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Category Archives: Music
Muscial necrophilia
Via Aaron Cohen, guest blogging at kottke.org, a delicious diatribe that I’d found and lost and now find again: Pat Metheny critiques Kenny G:
…he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs —never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them)…
Still looking for Chase at the iTMS
Five genres on my iPod not likely to be found elsewhere, as assigned by me:
- Irish Soul (The Commitments)
- New Swing (Joe Jackson, Swing Out Sister, Meaghan Smith)
- Electrofolk (Beth Orton, Snakefarm, Nels Cline)
- Brass Fusion (Chicago, The Ides of March)
- Alien Pixie (Björk, Laurie Anderson, Radiohead)
Slippery
In the European classical tradition, the piano, with its twelve precise divisions of the octave—inflexible, immovable—has dictated musical thinking for several centuries. Once developed, the piano quickly became a machine of almost tyrannical influence throughout the Western world. Its division of the octave into twelve intervals, each mathematically equidistant from its neighbors, forces one to regard pitches as discrete entities, like nations with strictly policed [borders]. A piano-generated melody goes from point to point with no expressive sliding in between. This is not a fault—Bach and Mozart built their entire work on the notion—rather, it is a stylistic choice. Since the advent of the black-and-white keyboard… Western instrumental music has had to state itself according to the twelve discrete, individual pitches of the scale, resulting in a more limited universe of emotional expression.
—John Adams, Hallelujah Junction, ch. 10, “The Machine in the Garden”
The B feature
Via Arts & Letters Daily, Lucie Skeaping recaps what we know of 17th century jigs, bawdy theatrical afterpieces.
Were jigs recited over the tunes, did they contain song interludes, were they through-sung like mini-operas, or did all three of these at various times apply? Of the 12 surviving English jig texts roughly half contain specific tune titles printed at various points alongside the text, that is, the names of popular ballads or dance tunes of the day.
Still a lot of Curve
My iTunes signature (courtesy of Jason Freeman) has changed a little bit since the last one I made, in 2005, but not that much. The caveat: songs purchased through the iTMS are not included in the mix.
Nipped and tucked and buffed
Carrie Brownstein puts in a good word for flubs in recorded music.
Voices, guitars and drums are really expressive instruments for the same reason that they’re really inexact instruments: [You] can’t coax the same note or beat out of them exactly the same way twice, even if you try.
Any stage actor could tell you that, and ruefully.
She mentions, as an exemplar, Denny Doherty’s early entrance for a chorus of The Mamas and Papas’ “I Saw Her Again.” Heck, I always figured that he meant to do that. It was effing brilliant.
O.F.
Via The Morning News, John Adams gives tips on getting through the first rehearsal:
Be flexible and take every opportunity to talk to the players. Sometimes you can make an on-the-spot change that will make an instrumentalist’s day. Other times, although you realize that what you’ve written is in fact awkward and unreasonable, the player will be affronted if you offer to simplify or revise a phrase or a passage. They assume that if something isn’t working it’s their fault. Composers are geniuses, right? For them it’s their burden to somehow make it work, and they do not realize that it’s the composer who needs to get it right.
Many actors I know aren’t quite so accommodating toward playwrights.
I also must quote this bit, relating to the many, many details of the composition process:
[Is] it mezzo forte or mezzo piano? (Or maybe pianissimo, because they’ll play it loud in any event?) Why aren’t there more gradients available? (Stockhausen tried: zero to ten.) Is pianissimo in the brass still going to cover the clarinets? And you always forget about mutes. It says “mutes on,” but you’ve declined to say when to remove them. Is it true that Schoenberg thought “mezzo” forte and “mezzo” piano were for sissies who couldn’t make up their minds? Maybe he was right.
Tripping Wires
Brandon Gentry looks back on the production of a mighty fine CD from 1994, ¡Simpatico! by local band Velocity Girl. Alas, there are no quotes from singer Sarah Shannon in the piece.
Coalescing at the University of Maryland in the late ’80s, Velocity Girl specialized in winningly sharp indie pop steeped in resonant major chord melodies and spry, agile rhythms…. Focused and concise, the best Velocity Girl is some of the best indie rock D.C. – or any other city – can claim to have produced in the last 20 years.
John and Robert are somewhere smiling
Alex Ross falls under the spell of the Make Music festival in New York:
It was in the spirit of the day to be charmed rather than annoyed by the accidental music of the city: the beeping of a bus’s wheelchair lift during [Terry Riley's] In C; the syncopated barking of a dog energized by the drumming of Loop 2.4.3.
Close reading
Rob Kapilow deconstructs Stephen Sondheim’s war horse “Send in the Clowns.”
Sometimes the people we think we know best are the people we know least.
Doctor Atomic
So what do you get for your $23 ticket to The Met: Live in HD? Well, the food court at Tysons Corner Center doesn’t have the cachet of the plaza at Lincoln Center. Twenty-three bucks doesn’t get you a reserved seat in this almost-full medium-sized auditorium in the AMC Tysons Corner 16, and the program is a simple one-sheet affair. The subtitles are onscreen, not in the chair backs, and the AMC’s technical execution was only serviceable, not flawless (the image was not framed properly for a few minutes; sound and lights came up and down with peculiar timing). But you do get the opportunity to munch popcorn in your seat (a few of us indulged). And the proceedings are framed by backstage patter: it’s awful darn cool to get to hear the SM pass the “maestro to the pit, please” call.
What you do get is a good taste of something like the live experience, and in the case of this electrifying production about the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, under the scientific direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that’s something special.
Julian Crouch’s set makes the first impact. Projected on a scrim is the periodic table of the elements known at that time, quaintly missing Francium and Technetium and stopping at Plutonium. The scrim is pulled to reveal a three-level set for the chorus: the effect is of pigeonholes in a rolltop desk, or a warren of office cubicles. The stage is abuzz with activity as preparations for the bomb test are being made.
In the second scene, Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer sings a lush, intimate “Am I in your light?” to her husband Robert. The act closes with a powerful “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” from Oppenheimer, sung by Gerald Finley of the piercing, haunted blue eyes.
John Adams is known for his choruses, and the second-act “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous” is a stunner, as the atomic energy workers react to a vision of Vishnu in the skies. The put-upon meteorologist Frank Hubbard (Earle Patriarco) reports that weather conditions have finally cleared, and the test is on. The penultimate moments of the opera, as the atomic explosion ignites an era, perhaps carry more effect in the actual theater.
Generally, the multi-camera work is unobtrusive (the Met has been televising live performances effectively for years, of course) and follows the action, mixing long shots (a four-shot of Oppenheimer, Kitty, her shadow, and his gigantic one is well-framed) and extreme closeups—pans, zooms, and tilts up from the vantage point of the pit. Once in a while the lighting and exposure levels for Ms. Cooke wash her out.
Which leads me to the following question: do Met performers adjust their makeup when they’re being televised? What I saw looked natural in closeup, so I wonder how it plays in the upper reaches of the balconies.
And where can we score some of those great prop cigarettes? Oppenheimer and Kitty were rarely without one, and the cool thing about the prop is that you can take a drag from it and get a little puff of smoke.
- Doctor Atomic, composed by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars, conducted by Alan Gilbert, directed by Penny Woolcock, Metropolitan Opera, New York/HD Live
The not-so-lost chord
Eliot Van Buskirk sketches the analysis that went into decoding the opening guitar chord of The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” He links to an audio clip as well as the detailed paper by Jason I. Brown of Dalhousie University, “Mathematics, Physics, and A Hard Day’s Night.” Seems that the boys had a little help from George Martin on piano.
Musical shoe box
Happy birthday to Boston’s Symphony Hall, McKim, Mead & White’s masterpiece of architecture and acoustics.
Counter melodies
Susan Elliott gives recognition to another unsung contributor to the musical theater: the orchestrator. Orchestrators are needed even for revivals, perhaps moreso.
Downsizing is the norm these days, mostly because of space and economics. “We’re being asked to write for smaller and smaller bands all the time,” [Michael] Starobin [orchestrator of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins] said. “Everybody’s oohing and aahing about South Pacific, but nobody’s saying: ‘Hey! Let’s use big orchestras again.’ Producers don’t want to put money into the music; they’d rather spend $3 million on the scenery.”
