3:25 AM
And my CD player started working again the other day. I didn't do
anything special to it, aside from not using it for a long time.
I will not be surprised when it stops again. I am trying to pick
CDs I will happily play on repeat forever so as to prolong the
inevitable time when I switch discs and the player won't load
anything again.
Current favorite for such things: Goldfrapp, about which more later.
2:23 AM
Just so you know, Outkast's Aquemini is one of my favorite
albums now.
I mean a specific thing by that. I don't have a list somewhere where
I've just added something and possibly removed something else,
shuffled the order, nothing that formal. If I were to make a list,
though, I would try to put it up near the top, and it would be one of
the albums I (hopefully) remembered before I had to go stare at my
CDs to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything. In this respect it
joins music by Low, Miles, Coltrane, Massive Attack, Spiritualized,
the Dismemberment Plan, and others.
I also mean that now for whatever reason I feel like it's not just
that I've been temporarily wowed by the CD, as I was shortly after
buying it last fall. I would normally wait something out this way,
but especially in the case of a relatively new (to me) genre like rap
where everything seems less sure to me. Or, where initially everything
seemed less sure to me, because I haven't really felt disoriented, as
it were, for a long time.
It's still too long - it feels like it takes an hour just to get to
"Da Art of Storytellin" (maybe it does), half an hour just to get to
"Aquemini". I also trail off a bit near the end, in terms of loving individual
songs and just being more familiar with them, because I get to that
part of the album less often (also maybe I just don't like the last
song as much - would've preferred that the album end with "Liberation").
But also maybe just because it has a whole two songs that I like
noticeably less than their neighbors - "Y'All Scared" and "Chonkyfire"
(despite not really, really liking "Mamacita," for some reason I
don't mind it the same way). But this is a very minor flaw, as much
as I like every other track and as much as it all manages to stick together
despite the length (like, "interstitial track" stuff for all of
the first-side (second-side too, on the multi-disc vinyl?) tracks,
and it's still not too much).
If they would make an album with horn arrangements on every track I
would weep with joy. Also if they made a 45-minute album. But I'm not
an everything-has-to-be-perfect-for-it-to-be-a-favorite kind of guy
anyway.
July 03, 2001
3:49 PM
I've been listening to a lot of public
radio since my home CD player broke, and although I've been happy
to hear some of its programming there's been a significant part of it
that's
disappointed me. I don't remember hearing so many sponsors' messages
(i.e. commercials, but for supermegacorps and read by tasteful announcers,
not commercials like on commercial radio - loud, crass, tasteless, advertising
things normal people can buy) in the past when listening to NPR. Now
I hear enough of them that I'm disgusted, not the least because these
are blatant messages from corporations looking to improve their
image by appearing to support "culture." It's no wonder that all the
big stories I hear on All Things Considered are about disputes between
capitalists, government officials, and environmentalists about the
intended opening-up of preserved or conserved areas for oil drilling
and the like. Those are visible stories, and ones that people can
feel informed by listening to - maybe it makes them feel more liberal
and enlightened, providing a distraction from the fundamental conservatism
of the programming on most public radio stations. I've heard better
news on 15 minutes of
Counterspin, despite its problems.
The "culture" is the part of it that's always bothered me - a similar
thing goes for public television. The programming is safe to a fault.
Classical music - not too dissonant, always "light" enough. (Overnight
programming is especially safe.) Non-classical music is usually jazz,
always "tasteful." Some stations play other music. World music is
popular - oh, look how enlightened we are, enjoying the simple, authentic
native melodies of the land of [people who make western-enough music,
like the Irish, or something]. I believe a station in eastern Iowa plays
more popular music - from what I know it's the kind of thing you'd
expect well-behaved, well-to-do grownups to listen to. Self-congratulatory
"culture" which serves as a mark of class for the audience. The same
goes for the non-musical programming: "clever" quiz shows, James Thurber
stories, and on our AM station here, a chance for the university president
to talk to the "public" (uh... the old people that sit at home listening
to AM talk radio to call in and ask the guy how he's going to spend
their money, or something, or if those protesters on campus they read
about in the newspaper are really a problem).
The author of the Salon article above is aware of the problem but I'm
not so sure I'd want his ideal station as a replacement (it would probably
be better, though). Oh no! Rock music reviews, on public radio!
If public radio is supposed to be for the public good, instead of just
a big joke that the corporate world and the high-end bourgeoisie take part in,
reactionary hiding behind the western canon isn't the answer. The ideal
(my ideal) public radio station would play Outkast, Mozart, Berg, Cash,
Jaxx, Coltrane, Waitresses, Diddley, Dre, Duke... you get the point.
Not just stuff I like, either.
The ideal public radio station wouldn't be able to handle it all,
there'd have to be multiple stations in every area. The ideal public
radio station, if it were to start up tomorrow in my town, would probably
have almost no listeners over the course of the day - people wouldn't be
able to put up with the guerrilla cultural diversity. But public radio
isn't about that kind of celebration of (all) human culture - neither are
the public or the government. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that's
supposed to make it something to be done for the public's own good?
(I got the Salon link from Badger.)
3:45 AM
Artists who I have heard tracks by that I enjoyed lately: Armand
van Helden, Slam, Basement Jaxx.
If you are Tim Finney you may now be quitely amazed and pleased.
And yes, I am thinking about why Protection is my favorite
Massive Attack album, Tim, but it will take me a while.
3:30 AM
I'm resistant to this idea of "filler" on
records. It's related (but maybe only because I'm saying so right
now) to an idea that lots of logical positivists (and indeed plenty
of philosophers before their time, like Kant) held to and that
Wittgenstein worked against, the idea of "compositionality" -
that the meaning of a sentence was solely a matter of its
structure and the meanings of the terms involved. The parallel
for records and music criticism, then, is that the goodness of
a record is solely a matter of how many "good" songs it has on
it, and whether they're sequenced (structured) the right way.
I want to assert, counter to that, that a record isn't necessarily
made better by removing or ignoring the songs that don't hold up
as well, qua song, to the better ones on the record. Those pieces
of music have their own place, they change the character of the
record. On Amnesiac they poison the relatively greater
(compared to Kid A) level of normality, for one thing.
(Or sweeten it, if you will.)
And I like "Pulk/Pull" and "Hunting Bears," dammit.
Not that this should reflect on those two songs, but things I
also like: presence of "boring" parts in books and films.
3:20 AM
DJ Premier's samples for Gangstarr have a kind of shimmering quality
to them.
Surely someone has already written academically (probably badly,
sadly) about rap music and sampling in light of Walter Benjamin's
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and its
ideas about the "aura" of an art work.
3:17 AM
I'm very pleased to see that the increasingly personal tone Mark's
reviews have taken will now find expression in a new
column at Pitchfork. I hope he continues it (whatever happened to
Brent Sirota's, anyway?) for some time to come.
2:25 AM
"Most musicians today laugh when asked 'How much of that is improvised?'
I think that what's funny to them is that the distinction between
composition and improvisation is so blurred that the question itself
points out the absurdity of trying to sort them out."
That's Dave Douglas, in the liner notes to his 2000 record A Thousand
Evenings, which I listened to again the other day. I thought of the
quote because I was struck by how much the style of the music on the
record obscured the seams between the composed music and the improvised
music. It's enough an amalgam of "classical" chamber music, "new
music" (as in, the kind with improvisation), jazz, and ethnic genres
(some not-always-clear drawing from eastern Europe and the mideast),
that it's not really appropriate, or maybe even possible (within the limits
imposed by everything else going into the mix, and the guiding requirement
of some kind of unity of the disparate influences), to have clearly
marked-off "improvisation" sections. There are comparisons to be drawn
to lots of different styles and genres. Bebop, in contrast, seems to
be fairly definite about where some (not all) of its improvisation
comes - during the solo sections, often structurally situated sequentially
between the beginning and ending melody statements. But Dixieland jazz,
or free jazz, in many cases, involve a sort of constant interveaving
of composed and improvised playing (it gets a little hard to make
the distinctions, as in Douglas' quote). I suspect klezmer, for example,
falls into that latter group in some way, too, but I don't know enough
about it to really say.
Interestingly, I recall Wynton Marsalis making somewhat related statements
when talking up his big push of Armstrong's music (and prior music) -
he said something about how he wanted to promote more composition in
jazz, and ensemble playing, which wasn't all that unnatural anyway,
since there wasn't such an emphasis on solo improvisation before bebop.
There was something to that, but of course I don't like the conservatory
attitude he was justifying with it. The main difference is probably that
by working with such established music, Marsalis draws a very different
reaction from listeners (rightly so? perhaps, perhaps not). There are
more stable expectations about the role improvisation will play in
faux-20s jazz.
Listener expectations are what make this question of composed-or-improvised
more than esoteric. Knowing when you're hearing improvisation helps
you to form your responses to what you hear. There are different standards
for improvisation. (I'm not going to expand on that right now, except
to say that it's not a simple matter of improvisation being "spontaneous
composition," and thus getting slack for not having as much time to
work out what's being composed.) Or, I might say, because of the kinds
of music featuring improvisation that have been instrumental in forming
out ideas about improvisation in the west, we apply different standards
to improvisation, or at least are sometimes expected to (it's still quite
possible to sit down and listen to e.g. a jazz record, "just" as music,
without a care where it came from). So a record like A Thousand
Evenings challenges that by using improvisation to provide things
for the music that are perhaps harder or not possible with through-composed
music, while simultaneously pushing the listener into responding to
the whole range of music in much the same way, without the typical
improvised-music cues.
Some of these thoughts were strengthened upon listening to Uri Caine's
Mahler in Toblach record last night while I was filling dead
air time at KURE. While lots of the songs on that record change
moods or styles multiple times, there are a couple that have substantial
bop "blowing" sections. As soon as those sections kick in, I feel like
I know much better what's going on, my reponses are more definite.
Part of this may be the bop, separate from the convention of having
one soloist up front - it's hard to tell. I say that because certain
other sections that are in significant ways "straight" also affect me
more - the klezzed-up funeral march from the fifth symphony,
or the similar music that opens disc two, from the third movement of
the "Titan." There's clearly improvisation going on all over the disc,
but it's more muddled. During the bop sections I feel I can listen to
the solo, and say, yeah, man, listen to him blow, and talk about the
solo like I would one from most any jazz record from the fifties or
sixties. During the other sections, sometimes I'm left responding
to something that I have broader categories for - "music". (It would
help if I knew what all the "proper" performances of the original
compositions sounded like, because that would give me at least one
thing to reference for each track.)
July 01, 2001
10:57 PM
Some of the more interesting things at that site (below), then, are quotes
from composers and such, because the composers tend to approach their
music at something between the purely formal level and the level listeners
tend to come from. Penderecki's
comment about how his music wouldn't work when written in bars (as
in, time is measured according to some standard - a quarter note
will be this fast - and then the music is written out in divisions
time according to that standard, with the instructions to the musicians
taking the form of certain pitches to be made at certain times, for
certain durations) speaks to a number of things.
Aside from the aleatory aspects, he could probably write the music
in standard western notation. But to do so would probably make it
prohibitively difficult to play, when instead it can be written
in some simpler form which the players can be made to understand.
So in part this is just ("just") a pragmatic consideration.
More importantly, though, the system of western musical notation
is made for writing the sort of music that is written with it. It is
adapted to suit a specific task, or range of tasks. It's popular to
view music as a "language," and if you do so and you're inclined to
think of western art music as "music," period, I can see how the
idea that music should be able to be written in western notation
would be tenable. But western notation is quite inadequate by itself
to represent (and make available for reperformance) an enormous range
of music. Even fairly straightforward jazz, with western music a distant
relative, can't be captured in vanilla western notation. The notation
allows for ways to show syncopation, for example, but if you played
"Take the A Train" as marked up that way, it would sound awful - "swing"
is more subtle than that. This isn't simply a matter of the musician
having to bring some "interpretation" to the performance, which one
might want to parallel to the case of someone playing a Bach fugue:
if the musician plays the Bach fugue "straight" it might sound a little
rote, but it would probably be judged as much more appropriate a
rendition of the composition than a similar performance of a
syncopation-marked Ellington tune.
The problem that notation presents Penderecki with is far more unavoidable -
even if western notation can't totally accurately capture jazz, it's still
widely used to give a good approximation (though note, before the 40s or
so, perhaps, the number of working jazz musicians who couldn't read music).
Working outside of the barline conventions is crucial to creating Penderecki's
blocks of sound - which are what give his music such presence in the sound
field. Rather than sounding like, as in a Beethoven symphony, sounds
reproducing or representing notes (chords, etc.) on paper, the orchestra
in Penderecki's music sounds like... sounds. Masses of it. I'm overemphasizing,
slightly, because this isn't always the case. There are, for instance,
plenty of note-sounds to be found. But especially when the instruments
combine, the result is less like "the string section playing a G minor
chord behind the theme played by the flutes and complemented by an
inversion of the theme played by the clarinets," which I think has an
effect of reducing the power of the orchestra, down to simply something
that thickens out, or fills in, what we could imagine to be the same
music, the core of it, played by four or five people. No - in Penderecki's
music, at its most thrilling, you need all that sound, it can't be
explained solely as some way of orchestrating a more basic structure.
This is why, I think, Penderecki is viewed (or so say the liner notes
to EMI 7243 5 65077 2 2) with scepticism by the musical establishment,
or just scoffed at (by my pre-Romantic-era fetishizing acquaintance Bob).
He's engaged in something similar to what earned a lot of free jazz
musicians uncomprehending listeners, or more extremely, denouncing
critics - music which is just too damn different to be explained in
terms of conservative extensions (in the sense that they preserve some
substantial part) of what came before, of the tradition. Listening,
you can't really say "oh, he's got some nice tunes" with a straight
face, although he has his surprisingly lyrical moments. You're confronted
with screeching, whining violins, huge masses of sound shifting about
in glorious ways on your headphones, nattering, hissing choristers,
and either a) responses that you don't know how to describe with your
usual emotional vocabulary, or b) surprise, a sense of menace, fear,
because of Penderecki's preference for what we would usually expect
to find in a horror movie score, rather than in a concert hall - emotional
material at "dark" extremes. For (b) I have to fight the urge not to
dismiss some of the feelings I get (and by extension, the music that
prompts them) as schlocky sub-expressionist manipulation. But then
I've had to fight similar feelings when Mozart's sweetness struck me
the wrong way, or when Rachmaninov never failed to evoke saccharine
old film scores for me. So I can't really let (b) dissuade me, I have
to work against it to know that I'm giving the music its due. Something
similar goes for (a), though by now I am too used to being amazed by
the capacities music has for presenting me with these kinds of unlabeled,
hard-to-categorize responses that I would hopefully never allow laziness
or the overrule of preconceived ideas about what music can do to prevent
me from appreciating the value in this music.
10:56 PM
This page
for a course on twentieth century western art music collects a number of
useful factoids, although since it's designed, apparently, to supplement
class lectures and readings it tends to do little more than provide some
formal information about different composers' music (Penderecki used
sound-masses, Part's third period makes use of "tintinabulation," etc.).
to June 2001
kortbein@iastate.edu