Christopher Davis

I just recently finished reading a biography of John Pierpont Morgan. The name JP Morgan sounds familiar because the modern financial giant is still named after it’s original founder. Morgan Stanley, another modern investment firm, was started by one of Pierpont’s grandchildren. That said, the Morgan family does not hold any interests in the investment world today.

At a time when anti-trust regulation as virtual nonexistent, Morgan masterminded numerous company consolidations, leading to companies like General Electric and US Steel. He was most likely the most financially powerful man on earth from around 1875 until his death in 1913.

Ego and Bigotry

Morgan viewed himself as a steward of the United States economy. He, along with several other bankers, work to stabilize and “save” it on more than one occasion. Morgan was an active church goer, dedicated to christian ideals (though more in the eye-for-an-eye way; he wasn’t so into brotherly love) and the episcopalian church.

Despite his view of himself as a good man, Morgan was a egotistical bigot, whose megalomania caused far fewer errors than it should have. He wouldn’t work with Jewish firms, for instance, and almost all of his staff looked like “Aryan Ideal” people (athletic, blond hair, blue eyes, etc).

This deep seeded bigotry and a surety of his own decisions combined to make one arrogant man.

The Lesson

I’m pretty fascinated by this period of history, and the characters interest me. Alfred Rothschild, one of Pierpont’s friends, had a carriage drawn by Zebras. That’s just a good story.

But there are lessons to be learned from Pierpont. First, your decisions are never perfect, and your ego and bias (known or unknown) can lead to some bad decisions. In other words, the honest self-evaluation that Morgan avoided, believing all his decisions perfect, can be an effective tool.

Interestingly, Morgan depended heavily on his staff to give him the pertinent information about a given business situation. He would then make a decision after studying the data. His staff had an incredibly power over him, and could have colored to the data as they saw fit (who knows if this happened). But still Morgan was sure that he always made the correct decision.

Second, how our actions are perceived is not under our control. Morgan’s companies were often under scrutiny by the white house, and some anti-trust prosecution began at the end of his life. When Pierpont died, the US government was on the verge of changing the financial world. Morganization, Pierpont’s strategy of brokering stock deals and taking a small portion of cash along with a large chunk of company stock as a commission, put his company’s staff on many boards of directors. The Clayton Antitrust act made serving on the boards of two competing companies unlawful, forcing an end to the Morganization strategy and minimizing the Morgan firm’s power. Further legislation would force the Morgan firm to choose between being an investment office or a bank, and the creation of the Fed meant the JP Morgan firm no longer had to fill the roll of steward of the American economy.

In short, Pierpont’s life, while amazing and influential, probably did not give him the image or legacy he desired. He was often attacked in the press, and his company’s power (along with similar companies’ power) caused fear, inspiring the changes that eventually led to the Morgan firm’s fall from absolute financial power.

Morgan believed himself a good, patriotic man, and was disturbed when he was not perceived as such. If anything, this probably caused him to retreat further into his own surety, ignoring the outside world.

People do things because it makes them feel important. People who feel that their work is meaningful are happier with their jobs. Bloggers and companies become obsessed with their stats because they want to know that their website is visited — that people read what they have to say. I’m writing this post right now because I want to share with you things that I learned and thought about. I want to feel important by getting your eyeballs and minds engaged for a few minutes.

Making People Feel Important

A lot of Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People is about making people important. How? Listen to them. Sincerely sympathize with them. Remember their names. Chat with them. Ask questions. In short, be a human being.

By doing this sort of thing you turn prospects in friends and, if you’re in the business world, friends into customers.

Cognitive Surplus and the Modern Human

We have a lot of time on our hands. Well, that’s not true. We’re all busy. And we all have a mile long to do list that never gets any shorter.

What’s not required of the modern human is the extensive work to fill basic needs practiced by our predecessors. We just don’t have to go kill our dinner all that often. As such, all that left over time goes into developing cultural and artistic institutions. We put our cognitive and time surplus to work.

Where We Place Our Attention

Every individual chooses to put their cognitive surplus into one or two things that make them feel important. That’s why people help with Linux OS development. It’s why forums have participants. It’s why parents run their kids around to way to many activities. It’s why anybody does anything: it makes them feel important.

Can you imagine a professional musician in prehistoric times? It wouldn’t happen. Everyone’s job was to try to not die from starvation, predators, or (insert scary thing here). The time we don’t have to spend surviving anymore goes into hundreds of cultural things and interests and ideas.

The real question, of course, is how can we turn those ideas into a way to make a living if so desired. How can an interest be monetized?

Make Other People Feel Important

Simple. Convince others that they need your product/service. Make them feel important by being your customer. Turn prospects in friends and friends in customers.

Now the hard part: don’t forget that those customers are still your friends. Treat that as such. Listen. Send them messages or give them a call just to chat. Be a human.

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I love recording myself. I found so much stuff to work on just in this little prelude by doing so. Hope you like it!

For the past few months, I’ve been reading a lot on how people make decisions. Specifically, why decisions go wrong. Here’s an (extremely) brief summary of what I’ve learned.

Two Brains

Generally speaking, we approach problems and decisions from two directions: the rational and the emotional.

The rational brain has been held up since ancient Greece as the be all end all of decision making powers. It’s what makes us different from animals. The emotional brain, on the other hand, is said to be irrational — not to be trusted.

We’re Irrational Anyway

Turns out people are irrational anyway. It doesn’t make how much we tout our logical ability, everyone makes very predictable, irrational decisions. Knowing what sorts of errors we’re susceptible to, however, can often mitigate the effects of irrationality.

The Power of Intuition

Intuition is an extremely emotional thing. It’s that vibe we get from something, or the nagging sensation that we should make a given choice.

Human beings take in a lot of sensory data. In fact, there’s so much of it that we have to “tune out” some of it. That is, much of our sensory processing goes on in the unconscious mind. We do tend to notice changes in our environment and become acclimated to those changes over time, eventually tuning them out.

The output of our intuition, that feeling we get, is the result of all that subconscious data processing combined with our expertise and the ability of our brains have of detecting patterns. Our subconscious minds take all that data, run it through what we know (expertise), and strive to recognize any patterns or similarities between what’s happening and what we know or have experienced in the past.

If the subconscious mind recognizes a pattern and knows that the end result is undesirable, you will probably get a bad sense from your intuition. If the result is positive, however, you’ll probably get a good feeling from your intuition.

Intuition Isn’t Fool Proof

Human beings love patterns. We find them everywhere, even where there are none.

Take a slot machine. It’s designed so that you win at random intervals. Your brain, however, will start to recognize patterns in the numbers/spins and start to make predictions. Because the reward schedule is variable, the times when you win feel amazing and convince your subconscious brain that it did indeed recognize a pattern. Thus we continue playing — our intuition tells us to!

In reality, there is no pattern. Your intuition has failed.

Rationality is Good (Sometimes)

The key to make good decisions is recognizing both the power and failings of intuition and rationality.

Some decisions are better left to the rational/logical mind, such as the slot machine example above. Others are better done with the emotional brain and intuition.

The reality, however, is that we use a combination of both. Every decision is emotional and logical to some extent. We know this because of studies done on brain damage patients. Folks who have trouble with the portions of the brain that control emotion, also have trouble making decisions.

It’s up to us, as decisions makers, to recognize when one side of the mind is better suited to a task. We would then give that thought process more weight.

Satisficing and Maximizing (and High Pressure Situations)

There are two types of decision makers: those who pick the first option that works and those who search for the best option.

Of course, we are all combination of a satisficer and a maximizer. We care more about some decisions than others. Do we endlessly debate what toothpaste to buy? Nope. It’s not worth it (unless you’re really into toothpaste). But we often spend more time finding the best option for decisions about something important to us (what concert to attend, where to go for school, etc.).

When in a high pressure situation, however, we all turn in to satisficers. We pick the first option that comes to our mind and act. Mostly because of the whole flight or fight response, and because we’re often not in a position to think and weight options.

This is both good and dangerous. If the high pressure situation happens to be related to our field(s) of expertise, then the first solution we generate is often really good. That expertise helps our minds generate a good solution from the start. If the high pressure situation is something we’re not familiar with, however, our solution generating abilities are severely impaired.

This goes back to intuition. When we know a lot about a subject, our first judgments and decisions are often correct. It’s often best to trust these intuitions. When people are asked to explain, logically, why they made a given decision in their field of expertise, they often assign reasons. The reasons people assign often are incorrect (or, more colloquially: the reasons are bullshit).

Conclusion

Don’t be afraid to trust your intuition, but recognize where it can fail. Don’t be afraid to trust your logic, but remember that human beings act irrational in very predictable ways.

The Book List

How We Decide
Why We Make Mistakes
Blunder
Predictably Irrational
The Upside of Irrationality
The Paradox of Choice
Blink
Sources of Power

The biggest mistake any musician can make in marketing themselves is just not connecting people that can help them. It takes a lot of work to develop a relationship with someone, however.

It’s All About Trust

Online relationships (Facebook friends, etc.) vary in their depth. But generally, they’re much more shallow than relationships with people you see every day. Some social media networks support really in depth relationships (Facebook being one), but others feel more like mass media one-to-many communication that has no real in depth connection (Youtube*).

In any case, relationships are about trust. We get married because we trust and love someone enough to be sure they’ll be there for us (and they agree to marry us for the same reason!). We count on our friends because we trust them.

Back in the Day…

Early hominids and humans probably didn’t have language in the sense that we think of it today. Their communication was probably what Steven Mithen calls “Hmmmmm”: Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic. In other words, their communicative vocalizations were mostly likely musical (think bird song) in nature and probably included gestures; the goal of such communication would have been to elicit a certain response from the other persons (manipulative).

Because they lacked the in depth communication system we do, early hominids probably relied on touch and grooming to develop relationships, much like great apes do today.

As language developed, the conversation replaced touch and grooming (though touch is still important) to develop bonds. It’s no different today. We trust because because we maintain relationships with them by talking or communicating.

Reach Out, but Don’t Ask

If you want to make friends with a blogger, you start commenting on their posts and emailing with them. I freaking love emailing with blog readers, and the theory course I just launched in generating a ton of really cool interaction.

Start relationships with people by reaching out. If you want to get a CD review on a blog, reach out to the author. If you want to be referred for gigs, reach out to prominent musicians who can’t possibly handle all the gig offers they get. This is key: don’t ask for anything. Just be a friend. Support those people in their activities. Two things will happen: (1) you’ll most likely get to experience some great stuff and (2) when it comes time that the person can help you out, they will.

Be a friend first, and a business person second. Do the things humans do and help other people out, and those people will help you.

Bottom line: don’t be afraid to reach out. The most important marketing any person can do is maintaining relationships with others.

*Though there are people on Youtube who I message with regularly.

There are downsides to giving away things for free. I have a ton of music on my hard drive that was legally free (thank you Amazon MP3!), and I listen to very little of it. On the other hand, that Shostakovich CD and Imogen Heap album I bought months ago still make it into my regular rotation. I suspect many folks notice similar patterns with their listening.

Free stuff is so enticing that people grab it, even if it’s not needed. There’s only so much time in the day, and only so much music to which we can listen. Giving away a free download will probably get it listened to once, but it may not create the lasting impression a musician wants. Specifically a free, downloaded track might not turn a person into a fan. And that’s a problem.

If we want fans to consume our music in the sense that it gets listened to and enjoyed often, this one time interaction generated by a free track isn’t going to cut it.

The Power of Expectations

The alternative to free is charging for your music. Price is a strange thing, however. Whether or not to buy something, even something costing a dollar, is an entirely new psychological game for the consumer.

With a price comes expectations. And expectations are powerful. They’re the reason name-brand drugs work “better” than their identical, generic equivalents, and why we’re convinced cheap wine tastes worse.

Making your music cheap or free is dangerous for this reason. It creates an expectation about it that may be contrary to what you want to say about yourself as an artist.

The Non-Monetary Economy

Free and cheap have their place, however. Giving away from free tracks is a great way to get permission to contact fans. That permission (usually in the form of an email address and name) is far more valuable than a few bucks over the longer term.

Giving something away for free (monetarily speaking) doesn’t mean that you can’t get something out of the deal. An email address is a valuable thing to receive in exchange for a track. Getting permission to use a fan’s social networks (see tweet for a track) in exchange for some music is powerful.

Being a musician with an online presence is about deciding what you can and can’t get paid for. For those things you can’t get paid for monetarily, it’s about creating a non-monetary market in which you can trade. In other words, always try to get something for your artistic work.

Questions

Before giving things away or setting a price point, think carefully about how this decision fits into your overall brand. Does giving something away generate real value in ways that can’t be measured monetarily? Does the price create an expectation you don’t want? What does giving something away for free or cheap say about you as an artist?

You don’t have to and shouldn’t give away everything for free. The trick is finding a balance between free and paid and the price point.

A lot of medieval music theory is based on Bothius‘ De Musica (On Music). Many of the concepts of what is a consonance, and the just tuning system are all from it. The treatise is mostly a summary of Greek sources (Pythagoras, etc.).

Naturally, because I’m a nerd, I wanted to read some of Boethius’s writing to see what everyone back in the day was so excited about.

Anyway…

[when two notes] are struck at the same time, and they produce an intermingle sweet sound, and the two sounds agree together as if joined in one, then that is what we call consonance. On the other hand, when the [notes] are struck at the same time and each one desires to go its own way, and they do not impress the ear as a sound which is sweet, and as one sound made from two, then this occurrence is what we call dissonance.

The second part is pretty interesting to me. “When the [notes] are struck at the same time and each one desires to go its own way … this occurrence is what we call dissonance”

Tendency tones are are melodically or harmonically unstable tones that desire resolution. Sing Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti (as in a major scale) and stop. Ti wants to go to Do– Ti is a tendency tone. Dominant function chords have tendency tones: the leading tone again, and the seventh (if one is present).

Seems like Boethius was talking about tendency tones a long time ago.
_______
Translation from:

Bower, Calvin Martin. “Botheius’ The Principles of Music, an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary.” Diss. Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, 1967.

I enjoy reading and learning about random things. I also really enjoy libraries: I’m cheap, and once I’ve read a book and taken notes I probably won’t read it again. I also enjoy raiding my friends bookshelves and borrowing books.

In a conversation, a friend brought up that fact that digital books can’t really be shared in the same way that physical copies can. You can’t borrow your friend’s digital copy of a book or album. Doing so would probably be considered piracy despite the fact that we borrow physical copies of books and other products all the time. (Maybe libraries are the real pirate bay?)

I can’t help but wonder what the social and cultural ramifications of being unable to borrow books (and other things such as CDs or DVDs) will be. What if we can no longer hand a book to a friend and tell them its awesome? Seems like we’ll be much poorer as a culture. There will still be plenty of recommending going on, I’m sure, but if everyone has to buy a copy I suspect there will be a lot less reading/listening/watching.

Physical products may be so 2004, but they do have a lot of advantages their digital equivalents can’t match (yet). Then again, the entire culture of the digital world has yet to really shake down. Old school institutions are still clinging to their last vestiges of power and trying to use scarcity economics in the world of abundance online. And the new crowd of digital natives are beginning to expect free as a standard. Perhaps not everything will go behind a pay wall and the technology for consuming digital information goods will have the same look and feel as the current physical products. Who knows.

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That’s a little chunk of Malcolm Arnold’s Fantasy. It comes back several times throughout the piece.

How I’m approaching it:

• Rhythmic Variations
• Slow/Fast Alternation
• I learned it early on with chaining

So far it seems to be working okay. I’ve never done anything like this before (huge melodic arpeggios) so it’s very unfamiliar. Need to perform it soon to see how it really holds up and evaluate from there.

The most interesting thing about my Analytical Techniques I course is the examination of early music notation. Partially because I get to check out all the precursors to modern notation practices, but also because it’s so strange.

Rhythm is the most fascinating part. In early music (think around the 13th-14th centuries) the rhythm of a given passage was dependent on the context. Certain practices dictate the rhythm — how long was this note held for? Well it depends on what comes next. Of course, later on things got more specific using mensuration signs and all that jazz. (more here)

There was also a lot of chromaticism that’s not notated. The double leading tone cadence, for instance, may not be notated. The performers were expect to know the practice and add the alterations. There’s tons of performance practice stuff that was just understood at the time.

Anyway, all that makes me wonder why there was this move towards specificity in notation. Perhaps because the composers began to express themselves in more unique ways. Rather than being subservient to conveying the text, composition became increasingly more of an art form. That’s evident when you look at the progression from chant to early polyphony and beyond. As the composer became more of a personality, perhaps more control was desired.

Or maybe the developing international community was a reason. Certainly different regions had different performance practice quirks, and maybe the standardized systems began to emerge to combat these differences.

Then again, maybe the church was behind it, desiring a more standardized liturgy. Composers of secular music likely wrote some sacred music and simply borrowed the notation.

I find this stuff pretty fascinating. The more I learn, the more questions I have, however.