Last week was the first time I’ve failed to send out an edition of Steve on Steve. I had a rough draft of something ready, which I planned to finish on Friday morning, but I learned some sad news that left me feeling like I couldn’t really be bothered.
An old professor of mine, Jonathan Sterne, died after a long illness.1
Reading the words written about him, it’s striking how similar people’s positive experiences of him were. He clearly had a way of making people feel, as his spouse Carrie Rentschler put it, seen “in their specificity.” I only took one course with him — a graduate seminar on sound studies — but, even then, he was one of those teachers who let the relationship be a little more personal than the traditionally formal student-teacher dynamic. He and Carrie invited us over to their house for Thanksgiving, and he was as open to talking about the course material as he was Simon Reynolds, Burial or Andy Stott. During one long chat in his office, he turned me onto Louise Meintjes’ book, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. I devoured it in an afternoon when I should have been doing my coursework. He was also one of the few actively sympathetic McGill professors during the 2012 Quebec student movement.
It’s true that teachers usually mean more to their students than vice versa. We experience them as mentors (and individuals) during periods of expansion in our life. They can indelibly touch our lives, even completely alter their course. Meanwhile, students are part of their job. With the best will in the world, they get an influx of new faces each year, each one as deserving of quality treatment as the next. I guess if you want a lot of nice eulogies, be a good teacher.
Years after taking his course, I was researching the Linnstrument, and came across a forum profile that looked suspiciously like his, so I emailed him. And, of course, he sent me extensive, detailed thoughts about both the Linnstrument and MPE in general (including criticisms of its marketing — he was trained in cultural studies, after all). We corresponded intermittently over the peak pandemic years. Looking back at the email threads now, they were longer and more detailed than I’d remembered, a testament to his generous spirit. We were both fans of Madrona Labs synths and other lightly idiosyncratic music-making tools. I’d read his blog on and off since about 2011.
I ran into him not long after starting Steve on Steve — all our contact since the course had been online, so he barely recognised me — and invited him to subscribe. Substack’s open tracking is somewhat vague. It assigns people a 5-star rating based on their engagement over the past month. When I check, most of my main readers oscillate between 3 and 5 stars. Maybe they miss some weeks, maybe they catch up on some a couple of months later. Every single time I checked, Jonathan had 5 stars.2 I feel like that says something about his character and genuine curiosity because I barely knew him. I also know from his posts on various music forums that he didn’t really like listening to music with lyrics! He was extremely busy with work, often quite sick, had numerous interests,3 countless former students — many respected in their own fields, others acclaimed musicians. But, even if he was just skimming them on his way to work, he still took the time to check out my little corner of the internet. That kind of curiosity is worth celebrating.
I’ve been searching for a word that aptly describes being sad at a person’s death, but which isn’t full-on grief. A word to describe the sadness you feel when someone who touched you but wasn’t close to you dies. Lamentful or heavy seem the closest. Regardless, we lost a real one last week. Grab a copy of the Audible Past, Diminished Faculties, or MP3: The Meaning of a Format and rejoice in the mind who passed through.
I wrote most of this tune in March 2017 and finished it in March 2023. It’s called No Grid because it’s not written to a DAW grid. Much of Jonathan’s work was about how media technology flattens difference and sells it back as ‘innovation’, often in line with capitalist and ableist ideals. So I guess an attempt to go ‘off-grid’ is an apt tune to share. There are also no proper lyrics to speak of.4
If you’re interested, he blogged extensively about his cancer. It’s a useful resource for anyone confronting cancer in their own life. Though, of course, cancer is an umbrella term for a fairly wide range of illnesses.
When I wrote this on Wednesday, he was still at 5 stars, despite being dead almost a week. He’s now at 4. Some of you 3-star people need to seriously raise your game…
A polymath, in David Grubbs’ nice words.
At one point, I thought I might take the chords and do an R’n’B style thing with them, but I think I just ran out of steam and wanted it finished, so layered random rough vocal takes over each other at the end to create the eucatastrophic cacophony. The album it’s from is called Ghosts, so that kinda makes sense, too.