“The Shrine/An Argument” Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues. Sub Pop, May 3, 2011.
I drove up from California to Oregon with an iPod full of music I had never heard before, so I’m processing way more music than I can reasonably write about, but I wanted to say something about the new Fleet Foxes record, Helplessness Blues.
I was not a huge fan of their first album. I thought it was twee, boring, and exactly the wrong kind of retro. Even though their vocal harmonies were a selling point to their fans, I thought they were a crutch to distract from generic, uninspired songwriting.
Helplessness Blues is a big step up, in my opinion. I’m starting to get a sense for a real voice emerging from the pastiche of influences. There’s still plenty of harmony, gauzy production and prog rock-like lyrical nonsense (I went down among the dust and pollen/to the old stone fountain in the morning after dawn/underneath were all these pennies fallen from the hands of children/they were there and then they were gone), but there’s also an effort to assimilate more and varied sounds.
Some songs: “Montezuma” is a well-crafted and catchy opener. “Bedouin Dress” has a violin hook that I really like. The two song stretch of “The Shrine/An Argument” to “Blue Spotted Tail” is absolutely fantastic. “The Shrine” has a searing and devastating vocal performance by Robin Pecknold that transforms into a refrain with a driving groove, making it one of the few Fleet Foxes that rocks in a traditional sense. “An Argument” contains an instrumental tag that is the single most musically interesting thing that I’ve heard from them. Not coincidentally, this is the point in the song where the blurry reverb effects drop out and the music gets to speak for itself. “Blue Spotted Tail” is simply beautiful; it sounds like it’s a Pecknold solo.
For many, teenagers playing tinny music to each other on public transport on their mobile phones can be intensely irritating. Why do they do it?
With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a phone in public – has created a noisy problem for a lot of commuters.
First, stop using the term “sodcasting.” No matter how many times you repeat it in the article, it’s not going to take. Continuing,
“I don’t think it is intrinsically anti-social, what I would say is that it is a fascinating human phenomenon of marking social territory,” says Dr Harry Witchel, author of You Are What You Hear.
“With young people, usually loud music corresponds very strongly to owning the space.
“They are creating a social environment which is suitable for them and their social peers. But for those not in this group – a 50-year-old woman for example – instead of confidence, she’ll feel weakness and maybe even impotence as there’s nothing that she can do about it.”
I guess there’s some truth in that. The British legal use of the term “anti-social” has always struck me as really creepy, and it’s downright Orwellian in this instance. As with cameras, the best speaker is the one you have on you, and if that means that the only way you can listen to music with your friends is through a shitty phone speaker, that’s what you do. What could be a more social activity than that?
Bruce Haynes creates “new” Bach concertos by arranging cantata movements.
These so-called Brandenburgs are actually instrumentalized groupings of Bach cantata movements. The original idea was Haynes’s, a Bach expert who had already used Bach cantata movements to score a concerto for oboe and harpsichord obbligato in 1982, almost thirty years before starting this new Brandenburg project last year. Tragically, Haynes passed away on May 17, just over a month before the premiere of what will be the last of his projects.
Why would somebody do this, you ask?
Why new instrumental concertos, instead of vocal or solo pieces? Because the small number of chamber pieces by Bach that have survived has always frustrated musicologists and musicians. Bach gave his chamber music to Wilhelm Freidemann Bach, his favourite child. Unfortunately, W.F. was also a drunkard and lost most of the music. Compare this to the cantatas, which were bequeathed to another son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Those were carefully preserved and indexed. Today, we know of six Brandenburg concertos and a few other Bach concerti. There were probably many more.
It was also a very well known practice in the baroque era to re-score cantatas without singers. “Several composers and writers mention this,” said Napper. She added while laughing, “No singer, no problem!”
No problem! Hahaha. Seriously. Fuck you.
I’m sorry that you love Bach’s music so much that you feel like you need to take those terrible vocal parts out. Oh no, definitely, the music is much better without them. Yes, it’s totally a good idea to rearrange 18th Century music to fit contemporary aesthetics. No, nobody has ever done that before. Okay, some people have tried that before. But we totally respect them for their efforts and play their “improved” arrangements all the time.
Right?
Right?
Sarcasm aside, the point that we probably hold too tightly to Bach’s scores and that he reused and rearranged his music all of the time is a valid and important one. But that’s not where the trail of breadcrumbs ends. The fact is, we know little about Bach’s personal attitude toward his music. We don’t know if he viewed the cantatas as artistic works or only as things he composed for his day job. There are remarkably few Bach compositions that seem to be deliberately intended for posterity or as an artistic demonstrations (these include, off the top of my head, the Mass in B Minor, the Art of the Fugue, and his French and Italian keyboard suites). Almost every aspect of Bach performance includes some speculation or artistic decisions, many based on aesthetic preference alone. Still, sticking to what actually survives on the page seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable line in the sand.
Gary Burton’s reflexes in this performance make me so jealous. Ahmad Jamal is actively trying to fuck with him and throw him off, and once he catches on to that, his responses are genius.
Posting has been scarce of late due to my normal post-semester crash. Hopefully my brain will be up and running soon. I plan on tackling Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Edward Abbey’s Monkey-Wrench Gang this week. In lieu of in-depth thoughts, here’s a potpourri of impressions:
1. Modernism, Music, and Politics
Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, one of the most powerful, political pieces of modern music. Interestingly, especially in the context of the essays below, the piece was fully composed before the title was added.
Martin Bresnick’s fascinating account of a very special musical exhibition in Prague, 1970 has been going around the classical internet. It’s a remarkable piece of writing, powerful even to those who don’t know the musical names invoked:
On March 6, 1970, at the close of the Second International Free Composers Tribune in Prague, the final composer to be represented at the conference, Luigi Nono, spoke for more than 10 minutes before a large audience of mostly Czech musicians, vigorously criticizing my score for the short film “Pour,” which preceded his presentation. Although the protocol of the tribune permitted each composer only 10 minutes to speak about his or her own music, Nono took those 10 minutes to speak about mine, concluding with a scathing condemnation of my use of vernacular music.
Nono then went on for another 10 minutes about the making of his own work, especially pointing out the theoretically correct choice of the pre-recorded sounds he had employed. He then played a tape of his composition “Non Consumiamo Marx.” When the piece was over there were three people left in the hall at the Janacek Composers’ Club at 3 Besedni Street: Luigi Nono, Mr. Okurka (the technician who operated the tape recorder and sound system) and me.
I won’t spoil the punchline to the piece, save to observe that the goal of infusing music with political meaning is perpetually one of the greatest challenges a composer can undertake. It’s interesting to read Bresnick’s piece as counterpoint to David T. Little’s piece on contemporary music:
Historically, political composers believed that, since politics was going to concern itself with the arts — (as rulers like Hitler and Stalin proved) — art had better concern itself with politics. It was as if this was the artists’ preemptive duty. During the 1930s, the revolutionary tide reached the ivory towers, and composers began to see themselves as standing in solidarity with the worker. “Whether composers know it, admit it or not … they most of them belong to the proletariat,” wrote Charles Seeger in a 1934 essay.
But my reasons, approach and techniques are different, because this historical moment is different. We are no longer amidst a social(ist) revolution in the United States (despite what the Tea Party says) and as such music with a strong ideological or revolutionary message can often feel out of place and out of touch. As a result, political composers are no longer the revolutionaries we once were. Instead, we function as critics.
Perhaps because of my age, the demise of film production only merits a shrug. I would, of course, be very sad if film was altogether unavailable in the future, or if production standards were likewise diminished. But other once popular media, like woodblock printing, lithographs, etchings, are still alive and well and their traditions maintained by artists and craftsmen that love the tradition. I would imagine that the same will hold for film.
What I think is truly gross, however, is the rise of fake vintage camera effects, à la Hipstamatic. They hold all of the false charm and tackiness as stock Photoshop “impressionistic” or “fresco” effects. By appropriating the visual signatures of the past, we further unstick ourselves in time.
3. Musical Public Domain
Marc Parry writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education (behind paywall, sorry) of conductor Lawrence Golan’s David-and-Goliath fight against Big Media’s effort to keep 20th century artworks out of the public domain ad infinitum:
For 10 years, the music professor has been quietly waging a legal campaign to overturn the statute, which makes it impossibly expensive for smaller orchestras to play certain pieces of music.
Now the case is heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high-stakes copyright showdown affects far more than sheet music. The outcome will touch a broad swath of academe for years to come, dictating what materials scholars can use in books and courses without jumping through legal hoops. The law Mr. Golan is trying to overturn has also hobbled libraries’ efforts to digitize and share books, films, and music.
The conductor’s fight centers on the concept of the public domain, which scholars depend on for teaching and research. When a work enters the public domain, anyone can quote from it, copy it, share it, or republish it without seeking permission or paying royalties.
The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.
“It was a shocking change,” Mr. Golan says over dinner at a tacos-and-margaritas dive near the University of Denver’s mountain-framed campus. “You used to be able to buy Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. All of a sudden, on one day, you couldn’t anymore.”
I think the ethics of copyright are very much up in the air right now (and the ethical issues are much more complicated than both the “rights protect artists” and the “information wants to be free” camps seem to acknowledge) but I think one thing that’s clear is that efforts like these–and big music publisher’s draconian crackdown on live performers–are creating an environment that is toxic for future performers and composers, or at the very least, turning them into rulebreakers.
4. Portland’s New Bud Clark Commons
The great Portland arts blog PORT has a great feature on the design elements incorporated into a new no-income housing/homeless shelter project in Portland’s Pearl District.
I’ve seen some critical posts elsewhere in the blogosphere (I’m not going to dignify them by linking) that have focused on the high-value design and stylish materials to attack the project. As with some other publicly funded services, especially prisons and public housing, any element of comfort seems to be a waste of taxpayer dollars, or “too good” for the target population.
That’s probably just an ugly side of human nature, but it’s always amazing to me how much resistance there is to public projects that are, you know, effective.
This Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum on the cult of Bob Dylan, musical politics in China, and the neverending mystery of the man is one of the best pieces of music writing I’ve heard in a long time.
Here’s a taste:
And then they twisted themselves into pretzel-like contradictions: Dylan was never really a protest singer anyway; he only faked being one early in his career to get a leg up the ladder of fame from the folkies then fashionable when he arrived in New York at the beginning of the ’60s. So he shouldn’t have been expected to do anything confrontational in China; he was, like, above mundane political considerations.
Great defense! They’re saying—his defenders!—that he was a scheming careerist liar. (Do they really believe the emotion in that beautiful ballad “Song to Woody” was all faked?) But he’s Dylan so it’s OK.
What’s amusing is that they’re willing to accept his explanation that he was never sincere in the first place politically so he shouldn’t be bothered by it now. Don’t they realize that this itself could be insincere. That he might be insincere in his protestations of insincerity about his protest songs? They’re just such suckers for anything that issues from Bob’s mouth they don’t know when or whether they’ve been conned by one of the great put-on artists.
Still you have to love Dylan for creating all the mystery—and for that immortal line from the disclaimer-of-sincerity period when the folkies were on his case: “Folk music is a bunch of fat people.”
But if Dylan was never really a protest singer, how can you claim at the same time that his songs, whatever he played, had the effect of a powerful protest on the Chinese torturers? Oh, and one of the most peculiar Bobolator defenses was that he really didn’t, as Maureen Dowd implied, inspire anti-Vietnam War protesters with his music because, despite all the anti-war songs Maureen Dowd wanted him to play, like “Masters of War,” he wasn’t really against the Vietnam War! It may be true: The entire Vietnam protest movement was mistaken if they took any inspiration from him. They had the wrong exegesis!
hammer & jack 