Tag: Music

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

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I’ve been brooding on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs for a little while now. I wanted to review it, but found it very hard to pin down, and then the moment passed. But I do want to to note how surprised I was at the different sound that Arcade Fire uses on this record as opposed to the other albums.

One of the unique properties of their records was the huge ensemble that they recorded with, and the sheer variety of instruments they incorporated into their music. Not only did they use all of these instruments, but they were used front and center. In their music, strings were not used like synth pads, not used as filler in the background. In songs like “No Cars Go” or “Rebellion (Lies),” the strings were an integral part of the hook. It was for this reason that they were mentioned in the same breath as Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy) and Beirut. The Suburbs places the strings back in the background, and the production has been transformed from the warm and acoustic aesthetic of Funeral to an indie rock sound that is regrettably more generic.

Other critics have written about this change in sound. Some have characterized it as Arcade Fire emulating some of the scope and scale of arena rock. I think this fails to acknowledge that this emulation has been an aspect of Arcade Fire’s music from the beginning. Simply listen to “Wake Up” or “Keep the Car Running:” the stomp-along, stadium filling songs have been there. What’s different in this record is that they have pulled back from the sound that differentiated them from the other bands out there that are trying the same thing.

This isn’t enough for me to dislike The Suburbs. In most other respects, it’s a new Arcade Fire release, something I’ve been looking forward to. But it is true that they’ve removed one of the characteristics of their music that made me fall in love with them in the first place.

Michael Torke – The Yellow Pages

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Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages (1985) is a movement from a three-piece work called Telephone Book. It takes a simple, upbeat musical phrase and develops it slowly, modulating and employing variations on the phrase. Torke’s music falls somewhere in the grey area between Minimalism and Post-Minimalism; he began composing when Minimalism was beginning to gain credibility in classical music circles. It befits our strange postmodern culture that a movement and a post-movement can arise simultaneously. Torke embraces the superficial characteristics of minimalism–the short repeated phrases, the minute variations–and combines them with both poppy, jazzy musical phrases and idioms, and a tonal and developmental scheme that falls comfortably within traditional harmony. In a way, his music is similar to John Adams’, unafraid to engage with both minimalism and traditional harmony at the same time. However, whereas Adams uses minimalistic processes to compose music that draws from both American themes and post-tonal harmony, Torke’s music owes as much to the orchestral pop of the 40’s-60’s as it does to the European classical tradition.

This brings up a serious reservation I have with Torke’s music. There’s a big difference between the post-tonal sources that Adams uses in his pieces and the tonal, commercial sounds that Torke uses in his: the former is much harder to listen to, less accessible, than the latter (It’s no accident that Torke’s music is commercially sucessful [for a classical composer]). That’s not necessarily a demerit, and I should say that I enjoy Torke’s music very much, however other aspects of his music give cause to doubt its real merit. Torke’s Wikipedia page* categorizes his music as influenced by minimalism and jazz, but when you listen to his music, there’s not much jazz. There a lot of stuff that’s jazzy, but it’s the jazz of commercial jingles and the A.M. radio of a bygone era. An uncharitable reading of Torke’s music might find it to be pretty, empty phrases rearranged in a watered-down minimalist scheme.

I still haven’t decided which side I come down on. I’m not a fan of his source material; I despise the vacuousness of the idioms that he imitates. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like the compositional processes he employs are interesting enough that I don’t care (part of the reason I like The Yellow Pages so much is that it has really fine counterpoint. And believe me, I’m not usually the type to be excited about anything for counterpoint). It’s also just fun to listen to.

There’s a couple of good recordings out there, but if anybody is interested in hearing more Torke (I particularly recommend Adjustable Wrench), he has a 6-CD box set called Ecstatic Collection that contains most of his major pieces.

*I recognize that nobody is responsible for their own Wikipedia page, but these pages are often an indicator of general consensus about how musicians and composers are categorized.

Steve Reich – Nagoya Marimbas

Matthew Eilar4 Comments

I’ve been putting together a mix CD for a person that asked me to give them some classical music. Because I’m a music nerd, I’m putting together a listening guide as well with historical context, a little information on the composer, and some things to listen for. I don’t want it to be too technical, so I’m finding myself with extra insights that I’m going to channel here over the next few days.

Nagoya Marimbas was written in 1996, thirty years after Piano Phase (see my post on Piano Phase), but I see a direct connection between the two pieces.

Piano Phase was written to try and emulate with instruments a mechanical phenomenon: identical tape loops playing at different speeds and becoming out of sync. It accomplished this by having identical musical phrases played by two pianists at different speeds. It’s still phasing, but achieved by a different method. Once you become familiar with the way that phasing sounds and behaves, acoustical phenomena become apparent. These are the “events” you hear in Piano Phase–the way that the music behaves when the pianists sync up at a lag of the eighth note, or the sudden resolution when the pianists play note against note. There are also rhythmical patterns that emerge; depending on the content that’s being phased, individual tones become isolated and create their own identifiable rhythmic patterns that may not be contained in the phased material.

I think pieces like Music for 18 Musicians, Drumming, and Nagoya Marimbas representing Reich taking the experiment of phasing a step further. Works like Piano Phase and Violin Phase established the phenomena possible in phasing, which Reich isolated and manipulated in new works that left the phasing framework behind. If you listen closely to Nagoya Marimbas, events, moments occur that remind one of events in a phasing piece, however the means used to make the music is completely different in conception.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about while writing about this piece of music is the prominent place that the marimba has taken in minimalist and contemporary classical music. I think this partly due to stylistic determinism (corresponding to linguistic determinism). Whereas earlier styles of instrumental music emphasized different values that lead to the strings, for example, occupying the primary place in an orchestra, the leaner, generally (in the early years) chamber-sized, rhythmically oriented minimalist music valued the marimba for its advantages: it’s tuned, has a moderate sustain, percussive, and can switch patterns more quickly than many instruments. It’s a reminder that the fortunes of instruments rise and fall with the times, and that instruments that aren’t considered particularly useful now may have unique qualities that may be valued in the music of the future.

Good for music?

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OK GO’s breakout success came after an extremely popular homemade music video was uploaded onto YouTube. Quirky music videos became their shtick. Remarkably, when they released a new(-ish) single, “This Too Shall Pass,” their label, EMI, decided to make the video un-embeddable and issue takedown notices when it popped up on YouTube. The band made them reverse the decision, but it’s an example of when idiot executives fail to understand that what looks good in the short term might not work out in the long term.

I’ve been mulling over this Boston Globe article about copyright enforcement for a few weeks. Copyright enforcement is a tricky issue. First, it’s important to recognize the conflict between thinking of copyright as a property right (artists create something and they have the right to sell it any way that they want) and as a tool for encouraging art (the original language in the US Constitution that covers copyright gives authority to Congress like this: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”). These two ideas are not necessarily opposed, but the internet and modern artistic trends seem designed to poke at the gaps between those two perspectives. For example, if you view copyright as a property right, it’s entirely reasonable to ask that mash-up artists get permission to use samples in their releases. The musicians who created the sample own it, and can allow others to use it as they see fit. On the other hand, if you wanted to promote the progress of art, you would want to break down those barriers.

Other people have written at length about this divide with more depth and understanding than I have, but I was intrigued by another aspect of music and copyright, which is that it is much easier and simpler to strike a correct balance between content creators and those who wish to use their work in an honor-based system than in a legal system. If musicians act in an honorable way, it’s not a big deal that your songs are covered by people that pose no financial threat to you. No matter what, The Eagles will always have more fans than The Eagles Tribute Band. From the other direction, independent gigging musicians understand that it’s a douchbag move to cover a song by somebody in the same position as yourself. If you’re going to perform covers, perform songs by well known and successful acts.

There’s another category of copyright offense that I don’t understand at all. The article (which is pretty good, if that will make you click through) also mentions crackdowns on open mic and variety nights. This is completely stupid, and like the Teachout article last-ish week, it’s an example of people in a position of power (the RIAA in the music industry, Teachout’s audience at the WSJ) that either have no interest in the long-term prospects of their fields or lack the vision to see what the long term consequences of their actions are. Discouraging people from performing because they either don’t have entry-level venues or they worry about harassment from the RIAA hurts music. Period. By acting in such a foolish and thuggish way, they’re diminishing their future power.

Fan Taxonomy and High Fidelity

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High Fidelity is available to stream on Hulu right now.

High Fidelity is a movie about musical biography, and I’ve always been tickled by this because it’s an integral part of my musical biography. I didn’t listen to a lot of pop music growing up. The only genre of music that I know from my childhood is Motown and oldies, the result of many car rides to the soundtrack of K-RTH 101.1 FM (Oldies Radio!). About the time that I left home for high school, I was getting more curious about music–oddly enough, the album that led to all the others was Seal’s Human Beings–as well as being more aware of how un-cool I was for not knowing any music besides the piano pieces I played. The summer before freshman year, I got a subscription to Rhapsody, and I haven’t stopped listening.

That year, I also saw High Fidelity for the first time. At the time, I was charmed by John Cusack’s monologues and the smart soundtrack. As I learned more about music, I began to enjoy the music banter in the movie more. This time around, I’m struck by the different music-fan archetypes set up by the three record store proprietors, played by John Cusack, Jack Black, and Todd Louiso.

Cusack listens for the way that music makes him feel, for the strange way that a pop song can completely inhabit a memory, or a person, an emotion, a day, a decade. For him to arrange his record collection not alphabetically, but autobiographically makes sense because that’s the way that he listens to music. Cusack cannot separate his love for an album from the circumstances in which he heard it.

Jack Black is the type of listener that’s always chasing the new, as well as a musical partisan. Once an album is regarded as “classic,” Black has less interest in it, not because it isn’t good, but because the record no longer needs help to be heard. He has no patience for music that is tame, or backwards looking. He’s also the most critical.

Louiso’s character is a collector, a completist. When he hears a song he likes, he goes and tracks down all of the albums by that artist, reads about the records, knows the session musicians. He’s the most likely to like deep tracks on an album.

Their interactions are also interesting, and ring true to me as a music fan. All three have comprehensive knowledge of the same general area of music, but because they derive pleasure from different aspects of the listening experience, they all have some degree of suspicion for each other. Cusack, because his love for an album depends to a certain degree on circumstance, finds the other two approaches annoying. They, on the other hand, find him dilettantish. Louiso doesn’t understand how the other two could like an album and not be curious about all the other albums by the same artist. Black hates old sad bastard music, and is deeply suspicious of anybody that likes music that he doesn’t like.

Anybody who talks about music with other people a lot knows these archetypes. I’m a Jack Black style listener, and I often have to catch myself from being mean to the John Cusacks of the world.