Bill Withers explains the origin of “Ain’t No Sunshine”:
Women can say stuff like, “I loved him, I really, really loved him. But he just left. Why’d he leave like that?”
Men, given the same situation, usually say something like, “I’m glad the old jive broad split, man,” knowing all the time that it’s really killing them inside.
The drummer is probably having too much fun. The guy on bass is like, “I’m not getting up.” [via megfowler on twitter]
Live performance in the age of supercomputing, a good essay on the past & present of electronic music, and how we make it happen:
The more operations that a computer in the bedroom studio was able to carry out, the more complex the musical output could be, and the less possible it was to re-create the results live. A straight techno piece made with an Roland TR-808 and some effects and synth washes can be performed as an endlessly varying track for hours. A mid 90s drum&bass track, with all its timestretches, sampling tricks and carefully engineered and well-composed breaks is much harder to produce live, and marks pretty much the end of real live performance in most cases. To reproduce such a complex work one needs a lot of players, unless most parts are pre-recorded. As a result, most live performances became more tape concert-like again, with whole pieces played back triggered by one mouse click and the performer watching the computer doing the work…
Fame puts the performer on stage, away from the audience. Miniaturisation puts the orchestra inside the laptop. Fame plus miniaturisation works very effectively as a performance killer.
Chigurh vs. Plainview. I like Javier Bardem’s comments about letting go of the backstory for his role:
Maybe the character’s mother didn’t feed him when he was 5 years old, or something like that…. I started to do that [imagining a “backstory” for Chigurh], but then I realized… in this case, it would be much more helpful if I didn’t know where he was coming from. The challenge was to embrace a symbolic idea and give it human behavior. It wasn’t about how his mother didn’t feed him.
That reminds me of Rebecca Mead writing on Nico Muhly’s recent comments about new music in last week’s New Yorker:
He devises an emotional scheme for the pieceÄîthe journey on which he intends to lead his listener. Muhly believes that some composers of new music rely too heavily on program notes to give their work a coherence that it might lack in the actual listening. “This stupid conceptual stuff where it’s like, ‘I was really inspired by like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis.'”
You can lose a lot of creative punch when trying to over-think and over-explain the roots. Embrace an idea and give it behavior. See if it sticks. I like that a lot.
A couple years ago, Alex Ross rounded up some literature on applause during concerts:
Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would now be seen as wildly inappropriate applause.
Blame for the move to silence eventually falls on the conductors, beginning especially with Leopold Stokowski:
To refrain from applause heightens focus on the personality of the conductor. Silence is the measure of the unbreakable spell that Maestro is supposedly casting on us. A big ovation at the end salutes his mastery of the architecture of the work, or whatever… By the way, IÄôve noticed a new trend ÄîThoughtful Celebrity Conductors holding their arms motionless for ten or fifteen seconds after the end of some vast construction by Bruckner or Mahler. ÄúDo not yet applaud!Äù those frozen arms say. ÄúDo not profane the moment!Äù
He goes on further to touch on the influence of recording technology on the individual & concert listening experience, the rise of classical performance as a high-brow cultural event, and the communal aspect of concert attendance.
Stradivarius: legendary quality, mystery. It’s upper-crust and exotic. How did Stradivari make such wonderful instruments? What sort of alchemy was involved, and why haven’t we solved it yet? John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop talks about the mysteries and realities of violin-making. His book follows the work of violin maker Sam Zygmuntowicz as he works on a violin for Gene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet.
There’s a good bit about the history of violin making, and the experience of playing and hearing a fine instrument, but the bulk of the book is about Edward Heron-Allen‘s challenge: “Given: A log of wood. Make a violin.”
It’s those bits about craftsmanship really got my attention. For all the magic and mythology about great violins, it boils down pretty easily. Zygmuntowicz:
It’s a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven’t changed, and therefore the results haven’t changed and therefore it’s a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It’s not arcane knowledge; it’s something any guy can learn—if you spend thirty years doing it.
You could probably say the same for writing, drawing, sculpting, cooking, building relationships, any number of things. The not-so-secret is good old-fashioned hard work, deliberate attention. If only there were shortcuts! In one passage Marchese talks about a day with Zygmuntowicz near the end of the violin making process:
I spent a whole afternoon watching him work on the final thickness graduation of the violin top with a scraper that removed wood not in pieces, not even in shavings, but in grains. He’d weighed the piece before he started, scraped and scraped for several hours and weighed it again when he was finished. The sum difference in his day’s work was three grams.
Three grams! For reference, 3 grams, give or take a few tenths, is about the weight of a U.S. penny. Metaphorically speaking, I don’t know that I’ve ever paid 3 grams/day worth of attention to any one thing. But the heart of craftsmanship is right there in the attention to detail. Quoting Zygmuntowicz again:
If there’s anything I can measure, I measure it, on the theory that it will become interesting in later years. I’ll make some varnish notes, and some evaluations of the sound, and if I can I’ll follow up and see how the sound might have changed over time… Some guys take two measurements and that’s it. I think I’m kind of a maniac.
It’s a work technique. Not a particularly efficient one, but we’re not judged on high efficiency—which is a very good thing. I wouldn’t survive, or I’d certainly have to alter my work style, if I had to be more efficient.
But it’s all part of a process of becoming—I don’t know what you call it—I guess a more subtle worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less.
Another spot I loved was Marchese quoting Sir James Beament discussing rare, expensive violins versus work-a-day models: “They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will… Audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players.”
I went to a photography lecture a couple weeks ago, and in the Q&A session were the inevitable questions about gear. What camera? What lense? What film? What paper? There’s no shame in wanting to use better equipment so you can work better, but it’s dangerous to give in to the lazy thought that equipment trumps the process of attentive labor and the work ethic that drives it (rolls of film shot, hours in the studio, drafts revised, face-time with customers).
Lastly, I liked Zygmuntowicz’ comments on how originality and style develop over time: “When people talk about personal style a lot of what they’re talking about is slipping away from the original—people were trying to do it just like the original but they didn’t.”
Alex Ross writes about Johnny Greenwood’s soundtrack for There Will Be Blood. STILL haven’t seen the movie. Need to fix that this weekend.
This page has some awesome ideas on taming iTunes for classical music. I don’t think I need to go quite so granular with the tagging, but the article nails one issue right off the bat: the Gracenote CDDB is a HUGE thorn in the side when it comes to classical works.
When Bela Fleck gets an idea for a song that he can’t develop completely at the time, he calls himself and leaves a voice mail.
On January 28 is Unseen Forces: Electronic Music by Atlanta Composers at Eyedrum, presented by the Atlanta Composers Group. Here’s the program.
Paul Festa left a comment that his film, Apparition of the Eternal Church (trailer), will be playing in Athens, Georgia on January 30, and showing across the south in the following week. I’ve got it on my calendar.
My top artists for 2007, according to last.fm. Not the most representative collection, because the long tail of my listening habits is, well, really long. But aside from a few surprises, it’s pretty fair. One thing that’s not a surprise: I am decidedly out-of-date. I think only a few of these folks came out with an album this year. And a lot of them are dead. I almost never know what’s going on in the music world, but I’m okay with that.
On with the list…
Jeff Buckley – No surprise here. Pretty sure I’ve got more of his music than any other person in my collection.
King Crimson – Big surge in the second half of the year. In the Court of the Crimson King quickly became one of my favorite albums, ever. And Beat is a lot of fun.
Pink Floyd – Old standby.
DJ Ti?´sto – This was a bit of a surprise, but In Search of Sunrise has gotten a lot of play. Like today, for example.
Claude Debussy – Heavy play of the Nocturnes and Children’s Corner.
Dave Brubeck – Didn’t expect him so high, but he got featured in a couple of playlists.
Radiohead – No surprise.
Jean Sibelius – Huge surge this winter, after reading The Rest Is Noise.
Philip Glass – I went on a Glass-collecting spree this fall. Still have something of love/hate relationship with his music.
Feist – We had a good year together, except for when she released an album when I was out hiking for a couple months.
Sergei Rachmaninoff – Pretty balanced play from an old favorite, across the spectrum of symphonies, concertos, choral works and chamber stuff.
Madonna – Never really listened to her until this year. Big fan.
Bela Fleck & the Flecktones – Another surprise here. Didn’t think I was listening to them so much, but I got addicted to “Big Country” for a while.
Pat Metheny – Probably would have ranked higher if last.fm kept track of all the play on road trips.
Henry Purcell – I sat through Dido & Aeneas a bunch of times so I could hear the final aria and chorus in context.
Johnny Cash – A good bit of the older stuff, but especially American IV.
Duran Duran – Rio, mostly. Especially “New Religion“.
Daft Punk – Eh. Need to play this less, I think.
Al Jarreau – Mostly the live album, Look to the Rainbow.
Carly Simon – Almost all from Anticipation.
Erik Satie – Almost exclusively due to the Gymnopedies.
April March – For some reason, the fact that she’s over 40 really boggles me.
Will Scruggs – A good friend and brilliant jazz saxophonist.
Joanna Newsom – Surprised she wasn’t higher on my list. Probably would be if her songs weren’t so epic and awesome. Still feel like an idiot for not going to her Atlanta show this past November.
Machito – The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite got into a couple playlists.
“I don’t know how anyone can try to be universal. The way you really do it is to take care in your own work, do the best job you can, be as truthful as possible about the things right under your nose.” –Steve Reich
This Saturday in Atlanta, The Happenstance at The Earl: “We select 30 musicians, make them meet us early in the morning at a local rock club, randomly divide them into 5 piece bands, and send them off to create a 20 minute set of music which they will perform that evening.”
Geometry of Circles is a series of animated shorts that appeared on Sesame street in the late 1970s, with music by Philip Glass. Someone put together four of the Geometry of Circles videos for your enjoyment on YouTube. [via lined & unlined]
Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.” Though Ross doesn’t say it outright, that also applies to crowds of composers.
Much of his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, is spent wrestling with the idea of the push and pull of the crowd and the “split between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.” There’s that clever insinuation in the title. Though the book brings up a lot of music, yes, but it’s also about listening to the era, the shifting alliances and rivalries among composers, the feedback loop of popular culture, ethnicity, politics, war.
And the buildup to and endurance of wartime dominates the much of the book. His description of the Teens and Twenties has some eerie parallels with today:
For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning. Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio. Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age, without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in shining armor who would come to their aid.
Two recurring characters appear in the first half of the book. The first is Thomas Mann‘s book Doctor Faustus, about a composer who makes a bargain with the devil and whose fictional music owes a lot to the real music of Arnold Schoenberg. The second is the opera Salome by Richard Strauss, a scandalous early 20th-century opera. Opera comes up quite often. It’s easier to talk about the music with an explicit emotional narrative. Ross can let the libretto tell the story rather than relying exclusively on musical description or intuition. There are also long treatments of the operas Wozzeck, The Threepenny Opera, Peter Grimes, and Nixon in China.
It makes sense to talk about the big works, the standbys, the headlines. I don’t think he meant to create a comprehensive book, so of course there are some unfortunate absences. Ross mentioned that he regrets he could have spent more time writing about “conservative” composers. Rachmaninov, for example, only gets a few mentions. Though he’s a modern-day orchestral standby (and one of my personal favorites), he didn’t shake things up enough to make it to the book. Carl Nielsen and a bunch of the British also get passed over. Nonetheless, the depth and breadth of research that went into the book is consistently amazing, in part because it flows so well. I don’t think I’ve read non-fiction this enjoyable in a couple years.
Be sure to stop by his website. Ross has audiofiles for The Rest Is Noise on his website, as well as a video introduction. If you’re looking for a great sample, there’s an excerpt from the chapter on Sibelius.
Man, The Rest Is Noise was a great book. Review coming soon-ish, after I go through all my dog-ears.
I, too, wonder why famous musicians don’t put out as much music. “I’d feel a bit cheated if they couldn’t put together more than three or four decent new tunes a year. These people are musicians, this is their job. In the mid-’60s, Bob Dylan was probably putting down three or four great new songs before lunch some days.”
A couple weeks ago, NPR hosted an awful interview with Sigur Ros. Incredibly painful to watch. They recently followed up, bringing in music writer Jancee Dunn to help with a director’s commentary to find out where all the suckage came from.
Brian Sacawa on playing unfettered, taking classical music out of the grand halls and into alternative venues. A lot of the talk focuses on music groups reaching new audiences, but like he says, it can be great for the performers, too. It’s liberating.
Mark Larson 