Cooperative Performance

I enjoy watching sporting events. When it comes to the major leagues, I prefer watching in person over the TV. The Super Bowl is about the only exception to that. Not that it wouldn't be fun to go to the Super Bowl in person, but that isn't likely to happen. That said, I prefer watching NCAA sports, because while they are often very, very good at what they do, there is a higher chance of something unexpected happening. You see more trick plays, fumbled balls, standout individuals, etc. I also enjoy watching my kids play on rec, competitive, and high school teams.

The competition drives higher and higher levels of performance for those who stick with it, while driving those out of the sport if they can't perform at the needed level. This is one of the negative aspects. What happens to those who enjoy playing for fun and fitness but don't like the extreme competitiveness?

I've been thinking a little about this recently and how music and art performances differ or are sometimes similar from a competition perspective. There are plenty of music competitions on TV - American Idol, The Voice, etc. And any tryout for a leading role in a musical or the solo at a concert is going to result in someone winning the exclusive part, leaving others to be an understudy, lower profile named part, or ensemble. The big difference, however, comes down to competition at performance time.

In sports, there is competition at tryout time and during performances. At each event, there is a winner and a loser; sometimes there is a ranked list of how well each person competed. In marathons and triathlons, even though there is a ranked list of times published afterwards, there is usually a good camaraderie among competitors, with positive words when crossing paths, which I have appreciated. Yet so often, the negative attitude towards competitors is part of the environment as an attempt to intimidate and break the concentration and confidence of the opponent.

While concerts and musicals do have to have tryouts, because we can't all be the lead, I appreciate how they become a community effort. Different theater companies share props, scenery pieces, and costumes and attend each other's performances. Individuals often perform with different companies. Everyone involved wants to perform at the highest level possible, but there are no losers. Even the actor portraying the villain gets an especially hardy applause if they did an excellent job making you hate them over the course of the show. Multiple bands can get together and have a combined concert.

In the gaming world, there are cooperative games, such as Pandemic, where the players work together to beat the board game. You win together or lose together, but there is no person or team on the other side. The better you work together, the better you perform.

I wish we had something like this for sports. Maybe that's what is missing currently from the sports world - a way to perform in a way that drives higher levels of performance without anyone having to lose in order to make that happen. That's the big question - how do we drive cooperative performance over competitive performance and still maintain the things that are good about sports?

MuseScore

Several years ago I was making a simple arrangement of a song, most of which was done using copy/paste and manually drawing things onto a photocopy of an existing piece of music. I found a free, open source software package called MuseScore, which was kind of difficult to get through the learning curve but seemed like a great tool in spite of my awkwardness with it. Over the years they have come out with several new versions of the software, and I have practiced with it quite a bit to where I'm much more efficient with it.

In addition to the software for writing and transposing music, it has a community which lets people share arrangements they have created with others. As the platform and community has gotten bigger, it has started gaining the attention of the music industry, and they have had to start charging to gain access to download the arrangements other users have made in order to have money to pay licensing fees to the original artists for making arrangements of their works. Some are upset with the system changing to charge for what used to be free. But the best part about it is still free - the software itself.

I think a lot of people were just using the community to download free sheet music, but taking it to the next level, using the software to create your own arrangements is the best part, because you learn to create something for yourself. I have learned a lot about music theory and about the instruments I have been arranging for by doing it myself.

Thanks MuseScore!

Jazz

I've been dipping my toes into the world of Jazz recently. The following is a list of classic or interesting albums that I've been working my way through, plus a link to my son's high school Jazz concert at the end.

• Time Out - The Dave Brubeck Quartet
• Ellington at Newport - Duke Ellington
• Ella and Louis Again - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
• Blue Train - John Coltrane
• Portrait in Jazz - Bill Evans Trio
• Jazz at Massey Hall - The Quintet
• Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
• King of the Tenors - Ben Webster
• Somethin' Else - Cannonball Adderley
• Golden Hits! - Sarah Vaughan
• The Blues and the Abstract Truth - Oliver Nelson
• Logan High Jazz Concert

Music

Much has been said about formulas for writing the perfect pop song or the perfect country song.

But sometimes, every now and then, someone comes along and blows those formulas out of the water to create something so new.

If that isn't Twenty One Pilots, I don't know what is.

My son and I were coming back from a hard-fought soccer game he played in, where they were ahead, the other team started getting dirty, and they ended up losing the game due to getting pulled out of their comfort zone and trying to keep up in the dirty game instead of just doing their thing regardless.

As stressful as it was, we listened to some Twenty One Pilots on the way home, and everything seemed to melt away. The funny thing is, the next week on the way to another soccer game, he listened to those same songs in order to get pumped up and focused on the upcoming game.

Rock? It's in there. Rap? Got it. Ukulele? Oh yeah. Ska? Check. Screaming? The best part. Synth-pop? Bring it on.

Their lyrics are like something from Simon & Garfunkel but for the modern day, with themes and connections mixed throughout and between albums. It's magic.

Music

There are a lot of shows out there about finding talent and in particular talented singers.

The Voice has a unique spin (pun intended), where the judges don't see the singers until they choose them for their team. They often comment on how appropriate the name of the show is, because that is all that is important.

The problem is that once the chairs turn, that no longer holds, as they work to teach them and are biased to members of their own team. They go with the next best thing other than another chair turn, which is hitting a button, which is the exciting part (aside from the singing). New actions beyond the chair turn include a steal, a save, and a block. But there's no way to turn the chair back around.

The Masked Singer partly solves this issue, because the participants stay behind their ornate costumes until they lose. The gimmick there is that it is a celebrity. It is someone we and the panel know, and while it is important who wins the singing competition, that part is mostly overshadowed by the discussion of their identities, followed by the actual unmasking.

What about a combination of the two? How about a reverse reality show trend where instead of a celebrity version, we do a non-celebrity version? This takes away the excitement of the guessing and unmasking, but it puts the focus where it should be - the music.