web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
Singing The Lady is a Tramp:
Singing The Lady is a Tramp:
I was surprised and impressed by Gaga’s chops. I’m sure it’s massaged and produced like anything else, but I finally have a clear sense of what her voice sounds like.
I wish I could say the same about her face. She’s amazing to me because images of her are everywhere and yet I wouldn’t recognize her if she was walking down the street in front of me.
There’s a big idea that I wanted to bring up, but didn’t in yesterday’s review of The ArchAndroid; the idea of complexity in pop music. I’m not one to believe in musical “progress” per se, but the artist that I respect and value most are those that experimented and tried to create a new sound of music for their time.
One of the things that I find fascinating, especially now that I am in college, is the way that classical academics and composers relate to pop music. I get quite a range of views among my professors: my choral director and history professor grew up listening to classical music, and thus has never had any personal exploration of pop music (I actually think that her’s is the last generation that can get away with that). My organ professor lectures me about not using the terms “pop” and “classical.” I always nod politely, responding in my head that if you don’t see “pop” as a derogatory term, there’s no stigma associated with using it. My academic adviser listens much like I do; applying the same kind of thinking and reflection to music regardless of the tradition. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he is the youngest professor on the faculty.
Classical academics occasionally become “pop music tipsy;” they get exposed to an amazing piece of pop music, and become confused about how to respond to it. What they write, or how they talk about the music, is characterized by a few symptoms: they vastly overstate the importance of the artist under discussion; they don’t understand and disrespect the tradition that came before “their” artist; hyperbole about the death of other traditions; solemn predictions that this is the way pop music will be in the future. They’re almost always wrong.
The worst part is that they’re kind of right, too. These mushy declarations come from a profound cognitive dissonance. Many of these writers and composers have been trained and taught that pop music is empty and unsophisticated. When confronted with pop music that is sophisticated, is experimental, is vital, their reaction is to claim that pop music has changed. What they should understand is that they have changed.
What does this have to do with Janelle Monáe? When the “Bad Romance” video first hit, Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote a little thing about the cell ringtone that opens the video. It’s a quotation from a Bach fugue that uses all 12 tones in the Western octave. He grew very excited about this and used it to speculate about the future of pop music, a more chromatic future.
I think the ArchAndroid makes a good case for that future. The album sounds strongly influenced by Stevie Wonder, and his music has always been more harmonically complex (probably as a function of jazz) than others in his style. I don’t think that chromaticism is a virtue in itself, but I’m certain that you’re more likely to find it in the music of Janelle Monáe than Lady GaGa.
There’s video up at the Disney Parks blog of a scoring session for one of their new live shows at California Adventure in Anaheim. It’s a reworked version of “Night on the Bare Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky, which was used for one of the segments in Fantasia. That piece has always fascinated me because of the dramatic difference between the circumstances in which it was written and the place it occupies now in our culture. The piece was reworked over and over again by Mussorgsky, and it was never played during his lifetime (in fact, the arrangement that is usually played in concert and in Fantasia was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov). He is remembered only for “Night…” and Pictures at an Exhibition, and yet the music of this fairly minor and obscure Russian composer is heavily promoted by the Walt Disney Corporation, and people who have never gone to a classical music concert can hum its theme. It’s deeply tragic that the composer of one of the most widely recognized piece of classical music never heard it performed.
There are other examples of this. “A Lover’s Concerto” was a hit in 1965 for the girl group The Toys (it was later recorded by The Supremes); it’s a fairly literal translation of the Minuet in G Major from the Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach. I was playing some Brahms, and one of my friends recognized the Violin Concerto from There Will Be Blood. I guess the strongest example is Also Sprach Zarathustra, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On a more current front, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has blogged (in a post focusing on David Byrne and Los Angeles Opera’s staging of The Ring Cycle) about a Bach 12-tone phrased used as the opening of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video.
hammer & jack 