When we first started to discuss the Programs of Study at PHS, I had this idea that there were many different directions I might want to go, so many things I might want to focus on. Would I look at music or theater or urban planning or programming and math puzzles or… While it is authentic for me to say I have interests in all of these and more, it’s disingenuous for me to behave as if the first one, music, isn’t the absolute center of my universe and—more importantly for what “program of study” will come to mean at PHS, and how I hope to operationalize it in my personal and professional life—the center of my lived experience.

At a minimum, I play music three times a week. That’s 5-6 hours of playing, rehearsing, and listening that I have built into my life in a sustainable way. Outside of that, I sometimes spend time arranging songs, trying to write them, practicing tunes, and then *playing gigs *of all different types. This practice is central to who I am, how I express myself, connect to others, and see and participate in the world. But, perhaps more simply, it is a practice. Having practices is hard. Perhaps not for everyone, and perhaps it is growing less hard for me as I find myself able to pick things up more easily as I get older, but this is a practice that feels natural and necessary. I do it. And that means that, even if the day-to-day of PHS operations take me all over the place, leaving me just dribs and drabs of time, each of which is also filled with other school-y details, I will still play music. And I will, therefore, still be making at least passive, ambient “progress” in thinking about a program of study that centers around this practice.

All that said, “music” does not a program of study make. Music is a field, a practice, a domain, an art, and within it and around it there are millions of questions to ask and stones to uncover. I’ve wondered about tons of them, read about fewer, and really thought in any organized way about how to investigate approximately… zero. This document is my first attempt to try and do this, collecting the wide range of questions I’ve wondered about and then trying to devise an approach to investigating a particular zone of questions through active and passive activities feasible for me to begin and establish now, in the year leading up to PHS but, even more importantly, which I can continue to dig into once we’ve got up and running.

This seems like about the place in my thinking where I need to create a bunch of lists to collect my concrete realities: what I like to do/do now, questions and projects I’m actually interested in, areas I’ve not explored but am authentically interested in expanding into. This balance of things I already do, that I demonstrably love and am driven by, along with the challenge to stretch myself in order to frame a grow these interests is key.

Some of the things I’m interested in with regards to music:

  • I’m interested in what makes people move in response to music.

  • I’m interested in the trust and silent communication involved in ensemble music-making.

  • I’m interested in the different “zones” people get into when they play music (auto-pilot, uber-listener, fearful hunching, etc.).

  • I’m interested in the line between music and noise.

  • I’m interested in the institutionalizing/professionalizing process music has undergone over the past 500-800 years and how it mirrors other domains.

  • I’m interested in the history of music, broadly.

  • I’m interested in group singing.

  • I’m interested in improvisation, in music and more broadly.

  • I’m interested in what makes a song get stuck in your head.

Some other things I’m interested in, in the form of questions:

  • What are the roles of living traditions and participatory culture-making in the modern world? How have folk traditions persisted and adapted to fit into our current now?

  • How do stages change the nature of music creation, consumption and participation?

  • Do music-lovers make better musicians?

  • If technique and theory and other more academic musical constructs don’t make music “good,” what is it that does? How can we understand, describe, and get at these factors? I often talk about it as “energy,” but would like to be able to describe it in a deeper way.

  • How can *very *simple musical lines come together to create music which, to the ears of an audience, sound complex and dynamic? This is related to loops and beats, but also arranging for new instrumentalists. Put another way, or at least a related question: What makes something complex/musically interesting versus noise? e.g. If it is a spectrum, how does one distinguish between things along that spectrum?

Things related to these interests that I have no experience with:

  • Algorithmic music. For most of my music-related interests, there aren’t “tools and materials” I want to create in the sense that we usually talk about them at sprout. I would be interested, however, in creating a tool which allowed you to format (e.g. in a spreadsheet or some other human readable form) a set of data, and then assign values to sounds/sound patterns in order to generate music. I would obviously just need to do this a couple times, pre-framework, but this is super interesting to me. Ever since I listened to those, like, play-your-genome “music” makers.

  • Waveform analysis, related to timbre.

  • Playing back spectrograms, a la The Aphex Twins’ [Equation].

  • Creating music based on found sounds. And, I don’t mean “music,” although the world of soundscapes (to get rid of my quotation-based cynical tone) are awesome. I mean, being able to collect a set of sounds, cut and code them in such a way, that you can recombine them into loops and patterns which create a strong timbre-al basis for music.

Here are some books people have recommended to me: