{"id":7496,"date":"2021-04-13T10:57:05","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T14:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/?p=7496"},"modified":"2021-04-19T09:05:29","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T13:05:29","slug":"hello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/hello\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"7496\" class=\"elementor elementor-7496\" data-elementor-settings=\"[]\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-section-wrap\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-311395cb elementor-section-height-min-height elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-items-middle\" data-id=\"311395cb\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-settings=\"{&quot;background_background&quot;:&quot;slideshow&quot;,&quot;background_slideshow_gallery&quot;:[{&quot;id&quot;:6122,&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/tomswafford.com\\\/welcome\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2021\\\/03\\\/banner.jpeg&quot;}],&quot;background_slideshow_loop&quot;:&quot;yes&quot;,&quot;background_slideshow_slide_duration&quot;:5000,&quot;background_slideshow_slide_transition&quot;:&quot;fade&quot;,&quot;background_slideshow_transition_duration&quot;:500}\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-row\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-addaab9\" data-id=\"addaab9\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-4c7420ca elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"4c7420ca\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-text-editor elementor-clearfix\"><p>Tom&#8217;s Blog<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-29d6af27 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"29d6af27\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-row\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-33 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-41c136c2\" data-id=\"41c136c2\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-63426684 elementor-widget elementor-widget-sidebar\" data-id=\"63426684\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"sidebar.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<aside id=\"search-2\" class=\"widget widget_search\"><form role=\"search\" method=\"get\" class=\"search-form\" action=\"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/\">\n<label>\n    <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Search for:<\/span>\n    <input type=\"search\" class=\"search-field\" placeholder=\"Search Keyword and hit &#039;Enter&#039;\" value=\"\" name=\"s\" \/>\n<\/label>\n<input type=\"submit\" class=\"search-submit\" value=\"Search\" \/>\n<\/form><\/aside>\n\t\t<aside id=\"recent-posts-2\" class=\"widget widget_recent_entries\">\n\t\t<div class=\"panel__heading\"><h3 class=\"widget-title\">Recent Posts<\/h3><\/div>\n\t\t<ul>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/blog-heading\/\">Blog heading<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/rough-spaces\/\">Rough Spaces<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/hello\/\">Hello<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/ul>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-66 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-65e05783\" data-id=\"65e05783\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-57fef412 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"57fef412\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-text-editor elementor-clearfix\"><p>4\/13\/21<\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>Hello!\u00a0 Welcome to my new website!\u00a0 I spent a lot of time designing this. There may still be a few glitches but overall I\u2019m quite happy with it. The company that hosts my site stopped supporting the old Sitebuilder platform so I had to update to WordPress. My friend Tony built my original website back in 2007. It worked really well for a 14 year old website. Tony had to design the whole thing in html code, which makes it even more impressive.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 You can check out the old site <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tomswafford.com\/mp3.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here.<\/a> <\/span>The home page isn&#8217;t available but the other pages still work. I especially like the mp3 page! <\/span>For my new site, I was able to take advantage of the many website building developments without having to know how to program computers. I still found it pretty challenging. I finally have it more or less how I want it.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>My wife Molly and I left New York in March 2020.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Since I made most of my living playing in subway stations and other public areas, it was not feasible for me to stay in NYC during the pandemic.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I was lucky that my teaching work with the Brooklyn Conservatory quickly pivoted to an online format so I was able to keep that going wherever I went. Molly and I spent most of the last year bouncing around between her family on Cape Cod and my cousins in Boston.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It has not been easy but we are feeling hopeful now. We actually had planned to re-locate in the fall of 2020 before the pandemic happened, to be closer to family. But we ended up having to shift our exit a bit earlier.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>We are grateful to have the support of our family and to have had safe, comfortable places to stay during this time.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>We are very much looking forward to setting up our new life together in New England this fall. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>Tomorrow I will be going into Futura Productions, a recording studio in Boston, to record my solo album.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>My teacher from Tufts, John McDonald, recommended Futura to me.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>John has been active in classical and new music in Boston for over 30 years so I trust his judgement! I am paying for this project with an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I reached my goal last week and I am very grateful to all my friends and family who contributed.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>I have felt a bit of a conflict between my composer and improviser self while preparing for this project. In the back of my mind, I keep feeling like I should have written a series of highly complex compositions and then thoroughly practiced them for many months.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This would showcase my \u201cbest\u201d musical self and would be far more labor intensive. But I wanted to present the best possible sound I could. And the strain and effort of trying to play something complex would be detrimental to the sound.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 So my album will be half folk-influenced music that I played on the subways, and half improvised music.<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>There is something to be said for music with fewer notes which may<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>not be technically difficult in the traditional sense. But in fact, when you consider all the nuances and subtleties in the sound, there is tremendous amount happening. Much of it cannot be notated. I\u2019m thinking particularly of Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I am doing a version of this on the album. My goal with this version isn\u2019t to duplicate what he does exactly, but to create a sound that approaches Johnson\u2019s. I remember hearing about a string quartet playing a blues arrangement.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Listening to it, the players thought it would not be particularly difficult. But the arranger transcribed every subtle variation in sound quality, every nuance and microtone, so the arrangement turned out to be very challenging indeed! I could have attempted an exact transcription of Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s original version, and then tried to precisely re-create it on violin.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This would have been a good challenge. But something would have been lost in the translation.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I think the feel of the original would be sacrificed. That\u2019s not to say that I am able to get any where close to the sublime feeling of Johnson\u2019s version, but I hope to get somewhere in the vicinity.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>I had similar ideas when it came to my decision to record some purely improvised piece. I could have improvised on my own, perhaps recorded my improvisations and transcribed them. And then tried to re-create the improvisations. But again the original feel would be lost and the tension of trying to re-create it would be detrimental to the sound quality. There is a lot of controversy about the terms improvisation and composition.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>As is the case with the term \u201cjazz,\u201d which many musicians (going back to Ellington) did not use to describe their own music, improvisation also carries with it a qualitative assumption: the idea that because a piece is improvised, or composed spontaneously, it is of less value than something written down.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I also fight these kind of assumptions. Just because something takes a long time, and a lot of effort, does not make it better.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>It has to do with what Molly\u2019s artist stepmom Ruth says when people ask her how long it took to do a painting. She responds \u201cabout 70 years\u201d. In other words, her whole lifetime. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>The actual painting process could take a few minutes or a few days.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The amount of time spent on something does not correlate to its quality.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>So I fight that sense of guilt when making an album means sketching out some ideas and going in to the studio and recording. In some cases, I might not even sketch anything out.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>But I have thought a lot about what I\u2019m going to do. I\u2019ve spent 30 years improvising. And I\u2019ve played the subway pieces thousands of times, so it has been engrained into me.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>I would like to get back to composing notated music.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It uses a different part of the brain and it is beneficial to keep both parts active. Many musicians do both.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I like the communication that happens between composer and musician. It\u2019s very satisfying to hear someone realize your musical ideas. And it is often a collaborative process,<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>figuring out what works best for the instrument and the player.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I still have to figure out the difference is between the music I compose and the music I improvise.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>My compositions up to this point have been in a completely different style than my improvisations. Part of this might be because I compose a lot on the piano- and the act of pressing the keys is quite different from violin technique. The freedom from the written score means, of course, that music I improvise can be far more complex than anything I could easily write down.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 It also means the subtleties in the sound, sometimes more than the notes, become essential parts of the music.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>And if I went through the tedium of accurately transcribing it, the original feel of the improvisation would still be difficult to recreate. So even though it doesn\u2019t make sense to transcribe my own improvisations for myself to play,<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>if another musician wanted to play something I improvised, I would be happy to attempt a transcription, and in the process I would probably discover things about my musical self. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><p class=\"p1\"><b>I keep thinking the next thing I do will be really be \u201cit\u201d and I\u2019ll feel like I\u2019ve finally arrived at my true artistic goal. But of course it\u2019s all a process. Just like everything I\u2019ve done in my life so far, this recording project is another step in my development. But I am hoping it will open up some doors for me in terms of what I do next.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tom&#8217;s Blog 4\/13\/21 Hello!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7496"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7547,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496\/revisions\/7547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomswafford.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}