Religion in NYC

Writing music based on religious believers this month. I’m wondering if the religious populations in NYC are the same as in 2001.

from wikipedia:

As reported in 2001 the religious affiliations of the people of New York were:

• Christian – 68%
  • Roman Catholic – 38%
  • Baptist – 7%
  • Methodist – 6%
  • Presbyterian – 2%
  • Episcopal – 2%
  • Lutheran – 2%
  • Pentecostal – 2%
  • Other Christian (including unspecified denomination) – 13%
• Jewish – 9%
• Muslim/Islamic – 3.5%
• Buddhist – 1%
• Other Religions – 4%
• Non-Religious – 13%

6% of the people surveyed refused to answer.

Wow, this year is flying by!

March flew by. And now April is almost over.

Other than working really hard on a successful Kickstarter campaign – more on that soon- I’ve been super busy with music.

Here is something of a recap from the last month and a half or so.  I focused on immigrants in NYC in March.  I thought the music came out really well.  We are still putting final touches on the recordings, but they should be out soon.

Here is a quick overview of how the month went.  It’s also a look into how I go about working through this material every month.

I always start by doing musical exercises that get my fingers working and my mind thinking about creativity, composition, melodies, etc. I also like to do free association with words that pertain to the community I am speaking with.  It helps me get ideas together in a very loose way:

I then spoke to as many people in the immigrant community as I could and recorded the conversations.  The clips I ended up using in this month’s music were from a teacher I spoke with from Ecuador.  I thought her story was indicative of the experiences of many immigrants. I met her through a friend of my wife and I, named Maya.  She is teacher at a public elementary school in the city and got me in touch with this particular woman, who also teaches with her. I met her at the school during her lunch hour and we talked about her experience.

So, then I go home and listen to the recordings.  I write, practice, and think about music.  I start sketching out lots of ideas, some of them good, some of them not so much.  In the last few days leading up to the recording I write out everything and orchestrate it for the band.

Then we record everything. This month it was on March 21^st. Here are the musicians who made it possible.

The performance was at the Douglass Street Music Collective in Brooklyn:

(sorry this picture says nothing. I need to get better at documenting!)

April has been focused on children in the city. Our recording session is this upcoming week, and the performance is on May 6th.  I’ll post more about that soon. If you are in NYC, please come on out to the Douglass Street Music Collective on May 1st. It’s going to be an awesome show.

Thanks for reading!

Take care,

Matt

City of New York, 2013 & Kickstarter

Hey all,

This is a note about the Kickstarter campaign I’m doing to raise some much needed funds for the “City of New York, 2013” project.  The goal is to raise $12,000 by April 19^th. We have about $3000 pledged with a little over two weeks to go.  If the goal isn’t reached, no money changes hands, and the project doesn’t receive any money.  It’s a manic existence for my wife and I! We receive a pledge and think “Yes, we can do this!” or a day goes by and the project receives nothing and we glumly think “Well, we tried.” But when I look at the Kickstarter website and see things like this getting pledges (ahem), I can’t help but feel certain that we will make it!

$12,000 is the lowest possible amount to fund this project every month. Between 10+ professional musicians, 2 talented recording engineers, other recording costs, materials for monthly CD booklets, and a bunch of other smaller expenses – and all of this happening every month for the rest of the year, I think $12,000 is pretty reasonable. A deal, actually.

So the remaining $9,000 seems really daunting right at this point. Would you consider helping? For just $15 you can preorder all of the music from the entire year. There are a bunch of other rewards for pledging that a lot of people have been interested in. And for those of you who have already put some dollars toward the project, thank you. I (and my wife!) really appreciate your generosity.

Here is the link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cityofnewyork2013/city-of-new-york-2013

Thanks for reading.

fingers crossed,

Matt

Reposted: Sight Reading by the Pound

 

This is from a blog I contributed to in 2008. Still true for  me and my practice habits…

      I’ve come to believe that the best way to learn how to read music is to learn by the pound….

      I recently went on ebay and found someone selling 30 pounds of sheet music. I got it and 2 days ago a huge box full of random old sheet music came. Now I’m busy reading  “Music for the Concertina”, various etude books, random 1920′s popular songs, and a bunch of other treasures. Guitarists always have trouble reading, so I wanted to pass along some things I’ve realized about sight-reading in the past few years that have helped me a lot. I hope you find them helpful too.

 

      It’s always assumed that guitarist can’t read music. For the most part, it’s true – we suck at it. At least I always did, and a lot of players I know have always been weak readers. When I think about it, guitar might be the hardest instrument to read on. It’s the only instrument (that I can think of) that you can play the same note in 5 or 6 different places. Unlike piano or single note instruments, where a “c” is always the same “c”, guitarists have a bunch of options – which makes everything confusing when you are reading a difficult line or a chord. And it’s also difficult to coordinate your right hand picking technique with your left hand position while finding the right note/rhythm, etc.

 

     Anyway, after being a terrible reader for years, I finally got serious about it a few years ago and started practicing it a lot.  One obvious thing I realized about my problem was that I would get down about my reading abilities and spend three or four hours practicing it to get better.  And then weeks would go by and I wouldn’t practice it at all. When I would return to reading, It was as if those four hours never happened.  Practicing your reading on a regular and consistent basis is imperative to improving. Even if it‘s only 10 minutes a day, it’s better than several hours at a time once a month. It’s a very gradual process. Also, I realized that most of the time I would try to read music up to the tempo at which it was intended to be played.  So, if something was too fast, I wouldn’t be able to get through it, I’d get frustrated and eventually go on to work on something else.  Now I take things really slow if I have to, even if I have to put the metronome on 40 bpm and think of that as the 16^TH note. Whatever I have to do to understand the rhythms and get through it.  There’s nothing wrong with practicing things really, really, really slowly if you have to.

 

       One last thing I realized was that whenever I would work on my sight-reading, I would always take a piece of music and play through it again and again until it sounded right.  I didn’t realize it, but I would be practicing a piece of music instead of practicing my actual sight-reading skills. As soon as you read something once, you remember some of it when you read it again, and the amount of material that you’re actually reading decreases.  Now I take books of music and read through them, front to back, and never stop to fix my mistakes. It’s always new material, and I’m forced to really read what’s in front of me without any idea of what it should sound like.  When I started doing this, my reading abilities improved quickly.  I’m not trying to play the material at a high performance level; I’m just trying to improve my reading.

 

      I’ve always been into old junk. I often go to flea markets, yard sales, etc.  I started buying old sheet music and etude books from these places – whatever was around: clarinet books, violin studies, accordion music, etude books, and old Broadway music, whatever. I take it home, open it up, read it once, and then put it in my bookshelf.  I have tons of reading material now, or at least 100 pounds or so, ha-ha.  It has become part of my routine: I get up in the morning, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read these old random books for an hour or so.  But I only read it one time and then I move on.  This has been the best way for me to get better at reading, and it way to warm up too.  Anyway, I hope these ideas on reading help.  Now I’ve got to get cracking on my 30 pounds.

 

take care,

Matt

 

Audio from Aerial Photograph performance on Soundcheck is now up!

It was a ton of fun to perform on WNYC and talk about the “City of New York, 2013″ project.

To listen to the show, click here.

And as always, for info on Matt, Aerial Photograph, and this year long project, please visit www.mattdavisguitar.com.

 

Thanks for reading!

Matt

From Addiction to Immigration.

 

      The composing and researching I did in February, which focused on individuals in NYC who are affected by issues of addiction and recovery, culminated in a performance this past Monday night in Brooklyn. It was an awesome experience. We played at the Brooklyn Tea Lounge, which is a cool spot, but in retrospect, maybe not the best place for a group like Aerial Photograph. We have a lot of music that goes to the quieter side of things, which is a hard mix for a coffee shop/bar/hang out with your laptop kind of place. But it was still super cool. My good friend Sonia Szajnberg sang a few pieces with the group. Check her out if you can. She’s a really great singer who writes some really interesting music. 

      The suite of music I wrote in February is called “Sunlight | City”.  In all honesty, this month was hard. Hard to find people willing to open up to me (a stranger) about addiction, hard to focus on substance abuse as a compositional subject for so many weeks, hard to write music that expresses these ideas in a meaningful way. But it was good. Drug and alcohol addiction is so incredibly destructive and, unfortunately, so common. I think a lot of people can relate to the stories that were told to me about this subject. 

Here is one quick story - 

      I spoke to a woman, 44, who was a mother of 4 kids under 10 and struggles with alcoholism.  Alcoholism ran in her family – her earliest memory of being drunk was before she was 10. She was 83 days sober when I spoke to her, but because of her addiction she was separated from her children and husband. She was living through it when I spoke to her – missing her kids, feelings of guilt, anger, etc. But she was on the right track and was hopeful that her  sobriety would last this time. I was hopeful too – she seemed really committed to overcoming this.  Especially having been separated from her family as a result of her addiction. 

     One thing that struck me when I spoke to her was how easy it sounded for her to go from functional drinking to alcoholism in just a few short months. It started for her by having a glass of wine each night to relax or “take the edge off” during stressful times a few years ago. Then two glasses, to three, to a glass at lunch and three at night, to two at lunch and four at night, etc. Soon it became wanting alcohol when she woke up and all throughout the day simply to stave off the horrible feelings of withdrawal. For some people, there is no middle ground, and it quickly becomes a physical addiction where your body needs to have it.  I am really grateful that this woman shared her insight and experiences with me – and through the recordings and performances, will share it with more people. 

 

I’m now immersed in the stories of immigrants in NYC. More on that to come. 

 

As always, thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.

Matt

 

Addiction part 2

Mixing the Aerial Photograph recordings from this month in DUMBO with Devin Greenwood and Arun Pandian. Passionate musicians. They made everything sound so good!