Yes, and...

The semester ended not with a cymbal crash, but with a feeble “end meeting for all?” prompt from Zoom. We tried to make the celebration as celebratory as the medium would allow, but with no buffet from Bittersweet, no one pouring Trader Joe’s best, no mixing and mingling of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends in the rooms and hallways of 1001 Prince among a year’s creative production, it just wasn’t the same. Mostly, I missed the Band. The WAAC Band plays for all the WAAC's parties and we’re ready and open for anyone to sit in. Whatever we practiced, whatever we thought the set list would be, the night never quite goes that way. And it’s wonderful. There is nothing quite like the feeling of getting into a groove-- blues in E—when you know enough about where the song might go, but not so much that you can’t be surprised in the moment. I miss that. For all the interesting new powers that Zoom and its cousins have provided, there is suite of joys they cannot: serendipity, chance, improvisation.

The WAAC Band is constantly changing personnel, adjusting to circumstance as students and faculty come and go. What we lack in precision, though, we make up for in enthusiasm. Sometimes we have cello player; sometimes a banjo. This past year we had an exchange student from Japan who played trombone. So, we made space in every song for a trombone solo. We never really know who will show up, but someone always does.

It happens every semester: we’ll set up and start to practice in the library (Great acoustics. Who woulda thought?) and a new student will poke their head in with that look, a combination of longing and hesitancy. (Admittedly, there are other looks-- the “what the heck is going on in here? look” Or the “how do I get past the drummer to get to the Reserve Shelf?” look) I’ll ask if they play or sing, and the answer is often yes, I play violin/piano/guitar/drums/whatever… Then I have to ask the follow up questions: Does the phrase “blues in E mean anything to you?” If the answer is a knowing smile and a yes, then odds are the answer to the next question will be “no” because the next question is: do you need notes? You know--music. Written on a staff. 

In my experience, there seems to be a correlation between knowing the blues scale and not needing notes, but it’s not necessarily constant. I know notes; but I don't need them. I learned how to read music when I learned how to play piano, but I was lucky to learn something else: theory. I didn’t know then that I was learning theory. That’s not surprising: I was in middle school, and I didn’t know much of anything. (although that’s not what I would have told you at the time.) My unconventional, to say the least, piano teacher would hand me a song with just lyrics and the names of chords where the changes were. She would hum the melody and tap out the rhythm, suggest a left hand pattern, and then tell me to play it. If I could do that, I could play anything. I learned to regard written music the way I now see recipes, as a set of suggestions rather than orders. As long as you understand the end goal, can see the field, there’s room for interpretation. For improvisation. 

Theory bestows the power to improvise, not merely to react to the situation. Actors will tell you that the first rule of “improv” is that the answer to any prompt is “yes, and…” Improv is a technique of performance, a jujitsu of accepting challenges, a reflecting-in-action, as we design-types might say, but at blink speed. In that sense, it may seem to be the exact opposite of Le Corbusier’s “studio of patient research” or the methodical retreat of a scholar’s study, or any other model of deliberate studiousness. Yet improv demands thoughtfulness in equal measure to quickness. It is resourceful; like a trickster making use only of the materials at hand. It is attentive and imaginative by necessity. Improv is creativity on deadline. It’s design.

It’s hard to maintain the improvisationalist’s balance these days because the prompts are dark and uncertain. For design, however, and those who practice it in any form at any scale, there’s no option to refuse the prompt. We have to answer, yes, and… Because, as singer/songwriter Paul Brady reminds us, the world is what we make it.

The City Sounds...

The city sounds different these days. I live on a relatively quiet block of a narrow street connecting busy Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As I write this morning, I hear rain falling, birds chirping, a car engine belching. Sometimes I hear the beep beep beep of a truck backing up, the slamming of the back of a delivery truck, dogs barking, snippets of conversation, helicopters. Some are natural others machine sounds, the mix tape of the random noises of urban life. But it's definitely quieter than Before. Silence in the city can be a precious commodity—and it is a commodity commanding a high price—but a silent city is also unnerving. Like Rachel Carson’s warning about a pesticide-induced “silent spring,” silent streets and sidewalks are an ominous sign. 

Over the last year a string of restaurants on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle had begun to host regular live music. The old Childe Harold—I know it has another name, but it will always be Childe Harold to me—had gotten back to its live music roots; several newer places had begun to feature a single guitar player or small combo, often set up in the front window. Music leaked out onto the sidewalk, mixing with the noise of cars and horns and conversations. This was my evening soundtrack as I walked home from Metro in the Before Times. Now, just silence.

Music and noise. What’s the difference? It’s an insult to call music “noise” as in “hey you kids, turn that awful noise down.” Duke Ellington said that there are only two kinds of music, “good music and the other kind.” We may think that the difference between music and noise is purely subjective—the “other kind” is stuff I don’t like—but noise is also culturally constructed. “’Noise’ was a product of acoustics and psychology” says Shannon Mattern in “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart,” in Places. In yet another of her wonderful pieces, Mattern is writing about sound, technologies of listening, and about efforts in the 1920s and 30s to analyze and quantify urban sounds. She talks about “scoring the city”--how to listen to the city, the role of the human ear, and what tools we need to perform acts of auscultation—mediated listening. Mattern compares this to how physicians learned to listen to the body—what distress is communicated in the heartbeat, what strength revealed in the deep breath? How should a heart sound, or a joint? What does a healthy body sounds like?

Zach Moshier,Urban Rhythms of Washington DC, Masters thesis, 2016

What does a healthy street sound like? And what is its antiphonal call and response—what is it saying, and what do we hear? The medical analogy does apply but since I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV) I prefer to think of another type of listening—not to the noise of a body, but to music. When Mattern used the phrase “scoring the city,” I thought of the thesis of a former student, who was also a drummer in the WAAC Band. Zach really did score the city: he looked at historical maps to see—and hear—how the beat of V Street had changed over the years. It was a revelation: sound, not only sight, can be an instrument of urban analysis and design.

“Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,” Petula Clark sang in her urban love song, Downtown. I’ve been writing my own ode to the city during this Covid-hibernation. Called “The City is Waiting” it's a melancholy reflection on the situation that seemed more suited to music than  prose. The refrain is about how the city is listening, waiting, restless, for us to return. When I looked up the lyrics to Downtown to make sure I got Petula’s words right I was struck by the last line of the chorus:  “No finer place, for sure. Downtown. Everything’s waiting for you.”