The trouble with music is that there’s too damn much of it.

Let’s set aside, for now, the proliferation problem: that every jackass with a computer and a microphone can make “bedroom pop,” which is just an extension of the older problem of every jackass with a guitar being able to make “folk music.” This isn’t in itself an issue; at earlier stages of human social development it was even good, in a “hey, Joey can cook a pretty good hamburger” kind of way.

The bigger problem is one of accumulation, in the sense that every jackass can share his bedroom pop with the entire world — and every jackass is indeed doing so. Some of these jackasses have money, or the support of people with money, and that’s without even getting into the problem of AI-assisted music and AI-generated music and the whole hot steaming mess of streaming algorithms (which, yes, every jackass with a computer thinks he can hack). So “the world” — by which we mean, of course, “the internet” — is flooded with a deluge of mediocrity that has gone fractal like the brooms in Fantasia.

Set all that aside, though. That’s not the problem. The problem is that even just weighing good music, music made by real humans for the sake of real human happiness – there’s still too much of that. And thanks to recording technologies and modern transportation and communication technologies – not just the internet but the record store and the radio and the mail-order catalogs and the Columbia House Record Club – we have access to all of it, every good thing ever made, an embarrassment of riches.

Say you get into, I don’t know, let’s go with the Cure. Maybe you heard a song on a playlist or in a movie or saw a poster on somebody’s wall or they came up in your feed and you thought, “these guys move me, I’m gonna listen to more.” So you do a little digging on i-tunes or whatever and come across Wish. You love it. You love the whole thing, listen to it all day every day for a week. You find out there’s a dozen other full-length Cure albums to fall in love with. You go back and start at the beginning and work your way to the end. You get into the singles, the B-side collections, the deluxe editions of the albums that have not 10 tracks but 30 or 40, live cuts and alternate takes and radio spots and demos and so on. You listen to entire live shows, either by seeking them out or just by letting that deluxe edition play on into hour three. Congratulations. You’re a Cure fan.

Okay! Now it’s time to move on to Siouxsie and the Banshees and repeat the entire process. Next up after Siouxsie is, what, Magazine or Wire or whatever. Devo, Ramones, Iggy Pop, before too long you’re hip deep in the David Bowie discography and gazing deeply into the mythos of Major Tom and the conspiracy theory abyss surrounding Blackstar.

It’s even worse if you get into jazz or classical music. With jazz it’s the ten thousand alternate takes of everything, the endless live shows with various lineups, the legends and the other legends and the forgotten artists who toiled in their shadows and the weirdo mavericks and so on, forever and ever, world without end, amen. All the jazz dudes who didn’t die young died old, so you’ve got like eighty years of Roy Haynes to catch up on (the man will be 100 next year, and he’s still going).

The problem is especially acute in the classical realm, because you not only have a superabundance of composers – about a thousand years’ worth if you start with Hildegard – but also all the different recorded versions of everything. Is it better to listen to recordings of performances made on period instruments, or modern instruments, or modern reconstructions of period instruments, or on computers, or in arrangements for brass band or metal band, or transcriptions for guitar or for double bass, or what?

Whose performance of the Bach Cello Suites is best? Pablo Casals or Mstislav Rostropovich or Xenia Yanković or Alisa Weilerstein or Yo-Yo Ma? Let’s say Ma – which recording? The one from 1984, or the one from 1997, or the one from 2018? Why not all three? And, hell, throw in the Casals and the Rostropovich and the Yanković and the Weilerstein (and the Isserliss and the and the).

Or should you be a purist, eschew modern recording technologies altogether, and only listen to classical music performed live, perhaps in a church, perhaps in a Viennese opera house? How far can you take it?

Anyway, let’s say you zero in on Beethoven. One composer, with a medium life span. Totally manageable.

You’ve got nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, plus various concertos and piano trios and on and on and on. It’s more than 700 individual pieces of music. It’s all amazing. Well, heh, it’s all good, at least. Most of it is amazing. More than a little of it is transformative on a deeply spiritual level. A few specific compositions could form the basis of a new religion. You could spend your whole life getting into Beethoven to the exclusion of all else and never be sorry. It would be a life well lived. Except you’d miss out on Bach. And Wagner. And the Beatles. And Kate Bush. And so on.

It’s all rather like that line from The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland:

And consider this dismaying observation: this chamber has no windows and no doors. Which offers you this chilling challenge: to find a way out!

There’s always my way

There are many ways out, and I recommend a three-step method:

1. Follow your bliss;
2. Embrace physical media;
3. Use filters to guide and limit your listening habits.

One at a time. First, follow your bliss: neglect not your own true loves. Listen whole-heartedly to the things you loved in youth, or when you were falling in love, or falling out of love, or when you moved to a new town, or whatever you associate with friends or family or good times and good memories, or bad times or bad memories, or just music you really like and don’t feel like explaining.

Second, embrace physical media. You already know you ought to get a good record player and a good pair of speakers. You might also (or instead) get yourself a portable CD player and some decent headphones. Ebay is your friend, because a fully refurbished and guaranteed Sony Discman goes for about $25 and will work a lot better than whatever junk Walmart is selling these days. A pair of Sony headphones should set you back another ten bucks (just make sure you get the kind without the microphone – it’s a technical issue; trust me on this).

The CDs themselves can be had for free, or nearly so. Ask your older acquaintances if they’re getting rid of any. Try the local library, or the Goodwill. Right now, even as I write this, I’m listening to a beautiful recording of Isaac Stern playing Mozart’s Violin Concertos. Two discs, two-and-a-half hours of music, it sounds great, I didn’t have to agonize over which recording was the best, and it cost me one dollar at Goodwill. You and I each spent more than that on coffee this morning.

Number one and two both feed into number three, using filters. Because a filter can be almost anything, such as “listen to the CDs you bought at Goodwill” or “listen to stuff you grew up with” or “listen to your favorite band’s new album” or “listen to stuff that was around when you were young but you didn’t get into it then but now you’re totally into it” (lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Pearl Jam, whom I missed the first time around because we all thought they were sellouts). Then there’s the shoulds, like “listen to music by women” or “listen to music by Black composers” or “listen to Renaissance choral music” and so on.

Being that this is Oregon ArtsWatch, may I suggest “listen to music made in Oregon by Oregonians” as a filter?

We offer these albums to you just in time for the return of Fee Free First Friday, the one day a month when Bandcamp waives their fees (always nominal anyways) and sends 100% of whatever you pay for the music directly to the artists who made it.

And, in keeping with the spirit of our opening line, this time we’re only going to tell you about two albums: Deena T. Grossman’s Becoming Durga and E. Ellison’s Pillars.

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Deena T. Grossman, Becoming Durga

You can read about Grossman’s first album, Wildfires and Waterways, in James Bash’s profile right here. You can read about her upcoming album Thrice Burned Forest – and attendant release party on September 10 at Congregation Beth Israel – in this month’s MusicWatch Monthly. And you can read about her second album, Becoming Durga, right here.

You can get both albums (and the new one, when it’s released September 13) on CD. The beauty of that is twofold. One, you have a nice physical object you can put on your shelf and take off your shelf and pop in your Sony Discman and listen to even if the internet goes out, even if the power goes out, even if you get stranded on a deserted island like Hurley on Lost.

Two, you get a nice booklet to read through while you’re listening to the music – and Grossman is one of those literate composers who always has something interesting to say (like her mentors Lou Harrison and Thea Musgrave, likewise invested with strong doses of the Gift of Gab). Her stories and program notes make a good companion to the music.

Yet the music stands well on its own, a virtue we find sadly all-too-lacking among modern day composers who lack confidence, skill, talent, and a voice. Grossman’s music lacks none of these qualities – her compositional voice is rich and assured, direct and deep and meaningful as music. It’s as if she understands that music, if it is to support extramusical causes like environmentalism and social justice and religious awakening and personal expression, must first be solidly good music. Otherwise it is hollow and fake.

As a classical album, Becoming Durga is tremendously good. Pansy Chang’s cello on the opening Raven: a portrait in four movements is beautifully aggressive, right in your face, gorgeous and mysterious and prankish and obtrusive, just like the work’s namesake. Same goes for Camila Olveira’s flute on the album’s two older pieces: Snowy egret, january messenger (1993) and Island of the Spirit (1984) both express the inexpressible in their own haunting ways. It’s evident that Grossman is a composer with an ear for production; the album, like its predecessor, was recorded by Billy Oskay at his Big Red Studios in Corbett out east of Gresham (Oskay’s story is an interesting one, but would take us too far afield today).

Which brings us to the two tracks with Mirabai Peart. On Temenos: Sacred Space she sings and plays viola, and on the closing title track she takes up the violin. That closing track, Becoming Durga, is the longest and probably my favorite on the album. Peart and guitarist Michael Mandrell join the composer herself, playing banjo. It’s always exciting to hear “composers” (as opposed to “songwriters”) playing their own work, partly because in a classical tradition that stretches back a millenium we’ve only had access to this level of music-making intimacy for a century.

Speaking as a fellow sometime banjoist, I find Grossman’s playing delightfully sideways. You can hear that she not only knows how to play the instrument but is familiar with its traditions. But hers is nevertheless a sad and strange and haunting approach to an instrument that usually sounds all too jaunty, even ironic.

There’s nothing ironic here. Here’s what the liner notes say about this piece:

A testament to Durga, the Hindu protective mother goddess and a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, the eponymous work is bright yet mysterious; a creative exploration of modal C tuning drawn from the depths of the pandemic.

Here’s a painting of Durga:

“Modal C tuning” refers to this alternate guitar tuning but doesn’t really explain why it sounds so sad in such a universal way. Perhaps this bit from her bio offers a clue:

Grossman’s upbringing in Berkeley, California and later travels offered first-hand exposure to many musical cultures, including traditional American and Jewish folk tunes and music of Japan, Bali and India.

Well there you go! Only five of the richest musical traditions in the world! No big deal! Small wonder it all sounds like something that Ursula K. LeGuin’s Envoys of the Ekumen would listen to via ansible while riding between planets on their NAFAL spaceships.

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E. Ellison, Pillars

This is the second incarnation of Elisabeth Ellison – third, if you count her stint with Radiation City. You can read all about Ellison’s backstory and her time as Cardioid right here in Robert Ham’s profile for ArtsWatch; you can check out all three Cardioid albums, each beautifully undefinable in a very Oregon way, on Bandcamp. You can even still get the second one, Parts Dept., on vinyl. There are also a variety of t-shirts, an underappreciated aspect of Bandcamp’s business model.

Ellison describes the new album, the first under her own name, like this:

This record is an attempt to share my experience and realization of entering into the second half of my life. What I’ve lost in terms of time coupled with remorse and grief and gratitude. The absolute love and beauty that surrounds me now, and their attempts to challenge my beliefs that have become weathered and worn. I have struggled as a musician to create something that scrapes the insides of me and present it unscathed in its truest form. I still think there is more to learn/present in that aspect, but this is the closest composition I have made that resembles that desire. My only wish is that it speaks to you, resembles familiar feelings, and allows you to move through it.

It is composed of a series of field and home recordings, captured throughout the past three years. It is purposefully imperfect and captures a period of her life just as it happened.

Aside from guitar and omnichord by Kristina Moore on a few tracks and a bit of bass guitar by Peter Ellison, the whole album is Ellison. We have to admit a certain fondness for these self-overdubbed auteur recordings, especially when they’re done as well as this. Pillars has layered vocals, guitars, piano, funky drums, spooky organ, lo-fi electronic percussion, bird sounds, all manner of good stuff.

To borrow a favorite terrifying phrase of Jeff VanderMeer’s (from his novel Borne), the album “has the economy of design usually only achieved by committees of one.”