For the third time in a row, I attended the World Saxophone Congress. After St. Andrews (Scottland) and Strassbourg (France), the triannual congress was held in Zagreb (Croatia). With Raum-Musik für Saxophone we played two concerts. Here the two videos with thanks to James E Cunningham for the videos.
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From the soundtrack of my life I picked out 5 records, all of them absolutely no easy listening. If you don’t take your time to listen carefully this music will be annoying. On the other hand this is music with a lot of emotion and music thinking. I get a lot of inspirations by only reading about it, by listening to an alternate version by another artist or just by looking at the album covers – that definitively gives me a ‘musical cue’.
Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata by Rhasaan Roland Kirk
this is a duo record of one saxophone player and one drummer, just listen. Video about this virtuoso and great inspiration for a lot of musicians. Listen to it!
Ascension by John Coltrane
End of the 70s I read a lot about John Coltrane and his innovative and game changing record Ascension. In that time there was no internet, so you really had to be lucky to find a record store that would sell it. It happened when I was on holiday with a friend in France, that we popped into a record store and by accident I found a copy of Ascension. I was so excited to hear this record that I decided to not listen to it in the store, but to buy it, wrap it into a plastic bag and fix it with tape on a plane wooden surface in our camper to assure that the record won’t bend or got destroyed on the sweaty summer in France. After 3 weeks of holiday I put the record on my record player and listened to it very carefully – and … I really didn’t get it. I thought this is one of the most overrated records ever. But I didn’t give up and listened to it two more times in a row. After the third time I began to understand and after that I listened to the record many times: as a background while learning or even on a long drive with my car. Read more! Listen to it!
Hymnen by Karlheinz Stockhausen
This is maybe the record I have spent the most time in my life in many different variations plus the original material that was used to make this concrete and electronic music. I worked in a two year research project at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, together with Prof. Frisius, we also made a copy of the original 1′ tapes on DAT in the WDR studio, which means that the original material IS the tape and not the score (that was done afterwards with the purpose to read while listening to the recording for a better understanding!). Read more! Listen to it!
Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman
a collective improvisation by Double Quartet (saxophone, trumpet, bass and drum ) with a picture of a Jackson Pollock painting Read more! Listen to it!
No time to listen to all this? Here is a time saver:
Here is a selection of different TED talks. All of them use Music and Music Thinking in one or the other way. From psychology, to emotion, to technique – get inspired by this amount of musical presentations.
Schizophrenic violin lesson
Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician — and what he learned.
Making Mistakes and Prototyping
What is a mistake? By talking through examples with his improvisational Jazz quartet, Stefon Harris walks us to a profound truth: many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don’t react to them appropriately.
Imagination, Emotion and New Experiences
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. With a great exercise on Imagination and Emotion with Chopin.
Music Psychology and Soundscapes
Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices.
Research on the Brain and Music
Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.
Trust and Examples from the World
Conductor Charles Hazlewood talks about the role of trust in musical leadership — then shows how it works, as he conducts the Scottish Ensemble onstage. He also shares clips from two musical projects: the opera “U-Carmen eKhayelitsha” and the ParaOrchestra.
Music and emotion through time
The composer Michael Tilson Thomas traces the development of classical music through the score, the record, and the remix.
Live Looping, Improvisation, ‘gestural” Sound Design
Musician and inventor Onyx Ashanti demonstrates “beatjazz” — his music created with two handheld controllers, an iPhone and a mouthpiece, and played with the entire body. At TED’s Full Spectrum Auditions, after locking in his beats and loops, he plays a 3-minute song that shares his vision for the future of music.
The is another one I can’t embed: José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman. José Bowen outlines how new printing technology and an improved piano gave rise to the first music industry and influenced a generation of composers. Note: you should also read the comments.
On the TED website you can find more examples when you search for the Tag music (there is no music thinking tag yet!).
6th of january is epiphany day – the 12th and last day of christmas. The holiday is over and we can focus on the coming year. A good moment to wish you all the best for 2012 and hope that you will have many epiphanies!
What exactly is epiphany, here is a collection:
EPIPHANY is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
PHILOSOPHICAL meaning: having found the last piece of the puzzle and suddenly seeing the whole picture.
ARCHIMEDES Eureka! I found it!
EINSTEIN was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move.
DARWIN An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin’s “hunch” (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.
JAMES JOYCE Referring to those times in his life when something became manifest, a deep realization, he would then attempt to write this epiphanic realization in a fragment. Joyce also used epiphany as a literary device within each short story of his collection Dubliners (1914) as his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.
In RELIGION it is used when a person realizes their faith or when they are convinced that a event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.
WESTERN CHRISTIAN Religion: The adoration of the magi, represented as kings, having found Jesus by following a star 12 days after christmas.
HINDUISM epiphany might refer to the realization of Arjuna that Krishna (a God serving as his charioteer in the “Bhagavad Gita”) is indeed representing the universe.
In ZEN kensho describes the moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realizing the answer to a koan.
BUDDHISM Buddha finally realizing the nature of the universe, and thus attaining nirvana.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS is talking about a drug-influenced state, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork (naked lunch).
EPIPHANIES is the thirteenth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series.
EPIPHANY is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop.
HIERONYMUS BOSCH painted the adoration of the magi around 1495.
HOMER SIMPSON has an epiphany, after visiting a strange Inuit shaman, and realizes he has to save the town from Russ Cargill’s plans to destroy Springfield.
The last page of THE WIRE magazine with surprising sonic stories about music is called EPIPHANIES.
Interesting: if you search for Epiphanies or Epiphany on TWITTER many people talk about that they (just) had an epiphany, but don’t exactly say what it was.
MUSIC THINKING Everything where metaphors, tools, techniques, patterns, instruments, brands and behaviours are derived from music and used in other areas or in a surprising new way.
Although the music industry may use the term branding for marketing a product or band it is not used in the context of music itself. Though it could be interesting from a brand point of view to see how co-creation works in music. In many genres there are examples of co-creation from jazz to pop and rock.
But where rock bands would co-create in the studio and later just reproduce the outcome in gigantic tours without changing a single note, the jazz approach is different.
Recording sessions in the studio were rather an interruption of playing in clubs or being on a tour. So things that where tried out and tested on stage could be easily brought into the studio and studio experiments could easily be tested life with the experience of the direct response of the audience.
It is legitimate to call Miles Davis a strong brand that managed to develop, innovate and co-create new musical styles and genres over several decades starting from the 40s to the 90s. When you listen to albums like Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew or Tutu we encounter many different sounds, styles, genres and musicians but in all of the songs we hear and feel the ‘musical essence’ based on directions from the charismatic personality of Miles Davis. Although the essence is not explicit or defined by words we could see this as the brand itself that was co-created by Miles and his musicians.
In other words Miles the person is the brand ideology (mission, vision, values) and together with his musicians they were branding together.
Some aspects in his way of working:
Young musicians
An important role in the changes of musical innovation was the recruitment of young musicians that where willing to go where Miles wanted to be, or already had chosen a direction where Miles wanted to go. Miles did recruiting based on his vision and was actively looking for change of his own brand through co-creation.
Start with a sketch Miles Davis self did not compose in the way that he came to a recording session with a fully written-out score. Most of the time either Miles or one of the band members came up with an idea or rough sketch that then was developed further.
In Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pur l’echafaud e.g. he let the band react directly to parts of the film that were shown in the recording studio via a big screen. Based on small instructions from Miles the band collectively reacted to actions and emotions.
The musicians did not always understand what he was doing, or what he wanted, but they trusted and respected him to make something outstanding. It was like: start with a sketch, learn together, build consensus for change and innovation.
Listen and play Most of the musicians were talking about Miles as the ‘best listener who ever led a band’, he heard what everybody else was playing and with his voice and the ability to show new possibilities he was the glue to make it sound like a whole band. His instructions were famous in being vague, showing the right direction and also leaving enough freedom for own interpretation: Don’t bang just play! You listen and you play!
Brand influence and the creation of new brands “Everyone who played with Miles, feels a bond with each other” Herbie Hancock. Playing together with Miles was special and also inspiring to go on with musicians that had the Miles-experience in working together.
Bringing yourself in a co-creation with a big brand can also have a very positive effect on your own brand or personality. Nearly all of the musicians that played with Miles became later famous musicians and bandleaders themselves and created their own sound. Especially the ‘In a silent way’ players were dominating the jazz and rock development of the 70s and beyond.
The music of Miles Davis and the music thinking that is inspired by him can be a learning and inspiration for branding, communication, co-creation, new thinking about design and design of organizations and creative processes. Christof Zürn
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The new CD of Raum-Musik für Saxophone has arrived: DOUBLES
Five years ago in spring 2005 I had the idea of a triple concert: 1. a ‘normal’ concert with single microphones attached to each saxophone plus ambient microphones to record the special acoustics of the different rooms of the venue. The single tracks per saxophone could be used for concert nr. 3 and the ambient mocrophones for concert nr. 2 2. a live concert with a loudspeaker orchestra where the registration (or parts of it) from the first concert were diffused via a loudspeaker orchestra and where the 9 saxophones would interact live with the material from the first concert and with each other. 3. a live diffusion concert of 9 saxophone tracks (single tracks recorded during one of the concerts) via 9 iPods and 9 dedicated loudspeakers. So there would be 9 players, everyone with a single iPod and a single speaker. All the 9 players would play together in the concert (going backward and forward on the single saxophone track like a Ipod DJ). You would hear 9 saxophones improvising together with original material from one of the saxophones, but no saxophone would be seen. The iPod would be the actual instrument.
The new CD of Raum-Musik für Saxophone DOUBLES is the recording of the second concert (with material from the first), a live improvisation between 9 saxophones in the room and 9 saxophones via 40 speakers of the concert the day before. There were 140 people in the audience. You hear the following saxophones: bass, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano and sopranino.
I hope we can perform one day the third part to make it finally TRIPLES. Here are two pictures of the 12 page booklet I designed, the CD will be available via the RMfS website or RMfS facebook page. All pictures are taken by our friend Irmtrud Saarbourg.
DOUBLES by Raum-Musik für Saxophone
Booklet of DOUBLES by Raum-Musik für Saxophone (ouside of the 12 page booklet))
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I had the chance to read an early version of the new book of Nicholas Ind and to co-create and share with him some thoughts about co-creation, innovation and branding. I am looking forward to an interesting read! 
A diverging and converging blog by Christof Zürn 