order to communicate through WORDS what we wish to accomplish in sound. However, this syntax is primarily governed by a pro-male interpretation and style, which deems female ability and interpretation as weak, inferior, and submissive. Sounds familiar? In fact, often the subversive question is: Is it better to sound like a woman OR a man?

That maybe a silly question, but more often than people care to admit, their stylistic decisions are divided into the only two camps of expression...that which is male and that which is female. Fortunately, the human element- creative expression cannot be assigned a gender. It is free of the simple categories by which we try to feebly label it.

However, when communicating ideas or aesthetics, people often resort to words, which regrettably are riddled with all sorts of gender mines. For example, when playing a passage of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (the coda) on the timpani, several descriptive gendered terms come to mind: forceful, powerful, aggressive, and unyielding.

But what happens when your playing, your interpretation does not concur with the standard "masculine" approach? Well, then we have a problem. YOU need to re-think your interpretation to best fit the expectations of that famous piece of music...but let's be real here...who established these interpretations that academia and established musicians have come to expect and demand? MEN.

I am by no means disregarding the centuries of history have taken place in order to establish standardized interpretation, but I AM criticizing anyone (schools, orchestras, musicians, teachers and anyone else who upholds a system of dividing human emotion and expression into male and female contexts) who feels the need to simply bifurcate music.

Those of you who would disagree with me, probably think this is overboard. But when women are asked to play more like men or in the style of men, whereas men are merely asked to play lighter or softer...and rarely to play like women...well, I think there is an asymmetrical expectation of female vs. male interpretation.


But somehow, it is common practice, even among the most educated musicians to write off gendered descriptions of music as merely explanatory and terms, which are vague and not so informative, are still used in the name of creating beautiful music.

So how do we go forward? I offer this humble solution. Why offer specific, descriptive words and metaphors, which effectively guide a performer. Gender need not be mentioned. Simply legato, molto cantabile, or play like you are making love. As erformers, conductors, composers-together we are charged with the beautiful challenge of bringing life to the unknown mysteries of the universe. Words do not become us. They are necessary tools, but only a means to an end.

Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

After reading this article, please read on and let me know what you think.

"Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope," wow... how to begin? I read that title and a little crinkle emerged between my eyebrows. How can I take anything in the article to follow seriously with a title such as that? First, "their brains cannot cope" implies that the average person is a neanderthal, incapable of adjustment, comprehension, or understanding. Secondly, the word "hate" is uncomfortable, brutish, and down right wrong. Does the average person listen to modern classical music? If so, do they "hate" all the many different compositions that are so loosely encompassed underneath the "modern classical music" umbrella? I cannot believe that is true and here are a few reasons why:

1. Now, more than ever, music is more available and accessible by means of torrents, libraries, iTunes, and all sorts of downloads. Not to mention the countless ways that you can rip and swap playlists with friends. As such, the average listener has had greater exposure to a variety of styles and genres, which almost all have permeated modern classical music in some way or another. For example, electronic tape pieces like Temazcal by Javier Alvarez for maracas and tape is electronica samples infused with monks chanting and maracas. That is modern classical music. Is the human brain incapable of "predicting patterns" in that piece? I do not think so. My 14 year-old little sister, who is obsessed with Glee, would enjoy this dramatic and lively composition.

2. While the science that is support this article's generalization seems valid, it is out of touch with the purpose of music and even further from the purpose of most modern classical music. Modern classical composers strive for furthering the art form. Creating and performing music that elevates our minds and perhaps even alters them. So that when you leave a new music concert, you walk away with a sense of difference and removal from your "comfort zone." If composers based their compositions on brain patterns, well that is exactly what we would have-MUSIC THAT IS PATTERN-BASED, FAMILIAR, AND NOT NEW! How interesting, thought-provoking, or enlightening is that?


However, I do want to stress that I support this kind of scientific research. It teaches us more about ourselves, our conditioning and our natural tendencies. Those findings are informative and can tip us off to pattern-based behavior and expression. And if we understand those patterns, we might be able to remove our expression from the restrictions of our nature. We might be able to discover and invent and re-interpret our creative world separate from expectations. Oh, wait...I think that is a big motivating factor behind modern classical music. That the rules of tonality were limiting and could not always fully express the complexity of the world around us. Also, there comes a point where tonality can loose its effect. We know the patterns and we can predict what will happen in a piece of music before it is played. That is boring and uninspired.

Music is the medium by which we can express the inexpressible, the ethereal, and the unknown. It transcends the boundaries of language, culture, time and space. Thus, it should never be subjected to the microscopic lens of science as litmus test for what is enjoyable and what is not. The scientific research done on audiences is novel at best, it is neither conclusive or usefully informative in practical compositional applications. What this article did for me, was dredge up a lot of reasons why people do not enjoy modern classical music, but is that really helpful?

Modern classical concerts are some of the least attended and yet this article paints this art form as misguided and inaccessible. How does that encourage people to broaden their horizons? How does this help people break free of the patterns by which their whole musical enjoyment and aesthetics are founded?

It does not.