Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Age schmage.

Music | Posted by Josh
Jan 10 2012

Colin Holter of NewMusicBox asks in a post:

Have you ever read a piece of serious writing on the attitudes of the elderly toward classical music?

And Molly Sheridan echoes the question over at Mind the Gap:

In what other market would we try and sell an experience to a rarely interested buyer while simultaneously overlooking those demographics that have demonstrated a high affinity for it?

The idea is that perhaps classical institutions should be putting their efforts into courting older people instead of hoping to attract younger people because it’s clear that younger people don’t give a crap. While this sounds like a solid idea, there are a number of aspects to it that are being ignored and even Sheridan admits that “these are not perfect questions.”

Possibly the biggest error in this line of reasoning is overlooking that everyone actually does this. As a commenter at Mind the Gap claims:

Marketers are constantly chasing the elusive younger demographic that doesn’t watch TV while ignoring the older (and wealthier) folks who do.

Remember Joe Camel? He was a cartoon camel who lost his post as mascot for Camel cigarettes because it was feared that he marketed the product too directly toward young people. I admit that I’m making an assumption here myself, but I doubt one could find any industry where a significant portion of the marketing wasn’t aimed at a demographic that currently has no interest in the product. Afterall, why bother marketing to people who will buy your product regardless? Sounds like a waste of money to me.

In fact, this even occurs in the industry that classical music most wishes it could be as successful as: pop music. I’m not even referring to boys bands and their ilk but even successful non-classical bands with a markedly less commercial approach do this. One of my favorite bands, Thursday, admits in an interview:

It’s a weird situation to be in. If we just relied on our fans growing up to have a career, it would be impossible. We’ll be playing in a town and go out for dinner that night and the waitress will have a Thursday tattoo and be like, “Oh wow, I don’t go to shows anymore or buy albums, but I still love you guys.” And it’s like, it’s nice that you still love us, but you’re not coming to see us, or getting our record. I’m sure we have a lot of fans who have since grown up and still have a soft spot in their hearts. But generally I think older people get less and less involved in music. Cause when you’re younger, it’s your whole culture.

I think it would be great if young kids were digging us, because, I don’t know, maybe I could pay rent next month.

The difference in Thursday’s case is that the aging fans they can count on are no longer willing to dish out money while classical music fully expects only these older fans to dish out money but the general idea is the same: Thursday needs to constantly court a new demographic to survive.

Holter mentions in his post that “we can agree that it is thought that the patrons of classical music in the United States are old and getting older,” which may be the most telling sign of where all this comes from. This isn’t “conventional wisdom,” it’s fact. That link, from Greg Sandow’s blog, I’m fairly certain, doesn’t even come close to all the evidence Sandow has posted over the years. While I don’t know Holter at all, even in writing, and am so reticent to pass judgement on him, I still feel inclined to speculate that his refusal to flat out accept this fact could be evidence that he wants to deny that there’s a problem. In that light, why wouldn’t the classical world spend all it’s time going after old people? If there’s no problem, if the industry can count on people spontaneously becoming engrossed in classical music once they hit 60, even those who have never listened before, then there’s really no reason to focus so much on procuring a new young audience.

And, if I had time, I might get into the fact that everything about how the classical world operates already seems geared toward old people. Just look at the programs that largely mimic the programs that were being used 60-70 years ago; is that an appeal to young people or to people who were alive back then? I’m sure I don’t need to extrapolate much further than that in order for anyone to get my point.

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All Art is Theft: Tom Waits vs Ron Sexsmith

Music | Posted by Josh
Jan 02 2012

Some time ago I was listening to Tom Waits’ compilation/B-sides/album thinger, Orphans, and when I came across this song:

I immediately thought of this song by Ron Sexsmith:

At the time, going from memory, the two appeared to have identical verses in my head save for different instrumentation. It seemed so striking to me that my first reaction was to see who wrote their song first. Sexsmith released Gold in Them Hills back in 2002 while Shiny Things was released in 2006. The problem is, the album Tom Waits released this song on was only about half new tunes and half old unreleased stuff so I’m not sure which came first. Seeing as how I thoroughly enjoy both these musicians, I chalked it up to great minds thinking alike.

Today I went ahead and analyzed the verses from the two songs and came to realize that they’re not as similar as I intially thought, almost to the point where it seemed silly to compare them. Waits’ tune is in 5/4 where Sexsmith sticks to a standard 4/4 time signature. This probably goes a long way to making Gold in Them Hills sound more like a pop song while Shiny Things feels like an odd ode to Americana. I actually had a bit of trouble figuring out the time signature Waits was using. The unusual, for western music, rhythm is highly effective at turning a pretty basic chord progression and melody into something full of surprises.

The chord progressions are, in fact, pretty similar. Both are essentially sticking to a I IV I progression, extremely common in, well, everything western, only varying from each other at the end. Waits goes for a turn-around, playing a slightly different progression leading to a perfect cadence, while Sexsmith shuffles back and forth between ii and V for a while, also creating a perfect cadence but also creating the vague sense of modulating due to how long he sits in this position. Of course, these similarities essentially mean nothing given their ubiquity since the Renaissance.

The melodies are probably the most intriguing parts, and also the parts that made me think the songs were so close. They actually sound very different when listening to them one after the other but, when you look at the actual contour of what’s being played:

They have a lot in common. It’s as if, despite the fact that the rhythm of each melody is different, the key is different, the chord tone the each melody begins on is different, they still manage to recall each other. They each go up a bit, down a bit, up more, then down a bit, and that appears to be enough. It reminds me of an instructional guitar video I once saw where the guitarist explained good phrasing as only getting close to the notes you played last time you went through the melody, but not actually playing the same ones. In other words, someone can play Happy Birthday with all the wrong notes but if they get the general contour right, you’ll still recognize it as Happy Birthday.

There clearly isn’t any real theft here. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither musician had ever heard the other’s song. What’s more interesting is what this says about the creative process. Both artists probably came up with their verses independently and felt they had something good, something that expressed their thoughts and feelings uniquely, something that was theirs. Neither is particularly original, though. I’m sure there are loads of composers hundreds of years before these two that created very similar lines. The actual melody itself is not something anyone can take credit for, the way it’s put to use is. Waits gives his melody one context while Sexsmith gives his another and, ultimately, this change of context makes it feel like they’ve both done something uniquely them. Composition is really much more akin to creating collages than coming up with pigments that have never been seen before.

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Ob la di, ob la da.

Music | Posted by Josh
Dec 28 2011

As I was riding the bus a few months ago, a mentally handicapped man got on and immediately yelled, “Go Giants!” Well, this was in San Francisco, and it was also after the Giants became World Series champs, but it was also long after they became World Series champs. Needless to say, much chuckling ensued and the results were all captured on my recorder. Occasionally, the man would randomly repeat his exclamation to the further delight of his bystander audience. It seemed like something that might be useful to sample, although I don’t know exactly how I could use it, but it also made me wonder if giving a microphone to people like this is some form of exploitation. Case in point:

Talk about mixed feelings. I remember listening to this stuff years ago and getting a good laugh out of it due to how incredibly ridiculous and awkward it was and I can’t imagine that Chris Burke has been in on the joke. So is Chris Burke being exploited or is he drawing attention to down syndrome? Is this the kind of attention down syndrome needs? Would I simply be mocking a handicapped man by sampling his enthusiam for the Giants? It’s hard to say. It seems like exploitation and promotional education should be on opposite ends of a spectrum but, the more I think about it, the more it seems as though these two interpretations lie on either side of a thin line at the center of a spectrum.

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Ode to My LS-11.

Music | Posted by Josh
Dec 26 2011

In six more days I’ll be parting with my constant companion: my trusty Olympus LS-11 linear PCM recorder. The idea feels a bit stranger than I expected it to; it appears that after a year of carrying this thing around, I’ve gotten quite used to it. I’m regularly reflecting on what odd conversations I’ve stored and relishing the fact that they’re now available to me for good. It’s like an incredibly drawn out Stanley Kubrick film that only I have access to, for now (ya know, because his films progress so damn slowly). And I want more. My recorder is actually starting to die, the buttons not being very responsive anymore, but I can’t imagine that I’ll be putting it away for good after the 31st. For one, the next time I’m in New Jersey, I would really like to record my grandmother. She’s a, uh, character, to say the least, in her 80s, and has a rather unique Louisiana accent. It’s as though, if I were to capture her voice, even just through one conversation, I would somehow be saving her for posterity. I suppose that’s why people make home movies: so that those who didn’t create some grand legacy can still be preserved somewhere for the people they leave behind and their progeny.

I think there’s a weird reliance one develops with the technologies they use on a day-to-day basis. How many people feel complete when they leave their homes without their cell phones? I certainly don’t. I feel disconnected when I can’t instantly Google that odd concept I suddenly became curious about. How would I have casual conversations with friends without text messaging? How will I know what time it is or what my mom’s phone number is? I think leaving my recorder behind will have the same naked effect for me.

I’ve also come to realize that some of the most interesting things I’ve recorded would be some of the most difficult to use in songs. On the one hand, I don’t want to bar the use of anything as that would be out of the spirit of the project but, on the other hand, I don’t want to cause unnecessary problems either. I didn’t really expect the issue of privacy to become so important as I figured most of the issues with privacy would be with my own privacy, in which case I would just stomach it, but I can’t stomach it for other people, and I really have been documenting more than just my own life.

In any case, I figured this little rant was apropos considering how close to the end of the year it is. That’s all.

[Update 1/1/2012: Yup, definitely feels weird to not be recording.]

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Too old for prizes?

Music | Posted by Josh
Dec 07 2011

The Rest is Noise reports on French composer Henri Dutilleux receiving the Kravis Prize today, which consists of a $200,000 grant and a commission with the New York Philharmonic. The most interesting part to me is this phrase:

” . . . Henri Dutilleux, who turns ninety-six next month.”

Wow. Go him. But it really makes me wonder what the probability of him completing this commission is. I guess anyone could die at any second so handing out a huge sum of cash and a work order to someone who’s particularly old isn’t much different from handing it out to someone who is particularly young, but I still suspect that the probabilities of dying before the work’s completion are incredibly out of wack. Is it wrong to even take this into consideration? I mean, there are plenty of young up-starts who would kill to get this opportunity. I guess the risk in that case is they may not write something that anyone wants to hear… That brings us to a discussion of the general lack of taking risks on new music in the classical world. But then, Dutilleux doesn’t write safe romantic-style music so I guess he’s a bit of a risk in that sense.

In any case, things like this simply don’t come up in the pop music world where you’re old once you hit thirty.

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How 6 seconds grows.

Music | Posted by Josh
Dec 04 2011

This explanation of how a 6 second drum break from a little-known 1969 song can spawn innumerable sounds and subcultures is quite beautiful. I really couldn’t hope do a better job of explaining how sampling and technology have redefined the potential for musical expression so here it goes:

I’m really glad that the creator of the video inserted all the issues with copyrighting at the end, too. Imagine how different music might be if The Winstons had sued every artist that wanted to use their music right from the beginning. We seem to have moved closer and closer toward that being the norm and it’s a shame. Who knows how many remarkable uses of samples have been stifled by stringent copyright laws.

Also, it strikes me that this is essentially the opposite of what I’m doing with my one year project. Whereas this simple 6 second drum break has been manipulated to create innumerable musical expression, expanding it endlessly, my idea is to take an enormous amount of recorded sound and stuff it into one small, digestible package. Actually, I would love to see someone take a snippet of my end product and expand it out again. It could be as if the music is alive, inhaling and exhaling.

There’s a piece by Steve Reich called Proverb which puts the phrase, “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”, to music and expands on that. I just like the piece, and the quote (from Ludwig Wittgenstein), and thought it seemed in the same vain as the video above, even though it’s classical music.

This has really turned into more of a miscellaneous post than a post about sampling. Oh well. Here’s the Reich piece:

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Noiseless concerts.

Music | Posted by Josh
Nov 24 2011

This morning I came across this post on Alex Ross’s blog about a recent skirmish at a London Philharmonic concert of Bruckner’s 4th symphony. Norman Lebrecht, while giving more in depth coverage of the incident, attracted the attention of the instigator, one Alex Verney-Elliott, whose response was posted on Lebrecht’s blog.

Mr. Verney-Elliott, apparently, got up in the middle of the 4th movement and called the performance “rubbish” before storming off, as the YouTube clip on Mr. Ross’s blog shows. I listened and, honestly, it’s barely audible. I understand that unwrapping a piece of gum at a classical performance can sometimes be loud enough to be distracting, due to the lack of amplification and extreme dynamics of the music, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. What’s more, wasn’t this a common occurence in past eras? Don’t misunderstand me, like some commenters, I think Mr. Verney-Elliott probably should have waited until the end of the performance to “boo”, but mid-performance outbursts have not always been so frowned upon (I’m fairly certain this pertains even to “booing”, which I believe I’ve read about happening at opera houses in Rossini’s day on Greg Sandow’s blog). Essentially, outbursts are an extremely effective way of calling attention the perceived competence level of performers. Of course, the drawback is that those making the noise could be an extreme minority, as Mr Verney-Elliott seems to be.

In any case, the responses are interesting. Calls for “banning” Mr. Verney-Elliott seem ridiculous. While admittedly not going quite this far, it’s almost as if other concert-goers are against having people in the audience who won’t reliably clap at the end, regardless of how they feel about the performance. That’s unfortunate. How often do bad performances receive bad ovations? Or no ovations? Or “booing”? Perhaps Mr. Verney-Elliott was at one end of the politeness-spectrum in this case but it seems to me that the vast majority of listeners are at the other of this spectrum where they aren’t even willing to tell a performer that they sucked. How can things improve in that atmosphere? Critics can pan performances but they’re not necessarily the voice of the people.

So maybe Mr. Verney-Elliott went too far, but I think it only appears to be an extreme actions because of the culture surrounding classical music performances. As one commenter stated, this heckler should maybe have been at a rock or jazz concert where such actions are acceptable. Therein lies the crux of why your average music lover is way more likely to do just that.

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So it goes.

Music | Posted by Josh
Oct 17 2011

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Here lies the last two hard drives I’ll need to finish recording a year of my life.

My roommate mentioned to me the other day how it didn’t seem like I had been doing this for almost a year. It hasn’t seemed like that long to me either; it’s behind just part of my routine. Wake up, change the batteries, download yesterday to my computer while I shower, transfer data from the computer to hard drives while I eat breakfast, format, record.

I think I’m gonna feel a bit naked when this recorder is no longer in my pocket; it’ll be like walking around without a cell phone. But all things must end I suppose and make way for new beginnings. In this case, the new beginning is facing what I’ve gotten myself into by trying to organize and convert 12 terabytes of sounds from the last year into music.

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Manga + laughter = …music?

Music, Science/Technology | Posted by Josh
Oct 09 2011

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It’s hard to tell which is more strangely humorous: this anime/manga image of a character laughing or the guy I recorded repeatedly laughing out loud on the bus while reading a manga. In any case, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself regardless of the fact that I had no idea what the joke was.

This got me thinking, what the hell makes laughter alone so funny? Maybe it’s just the situation that the laughter occurs in. This nerd was laughing in a public place, by himself, over something many people wouldn’t even admit to reading. That’s humorous to me. Then again, I know certain people who make anything that’s already funny ten times funnier with their laughter.

There must be some scientific literature on laughter that could shed some light on this, right? Bill Nye or some other “scientist” who’s supposed to be funny has probably done a whole series of experiments to decipher the effects of laughter. Nope. The science guy seems to have failed me. I did end up reading a bit about how you can seemingly understand someone’s emotional state by their voice even if you don’t know their language, though. (If you’re interested, see: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalizations, Sauter et al.; Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language, Pell et al.; Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures, Bryant, Barrett.)

In any case, I’m hoping that I can use laughter as a compositional device. If the rhythm is the culprit, I can use that maybe to create false expectations and then resolutions. Even if not, it will at least be highly useful for creating rhythms in general. Just think of how many crazy laughs I’ve recorded that can be turned into a frightening army of stupid.

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All Art is Theft: Theory of a Deadman vs Our Lady Peace

Music | Posted by Josh
Sep 22 2011

I listen to a lot of music. A lot of disparate music. And sometimes I come across similarities that I never would have expected. Then I get excited–a rare occurrence for me–and go hunting the interwebs to find out what the deal is. Some jackass with a blog out there must have noticed this as well, right? Nope. I’m almost always let down, left dejected and isolated. So I thought, “I could be that jackass with a blog!”

In the spirit of the idea, I’m stealing a tag that I linked to in another post about stealing music and art and all that jazz. This strikes me as an idea hard to argue with. Of course art is theft. Artists aren’t reinventing the wheel every time they create something; there’s always a certain amount of borrowing going on. With that in mind, I’ll say that I generally think accusations of musical plagiarism are ridiculous. What I’d really like to accomplish here is to have some random internet music nerd e-mail me with: “Hey I noticed that too! Yeah it probably means nothin’.” It’s the small things that count.

This is one that I’ve heard a bagillion times but only picked up on recently:

Yeah, that’s a terrible song. BUT, the guitar intro is markedly similar to the beginning of Our Lady Peace’s Superman’s Dead:

Both song start with a solo guitar strumming Bbm-Db-Ab, with the Our Lady Peace song adding a B to the end of the progression instead of sitting on the Ab for two bars. Both are in 4/4. The strum pattern for both is essentially the same. Even the beats per minute for both tunes is similar: ~84 for Theory of a Deadman and ~92 for Our Lady Peace. Both of these bands have even tuned their instruments down a half-step.

Of course, none of this is super-amazing. Theory of a Deadman may actually be familiar with Our Lady Peace but they could have just as easily picked up this stuff from any rock band from 1990 onward. It’s just a slight variation to a ii-V-I progression–probably the most used progression in western music ever–that replaces the V chord with a IV chord. Although, Our Lady Peace throws in that B which is not super-common. I can’t even explain where that comes from or why it works, theoretically, off the top of my head. It might be the IV/IV/IV, which doesn’t seem likely, or they’re simply modulating to F# when they play the Bbm and B–even though they never play the I chord in F#. This seems more likely as the song doesn’t have a clear tonal center to me; it seems fairly modal. Maybe that’s why I actually like this song also. They’re spicing it up a bit, throwing subtle curveballs and whatnot.

In any case, all the elements mentioned are pretty common in rock music. I think the thing that made my ears perk up a bit was the fact that they all came together at once.

If anyone has suggestions, feel free to send ‘em my way. I’d love to do these quick song analyses on a regular basis.

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