A couple thoughts that I couldn’t work into the earlier post:
–You may think I’m being melodramatic, but look at the face of Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad and The Queen) when he talks about Glee:
–I don’t buy for a second that music being featured on Glee is good for musicians because it exposes people to their music (at least when talking about Glee covers released commercially. If the music stayed on the show, I probably wouldn’t have anything to say). I’m not saying that the original song artists are being exploited financially (although some of them probably are, as I would imagine that only the credited songwriters are paid), I’m saying that its dirty money.
–Interestingly, that same conversation happened about the legitimacy of samples in hip-hop. I think a continuum from good sampling and bad sampling has emerged: Kanye West (just as an example) sampling “21st Century Schizoid Man” in “POWER” is brilliant, while Kanye West lifting “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” wholesale in “Stronger” is lazy. Of course, that was a hit too, so maybe we’re just fucked.
–If anyone wanted to know why could never in any way get on board with Greg Sandow’s idea that the classical music should look to Glee to see how can it can become culturally relevant again, that was it.
–It’s really strange to me that we have a force on the music charts that is such a cipher. Look at the other top 10 artists I mentioned in the first section, all of which have their own flavor completely different from each other. And all of them were tremendously influential–you could probably find a direct musical descendant of each of them on the top 100 list I liked to. How could Glee possibly be influential? The sound of their music seems to have no connection to the popularity of their music, it’s simply an expression of a marketing machine. In other words, no musician would ever want to copy their sound (they don’t have one) or their song strategies (they don’t have one), and if they did, there’s no way they would succeed anyway. It’s like a weird backwards culture where Kidz Bop was the number 1 recording artist of all time.
–I spontaneously made the Kidz Bop/Glee comparison, but a quick Google search shows me that I’m not the first. It should be a bigger part of the conversation. As much as I hate the use of music to signal social status and identity, if I could shame people into not buying Glee music, I would.
In the category of computer-aided statistics micronews*, the Official Charts Company (which sounds like a fake name) has stated that the Glee cast has broken Elvis Presley’s record for fastest act to score 20 top 40 hits. That particular “record” may or may not mean anything to you, but it’s undeniable that Glee singles are, to use Joe Biden’s charming turn of phrase, a big fucking deal. After all, look who (with the Glee cast and Elvis) rounds out the top 10 list of most entries in the top 40 charts: James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, Fats Domino, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and FRANK MOTHERFUCKIN’ SINATRA**.
I think Glee is pretty mediocre as a television show, but that it’s popular doesn’t make me depressed about the future of television. In fact, it even works for me on occasion, like when it nods to the past by recreating a famous TV moment, or when it tweaks conventional gender roles, or when the combination of music and choreography is so well executed you can’t help but be entertained. But Glee‘s supremacy on the pop charts deeply depresses me, and to understand why, we have to take a detour through some pop music theory.
*It’s kind of like sports: if you have enough statistics kept over a long enough period of time, you’re likely to find two or three “records” being broken in any given game, which is why it’s sometimes hard not to laugh at the bullshit the commentators are slinging.
**Although the piano is usually peripheral to pop music, it’s interesting to see how many keyboardists are on this list. Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Elton John and Stevie Wonder often use piano as their primary instruments, everybody knows that Paul McCartney loves his ebony and ivory, and not as many people know that Aretha Franklin is a wonderful gospel pianist.
2. painting with sound
In 1979, Brian Eno gave a lecture titled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at a conference sponsored by the New Music America Festival, which was subsequently published in Downbeat. In it, he addresses the musical implications of multitrack recording, a technology that was relatively new (Earlier music studios were limited to 4- or 8-track recording. Eno is talking about 32 & 64 track machines; the virtually unlimited tracks that come with today’s computer technology was a couple decades in the future.) Eno:
The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something’s on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren’t. It’s hard to do anything very interesting with a disc – all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can’t actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.
…
In a compositional sense this takes the making of music away from any traditional way that composers worked, as far as I’m concerned, and one becomes empirical in a way that the classical composer never was. You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound – you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter – he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.
Eno makes many points in this lecture, but what I want to focus on is the idea that pop music has a specificity that’s different from classical music, or from folk music. Every musical tradition has a loose set of values that define what music is*. For classical music, you might say that the music is defined by the written score, or the composers intention. The defining characteristic for a folk song might be anything from a set of chords to the words of a refrain.
One of the strengths of recorded pop music** is that it is so sonically specific–the sounds that make it on the record define the song. Minute adjustments to the tone of individual instruments, carefully tailored studio effects, all of these details make up the identity of the song.
*Keep in mind that I definitely don’t want to say that these values are universally accepted, or that there aren’t exceptions.
**To distinguish from live music, which is a whole different beast. If it weren’t then there would never be any bands who are great live but have shitty albums, or vice versa.
3. a case study
The very first time I remember becoming completely enchanted with a detail in a pop song was listening to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover.”
Many of my early music memories consist of listening to KRTH 101.1, the oldies station, in my mother’s car. There’s a moment—right after a climax of guitar, backing vocals, and noise—where the music simplifies to a guitar arpeggio over a relaxed percussion groove, and this voice, this voice, enters (4:28 in the video above*). The story I’ve heard is that Tommy James was just fucking around in the studio and wanted to hear what it sounded like if he plugged his mic into a guitar amp with the tremolo effect on. That effect blew my mind.
This song has been covered many times before, and it was probably played many different times live, but that effect is inseparable from the song’s identity. Any music fan can point out those things that, taken together, make up the music that they love.
*The best comment on that video: “I remember riding in the car and listening to this song on the radio and asking my dad why the singers voice gets all weird. He replied, “That’s for people who are fucked up on drugs and listening to the song”, then he turned it up.”
4. bringing it all together
Which is why Glee‘s dominance of the music charts deeply depresses me. The show’s production strategy is always to dull any edges, to plane any uneven surface. Just listen to that Jason Mraz song at the top of the post, a song that’s insipid to begin with. It doesn’t just change the details I was talking about–it obliterates them. Glee never met a guitar solo it couldn’t castrate. All the Glee voices are competent and pleasant but processed beyond belief, as far away from real singing as Oscar Meyer wieners are from beef. Somehow every song manages to sound like a commercial jingle (from back when, you know, they made those).
I think it encourages listeners not to care. There are many forces, from the increase in ambient music in public places to the sheer amount of music available in the internet, that discourage real listening. And I cannot accept that if people are really listening, and caring about what they’re listening to, they will choose the Glee version of a song, rather than the real thing.
The Guardian has a short profile/interview of the first classical soloist to be signed to Warner’s rock label. He sounds like a swell guy, and I don’t want to make any judgments on his music without hearing it, but a couple things mentioned in the interview make me curious.
Rhodes is also currently presenting his own primetime music show, Piano Man, on Sky Arts, in which he plays his favourite composers, all the while peering at sheet music on his iPad through trendy spectacles.
If he uses the iPad to explain the pieces, or reference the score, to the televised audience, then I think that’s great; I think it’s incredibly valuable for musicians to be able to explain what they’re thinking about as they convert a piece of written music into sound. If he’s just using it as a score…what the fuck does he need a score for?
The other thing that’s kind of bothering me is something that Rhodes probably can’t help. I’m all for changing the uptight appearance standards that soloists and conductors are held to, but if that becomes the conversation about you in place of your music, you come across like a Christian band trying way too hard to prove their “alternative” credentials. His albumcovers do not inspire confidence. This probably has nothing to do with Rhodes, and everything to do with lazy journalism. I suspect this is the case because of the way that the writer describes Rhodes: “Clearly, this is a man who has no need for added stimulation: it is barely 11am and he is already bouncing off the walls, a tightly wrapped bundle of tics and jitters.” I feel like I read a version of this sentence every time I read about a young (read: under 30) classical musician in a mainstream publication–it’s almost like they go in to the interview barely expecting a pulse, so anything more feels like a revelation.
I had a couple initial reactions to this list. The first was an appreciation of the long tradition of Western notated music–a tradition so long that you can make a top 10 list like this without saying anything remotely controversial. Of course, not everyone would pick this particular list, however it would be hard to take seriously an argument that any one of these composers does not deserve to be on the list because their music was insubstantial, or there wasn’t enough of it, or that it didn’t distinguish itself from the other music of its time. All of these composers had exceptional, rare talent and it’s only because we have centuries of music to pick from that we can make a list like this.
My second reaction was just awe at just how much music is out there, and how much I have to learn. Beethoven has always been one of my favorite composers, and I was extremely pleased that Tommasini placed him above Mozart. I’ve been blown away by Bach’s music over and over in the context of organ and compositional studies. But about half of the other composers only exist as uninformed, vague impressions in my consciousness. Brahms? Stuffy and heavy. Mozart? Monotonous and empty. Schubert? A complete unknown.
3. miami gets a new, gehry-designed concert hall
At first, I was all fired up to rant about Gehry becoming the go-to starchitect for concert halls, and why don’t we give other architects a chance and blah blah blah…then I actually read the article about the fundraising and construction process and decided that I was being a little bitch.
The picture above is actually the interior of the building. Miami blog Miamism gives a really good overview of the design of the building, what its goals are, and how it fits into the area.
4. conservative conservatory
The NYT published a story that looks a little more in depth at the New England Conservatory’s decision to sever ties with the fledgling El Sistema U.S.A. I’ve gotta say, this stinks to high heaven of an organization underestimating the extent of its commitment, then getting cold feet and backing out.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that El Sistema is supported by the federal government of Venezuela. It was always going to be a challenge for any music institution, or nonprofit organization, to provide the same level of support to a U.S. organization that is provided by the federal government in Venezuela. The decision to focus on training graduate students rather than directly establishing youth orchestras already was a compromise, and this public vote of no confidence by the New England Conservatory leaves the movement in a weaker position than before the Abreu Fellowship program was established. The program has only been in existence for two years, and that the NEC wants out of the partnership so quickly is a joke, and I can only believe that either the NEC severely underestimated the support it would need to provide to the program for it to have a hope of being effective, or that the organization was acting in bad faith from the beginning. I do not see a way that this does not reflect poorly on the New England Conservatory.
Above all, though, this is a missed opportunity. The NEC had a once in a generation chance (and it’s possible that another organization will take up this mantle) to radically redefine the mission of a top level conservatory. The conservatory’s president, quoted in the article, makes it clear that he wasn’t interested in that, “We really felt this was outside our mission altogether.” Music education has always been a part of the conservatory because so many professional, performing musicians also teach. This was different because it was an attempt to rebuild the musical infrastructure of the country on a societal level. It’s a shame, a shame, that the NEC had so little commitment to this organization in its crucial first years, and such a lack of follow through to see this vision realized.
5. on a lighter note
David Stabler, critic for The Oregonian, writes about an effective use of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in the movie The Kings Speech. I think I’ll always associate that movement with the great children’s audio program Beethoven Lives Upstairs, but I think that it’s best use in film is in the opening credits to Tarsem Singh’s masterpiece The Fall:
A recent New York Times story looks at the efforts of the Borromeo String Quartet* to incorporate more technology into their music making, including playing from full scores displayed on MacBooks controlled by foot pedals. One thing that I thought was really interesting, and was a good example of the give and take that comes with any changes in tradition or practice, was this little discussion of the costs and benefits associated with switching from parts (each musician only has the music for their instrument) to score (all musicians see all four parts):
Having the whole score in front of them is an immense help in playing new works. Complicated passages are immediately comprehensible. There are no long discussions in rehearsal that start, “What do you have there?”
Seeing the score as they play also deepens understanding of composers’ intentions. “The parts are our convenience,” Ms. Motobuchi said. The score “is exactly the direct picture they had in their mind.”
…
Mr. Tong — at 29, the youngest and newest member of the group — resisted the most. He still sounds not completely happy with the situation.
Seeing the music of his colleagues on the page can detract from the magic of chamber-music-making, of communicating through hearing, he said. “When first learning a piece,” Mr. Tong said, “it’s a constant battle to open up the ears. For a long time I felt that the more I was seeing, the less I was hearing.”
Via Noble Viola, this kind of wacky chamber version of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune:
It’s amazing to me how the different orchestration creates a completely different piece; the string section in the orchestral version does so much to create the impression of a verdant, secluded glade (that’s always where I imagine the piece taking place).
The Guardian has 
At first, I was all fired up to rant about Gehry becoming the go-to starchitect for concert halls, and why don’t we give other architects a chance and blah blah blah…then I actually read 
hammer & jack 
