To One in Paradise

Here’s a recording of my college’s chamber choir singing “To One in Paradise” by James Bernhard, a setting of the poem by Poe. It’a a little rough, but it’s a deceptively difficult song. The music isn’t that hard, but all of the lines are so slow and exposed that intonation and support are issues.

Billy Elliot

I was rewatching Billy Elliot last night. It’s one of my favorites. Michael’s call to Billy as he tries to catch him before Billy goes off to dancing school, “Oy! Dancin’ boy!” might be the most romatic line in the history of cinema.

Which probably says more about me than the history of cinema. Also, I love that the above image of Michael is from www.joyofcrossdressing.com.

Bad Lieutenant

I cannot possibly express how entertaining this interview is. It’s a Hollywood Reporter roundtable between Nicolas Cage, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, Morgan Freeman, Peter Sarsgard, and Christopher Waltz. Highlights include Nicolas Cage bitching about how direcors won’t leave him alone when he snorts baby powder to get himself into the zone to play a drug addict.

From the Old Sad Bastard school of thought

Here’s Glenn Branca saying that nothing new has been done in music for the last 50 years. Chris Milam thinks that Garden State has irrevocably damaged American culture.

Yawn. I won’t even bother, their commenters have done the work for me.

Someone needs better focus groups

Ad campaigns like this one, public service ads directed at “youth” financed by LG about the dangers of inappropriate text messaging, make me wonder about the people making the decision to go ahead with this (ad website here).

First, the print ads that reference the gag in the videos don’t make any sense without that context. Warden Gentle’s beard is not a pop culture icon that people recognize apart from its owner (but it is amusing to think of some that people do: Elvis’ hair? Jay Leno’s chin? Pamela Anderson’s hooters? Robin Williams’ arm pelts?) and I can’t imagine being anything more than confused if I saw those posters out and about.

Second, I guess it’s something that they are playing lip service to the existence of the internet with a dedicated twitter account. I would imagine that they hoped their videos go viral, but there’s a reason why they wont. And it’s the same reason that they need better methodology or data about what their target audience finds appealing. It’s lame.

I’m guessing that they chose James Lipton as an “ironic” choice; maybe they thought that the juxtoposition of his distinguished diction with the mundane and un-James Lipton-like subject matter would be enough to be funny. It seems a little too bizzare to be the usual “pick someone the kids will look up to” model of PSAs. If that is the case, then they didn’t push it far enough. It comes across as awkward and disturbing.

I really wonder if they road-test these with real people. It doesn’t seem like it.

Alexander Street Press

For those of you out there who have even a casual interest in classical music, I reccomend the free bi-weekly downloads from Alexander Street Press, an online subscription classical music database. The recordings are always one complete piece, and range from short chamber pieces for solo instrument to full symphonies. Their blog has RSS and there is an e-mailing list if you want to be updated when new recordings become available.

Terry Riley – In C

I was talking with one of my music instructors about my classes this semester, and I brought up the Minimalism class that I am taking. He kind of half smiled and said that he wasn’t familiar with much minimalist music, “…except, of course, In C. Everyone does that because it’s so easy to play.” I winced inside and politely nodded. He’s not exactly wrong, In C is about as transparent as it gets (the whole score fits on a single sheet of letter-sized paper), and yet looking at it like that completely misses the point.

In C revolves around “the Pulse,” a steady eighth note ostinato in the high register of the piano. For the other musicians (the ideal ensemble is somewhere between 20-35 players), there are 53 melodic cells. The performers are instructed to play them in sequence (and only in sequence), but they are free to decide how many times to repeat the cell, or to play the cell at all. They are instructed to never be more than four cells ahead or behind the rest of the ensemble, but everything else is left to the musician’s discretion.

In that sense the piece is simple. All of the information necessary to perform the work is found on that page. Yet it is a virtue of this work that looking at the score will tell you nothing about how the work sounds. By giving the musicians choice, collective and individual decisions completely change the character of the work. To give a couple of examples: players choosing to drop out for a few repetitions or cells completely change what would be the orchestration in a conventional work. If all your brass instruments drop out, that changes the character. If the musicians decide to play softly, that opens up the soundscape for an instrument to take a “solo.” Musician’s decisions can complely change the harmony and rhythm as well. There are different levels of syncopation in the cells. If the ensemble is spread out, those rhythmic changes come slowly and subtly, leaving the audience unable to distinguish where one rhythmic idea ends and another begins. If the ensemble is fairly close together, those shifts can be dramatic.

I had the opportunity to run through this with my college’s orchestra at the beginning of the semester, and was really surprised by things that I didn’t expect to be difficult. First, my instructor didn’t give enough credit to the difficulty of the cells. They are extremely fast, and occasionally are quite rhytmically complex. Not virtuoso music, certainly, but not easy either. It also requires a tremendous amount of self-confidence, as it can be very disorienting to try and keep to a pattern when you don’t quite know where everyone else is and there is no dominant beat except the Pulse. It would require a lot of rehearsal for any group to get to the point where they could begin exploring the possiblities I mentioned above.

In C had a great impact when it premiered in 1964. Steve Reich was a member of that ensemble (he was actually the person who suggested a Pulse when the ensemble had trouble keeping a steady beat) and his Music for 18 Musicians is clearly a descendent of In C. My Minimalism professor claims that everything that has ever been explored in minimalist music (I’ll have some thoughts on that later), and there is an argument to be made there. All minimalist composers who folowed Riley owe him a debt for his work in controlling harmony in the context of a musical process.

Terry Riley (b. 1935) is an American composer who studied with LaMonte Young (who I might write about). He also did some crazy cool work with early synthesizer music (see A Rainbow in Curved Air) and was one of the namesakes of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”

The National

Another album that I listened to in my quest to listen to the critical picks of the ’00’s was The National’s Alligator. Boxer, the album that followed has become my go-to record for listening straight through. I won’t bore you with superlatives, but I will share something interesting that I’ve been mulling over.

It took a while for Boxer to permeate my musical conciousness. I had been a fan of “Fake Empires,” but most of the songs are so low key that all of the careful, subtle details went into the backdoor of my ears without every making themselves obvious. As I began to really hear more of it, I had a hard time figuring out what intangible thing made the production sound so fresh to me. Then it hit me; I was trying to project too much on the music. The reason that it sounded unique is that it is completely transparent, musically honest.

There are no production “tricks,” with the exception of some reverb and limited distortion on the guitars, everything is clean. While it’s not acoustic, there’s nothing that you couldn’t reproduce live. Matt Berninger sounds like he’s singing to you because his voice is not hidden behind layers of post-production. There is nowhere to hide

There is also nothing new in the structures of the songs; we’ve heard them a thousand times in other rock songs. They are so perfectly executed however, that this becomes an asset rather than a liability. This is one of the things that I like most about the album. Recording and musical technology is evolving so fast that it’s refreshing to hear a band that does everything with thoughtful orchestrations, solid songwriting, and supremely perfect execution.

A note on those orchestrations: music technology has lowered the price of recording and releasing music greatly, but has also made big, lush music with large numbers of session players obsolete and economically illogical. One of the great pleasures of the movie Ray were the scenes of big recording sessions (especially “Georgia On My Mind,” with full gospel choir and studio orchestra). I don’t have any information about the cost of this record, but I like that they went after that full, rich sound. Every time I listen to it I hear something new, some instrumental motif or riff that I never picked up on before.

If I had to pick something to single out for praise, I would have to choose Bryan Devendorf’s drumming and their recording engineer’s technique. Throughout the record, the drums sound beautiful. I’ve embedded “Mistaken for Strangers,” but the YouTube compression has killed it. Listen to it from a good quality file, or the CD. You can hear the rattles in the snare drum, the tom toms sound full, and the bass drum has not been overproduced to abstraction; in short, the drums sound like an instrument. It is also a credit to how tight the band is that Devendorf is free to drum interesting, syncopated patterns and not just be a metronome.

“Mistaken For Strangers” isn’t my favorite track on the album, but my heart jumps a little every time I hear the drums come in.

Coming Out… On Ice!

This heartwarming story about Miami University hockey player Brendan Burke coming out to and finding acceptance from his father, Toronto Maple Leafs and U.S. Olympic team GM Brian Burke has been going around the gay internets. I know shit-all about hockey, but I do understand the importance of these kinds of stories of accpetance is to people who care. Here’s a taste (warning, the article is written in an annoying 2nd-ish person style):

Whatever happens in your life, whatever career path you choose, you know Dad is in your corner. His long shadow of a hockey résumé that once looked like a crutch might now prove to be just the thing you and others need — a powerful and eloquent voice shouting from the mountaintops.

This is far and away more than what you personally expected from your hockey-famous Dad as you prepared coming out to him. When people ask you about your dad’s reaction to your Vancouver sit-down, you initially say, “He’s been great, but I don’t think we’ll see him at any gay pride parades any time soon. But he has been really supportive.”

So, you are startled this past summer when you get a call from Dad saying, “Hey, Toronto Pride is this weekend, you should fly up.” So, sure enough, you fly up, and you and Dad go to the Toronto Pride Parade together.

If someone had told you before coming out that your dad, Brian Burke, would be attending a gay pride parade with you, you wouldn’t have believed it. You never suspected Dad would disown you or anything like that, but the way he has handled it and the way he talks about it now has, honestly, really moved you. He was a little awkward about it at first. Today, he doesn’t even think twice about it.

I sometimes do get a little sad when I read stories like this because they should not be newsworthy. It’s nothing but tragic that it is common for parents to completely disown their children because of something that doesn’t directly affect them.

The Big Sleep

I really enjoyed Philip Schultz’ poem in The New Yorker a couple of issues ago. I’m not going to excerpt it here; poetry is right with classical dance as the most vulnerable art form and I would feel bad if I didn’t steer traffic their way.

Part of me just liked the witty turns of phrase, but I also appreciated the courage of a poet writing on the technology that we have come to live with, and the effects of that technology on our soul.