Birdsong In The Business Park
I was walking between my company’s two offices the other day. There have been a bunch of crows showing up lately, and I heard a couple of crows “caw”ing to each other. That suddenly attenuated my ears to birdish sounds, quite unintentionally, and I heard one bird singing somewhere overhead, and then another down the street, then yet another somewhere else. I kept walking, but turned on my “comprehensive listening” mode, and I was surprised to hear lots of birds singing around the hallowed concrete halls of the business parks. It was an ear-opening experience. I never would have thought that there were a lot of singing birds in the area, but clearly they were there all along and I just wasn’t listening; perhaps I’d gotten used to hearing them so often that I didn’t hear them anymore. Just goes to show (again) that there’s a difference between hearing and listening–and that hearing something a lot often tunes out our listening. Here’s to deeper and more intentional listening!
Billy Idol and The Steve Miller Band Vs. Matchbox Twenty
Another entry in the recently reshuffled iPod playlist category….
I wrote a year ago about how my friend Rae hooked me up with some free CDs she didn’t want. Two of them happened to be the Greatest Hits of Billy Idol and the Greatest Hits: 1974-1978 of The Steve Miller Band. (What it says about the band that they have a Greatest Hits album with 14 tracks that spans all of 5 years, I’m not sure.) I put both those albums into my playlist, and I’ve heard multiple songs from both of them over the last week or so at work.
I’m not too impressed with either album. It’s definitely the 70s-80s rock sound that I would expect, not knowing much about either artist, and to be honest it bores me. Sure, there’s a lot of energy. But the style is quite outdated (insert your favorite cliche about 80s music here), and there’s nothing in the music that transcends the style–nothing that’s designed to last beyond the style itself. Especially in the Billy Idol tracks. They’re all constructed the same way, with the same instruments playing the same types of musical lines in every song. There are very few interesting details. The one exception is the live version of “Rebel Yell,” featuring some rocking acoustic guitar from Steve Stevens. He plays some unique accompaniment patterns, does some “superstrumming,” plays rhythms on muted strings, etc. That is worth listening to. But none of the other songs have the same redeeming quality (or any redeeming quality, to my mind).
Right after a song of Billy Idol’s and a song of The Steve Miller Band’s the other day, the song “All Your Reasons” from Matchbox Twenty’s album Exile On Mainstream started to play. It made me smile, because I love that song and it was a breath of fresh air after the other two. But then I started to wonder why–what was it that made “All Your Reasons” better than “White Wedding” and “Take The Money And Run”?
First of all, “All Your Reasons” is more intelligent than the other songs because while it has a distinctive pop/rock style, it transcends it because it’s a parody of the style. (The song starts out, quite humorously, with a couple of singers singing, with much feeling, “Ba da da da ba ba ba ba da” etc.) Maybe the parody won’t last for decades, but at least it’s a sentient style, so to speak–it’s aware of the style it’s operating in. Secondly, even though “All Your Reasons” is a simple song, there’s more detail in it than in five of Billy Idol’s songs combined–more subtle nuances in the instruments’ parts themselves, on a small scale. And thirdly, there’s more detail on a larger scale: there are great variations in texture (how many instruments are playing and what they’re playing), from the acoustic guitar and voices in the intro, to the full guitar-bass-drums chorus, to a driving bridge, to a chorus with only high guitar (punctuated by small drum fills, otherwise known as “details”).
Perhaps Matchbox Twenty’s music won’t last too far beyond its own style, either. But, while we’re still in a time where their style is relevant (and even if we’re not), it’s better music, and more worth listening to, than Billy Idol or The Steve Miller Band.
Longplayer Live On Twitter
No doubt due to my post yesterday, my TLB twitter account notified me that Longplayer Live (@longplayerlive) is now following me on Twitter. So if you’re interested in keeping up with the latest news on the Longplayer Live performance in September, head on over and follow them!
Longplayer
Thanks to Stephen (@idhrendur) for this one: So, apparently, Longplayer* is a musical composition that lasts for one thousand years. It began playing on December 31st, 1999, and will continue until the same date in 2999–when it will “complete its cycle and begin again.” It was composed by a UK-based musician and composer named Jem Finer, collaborating with the organization Artangel and a think tank of artists, composers and writers (including Brian Eno). It’s composed for singing bowls, and can be played mechanically, digitally, or live by human performers, which it will be on September 12th in London: 1,000 minutes of a 1,000 year-long piece of music–”the live debut of the longest piece of music ever written.”
“Okay, but how does it actually work?” you (and I) ask. This from the website (http://longplayer.org):
The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed. At this point the composition arrives back at the point at which it first started. In effect Longplayer is an infinite piece of music repeating every thousand years – a millennial loop.
The six short pieces of music are transpositions of a 20’20” score for Tibetan Singing Bowls, the ‘source music’. These transpositions vary from the original not only in pitch but also, proportionally, in duration.
Every two minutes a starting point in each of the six pieces is calculated, from which they then play for the next two minutes. Each starting point is calculated by adding a specific length of time to its previous starting point. For each of the six pieces of music this length of time is unique and unvarying. The relationships between these six precisely calculated increments are what gives Longplayer its exact one thousand year long duration.
So there you have that.
“Okay, but how does it actually sound?” you (and I) ask then. We’re in luck: You can listen to a live stream by clicking here: http://longplayer.org/listen/longplayer.m3u. When you click on the file, you will download an .m3u file (1 KB); once it’s downloaded, it should begin streaming Longplayer live through your default music application (e.g. iTunes).
“Okay, but who actually CARES?” you (and I) ask then. I (and maybe you) wonder if such things are just a fad resulting from the existential crisis of our age; it’s certainly difficult to imagine Bach or Beethoven conceiving of a thousand-year piece, or caring about it, even if the technology to make it possible had been present. Interestingly enough, the website has this to say:
The second and more abstract question about Longplayer’s future is social – who will look after Longplayer as its technological, cultural and social environments change? How does one generation of custodians go about establishing a durable chain of succession, down which the responsibility for Longplayer’s survival can realistically be expected to pass, even over hundreds of years? How many institutions have survived, with their initial objective intact, over the last thousand years?
It’s good and smart of the people involved in Longplayer’s creation to think about such questions; but apart from establishing the Longplayer Trust to oversee and perpetuate the project, they don’t provide any answers. My question is this: as the “technological, cultural and social environments” around Longplayer change, who’s to say that we won’t get to a point where it won’t be seen as art or science or metaphysics or whatever it’s supposed to be, but just as a silly experiment by a less enlightened time, and shut it off? How disappointed would Mr. Finer be if the composition survived for a few hundred years–but then died because no one cared anymore?
* I didn’t place the title “Longplayer” in italics, as I normally would, because it’s not formatted that way on its website. It’s possible that this isn’t a conscious decision, but on the off chance that the creators intentionally left the title without any special formatting other than capitalization, I follow the same convention.
Making Music Improves Your Hearing
I ran across this news article on Wired a few days ago. Apparently a new study has shown that musicians are better than non-musicians at hearing “speech-in-noise,” like picking out someone’s voice from a loud environment such as a crowded room. The authors of the study liken the ability to trying to hear one’s own instrument when playing in an orchestra or band, and suggest that perhaps things such as that are the cause of the enhanced perception. One of the authors says, “If we could establish that musical experience could help perception of speech-in-noise, that has all kinds of provocative implications in terms of encouraging policy-makers and parents to pursue musical education for their kids.” Check out the article here:
“Making Music Hacks Your Hearing”
“Icicle,” Under The Pink, Tori Amos
I mentioned the other day that I’d been introduced to Tori Amos’ album Under The Pink by an old friend of mine, and that I’d recently put it into a playlist on my iPod. My friend had attended a church I was a member of a long time ago, and she thought I would find it interesting that Amos makes use of a hymn in one of her songs on that album. She couldn’t find it on the record she was playing at the time, but I found it when I got the CD and listened to it on my own.
In the piano intro to the song “Icicle,” Amos writes a deconstruction of the hymn “O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing” (careful, a crappy MIDI piano version of the hymn will start playing if you visit the site). After some meandering chords that change modalities (switching from major to minor, mainly by switching from F to F-sharp), the hymn begins at the 53-second mark. Although she adds an extra beat here and there, it’s a faithful rendering of the hymn through one verse. But the last chord of the verse is swapped for a flat-VI (an A-flat major chord replaces the expected C major), and she launches into her deconstruction through another verse. She first simply adds the flat seventh, turning C major chords into C dominant sevens, but then really throws it off by switching between major and minor tonalities (by switching from E to E-flat and then from D to D-flat) and collapsing into a dissonant mess. After hanging out on the final cluster chord for a while, the accompaniment to the song proper begins, an A-flat 5 arpeggio.
The subject matter of the song concerns Amos’ exchanging of her parents’ religion for her own ideas, and thus the gradual decline of the hymn into chaos is a brilliant musical mirroring of what she’s about to sing. You can listen to the whole song here, courtesy of Last.fm. Be forewarned that the song contains some sexually suggestive material; but you can listen to the intro and then stop the song when she starts singing if you’d like to avoid it.
Listening On the iPod
Usually, I can’t listen to music while I do something else, because I’m always listening to the music and analyzing it, whether I want to or not. In college I was never able to listen to music while I was studying because the music would be too distracting. Even when I’m eating out at a restaurant, some back corner of my mind is always listening and analyzing. I like to call this one of the “occupational hazards” of being a composer.
All this to say, I don’t have much occasion to make use of my iPod. However, occasionally at work I’m given some mindless tasks, like data entry for reports or conversion of a bunch of files from one format to another; and so I keep my iPod at work for such situations. It’s not large enough to sync with my entire iTunes library (it’s a 4GB iPod nano), so I have to pick and choose what I put on there. Here are some of the more interesting things I’ve recently put into my shuffled mindless-work playlist:
- The entire Wicked soundtrack. I hadn’t listened to anything from Wicked in a while, so I thought I’d get it back into the rotation; and just hearing a couple of the songs again is enough to make me wonder at Stephen Schwartz’s genius. Even the “non-greatest-hits” songs (e.g. “Dear Old Shiz,” “I’m Not That Girl,” “Thank Goodness”) have very clever words and catchy, quality music; and when Schwartz is at the top of his game (e.g. “What Is This Feeling?”, “Popular,” “For Good,” “Defying Gravity”) there’s no one better.
- Strange Attractor, Mercury Rev. I wrote about this album a few weeks ago. Even though it’s instrumental pop music, which normally doesn’t interest me too much, Strange Attractor is strangely attractive and I find it engaging, detailed and well-put-together. And for free, it’s hard to beat.
- Under The Pink, Tori Amos. An old friend of mine from Colorado who lived in LA for a while introduced me to Tori Amos by way of this CD. Amos is weird, there’s no doubt about it, but some of her writing is really good in her own eccentric way, and as a performer there’s much I can learn from her unique piano playing style.
And here are a few albums I’ve taken out:
- Turning Point, The Emmons Sisters. This was a family band (four sisters) that I met on our road trip two years ago up in Oregon; they play folk/acoustic/country-style music. But the songwriting is not very good, and the vocals are far too nasal to be easily listenable. A shame, because I had a lot of fun jamming with them while we stayed at their house.
- Kicking Television, Live in Chicago, Wilco. A friend of mine from Redlands gave me this CD to borrow, and it was the first time I’d heard Wilco. I’ll grant that a live album might not be the best way to be introduced to a band, but I really wasn’t feeling it. It’s difficult to put my finger on, but nothing really stood out to me and I don’t understand what the big deal is about Wilco. Any fans care to enlighten me?
- Stockholm Syndrome, Derek Webb. The only reason I took this off is because I’ve been listening to it incessantly since I downloaded it. The (censored) physical album comes out on September 1st, but it’s still available to order in its original form at http://www.derekwebb.com/store; so head on over and get yourself a copy!
08.14.2009Elemental, Loreena McKennitt
Posted by AJ Harbison at 4:32 pmI posted back in April about “eclectic Celtic” artist Loreena McKennitt, and after listening to Live Under Lights and Wires for a while and passing it on to my lovely wife, I picked up another of Eleanor’s McKennitt CDs, this time her first recording, Elemental.
Apart from suffering from a really weird cover picture (is she wearing a trenchcoat over a nightgown? Why is the harp standing by itself out in the grass while she’s running away? Is the building behind her a country ruin or her studio?), Elemental is a fine little album. It’s her first recording (from 1985, although I have a remastered version from 2006), and it shows a little, in a few simplistic arrangements and rough edges; but it’s also nice to hear the simpler, more traditional sounds of this record compared to the multilayered, polished tracks of The Book of Secrets. McKennitt’s harp playing features in most of the songs, as well as her voice–also a little rough around the edges and a bit shrill at times, but still haunting and perfectly suited to the Irish ballads she sings. Her guest collaborators are well chosen too: Cedric Smith turns in a very strong performance of the traditional song “Carrighfergus,” while Shakespearean actor Douglas Campbell’s thundering voice is unforgettable as he recites a William Blake poem in the final track “Lullaby.” Apart from “Lullaby” and “The Stolen Child,” with text from a W.B. Yeats poem, all of the tracks are traditional Irish songs “adapted and arranged” by McKennitt.
I still hold that Irish music is good for the soul, and this album is filled with the evocative, longing side of the genre. It’s not McKennitt’s best record, but it still repays a good listen.
08.10.2009“Rhapsody and Rapture”: Pacific Symphony Concert
Posted by AJ Harbison at 5:05 pmMy lovely wife and I visited the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine last Saturday night to attend a concert by the Pacific Symphony, Orange County’s resident orchestra. The concert was titled “Rhapsody and Rapture,” and featured Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Carl Orff’s magnum opus Carmina Burana.
Neither of us had been to the amphitheater before, and it was a fun experience. It’s an outside venue; we were pretty far off to one side, so we couldn’t see the whole stage, but they had big screens above the stage which helped. And it’s a relatively small theater, so we weren’t terribly far away from the action.
The first piece, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody, was performed by the orchestra and pianist Yeol Eum Son, the silver medalist of the 2009 Van Cliburn piano competition, one of the foremost piano competitions in the world. It’s a great piece, often used in movies, trailers, commercials, etc.; it’s big and passionate (as Russian artworks tend to be) but also has its whimsical moments (see the very end of the piece). Unfortunately, since the amphitheater is an outdoor venue, most or all of the sound comes from speakers, rather than primarily from the orchestra as it would in a concert hall; this gives the impression that you’re listening to a recording, rather than seeing a live performance, but it’s an unavoidable consequence (I suppose) of the great outdoors. What’s more unfortunate, though, is that it wasn’t a terribly good recording. The mix in the speakers left something to be desired; the piano was a little low in the mix for my taste, and the brass was especially low–instead of being at the forefront when playing loudly, as they would be live, they were relegated to a role somewhere in the middle or even in the background. Yeol Eum Son, however, shone in her performance. Some of the big loud passages felt a little thin, and it was hard to tell whether it was the fault of the pianist, the piano itself, or the mixer. But her delicate touch in the softer passages was second to none, and she had a lightness to her touch that seemed almost supernatural. Her staccatos in the nineteenth variation (the return to the minor theme after the slow, major theme) were the crispest and shortest I think I’ve ever heard from any pianist. She was certainly the star of that show.
Carmina Burana comprised the second half of the concert. It’s one of my favorite pieces of all time, a huge cantata for orchestra, choir, children’s choir and tenor, baritone and soprano solos that takes about an hour to perform in its entirety. The opening and closing movement, “O Fortuna,” has been used in movies, trailers, commercials, etc. almost as much as Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. (You can listen to a recording courtesy of Last.fm by going here and clicking on the black “play” button.) I’m fond of saying that it’s a piece everyone should see performed live before they die.
After this performance, I said to Eleanor that I may have to take her to another performance of it live before she dies, because this one wasn’t exactly top-notch. The orchestra had some tuning problems in the beginning. Conductor Carl St. Clair took some passages at a faster tempo than I’m used to hearing them, and it seemed that the orchestra and the choir (the Pacific Chorale) had some trouble keeping up. And the mix still wasn’t as clear as I would have liked. Whoever was operating the cameras that controlled the large screens above the stage didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what they were doing; the clumsy, rapid switches back and forth combined with shots that lingered too long and panned out into nowhere were often more laughable than useful. And that goes double for the subtitles. In an effort to make the text, which is in Latin and German, understandable to the audience, they projected subtitles onto the screens as well, translating what the choir was singing into English. But whoever was in charge of the subtitles was clearly not paying attention. Even without the rudimentary understanding of Latin and German I have, one could tell that the subtitles were often late in changing, sometimes having to rush through three or four slides to make up for missed time before it caught up again. Sometimes words would remain on the screen when no one was singing; sometimes words would disappear during the singing; and sometimes a section of singing would pass with no subtitles at all. I assume the concept behind the subtitles was to be helpful to the audience, but more often than not they were just distracting.
However, despite these things there were some strong highlights to the performance, and these highlights were the three soloists. The tenor solo only sings one movement, the “Lament of the Roasting Duck,” which is a tortuously high aria from the roasting duck’s perspective, played to very comical effect. The tenor, John Duykers, did a terrific job of acting out the part as well as singing it and was very funny. The baritone, Christopheren Nomura (whom I’ve seen sing this part with the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale before), had a much larger role but was extremely expressive with his facial expressions and body language, as well as being a very talented singer. And the soprano solo, Kiera Duffy, was even more expressive–almost too much so, as some of her expressions were pretty suggestive, especially toward the end of the piece (much of the text in Carmina Burana is quite salacious). And she did an amazing job with “Dulcissime,” the impossibly high cadenza before the penultimate movement (you can hear it here; the highest note is a high D, two octaves above middle C).
Unfortunately, the end of the concert was a clunky throwaway for the unwashed masses, where the choir and orchestra reprised “O Fortuna” while booming fireworks went off and obscured the music completely. I suppose that summer concertgoers aren’t satisfied unless the performance ends with fireworks, but it was almost an insult to the greatness of the piece to revisit the “fan favorite” movement and fire off some explosives immediately following its end. And whoever was in charge of the subtitles must have been in charge of the fireworks, too, because there were sometimes long pauses where no fireworks went off and they came in seemingly random spurts; and, just as I thought they’d finally gotten something right as the big fireworks finale went off during the climactic final chord, another big fireworks finale went off a few seconds after the music ended.
It was a clumsy and unnecessary ending for a concert that wasn’t bad, but wasn’t the great one that it could have been with two great masterworks and two competent ensembles. I’ve heard both the Symphony and the Chorale perform better than they did on Saturday night; only the soloists really stood out. I’m sorry that we caught them on an off night.
(The local Orange County Register had a different perspective on the concert; you can read their review here, but beware the unrevealed bias–the Register was the primary sponsor of the concert.)
08.07.2009Glass
Posted by AJ Harbison at 4:08 pmI was working along my merry way the other day, helping an employee move from one cubicle to another (I’m doing double duty with data and IT these days), when I heard a loud crash coming from the kitchen. Naturally, I went to investigate; it turned out that the receptionist had been trying to put some plastic cups away in a cabinet, and the shelf was missing a peg, so it slipped and although she caught it she was unable to catch the eight wine glasses that had been sitting on it, so they slid down and crashed onto the floor. She was a little shaken up, so I volunteered myself to sweep up the kitchen. I noticed that as I was sweeping, the glass made some very pretty twinkling sounds as I moved it around; the bigger the shard of glass, the lower the pitch of its sound. This shouldn’t have surprised me, I guess, but I enjoyed listening to the sound of the glass as I swept it up. And it was interesting to observe a bit of beauty coming out of such disorder and chaos. (Hmm, sounds like there could be a metaphor for life in there somewhere…)
