Tag: music

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Fringe just finished up their first season:

The concerts will look something like this: chamber music (classical music played by small groups of musicians) will be the focus of each evening, with performances of some of the most virtuosic music compositions ever written, performed by the best musicians in Atlanta and throughout the country. Unlike the iconic classical music experience of sitting, listening, yawning, and then leaving, each interactive performance will be a swift blend of live music performances, a DJ spinning ambient and electronica, documentary-style videos of the performers and finally, an independent, jury-selected short film.

Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe writes:

The most radical shift in all this is how Fringe empowers its audience. People applauded after every movement of a work, no one shushed the occasional whisperer, beer and wine helped take the edge off, and no one gave bathroom visits during the performance a second thought. Also, the music was available for free download the next morning.

In recent decades, when concert rites ossified and the repertoire rarely included music composed after the early 20th century, the performers, by default, held a dominant position. Among other complications, this led to passive audiences who sat quietly, applauded at prescribed times and knew their role as a paying support group for the folks up on stage. This is a bit of a generalization, but I think not so far off the mark.

Fringe’s casual scene means that it is incumbent on the musicians, moment by moment, to earn your rapt attention.

Those ideas came up a lot in my review of the excellent book Highbrow/Lowbrow. Great stuff. Makes me wish I’d heard of Fringe *before* the last concert of the season. Damn. [via alex ross]

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (review: 5/5)

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In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing “Yankee Doodle,” “Home Sweet Home,” Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. Orchestras would choose a few excerpts from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and mix them in with popular reels, jigs, and other dance tunes. It was a different world:

GRAND CONCERT OF MUSIC…
An African Monkey
and several
CHINESE DOGS
Come One Come All

I dog-eared Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America more heavily than any book in recent memory. Lawrence Levine doesn’t argue that the old ways of interacting with art were necessarily better. But it is important to know that it was different. The book gives a whole different history and perspective on our inherited rituals, kind of like hearing a whole new arrangement of a familiar melody.

Levine opens the book with a focus on Shakespeare in American cultural life. Shakespeare was really popular. At home, in books (like Mark Twain’s parodies in Huckleberry Finn), on the road, in the theaters. Even the illiterate mountain man Jim Bridger knew it was worth hiring someone to read it to him enough that he could recite long passages.

In performance, this popularity and relevance made it fairly common for the actors to shorten or lengthen the monologues as they saw fit, and companies would commonly rewrite the endings. In a typical account from a local newspaper, when the audience disapproved, “Cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreath of vegetables, a sack of flour and one of soot, and a dead goose, with other articles, simultaneously fell upon the stage.” What’s cool is not only that the audience was carrying vegetables to the show, but also that they knew Shakespeare well enough to know the difference when changes were made to voice their opinion. And audience and performers alike weren’t just mutely receiving the Greatness of Shakespeare, but participating and engaging with it.

Events like the Astor Place Riot in 1849 helped mark the growing division between the audiences for art (the Cultured and the Masses), and the “sacralization” of the works themselves. A lot of it was tied to the economics of the art industry. Amateur actors and musicians were gradually replaced with professional payrolls. Wealthy patrons became the primary financial support for the organizations, so the programming was less reliant on popular approval and ticket sales at the door. With the Masses weeded out, the new superstar conductors began to program entire works, instead of just excerpts.

And along with that came programs of behavioral control (dimming the lights, refusal to encore, training audiences in when to clap, etc.). Levine ties in “the taming of the audience” to a broader cultural change that separated public and private space, and public and private behavior. As art became more hierarchical, the classes weren’t attending the same types of performances or sharing the same spaces. The cultural institutions were active in “teaching their audiences to adjust to the new social imperatives, in urging them to separate public behavior from private feelings.” By the early 1900s,

the masterworks of the classic composers were to be performed in their entirety by highly trained musicians on programs free from the contamination of lesser works or lesser genres, free from the interference of audience or performer, free from the distractions of the mundane; audiences were to approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment was the goal.

In other words, it changed to the modern, frosty atmosphere that lingers in performance halls and museums today. No more audience outrage, no more spontaneous celebrations. The groups were transformed “strove to concentrate on the music rather than the performance.” The orchestra plays, the audience receives. You see a similar transformation in museums and libraries at the same time. They change from the fantastic freak shows and cabinets of curiosity to sacred archives, filled with carefully curated items for preservation or quiet contemplation.

One really interesting bit that Levine touches on is how knowledge of these cultural manners (like knowing when to clap) helps classes distinguish themselves. In this way, knowledge becomes both a status symbol and a barrier to entry:

Thorsten Veblen constructed his concept of conspicuous consumption, he included not only the obvious material possessions but also the “immaterial” goods—“the knowledge of dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music… of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture, and equipage”; of the ancient “classics”—all of which constituted a conspicuous culture that helped confer legitimacy on the newly emergent groups. This helps explain the vogue during this period of manuals of etiquette, of private libraries and rare books, of European art and music displayed and performed in ornate—often neoclassical—museums and concert halls.

It’s a really fantastic book. Levine to close it out:

When the art forms that had constituted a shared culture for much of the nineteenth century became less accessible to large segments of the American people, millions of them satisfied their aesthetic cravings through a number of the new forms of expressive culture that were barred from high culture by the the very fact of their accessibility to the masses: the blues, jazz or jazz-derived music, musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, radio, popular comedians, all of which though relegated to the nether world culturally, in fact frequently contained much that was fresh, exciting, innovative, intellectually challenging, and highly imaginative. If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.

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David Byrne has a new art installation that connects an organ keyboard to various parts of a large building. Playing the Building makes a giant musical instrument out of the structure of columns, walls, pipes:

I’d like to say that in a small way it turns consumers into creative producers, but that might be a bit too much to claim. However, even if one doesn’t play the thing, it points toward a less mediated kind of cultural experience. It might be an experience in which one begins to reexamine one’s surroundings and to realize that culture‚Äîof which sound and music are parts‚Äîdoesn’t always have to be produced by professionals and packaged in a consumable form.

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Alex Ross writes about the life and music of John Luther Adams.

Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range.

Adams says, “I remember thinking, To hell with classical music. I’m going into the art world; I’m going to do installations. But I was really just interested in working with new media. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The work has a life of its own, and I’m just along for the ride. Richard Serra talks about the point at which all your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work.”

One of Adams’ experimental works is a room that generates the music based on external happenings.

The mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

‚ÄúThe Place‚Äù occupies a small white-walled room on the museum‚Äôs second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series‚Äîthe rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string‚Äîand have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.

I’d love to check that out.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

The Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song were written in response to survey results, just like the earlier creation of the world’s Most Wanted Paintings. The Most Unwanted Song features an operatic, rapping soprano and children singing a holiday polka:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance‚Äîsomeone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example‚Äîfewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.

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John Mark Harris arranged a piece for piano by Iannis Xenakis to make it, y’know, playable by a human. You can see and hear the graph for Evryali.
Harris comments:

The title refers to the “Medusa, with head of writing snakes”, as well as “the open sea”. Both allusions have clear meanings upon hearing the piece…

Evryali was composed without regard to the limitations of the human anatomy, as the branching often expands beyond the range of two human hands. In more than one instance, the branching has caused bushed to appear at the extreme right and left of the keyboard, yet there are also bushes in the center of the piano. The performer must obviously edit the score. The graph I made became a tool for determining what I would leave out…

The music that remains, after editing, is anatomically possible. Yet the performer is left with an undertaking that can not be thought of as reasonable. The relentless repetitive motions, wide leaps, and awkward streams of chords directly challenge the pianist’s need for fluid fingers and free arms. The pianist runs the risk of gazing into Medusa and freezing solid. Brute force and physical endurance are not enough to solve the difficulty. Only through the same imagination that one finds the music “possible” can one find the answer to its realization.

As one can never view Medusa directly, without cheating in the manner of Perseus, one can never hear the piece performed exactly as composed. The audience is not granted a true image of Evryali, but must, like Perseus, experience only a reflection of the monstrosity.

Further commentary from Marc Couroux:

Evryali is not virtuosic, nor is it anti-virtuosic. It is highly unlikely that this state could have come about as a result of the composer’s insufficient command of pianistic technique. The gauntlet is so clearly thrown down that the difficulties cannot be anything other than premeditated… The fact that one cannot physically realize the totality of Evryali makes it seem unnecessarily utopian. The task of any performer is to strive, regardless of difficulty, to achieve every detail and to project them into a broader context.

[via phil harnish]

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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]

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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.

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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 piece‚Äîthe 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.

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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, I‚Äôve 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.

(What I learned about craftsmanship in) The Violin Maker (review: 4/5)

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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.”