On Tuesday night I saw the movie Hot Fuzz, directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the guys who gave us Shaun of the Dead. Awesome. Simply awesome. The local paper The Stranger filed a review by Andrew Wright that had the complaint that the movie was a bit slow and could have been better with 20 less minutes. Yeah, right. The movie is easiest to sell as a send-up of Michael Bay but enough distinctly British cop/detective movie conventions are being sent up by the film that I think Wright just misses the point, which isn't a big deal because the movie is amazingly funny. In fact I find it more of a viscerally enjoyable comedy than Shaun of the Dead. The story-telling is tighter and there are more jokes but they are woven more organically into the fabric of the narrative than even in Shaun of the Dead, which ought to be saying something even if people have no reason to take my word for it.
In fact even speaking as a Spiderman fan (comics, and the movies) I'd be hard pressed to imagine how on earth Spiderman 3 could be more fun than Hot Fuzz. Now I want to enjoy Spiderman 3 and will give it a good shot but I think I've already seen the funnest movie I'm likely to see all year. Wright and Pegg could tackle just about any genre next and I'd go see it.
One of the problems we composers have is that we tend to write music at the very limits of our technical capacity as musicians, which means we have to spend a whole bunch of time practicing what we ought to be able to play ourselves. A music teacher once told me about this inevitable paradigm and that it is one of the ways we know that Bach and Beethoven were amazing masters of the keyboard. Writing the fugues Bach wrote suggest a certain, base-line of technical mastery at every level. If that was Bach writing at the general limits of his technical facility then his technical facility in mind and body was simply awesome.
Well, my technical and theoretical facility is considerably less awesome than that, especially as a self-taught pianist. In fact there are some things that so daunt me I'm avoiding them for at least about a year, like choral writing. Certain types of musical writing lay bare your limitations so mercilessly I can see why composers don't dig them. I've heard Copland didn't enjoy choral writing and when I hear his choral writing I can see why! Beethoven's choral writing was just plain awful. And there are other composers who write sublime choral music who can't be trusted to write at the same level of genius in instrumental genres. At the risk of sounding like some kind of Phillistine I've yet to hear an instrumental work by Poulenc that is anywhere near as amazing as his choral writing, which is where he sounds most distinctive and capable to my ears. Much as I love hindemith's music at so many level his choral music is almost invariably a bore.
It seems the great composers manage to write consistently enough across the different expressive media of art music that they remian fairly well-represented and wrote consistently. No one who composes mostly for one instrument, even the piano, seems to establish as much of a musical legacy. And often people who excel in one expression of musical literature for one instrument become established in the repertoire but at a very limited level. Scott Joplin is here to stay because of his ragtime but any detailed study of piano repertoire reveals that structurally there isn't much to composing in that style once you've got the basic technical facility down. What makes good ragtime hard to write is that the formula is so hard to exploit with any real invention because Joplin and others did so much.
My solution was to retain Joplin's strict approach to the structure and drastically alter the tonal vocabulary. Not that any one has heard a ragtime I've written or even could from this blog but it seems like people who have tried writing ragtimes could explore ways of unifying themes. Ragtimes are so disparate in cross-thematic motific relationships within any given ragtime that the genre is defined too readily by a set of cliches in h armonic movement. The second strain invariably seems to get built around an oscillation of the dominant to tonic in the tonic key. There's usually no real connection between themes which means you get a very cut-and-paste effect, like any kind of ragtime strain could be put together. It's sort of like rolling dice. Any combination could work and it wouldn't effect the ragtime feel.
But what if you worked to ensure that a ragtime was bound by some over-arching thematic paradigm? I toyed with one ragtime that had all of its strains derive from the motific material of two themes from a sonata form I had written a few years ago. I liked this idea a few years ago and I still like it. If Americana as a genre has any potential whatsover (assuming it ever did) then it seems like one way to develop that potential would be to find American popular musical idioms that could be reasonably substituted for forms in the traditional sonata cycle. And I'm sure it's been done thousands of times. It just seems that what hasn't always been done is finding ways to get these forms to sound like something that isn't artificial.
And if they are really FORMS then why stick to the tritest variations? I decided to write a ragtime where almost everything was in a minor key. Ragtime is really about the raggy rhythms and the structural relationships than about being in a major key. Joplin experimented with minor themes in subsidiary strains of his ragtimes so why not write ragtimes where the prevailing mood is minor? Better yet, why not also do this while establilshing a thematic connection between the strains instead of just throwing in any old melody that will plug in the requisite structural spot for a ragtime?
So my solultion for this was to compose a ragtime where the same four measure gesture appears in different forms in each strain, a kind of hybrid of ragtime with a few arbitrarily settled on techniques from twelve-tone. The initial strain employes the four measure motto in its primary form; the second strain employs the motto in retrograde; the third strain (the C of AABBACCDD) employs a retrograde inversion in relative major which is the only place where the piece sounds most like a traditional ragtime except for the fugato part; and the fourth strain is built from the inversion of the four-measure motto.
And, as I mentioned earlier, where I finally settled on a fairly traditional major key ragtime idea for the C strain I offset this by making heavy use of the lydian mode (an inevitable outgrowth of using the retrograde inversion of an idea in C dorian),. I also offset it by employed a fugato in which one of the other key gestures of the first strain becomes the basis of a fugato where voices enter at the tonic, then the leading tone, and then the submediant respectively to create a three-voiced sort of exposition that leads to a very trite but satisfying ragtime gesture. This is to say that as I see it I made the trite ragtime passage more interesting by withholding it until the third and, if you will, climactic strain of the rag.
This is all very geeky as far as music goes. I can't expect anyone to care about this the way I care about it because you didn't write the ragtime. I like ragtime and I enjoy trying to play the stuff. But I also feel that a composer can pay hommage to ragtime and drastically alter any number of its elements while still being faithful to the core of the material, writing a sort of novelty piece and a serious piece at the same time. Come to think of it, I guess I'm thinking about this as a composer and a musician because Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are so good at doing the equivalent in their movies. They can make a send-up of the action genre while writing a movie that is itself simultaneously a perfectly good (and even better than average) exponent of the very genre that is being sent up. That's a rare gift. If I could do that at a musical level, making fun of ragtime conventions in the process of writing an actually decent rag, I'd be happy to be able to do so.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
a cold spring
Though the sky is pale blue and clear, and the sun shone most of the day, today felt more like a mild winter than spring. I sat out on the porch today with my guitar in hand and was grateful the strings were nylon and not steel! After half an hour of playing tonight my fingers became so cold they almost felt numb playing barres and crossing strings. My fingertips as they slid and scrapped across the strings felt like they were pressing against not nylon but steel.
But it was nice to hear the guitar ring out from the porch and hear the sound of bright new strings mingling with the sound of birds and distant traffic. And even a cold sunny day is bolstered by a loud major chord. It was a cold spring today but with music it still felt like spring.
But it was nice to hear the guitar ring out from the porch and hear the sound of bright new strings mingling with the sound of birds and distant traffic. And even a cold sunny day is bolstered by a loud major chord. It was a cold spring today but with music it still felt like spring.
finishing a piano sonata as a self-taught pianist, doubtful pedagogues, and studies for right hand
Well, after ten years I've decided to let the piano sonata drop. It's done as far as I'm concerned. It's got a number of flaws but I think that by cutting out at least half a minute of material I've cut out everything that I would now consider extraneous from its form. There's a sonata form with one theme; an aria (ABA) with its own theme and a transition that leads attaca into; a fugue in which the exposition has a subject and second countersubject derived from the themes of the preceding movements.
The sonata form begins in C major but ends in F sharp major while the second movement is in B major and modulates to C major for the beginning of the fugue. The conceit behind the sonata is, if you'll bear with me, that there can be one form and theme for a groom and one form and theme for a bride and, so to speak, the fugue is where the two themes are transformed into contrapuntal elements of a fugue that doubles up as a kind of wedding march. It's pretty nerdy and this doesn' t mean that it sounds great or anything but after ten years of working on it I figure I'm done. Maybe a year or two down the road after some dedicated piano practice I'll try to write another piano sonata.
The biggest obstacle hasn't been a knowledge of sonata form or other musical forms but simply that I am a self-taught pianist. Years ago I attempted to study privately at college but the professor most interested in taking me on as a student had a tour that tied up his time; he said another professor who would have time would probably be too demanding for my skill level; and the only remaning professor literally told me they were saving their teaching spots for more worthy students and that it didn't matter if I taught myself how to play Joplin or Bach that they weren't taking me on as a student. It also didn't matter that the chair of the piano department had told me I could study with any professor I wanted as far as he was concerned.
In hindsight I'm still pissed about getting treated in such a way but I am also glad I didn't study with that dismissive prof. One of my friends in college studied piano with this professor and was told to employ a set of pedaling gestures in a piece and when a time to play for others came up my friend did as she was told. Another piano student pointed out that the pedaling was distracting and loud and the professor turned on my friend and said that was true and that had to be fixed and that my friend shouldn't have settled on those pedalings. Blaming your student for your own unmusical decisions as a pedagogue is pretty low. Eventually this professor earned a reputation as a less than capable pedagogue and musicologist so that seven years later when I came across a woman who studied at the same college she told me she only took a certain musicology class after friends had assured her that this particular professor was NOT teaching it. It would be nice to say that people who get doctorates really know what they're talking about but it's only true in a lot of cases, not all.
Which is my long whine about an unnamed piano teacher to explain that when you have to teach YOURSELF how to write a piano sonata with no outside help from any actual pianist it takes a long time and you don't know for sure if what you've written necessarily even works as piano writing. Another reason to call it a decade and see if maybe I can persuade someone to play the thing.
I have also taken something of a break from composing even for the guitar to focus on technique development and also to have that done so that I can play some music for the upcoming wedding of some friends of mine. To that end I decided to join a classical guitar discussion forum. This one, specifically:
http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/index.php
I don't have a ton to contribute there but that's not necessarily THE reason to join a forum like this. It's just fun to read and learn and sometimes share a few things.
It was there that I discovered Mauro Giuliani's 120 studies for the right hand. I've played through the first 34 as of last night and surprised at how fun they are considering it's just switching back and forth between C and G7! If you want to really give your right hand a work out as a guitarist of any style I heartily endorse Giuliani's studies. Your right hand feels pretty warmed up playing through fifteen or twenty of them. Eventually the plan is to be able to get through all 120 one of these days.
Revisiting Hebrews lately. Not much to say about that right now because there's too much to digest in the epistle and just sit down and blog about just a few hours after waking up. I've been taking a page from my roommate which is not so hot in the getting actual sleep department.
I think this will suffice for this blog entry.
The sonata form begins in C major but ends in F sharp major while the second movement is in B major and modulates to C major for the beginning of the fugue. The conceit behind the sonata is, if you'll bear with me, that there can be one form and theme for a groom and one form and theme for a bride and, so to speak, the fugue is where the two themes are transformed into contrapuntal elements of a fugue that doubles up as a kind of wedding march. It's pretty nerdy and this doesn' t mean that it sounds great or anything but after ten years of working on it I figure I'm done. Maybe a year or two down the road after some dedicated piano practice I'll try to write another piano sonata.
The biggest obstacle hasn't been a knowledge of sonata form or other musical forms but simply that I am a self-taught pianist. Years ago I attempted to study privately at college but the professor most interested in taking me on as a student had a tour that tied up his time; he said another professor who would have time would probably be too demanding for my skill level; and the only remaning professor literally told me they were saving their teaching spots for more worthy students and that it didn't matter if I taught myself how to play Joplin or Bach that they weren't taking me on as a student. It also didn't matter that the chair of the piano department had told me I could study with any professor I wanted as far as he was concerned.
In hindsight I'm still pissed about getting treated in such a way but I am also glad I didn't study with that dismissive prof. One of my friends in college studied piano with this professor and was told to employ a set of pedaling gestures in a piece and when a time to play for others came up my friend did as she was told. Another piano student pointed out that the pedaling was distracting and loud and the professor turned on my friend and said that was true and that had to be fixed and that my friend shouldn't have settled on those pedalings. Blaming your student for your own unmusical decisions as a pedagogue is pretty low. Eventually this professor earned a reputation as a less than capable pedagogue and musicologist so that seven years later when I came across a woman who studied at the same college she told me she only took a certain musicology class after friends had assured her that this particular professor was NOT teaching it. It would be nice to say that people who get doctorates really know what they're talking about but it's only true in a lot of cases, not all.
Which is my long whine about an unnamed piano teacher to explain that when you have to teach YOURSELF how to write a piano sonata with no outside help from any actual pianist it takes a long time and you don't know for sure if what you've written necessarily even works as piano writing. Another reason to call it a decade and see if maybe I can persuade someone to play the thing.
I have also taken something of a break from composing even for the guitar to focus on technique development and also to have that done so that I can play some music for the upcoming wedding of some friends of mine. To that end I decided to join a classical guitar discussion forum. This one, specifically:
http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/index.php
I don't have a ton to contribute there but that's not necessarily THE reason to join a forum like this. It's just fun to read and learn and sometimes share a few things.
It was there that I discovered Mauro Giuliani's 120 studies for the right hand. I've played through the first 34 as of last night and surprised at how fun they are considering it's just switching back and forth between C and G7! If you want to really give your right hand a work out as a guitarist of any style I heartily endorse Giuliani's studies. Your right hand feels pretty warmed up playing through fifteen or twenty of them. Eventually the plan is to be able to get through all 120 one of these days.
Revisiting Hebrews lately. Not much to say about that right now because there's too much to digest in the epistle and just sit down and blog about just a few hours after waking up. I've been taking a page from my roommate which is not so hot in the getting actual sleep department.
I think this will suffice for this blog entry.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
travelling
For the next month or so my blogging is likely to be intermitten. I found out i have work related travel plans. I will, true to comic book geeky self, make sure to catch Spiderman 3 before I have to be goin' to California with an achin' in my heart. Not really any ache but I just felt like quoting one of Led Zeppelin's over-exposed songs. But at least it's the Led Zeppelin song and not that incredibly stupid not-quite-remake Pearl Jam did ten years ago. Why they never got sued is beyond me ... maybe Page and Plant just have so much money they don't care.
Been watching sci-fi stuff lately. Mainly X-Files, one of the masterpieces of genre TV ... at least right up to the movie and then Carter should have dropped the show and gone on to new stuff. And a friend introduced me to Heroes, which I am enjoying immensely. It didn't seem too promising when I saw bits of the pilot on TV last year but I discovered the problem with pilots is that all they're doing is set up, not fleshing out characters for a series in ways that, unfortunately, always matter. Or maybe I just don't watch enough TV to know these things. Anyway, I gave the pilot and an episode or two a shot and found I really dug the show, particularly HRG and Claire for reasons I can't really explain. I just found myself liking those two characters a lot and the further along the series has gone the more I like those characters.
Well, that's about enough for now.
Been watching sci-fi stuff lately. Mainly X-Files, one of the masterpieces of genre TV ... at least right up to the movie and then Carter should have dropped the show and gone on to new stuff. And a friend introduced me to Heroes, which I am enjoying immensely. It didn't seem too promising when I saw bits of the pilot on TV last year but I discovered the problem with pilots is that all they're doing is set up, not fleshing out characters for a series in ways that, unfortunately, always matter. Or maybe I just don't watch enough TV to know these things. Anyway, I gave the pilot and an episode or two a shot and found I really dug the show, particularly HRG and Claire for reasons I can't really explain. I just found myself liking those two characters a lot and the further along the series has gone the more I like those characters.
Well, that's about enough for now.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Proverbs 17:6, The Incredibles, and a random excursus into Gen 9
Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers
If Brad Bird's film The Incredibles can be said to hinge upon any simple paradigm that really goes beyond the initial premise of a family of superheroes this would be the basic premise. To some degree the deeper fantasy or wish-fulfillment we have watching a movie like The Incredibles is not really that our parents would be super-heroes but that they would do and say and be for us something like what Bob and Helen Parr are for their children. The significance of this is, I think, actually extremely hard to overstate and its basic concept is nothing less than one of biblical proportions, encapsulated in a simple proverb.
And this is a proverb that we can't spiritualize away by making an appeal to how God is our heavenly Father who is our glory, though that would certainly be true but there are passages like Ezekiel 44 (in other words "And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their possession." So if God promises to the priests in Ezekiel to be the possession and inheritance they receive and through Christ believers are a chosen people, a group of priests, and a holy nation then we can see how Ezekiel 44 is fulfilled in and through Christ, our posession. Which is to say that we have no need to spiritualize a proverb like Proverbs 17:6 as though it were chiefly having a locus other than this life and our flesh and blood parents, grandparents, or grandchildren.
We live in an era, however, in which consider parents a glory is not only not encouraged but in many respects either not practical or essentially impossible. Abusive parents can't be thought of as a glory to a child at all. If the father is the glory of his son or daughter and he is a drunkard or an abuser or an all around bad man then what kind of glory is that to a child?
What kind of glory, indeed, because a parent who does not in some way contain the image of God is no glory at all. But this is a pretty brutal double-edged sword because what it means is that for those of us who would be tempted to see no glory in the parents we have received through Christ's providential hand it means that we are not thankful to Him for His provision even if with it terrible things have also come. As Job put it, shall we accept only good from God and not accept evil?
And sometimes that evil includes our parents. It sounds morbid and nasty and perhaps it is. Conversely, that anyone could get the idea of presenting a family in a film that are a bunch of superheroes and present them not just as a family of "supers" but a family of loving supers, that's interesting. It can be interesting for who refuses to buy the premise as for who chooses to. At the risk of employing some form of ad hominem the people who seem least likely to buy the premise may truly be least likely to have had any sense that their own parents could ever be like Bob and Helen Parr. Conversely, by the same measure the people most likely to find this appealing may also be least likely to have remembered experiencing anything like that in their own lives. Once again, a double-edged sword, so it's best to infer nothing particular in the end, isn't it, about those who do or don't buy the premise.
But it is the nature of wisdom literature in Scripture that you have to study it a long time and reflect on it a long time and the proverb often exposes you rather than you being able to necessarily expose the proverb, at least at first. Studying the wisdom literature more and more enables you to understand it better.
I think at the bottom of things we all wish at some level that our parents could be, were, or are able to help us figure things out, solve problems for us. If we don't then what right do we have to claim that we, as Christians, see God as our Father? Or Mother for that matter? If Proverbs 17:6 is just bunk because of what we experienced are we missing the point of the proverb? Is the proverb even true? Why? Perhaps it's just an epigrammatic disclosure of desires in our hearts that can't and won't go away no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise. Perhaps the more we seek to dismiss the input and significance of parents the more we find ourselves enmeshed in their influence, even reflecting qualities about them without noticing it?
And in a way the cryptic tale of the curse on Canaan may be illuminating here. Canaan may have displayed a greater proportional quality of a vice than his father Ham, which may have been why Noah cursed him and not his father, who in Genesis 9 announced to the rest of the family that he had seen Noah drunk and naked. This would be a moment where the father is most certainly not a superhero! But his curse, if you will, seems to be used by God to exact a startlingly multi-generational punishment for what appears to be a multi-generational sin which seems to be somehow exploiting or capitalizing on a parent's moment of weakness, sin, and self-humiliation as an opportunity to speak badly of them or reveal this to other family members.
Or it might not, I don't really know exactly what's up in Genesis 9. But it seems that whatever Ham did involved Canaan for Canaan to have been cursed.
Well, this is sort of a rambling, directionless discourse on a couple of verses and the utterly tangential link they have to a movie I like and it's kind of late.
If Brad Bird's film The Incredibles can be said to hinge upon any simple paradigm that really goes beyond the initial premise of a family of superheroes this would be the basic premise. To some degree the deeper fantasy or wish-fulfillment we have watching a movie like The Incredibles is not really that our parents would be super-heroes but that they would do and say and be for us something like what Bob and Helen Parr are for their children. The significance of this is, I think, actually extremely hard to overstate and its basic concept is nothing less than one of biblical proportions, encapsulated in a simple proverb.
And this is a proverb that we can't spiritualize away by making an appeal to how God is our heavenly Father who is our glory, though that would certainly be true but there are passages like Ezekiel 44 (in other words "And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their possession." So if God promises to the priests in Ezekiel to be the possession and inheritance they receive and through Christ believers are a chosen people, a group of priests, and a holy nation then we can see how Ezekiel 44 is fulfilled in and through Christ, our posession. Which is to say that we have no need to spiritualize a proverb like Proverbs 17:6 as though it were chiefly having a locus other than this life and our flesh and blood parents, grandparents, or grandchildren.
We live in an era, however, in which consider parents a glory is not only not encouraged but in many respects either not practical or essentially impossible. Abusive parents can't be thought of as a glory to a child at all. If the father is the glory of his son or daughter and he is a drunkard or an abuser or an all around bad man then what kind of glory is that to a child?
What kind of glory, indeed, because a parent who does not in some way contain the image of God is no glory at all. But this is a pretty brutal double-edged sword because what it means is that for those of us who would be tempted to see no glory in the parents we have received through Christ's providential hand it means that we are not thankful to Him for His provision even if with it terrible things have also come. As Job put it, shall we accept only good from God and not accept evil?
And sometimes that evil includes our parents. It sounds morbid and nasty and perhaps it is. Conversely, that anyone could get the idea of presenting a family in a film that are a bunch of superheroes and present them not just as a family of "supers" but a family of loving supers, that's interesting. It can be interesting for who refuses to buy the premise as for who chooses to. At the risk of employing some form of ad hominem the people who seem least likely to buy the premise may truly be least likely to have had any sense that their own parents could ever be like Bob and Helen Parr. Conversely, by the same measure the people most likely to find this appealing may also be least likely to have remembered experiencing anything like that in their own lives. Once again, a double-edged sword, so it's best to infer nothing particular in the end, isn't it, about those who do or don't buy the premise.
But it is the nature of wisdom literature in Scripture that you have to study it a long time and reflect on it a long time and the proverb often exposes you rather than you being able to necessarily expose the proverb, at least at first. Studying the wisdom literature more and more enables you to understand it better.
I think at the bottom of things we all wish at some level that our parents could be, were, or are able to help us figure things out, solve problems for us. If we don't then what right do we have to claim that we, as Christians, see God as our Father? Or Mother for that matter? If Proverbs 17:6 is just bunk because of what we experienced are we missing the point of the proverb? Is the proverb even true? Why? Perhaps it's just an epigrammatic disclosure of desires in our hearts that can't and won't go away no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise. Perhaps the more we seek to dismiss the input and significance of parents the more we find ourselves enmeshed in their influence, even reflecting qualities about them without noticing it?
And in a way the cryptic tale of the curse on Canaan may be illuminating here. Canaan may have displayed a greater proportional quality of a vice than his father Ham, which may have been why Noah cursed him and not his father, who in Genesis 9 announced to the rest of the family that he had seen Noah drunk and naked. This would be a moment where the father is most certainly not a superhero! But his curse, if you will, seems to be used by God to exact a startlingly multi-generational punishment for what appears to be a multi-generational sin which seems to be somehow exploiting or capitalizing on a parent's moment of weakness, sin, and self-humiliation as an opportunity to speak badly of them or reveal this to other family members.
Or it might not, I don't really know exactly what's up in Genesis 9. But it seems that whatever Ham did involved Canaan for Canaan to have been cursed.
Well, this is sort of a rambling, directionless discourse on a couple of verses and the utterly tangential link they have to a movie I like and it's kind of late.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
bits of stuff to read
I try not to only read just serious stuff and I recently finished a trade paperback of Paul Dini's work on Detective. Yep, in case I hadn't mentioned this anywhere else I'm a Batman fan. I've got all the cartoons for the DC animated universe and while I'm not much of a TV or movie watcher lately I still pop in an episode or two now and then and still like to read a comic book once in a while. My brother recently got me the first three volumes of one of my favorite comic book titltes ever, Maison Ikkoku. See, after about ten years of absorbing Kafka, Dostoesky, Didion, Conrad, and other "serious" authors I finally hit a point where I wanted something that was the complete opposite of that stuff and a fizzy romantic comedy comic book by a Japanese woman is about as opposite as you can get from serious, earnest dead white guys from Eastern Europe!
Hanging out on web forums is interested, sort of. It gives you a chance to see how nostalgia can be unfettered by any sense of proportioning reason. Take a super-geek point of reference, worries that Michael Bay's new Transformers movie is going to disrespect the source material. I just dont see that happening, not because I'm convinced Michael Bay is a great cinematic auteur (or that the auteur explanation holds up in the end) but because I do not have a particular childhood fondness for the original cartoon unqualified by all other ordinary characteristics about being an adult male in his 30s. I mean, yeah, I've got a lot of cartoons but the cartoons are all cartoons I bought after seeing them as an adult and liking them as an adult. I have not bought things exclusively for the reason that I liked the cartoons as a kid and therefore had to be able to show any possible future kids what I grew up watching. Not that people can't do THAT, of course, but the more I see on-line debates suggesting that Bay is going to destroy the potential subtlety and nuance of Transformers or miss how the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons serve as a metaphor for our own battles about energy resources and the environment ...
Sorry guys (and I know most of you ARE guys) but that is a childishly simplistic explanation that ignores the fact that if the ecological motiff is really the thrust of the show why are the good guys a bunch of old vehicles that hog gas while the bad guys are jets. Are the good guys good guys only because they have lower carbon emissions relative to the bad guys? Not saying you can't like the cartoon after all this time but I'm just saying ripping on Bay for being Bay is not going to make the premise of Transformers any more profound than it already is ... which is to say not at all.
Hmm, how did I ... oh, yeah, from one comic book story to a cartoon.
Hanging out on web forums is interested, sort of. It gives you a chance to see how nostalgia can be unfettered by any sense of proportioning reason. Take a super-geek point of reference, worries that Michael Bay's new Transformers movie is going to disrespect the source material. I just dont see that happening, not because I'm convinced Michael Bay is a great cinematic auteur (or that the auteur explanation holds up in the end) but because I do not have a particular childhood fondness for the original cartoon unqualified by all other ordinary characteristics about being an adult male in his 30s. I mean, yeah, I've got a lot of cartoons but the cartoons are all cartoons I bought after seeing them as an adult and liking them as an adult. I have not bought things exclusively for the reason that I liked the cartoons as a kid and therefore had to be able to show any possible future kids what I grew up watching. Not that people can't do THAT, of course, but the more I see on-line debates suggesting that Bay is going to destroy the potential subtlety and nuance of Transformers or miss how the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons serve as a metaphor for our own battles about energy resources and the environment ...
Sorry guys (and I know most of you ARE guys) but that is a childishly simplistic explanation that ignores the fact that if the ecological motiff is really the thrust of the show why are the good guys a bunch of old vehicles that hog gas while the bad guys are jets. Are the good guys good guys only because they have lower carbon emissions relative to the bad guys? Not saying you can't like the cartoon after all this time but I'm just saying ripping on Bay for being Bay is not going to make the premise of Transformers any more profound than it already is ... which is to say not at all.
Hmm, how did I ... oh, yeah, from one comic book story to a cartoon.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Why?
I recently joined a discussion board for classical guitarists and one of the questions was (go visit the delcamp forums if you want to find it) why do we do it? Why do we classical guitarists spend weeks or months perfecting a musical performance of something that isn't even our own music and only lasts a few minutes? For me the question is more pressing of why I compose music even though virtually no one listens to it.
I haven't gotten much in the way of feedback from my family about my music over the last six or seven years. My brother likes some of it but admits that he doesn't understand a lot of it and sometimes I'm not sure he really likes a lot of it. Writing song lyrics is immensely time-consuming because I've read too much Eliot, Donne, Stevens, Frost, and poets like that to settle for "moon" and "June" rhymes. And musically, well, it gets worse when you not only the cliches of pop music but the cliches of classical music and want to avoid BOTH sets of cliches if possible. In fifteen years I have written approximately ... 30 to 35 songs that I am not so ashamed of that I would be unwilling to play them now.
But for me that's still good because I remember a band from my college days. They changed their overall sound at least three times and put out three CDs worth of albums and the last phase was, no disrespect meant to them personally, some of the worst stuff I've heard. They went from a Rush knock-off to a Dave-Matthews knock-off to some kind of ambiant electronica outfit that issued what amounted to one tedious song in nine installments. If I wanted that I'd actually go out and buy a Phillip Glass album.
Being able to a write a song and having the feeling that even if you played it for no one but yourself you could do that for the next ten years, that is a feeling you get and you feel like the song is worth while. Music is a gift from the Lord, a gift that we can work on even if no one but the Lord and the individual musician can hear. I'm sure David wrote psalms for corporate worship but he also wrote music as a way to commune with the Lord.
Now because I hate to pump up the creative process because I've seen too many artists of all stripes make art their idol, I hesitate to say this, but when the Lord gives you musical ability and you have cultivated that through discipline (I am at a point where I don't believe there is any thing like a prodigy if you really look at what the so-called prodigies did) then by cultivating the gifts God has given you and dedicating those gifts to Him you get these rare but precious moments where by composing music as an act of devotion to the Lord He meets you where you are at. But like any other act of worship you have to prepare your heart, mind, and body for that. It's mundane stuff. It's setting aside if nothing else one day or night a week where no one and no thing can bother you and that, my fellower readers or bloggers, requires more discipline than possibly anything else. You have to shut out friends and family and your own worries about what the future holds and recognize that because the Lord gave you the opportunity to make music for the Lord you do it for Him and you also do it for you. This isn't selfish if in this process you delight in the Lord.
Now maybe that sounds dumb but it is something I have discovered slowly after sixteen years. But it's also not easy. There are times when I would like to be able to show my music to someone and have them not only like it but understand it. Music conveys very little and music with words, paradoxically, often conveys less than that. I had a friend in college who went for years thinking the song "Lola" was about a guy dancing with a pretty girl and he had a great experience with a girl listening to that song only to find out about ten years later that that was not exactly what the song "Lola" was about! Bummer, man! Finding out that a song you loved for years wasn't what you thought it was about, though, is proof that David Byrn and the rest of Talking Heads were probably right--lyrics are just a trick to get people to listen to music longer.
Of course if you don't want to write lyrics as spotty as those of Talking Heads you take a different approach and that's why I have spent upwards of two and a half years hammering out a lyric for a song that, all told, takes about four and a half minutes. In another case I spent two years working out lyrics that on the page are probably ... what, half a page? Why? I think if there were just one reason any of us did stuff like this we would have stopped doing it long, long ago.
But one thing is certain, if you plan to be any kind of composer or artist you have to make sure you devote yourself to it as a discipline because if you don't, well, it's not even a hobby. It alarms me how much work hobbies really are. I have been working on a piano sonata now for almost ten years and have been having to basically teach myself the piano technique I need to even play the thing. I have had to work on what my composition professor taught me twelve years ago and add to that years of studying counterpoint, form, theory, history, and continuously exploring and re-exploring aspects of my music to achieve what I'm aiming for.
And eventually, the scary thing is, you have to run it by people who won't spare your feelings if they're sensitive. You have to find someone who will savage your work to its core--tell you your lyrics don't make any sense; that the modulations are unconvincing; that your forms are worn-out and cliched; that your music has good themes but the forms are too messy and long for their own good. You have to find people who will kill your darlings for you because you are too afraid to kill them yourself.
But you also have to find people who are willing to do this for you and have the wisdom and experience in what they do to help you make your work better. No artist can possible exist within a vacuum and no artist is evere self-made in any respect. Even if you compose for yourself you are not finally composing just for yourself and you have to interact with people to grow as a musician. I learned a lot being in a band that went absolutely nowhere, and I do mean nowhere. Arguing and debating and rehearsing and discussing all things lyrical and musical with two guys who I often disagreed with taught me invaluable lessons about what does and doesn't come over in music all around.
And despite the possibility that the songs I wrote with that band may never see the light of day beyond a handful of friends and family who have heard those songs, and an even smaller group of people who have told me they really liked the music I worked on, those two or three people gave me feedback that I still treasure. Vaudeville isn't gone at all--everyone has a small group of people they trust to tell them they suck but they're getting better and any artist who can develop or have hopes of developing needs that, chiefly the people who can tell them they're getting better and show them how to get better.
And sometimes when all that is lacking for a time you have to find joy in the very nature of the work itself. The arts just don't seem to be something where it pays to be very goal-oriented. It pays to be process-oriented with the awareness that goals are ways to goad the process along. I don't write music so that I can look back and say I accomplished this or that. I write music because I realize that of all the ways I explored a process in composition A I realize, in hindsight, I neglected all sorts of good possibilities that wouldn't have worked for composition A but would sound pretty neat in composition B. It's what my composition prof once called "a sense of play".
Now, of course, I would eventually like SOMEONE to hear my piano sonata after I've finished working on it and I pray that it doesn't take much longer than ten years. Enjoying the process for its own sake only gets you so far in composing because performing the piece or having it performed is still part of the process. No one writes a symphony or a sonata that they never want performed. Something else happens when other people are involved, which is why music binds us together in strange and unexpected ways. You can write out every note of your piece over a period of years and yet when you sit down with musicians who are rehearsing the piece with you to interact with them you still learn things about the music that you couldn't imagine.
That's what's rewarding to me about classical music and even a pop song that you can play with someone else--it sounds too selfish to make sense in print but when you've written any piece of music that someone else has liked enough to play you begin to realize that you reveal things to others and yourself in your music that even you didn't really know were there. What you write and don't write opens a portal to who you are, especially as you begin to recognize recurring themes, melodies, harmonic progressions. You begin to wonder if anyone will hear or sense in your music what you find in it yourself. I had an associate write to me that he noticed an ironic sense of detachment that I have from my musical material but that's precisely what I don't sense in some music I've written where I have spent four years working on something that is about four minutes long. When the creative process takes that much time there's nothing ironic or detached in it for you! To put that much time, love, and work into a piece and have someone tell you it doesn't make any sense to theme and doesn't seem that good ... well, you can understand why you feel reluctant to share music with that person again! I don't blame anyone for feeling that way!
I recently helped a friend of mine transcribe a song. I won't get into details what the song is about or why the friend is working on it but helping him transcribe the song was a lot of fun for me. It wasn't particularly hard, either, but I had more fun helping him with that song of his than I have had in a while, a musical kind of fun. The reason I just don't relate to so much solo classical guitar repertoire in so many ways, even the great stuff, is that for me there is no sense of making the music together with someone.
Even if I'm helping a friend transcribe a song he wrote I get that feeling, that feeling that I am not just doing this for me but as a way to help someone. When I write sonatas or songs I don't just get a chance to express myself (and, really, is self-expression all that important by itself if everyone can do it anyway?) I have an opportunity to create something that, as I see things, gives me and others an opportunity to see how the way the Lord created things can be mirrored in what I create.
I especially like the idea, as a composer, that the microcosm contains within itself the macrocosm. In other words:
Hidden within Adam's rib, as he sleeps,
the woman with whom he will fill the world.
There, I might as well make a little couplet out of it, while I'm at it. That's quite possibly the shortest poem I've ever written and I can't help but feel I'm unconsciously ripping off Milton or something. Too bad I don't like Milton!
Anyway, the idea that begets of itself more ideas is the greatest thing about composing classical music for me--being able to begin with a 30 second melody and spinning it out into eighteen minutes so that a person who knows what to look for can see how the seed grows into the plant.
The creative process, though, is about how the seed is planted and dies to become the plant and it must be cultivated at every step. It is the discipline of cultivating the plant that is the mark of the artist as I am coming to fairly dimly understand the process. Plenty of people have seeds who never become plants and some people let the plants become whatever they become without cultivation and think that by so doing they are the more "honest" artists when their plants are really weak and the garden that constitutes their total work is, well, not the kind of garden that yields food that other people savor all that much.
We always have to risk having done everything in vain. Even after ten years I have gone back to my piano sonata and rewritten huge sections; cutting off almost all of a recapitulation and slicing off a coda that I thought was nice; even removing an entire theme from a movement because it was beautiful but didn't work where I originally had it. And sometimes you have to step back and admit that you're trying too hard or not trying hard enough. To get to this point where you can do this by yourself as you're alone with your thoughts and with your work ... that's not easy.
The fiancee of a friend of mine said that in her line of work and study (science) failure is the essence of the thing. Most of what you do is a total wash, a failure, a thing that didn't come together. Failure is not something I feel comfortable with in most aspects of my life and that is a big problem because, well, no one succeeds without first failing over and over again. I am most comfortable with failing as an artist in a piece of music or a poem or an essay or blog entry because I have learned how to transform my failures into a way to begin new work. When you learn how to transform failure into a way of restrategizing your art and your artistic vision you begin to learn how to actually be a composer. You learn how to stop forcing the materials you work with to be what you want it to be and find ways to discover what they CAN be.
I remember a fellow I knew in college once said he felt that he was writing too much music and that's why he was burned out and not coming up with ways to finish an assignment. I advised him that if anything the opposite was true: he wasn't writing nearly enough. He was so obsessed with pinning down a sonata allegro form that he wasn't writing songs, he wasn't playing with a fugue exposition for something he might have, he wasn't writing in a style he hadn't worked in before, he wasn't dabbling with old ideas that he thought were finished. Recycling is not just an environmental concept! Pilfering from yourself and regenerating the material or even completely rewriting material from the ground up just using a concept is a good way to refire the creative engine.
For instance, when I was in my teens I wrote a poem that I liked that was a hybrid of Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. I had music (awful music) that was built around the text that was a big droning chord/boogie pattern with instrumental breaks that were structured along a series of modal shifts. Blame it on my listening to Kind of Blue and not getting how to get that kind of simple form to work. I think I had a harmonic shift based on the following sequence: mixolydian, dorian, aeolian, phrygian, locrian, lydian, back to major/minor. Now you can see how this "could" have been cool. I start with a hippie type mode that keeps chromatically dropping the seventh, then the sixth, then the second, then the fifth intervals of the mode before returning to the lydian more and raising literally all the modal points I had flattened throughout the solo. In other words, for someone who was listening to how the harmonic language was being compressed out of traditional major/minor harmony the form was easy to perceive. Problem was I sucked so it didn't matter that my idea was great I didn't have the musical skill or sense of broad harmonic understanding to get it to work, let alone any of my musical friends in high school. But I had what I thought would be a good song.
But now, setting aside the whole dubious notion I had of what was musically cool that was just a vamp, I don't like the old song for a completely different reason. I wrote that song sixteen years ago in the throes of premillenial dispensationalism. So about four years ago I scrapped the song at every level except for a handful of lines I liked. Even then I only used those lines as a springboard for a new variation on the theme.
The original lines were roughly:
Now you can say, "Even Lucifer can feel pain."
But can you say, "He didn't get what he deserves"?
Remember that the fate of the master
Is the fate of the one who serves.
And I have retooled it a bit:
How many years has the devil spent
Wondering if he can ever repent?
Do you think he lives life on the run?
Do you think he thinks he's the only one
Who can say, "I don't have what I deserve?"
"Who can say whether I am right or wrong?"
"If I say what I want should that unnerve
When it's all that I've wanted all along?"
Not as good in some ways but still servicable for a song lyric. I guess my real point is to say that even if I don't finish the song I've started as a way of rewriting my old song I can use my reaction to what I feel to be an artistic immaturity in the old stuff as a way to spur the new stuff. So if you're like me and actually feel embarrassed by songs you wrote in your teen years under the sway of Hal Lindsey you can write a new song reacting to your old song by employing an eschatology more informed by partial preterism. I mean, this sort of reacting to misunderstandings or shortcomings in your own work got Sting working, even if I think "Set Them Free" isn't even close to being as good as "Every Breath you Take". The point here isn't to say you shouldn't write songs reacting to your old ones because the new ones will suck!
But it sure does help to have someone to play your music for. In my experience, for better and worse, family is NOT the audience that can help you. Even though I've never dated anyone in my life this will go double for girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses who are probably by and large so enamored of YOU that they're not objectively capable of telling you if there's an actual problem with either the music or text you wrote ... unless they're comparably up on musical or literary forms to point out that you mixed your metaphors or employed a harmonic retrogression that doesn't support the restless, forward thrust of a particular lyric. For instance, take Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". He was a good enough of a poet AND a songwriter to make sure the chords that play under "the minor fall and the major lift" do EXACTLY the same thing musically as the words express textually. Text-painting is a virtually unknown art in pop music, though, and I admit that most of the time I don't care about it but I will say that if you're going to pound away on some thematic notion like "I'm horny" it doesn't hurt to bang away at one chord as a harmonic pedal point for six minutes the way Led Zeppelin did because the musical means will support the literary end. Okay, forget that I put "literary" and Led Zeppelin in the same sentence!
Not that it proves anything since I've never had any music published but all that was to say "That's what you need musician friends for" if you're a musician. In fact the creepy discovery I have made not having my music played or heard by anyone for the most part is that if you DON'T have musical friends then beyond the One who knows all and sees all and you you are, for all intents and purposes, simply not a musician at all! It's the old question about the tree falling in the wilderness and whether there's sound only in this case there's no room for question. Humanly speaking music that is unheard by anyone but Jesus doesn't exist. That's why I hope to exist, so to speak, eventually.
As I was saying before, family can't be objective about the creative process unless they can double up as musical friends. If your dad was J. S. Bach then he's a trustworthy friend indeed! If your dad was Dmitri Shostakovich he might be a jerk about saying amateurs shouldn't play but he would at least let you know when you weren't an amateur anymore, thus his son's career. Mozart's dad rewrote a number of his pieces and I'm willing to bet those rewrites were good but most of us don't have Mozart's dad!
Then again, if you write in more than one style it helps to have friends whose interests reflect that diversity. I can't play my would be rock or pop songs for friends who only listen to classical music and I can't play the classical music for friends who only know pop or jazz and expect them to get what's going on. But that's also part of the fun because the way I see it finding ways to synthesize the vocabularies and forms of both styles helps blur the distinctions so that one day you can write a piece that, Lord willing, the pop fans can like and the classica fans can like. When I heard a co-worker who listened only to rock complement me on a piece I wrote for flute and guitar I really felt like I was getting somewhere as an artist.
But I've rambled about this question of "why" enough for one night.
I haven't gotten much in the way of feedback from my family about my music over the last six or seven years. My brother likes some of it but admits that he doesn't understand a lot of it and sometimes I'm not sure he really likes a lot of it. Writing song lyrics is immensely time-consuming because I've read too much Eliot, Donne, Stevens, Frost, and poets like that to settle for "moon" and "June" rhymes. And musically, well, it gets worse when you not only the cliches of pop music but the cliches of classical music and want to avoid BOTH sets of cliches if possible. In fifteen years I have written approximately ... 30 to 35 songs that I am not so ashamed of that I would be unwilling to play them now.
But for me that's still good because I remember a band from my college days. They changed their overall sound at least three times and put out three CDs worth of albums and the last phase was, no disrespect meant to them personally, some of the worst stuff I've heard. They went from a Rush knock-off to a Dave-Matthews knock-off to some kind of ambiant electronica outfit that issued what amounted to one tedious song in nine installments. If I wanted that I'd actually go out and buy a Phillip Glass album.
Being able to a write a song and having the feeling that even if you played it for no one but yourself you could do that for the next ten years, that is a feeling you get and you feel like the song is worth while. Music is a gift from the Lord, a gift that we can work on even if no one but the Lord and the individual musician can hear. I'm sure David wrote psalms for corporate worship but he also wrote music as a way to commune with the Lord.
Now because I hate to pump up the creative process because I've seen too many artists of all stripes make art their idol, I hesitate to say this, but when the Lord gives you musical ability and you have cultivated that through discipline (I am at a point where I don't believe there is any thing like a prodigy if you really look at what the so-called prodigies did) then by cultivating the gifts God has given you and dedicating those gifts to Him you get these rare but precious moments where by composing music as an act of devotion to the Lord He meets you where you are at. But like any other act of worship you have to prepare your heart, mind, and body for that. It's mundane stuff. It's setting aside if nothing else one day or night a week where no one and no thing can bother you and that, my fellower readers or bloggers, requires more discipline than possibly anything else. You have to shut out friends and family and your own worries about what the future holds and recognize that because the Lord gave you the opportunity to make music for the Lord you do it for Him and you also do it for you. This isn't selfish if in this process you delight in the Lord.
Now maybe that sounds dumb but it is something I have discovered slowly after sixteen years. But it's also not easy. There are times when I would like to be able to show my music to someone and have them not only like it but understand it. Music conveys very little and music with words, paradoxically, often conveys less than that. I had a friend in college who went for years thinking the song "Lola" was about a guy dancing with a pretty girl and he had a great experience with a girl listening to that song only to find out about ten years later that that was not exactly what the song "Lola" was about! Bummer, man! Finding out that a song you loved for years wasn't what you thought it was about, though, is proof that David Byrn and the rest of Talking Heads were probably right--lyrics are just a trick to get people to listen to music longer.
Of course if you don't want to write lyrics as spotty as those of Talking Heads you take a different approach and that's why I have spent upwards of two and a half years hammering out a lyric for a song that, all told, takes about four and a half minutes. In another case I spent two years working out lyrics that on the page are probably ... what, half a page? Why? I think if there were just one reason any of us did stuff like this we would have stopped doing it long, long ago.
But one thing is certain, if you plan to be any kind of composer or artist you have to make sure you devote yourself to it as a discipline because if you don't, well, it's not even a hobby. It alarms me how much work hobbies really are. I have been working on a piano sonata now for almost ten years and have been having to basically teach myself the piano technique I need to even play the thing. I have had to work on what my composition professor taught me twelve years ago and add to that years of studying counterpoint, form, theory, history, and continuously exploring and re-exploring aspects of my music to achieve what I'm aiming for.
And eventually, the scary thing is, you have to run it by people who won't spare your feelings if they're sensitive. You have to find someone who will savage your work to its core--tell you your lyrics don't make any sense; that the modulations are unconvincing; that your forms are worn-out and cliched; that your music has good themes but the forms are too messy and long for their own good. You have to find people who will kill your darlings for you because you are too afraid to kill them yourself.
But you also have to find people who are willing to do this for you and have the wisdom and experience in what they do to help you make your work better. No artist can possible exist within a vacuum and no artist is evere self-made in any respect. Even if you compose for yourself you are not finally composing just for yourself and you have to interact with people to grow as a musician. I learned a lot being in a band that went absolutely nowhere, and I do mean nowhere. Arguing and debating and rehearsing and discussing all things lyrical and musical with two guys who I often disagreed with taught me invaluable lessons about what does and doesn't come over in music all around.
And despite the possibility that the songs I wrote with that band may never see the light of day beyond a handful of friends and family who have heard those songs, and an even smaller group of people who have told me they really liked the music I worked on, those two or three people gave me feedback that I still treasure. Vaudeville isn't gone at all--everyone has a small group of people they trust to tell them they suck but they're getting better and any artist who can develop or have hopes of developing needs that, chiefly the people who can tell them they're getting better and show them how to get better.
And sometimes when all that is lacking for a time you have to find joy in the very nature of the work itself. The arts just don't seem to be something where it pays to be very goal-oriented. It pays to be process-oriented with the awareness that goals are ways to goad the process along. I don't write music so that I can look back and say I accomplished this or that. I write music because I realize that of all the ways I explored a process in composition A I realize, in hindsight, I neglected all sorts of good possibilities that wouldn't have worked for composition A but would sound pretty neat in composition B. It's what my composition prof once called "a sense of play".
Now, of course, I would eventually like SOMEONE to hear my piano sonata after I've finished working on it and I pray that it doesn't take much longer than ten years. Enjoying the process for its own sake only gets you so far in composing because performing the piece or having it performed is still part of the process. No one writes a symphony or a sonata that they never want performed. Something else happens when other people are involved, which is why music binds us together in strange and unexpected ways. You can write out every note of your piece over a period of years and yet when you sit down with musicians who are rehearsing the piece with you to interact with them you still learn things about the music that you couldn't imagine.
That's what's rewarding to me about classical music and even a pop song that you can play with someone else--it sounds too selfish to make sense in print but when you've written any piece of music that someone else has liked enough to play you begin to realize that you reveal things to others and yourself in your music that even you didn't really know were there. What you write and don't write opens a portal to who you are, especially as you begin to recognize recurring themes, melodies, harmonic progressions. You begin to wonder if anyone will hear or sense in your music what you find in it yourself. I had an associate write to me that he noticed an ironic sense of detachment that I have from my musical material but that's precisely what I don't sense in some music I've written where I have spent four years working on something that is about four minutes long. When the creative process takes that much time there's nothing ironic or detached in it for you! To put that much time, love, and work into a piece and have someone tell you it doesn't make any sense to theme and doesn't seem that good ... well, you can understand why you feel reluctant to share music with that person again! I don't blame anyone for feeling that way!
I recently helped a friend of mine transcribe a song. I won't get into details what the song is about or why the friend is working on it but helping him transcribe the song was a lot of fun for me. It wasn't particularly hard, either, but I had more fun helping him with that song of his than I have had in a while, a musical kind of fun. The reason I just don't relate to so much solo classical guitar repertoire in so many ways, even the great stuff, is that for me there is no sense of making the music together with someone.
Even if I'm helping a friend transcribe a song he wrote I get that feeling, that feeling that I am not just doing this for me but as a way to help someone. When I write sonatas or songs I don't just get a chance to express myself (and, really, is self-expression all that important by itself if everyone can do it anyway?) I have an opportunity to create something that, as I see things, gives me and others an opportunity to see how the way the Lord created things can be mirrored in what I create.
I especially like the idea, as a composer, that the microcosm contains within itself the macrocosm. In other words:
Hidden within Adam's rib, as he sleeps,
the woman with whom he will fill the world.
There, I might as well make a little couplet out of it, while I'm at it. That's quite possibly the shortest poem I've ever written and I can't help but feel I'm unconsciously ripping off Milton or something. Too bad I don't like Milton!
Anyway, the idea that begets of itself more ideas is the greatest thing about composing classical music for me--being able to begin with a 30 second melody and spinning it out into eighteen minutes so that a person who knows what to look for can see how the seed grows into the plant.
The creative process, though, is about how the seed is planted and dies to become the plant and it must be cultivated at every step. It is the discipline of cultivating the plant that is the mark of the artist as I am coming to fairly dimly understand the process. Plenty of people have seeds who never become plants and some people let the plants become whatever they become without cultivation and think that by so doing they are the more "honest" artists when their plants are really weak and the garden that constitutes their total work is, well, not the kind of garden that yields food that other people savor all that much.
We always have to risk having done everything in vain. Even after ten years I have gone back to my piano sonata and rewritten huge sections; cutting off almost all of a recapitulation and slicing off a coda that I thought was nice; even removing an entire theme from a movement because it was beautiful but didn't work where I originally had it. And sometimes you have to step back and admit that you're trying too hard or not trying hard enough. To get to this point where you can do this by yourself as you're alone with your thoughts and with your work ... that's not easy.
The fiancee of a friend of mine said that in her line of work and study (science) failure is the essence of the thing. Most of what you do is a total wash, a failure, a thing that didn't come together. Failure is not something I feel comfortable with in most aspects of my life and that is a big problem because, well, no one succeeds without first failing over and over again. I am most comfortable with failing as an artist in a piece of music or a poem or an essay or blog entry because I have learned how to transform my failures into a way to begin new work. When you learn how to transform failure into a way of restrategizing your art and your artistic vision you begin to learn how to actually be a composer. You learn how to stop forcing the materials you work with to be what you want it to be and find ways to discover what they CAN be.
I remember a fellow I knew in college once said he felt that he was writing too much music and that's why he was burned out and not coming up with ways to finish an assignment. I advised him that if anything the opposite was true: he wasn't writing nearly enough. He was so obsessed with pinning down a sonata allegro form that he wasn't writing songs, he wasn't playing with a fugue exposition for something he might have, he wasn't writing in a style he hadn't worked in before, he wasn't dabbling with old ideas that he thought were finished. Recycling is not just an environmental concept! Pilfering from yourself and regenerating the material or even completely rewriting material from the ground up just using a concept is a good way to refire the creative engine.
For instance, when I was in my teens I wrote a poem that I liked that was a hybrid of Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. I had music (awful music) that was built around the text that was a big droning chord/boogie pattern with instrumental breaks that were structured along a series of modal shifts. Blame it on my listening to Kind of Blue and not getting how to get that kind of simple form to work. I think I had a harmonic shift based on the following sequence: mixolydian, dorian, aeolian, phrygian, locrian, lydian, back to major/minor. Now you can see how this "could" have been cool. I start with a hippie type mode that keeps chromatically dropping the seventh, then the sixth, then the second, then the fifth intervals of the mode before returning to the lydian more and raising literally all the modal points I had flattened throughout the solo. In other words, for someone who was listening to how the harmonic language was being compressed out of traditional major/minor harmony the form was easy to perceive. Problem was I sucked so it didn't matter that my idea was great I didn't have the musical skill or sense of broad harmonic understanding to get it to work, let alone any of my musical friends in high school. But I had what I thought would be a good song.
But now, setting aside the whole dubious notion I had of what was musically cool that was just a vamp, I don't like the old song for a completely different reason. I wrote that song sixteen years ago in the throes of premillenial dispensationalism. So about four years ago I scrapped the song at every level except for a handful of lines I liked. Even then I only used those lines as a springboard for a new variation on the theme.
The original lines were roughly:
Now you can say, "Even Lucifer can feel pain."
But can you say, "He didn't get what he deserves"?
Remember that the fate of the master
Is the fate of the one who serves.
And I have retooled it a bit:
How many years has the devil spent
Wondering if he can ever repent?
Do you think he lives life on the run?
Do you think he thinks he's the only one
Who can say, "I don't have what I deserve?"
"Who can say whether I am right or wrong?"
"If I say what I want should that unnerve
When it's all that I've wanted all along?"
Not as good in some ways but still servicable for a song lyric. I guess my real point is to say that even if I don't finish the song I've started as a way of rewriting my old song I can use my reaction to what I feel to be an artistic immaturity in the old stuff as a way to spur the new stuff. So if you're like me and actually feel embarrassed by songs you wrote in your teen years under the sway of Hal Lindsey you can write a new song reacting to your old song by employing an eschatology more informed by partial preterism. I mean, this sort of reacting to misunderstandings or shortcomings in your own work got Sting working, even if I think "Set Them Free" isn't even close to being as good as "Every Breath you Take". The point here isn't to say you shouldn't write songs reacting to your old ones because the new ones will suck!
But it sure does help to have someone to play your music for. In my experience, for better and worse, family is NOT the audience that can help you. Even though I've never dated anyone in my life this will go double for girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses who are probably by and large so enamored of YOU that they're not objectively capable of telling you if there's an actual problem with either the music or text you wrote ... unless they're comparably up on musical or literary forms to point out that you mixed your metaphors or employed a harmonic retrogression that doesn't support the restless, forward thrust of a particular lyric. For instance, take Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". He was a good enough of a poet AND a songwriter to make sure the chords that play under "the minor fall and the major lift" do EXACTLY the same thing musically as the words express textually. Text-painting is a virtually unknown art in pop music, though, and I admit that most of the time I don't care about it but I will say that if you're going to pound away on some thematic notion like "I'm horny" it doesn't hurt to bang away at one chord as a harmonic pedal point for six minutes the way Led Zeppelin did because the musical means will support the literary end. Okay, forget that I put "literary" and Led Zeppelin in the same sentence!
Not that it proves anything since I've never had any music published but all that was to say "That's what you need musician friends for" if you're a musician. In fact the creepy discovery I have made not having my music played or heard by anyone for the most part is that if you DON'T have musical friends then beyond the One who knows all and sees all and you you are, for all intents and purposes, simply not a musician at all! It's the old question about the tree falling in the wilderness and whether there's sound only in this case there's no room for question. Humanly speaking music that is unheard by anyone but Jesus doesn't exist. That's why I hope to exist, so to speak, eventually.
As I was saying before, family can't be objective about the creative process unless they can double up as musical friends. If your dad was J. S. Bach then he's a trustworthy friend indeed! If your dad was Dmitri Shostakovich he might be a jerk about saying amateurs shouldn't play but he would at least let you know when you weren't an amateur anymore, thus his son's career. Mozart's dad rewrote a number of his pieces and I'm willing to bet those rewrites were good but most of us don't have Mozart's dad!
Then again, if you write in more than one style it helps to have friends whose interests reflect that diversity. I can't play my would be rock or pop songs for friends who only listen to classical music and I can't play the classical music for friends who only know pop or jazz and expect them to get what's going on. But that's also part of the fun because the way I see it finding ways to synthesize the vocabularies and forms of both styles helps blur the distinctions so that one day you can write a piece that, Lord willing, the pop fans can like and the classica fans can like. When I heard a co-worker who listened only to rock complement me on a piece I wrote for flute and guitar I really felt like I was getting somewhere as an artist.
But I've rambled about this question of "why" enough for one night.
sundry junk
I picked up a few discs of guitar music by Mertz but mostly Sor. I'm starting to see why Sor is so well respected. He actually tackles some longer-scale forms and has a nice tuneful way about him. I don't remember if it was he or Tarrega who was regarded as the 'Beethoven of the guitar' but I don't quite see it. I mean, I can sort of see how relative to the scale of what the guitar can accomplish compared to what the orchestra accomplishes; and then taking that into consideration in light of what Sor (or Tarrega?) achieved at the time ... yeah, I guess the shoe fits. But it seems Beethoven stretched the boundaries not only of technical accomplishments but of formal and theoretical accomplishments, too, and for this reason no non-guitarist music historian or critic would ever take seriously that being the 'Beethoven of the guitar' was anything more than egregious hyperbolic sucking up to a guitarist composer who doesn't even register beyond the world of the classical guitarists. Which is a little unfair both ways because I can see why Sor is well-regarded and, taking the blinders off folks, Beethoven wrote some pretty awful music along with all that good stuff.
Well, a short update of things that aren't exactly happening but could happen. I've sent off a few music scores to different musicians and while everyone's busy now amongst those folks there's some interest, so that in itself will suffice for now as far as I'm concerned.
For budget reasons and some future plans I'm taking a break from most concerts, or at least specifically symphonic concerts. So far there's just two local shows I plan to see. One is when Seattle Symphony plays Bluebird's Castle and a piece by Kurtag (I've got reasons for that that I won't reveal here); and the other is coming up this Saturday. A Messiaen/Prokofiev/Stravinsky/Debussy concert program is pretty hard for me to resist.
Well, a short update of things that aren't exactly happening but could happen. I've sent off a few music scores to different musicians and while everyone's busy now amongst those folks there's some interest, so that in itself will suffice for now as far as I'm concerned.
For budget reasons and some future plans I'm taking a break from most concerts, or at least specifically symphonic concerts. So far there's just two local shows I plan to see. One is when Seattle Symphony plays Bluebird's Castle and a piece by Kurtag (I've got reasons for that that I won't reveal here); and the other is coming up this Saturday. A Messiaen/Prokofiev/Stravinsky/Debussy concert program is pretty hard for me to resist.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Some side notes on composing a Mass
Masses are tough. I suppose if I didn't care what I was really doing musically with the text of the Mass I could say it wasn't hard or if I was some lazy dork who refused to set the Credo for some dubious reason besides just not believing that what the Creed says is actually true then I could decide that maybe it's not really hard ... but it's hard.
It seems the most crucial issue is to take the text and consider its theological content and form as a starting point. The text tends to suggest its own musical form. Kyrie settings are usually some variation of binary or ternary form, usually the latter. Glorias and Credos tend to be more free-floating but this is not something I'm sure I entirely endorse. I think that if you take the literary structure of the Gloria you'll find that a persistent pattern emerges in which declamations about God alternate with descriptions of how we respond to the nature of God's glory. Since the Gloria incipit is taken from the worship of angels to Yahweh I consider it to be not merely a descritpion of how acclamation of the Lord but of the divine court's description of the Lord. I.e. we're not angels so appropriating the worship of angels as our own should not distract us from the observation that angels are the Lord's messengers. Therefore I found a way to compose a Gloria where the incipit is used in a number of forms to describe the Lord's nature and attributes and to use a different thematic gesture to describe our own response to the Lord whether through thanksgiving or supplication. And it came out in a loose rondo form of ABabA.
The Credo presents another set of problems, a HUGE set of problems. I'm not Bach or Penderecki so a large scale multi-movement setting of the Credo feels utterly beyond me. But I am often stymied by attempting to just imitate the Credo forms I've seen other composers use, not because they're musically unsatisfying but because I"m just not sure the musiccal form explicates the theological significance of the text. Text-painting is cool and all but sometimes text-painting just creates a big mush of tunes and textures that don't always make formal sense. It's seeming terribly easy to create a big musical mess where people don't remember the content of the Credo.
So for me the plan that seems most logical is to build the musical setting of the Credo around Christ and to have that be the measure. There are two aspects of Christ to consider via hypostatic union--his divine nature and his human nature; His oneness with the Father and His identification with us as sinful men and women. So how would this work itself out? So far I think the best approach is to establish a thematic and structural link between Christ's earthly ministry, death, and resurrection and the ministry and gifts and hope of the Church. This would also entail finding a thematic and structural link between the Son with the Father and Spirit. So, of course, this means that the melody and harmony associated with the persons of the Trinity should be shared. So far the only composer I've found who made a point of doing this in his Mass is Frank Martin (way to go Frank!) but I imagine other composers have done this and I trust I'm not the last, the first, or that people besides Martin haven't done this already.
Yeah, I know, I've blogged about this before but making sure you are, as a Christian and a composer, putting a lot of thought into the meaning of the text is the smallest prerequisite for bothering to write a Mass at all. I've only been working on this for seven years so I figure I've got no one's deadline and only my artistic goals to worry about.
It seems the most crucial issue is to take the text and consider its theological content and form as a starting point. The text tends to suggest its own musical form. Kyrie settings are usually some variation of binary or ternary form, usually the latter. Glorias and Credos tend to be more free-floating but this is not something I'm sure I entirely endorse. I think that if you take the literary structure of the Gloria you'll find that a persistent pattern emerges in which declamations about God alternate with descriptions of how we respond to the nature of God's glory. Since the Gloria incipit is taken from the worship of angels to Yahweh I consider it to be not merely a descritpion of how acclamation of the Lord but of the divine court's description of the Lord. I.e. we're not angels so appropriating the worship of angels as our own should not distract us from the observation that angels are the Lord's messengers. Therefore I found a way to compose a Gloria where the incipit is used in a number of forms to describe the Lord's nature and attributes and to use a different thematic gesture to describe our own response to the Lord whether through thanksgiving or supplication. And it came out in a loose rondo form of ABabA.
The Credo presents another set of problems, a HUGE set of problems. I'm not Bach or Penderecki so a large scale multi-movement setting of the Credo feels utterly beyond me. But I am often stymied by attempting to just imitate the Credo forms I've seen other composers use, not because they're musically unsatisfying but because I"m just not sure the musiccal form explicates the theological significance of the text. Text-painting is cool and all but sometimes text-painting just creates a big mush of tunes and textures that don't always make formal sense. It's seeming terribly easy to create a big musical mess where people don't remember the content of the Credo.
So for me the plan that seems most logical is to build the musical setting of the Credo around Christ and to have that be the measure. There are two aspects of Christ to consider via hypostatic union--his divine nature and his human nature; His oneness with the Father and His identification with us as sinful men and women. So how would this work itself out? So far I think the best approach is to establish a thematic and structural link between Christ's earthly ministry, death, and resurrection and the ministry and gifts and hope of the Church. This would also entail finding a thematic and structural link between the Son with the Father and Spirit. So, of course, this means that the melody and harmony associated with the persons of the Trinity should be shared. So far the only composer I've found who made a point of doing this in his Mass is Frank Martin (way to go Frank!) but I imagine other composers have done this and I trust I'm not the last, the first, or that people besides Martin haven't done this already.
Yeah, I know, I've blogged about this before but making sure you are, as a Christian and a composer, putting a lot of thought into the meaning of the text is the smallest prerequisite for bothering to write a Mass at all. I've only been working on this for seven years so I figure I've got no one's deadline and only my artistic goals to worry about.
This is Your Brain on Music, part 2, connections to biblical literature
Now this may seem like a total joke to any of you who aren't Christians or don't see how scientific research on musical perception would have anything to do with biblical literature. Since I'm a Christian and a musician with at least a passing interest in some scientific research (though I admit I don't have any scientific training) I feel that this book Levitin has written provides some interesting stuff Christians, and Christian musicians, should at least be aware of.
I skipped entirely Levitin's points about how brain development connects to musical taste because I think it basically speaks for itself and I've tended to think that people stop expanding their musical tastes around the time they think they've "grown up". Still, it's another interesting excurses Levitin touches on to explore why people seem to have expanding musical interests and tastes up to about their early 20s after which many, many people just stop listening to new music and keep playing that same album by Boston or Led Zeppelin over and over again.
But I think Levitin's explanation of sexual selection, while probably pretty accurate, seems incomplete. To assume we must explain music in terms of the earliest humans is actually a perfectly good idea, though, even if it's not clear that just one explanation of the use of music would do the job. Scientists are still not sure why any animals need to sleep so why would we necessarily have one cover-all explanation for music?
Still, Levitin's proposal that music is a form of sexual selection, that music signals a guy is a good suitor and mate, is something Christians can extrapolate from the Bible. The first song ever sung in Scripture is Adam's song to Eve. When the first song in Scripture is invented by a man for his wife when he sees her for the first time I defy any Christian to just dismiss Levitin's explanation of sexual selection as being inaccurate. It may be incomplete but the Bible pretty well backs it up as far as it goes.
For that matter, let's just look at the titles of biblical books. The Song of Songs is not actually about God except by means of theologians forcing it to be an allegorical exploration of God's love for His people or the individual believer by means of sheer historical accumulation of avoiding the more obvious content of the book. It's a series of love poems celebrating sexual love between a husband and wife. If the first song in Scripture is about sex and the Song of Songs, which advertises itself as the greatest of all songs, at least uses the sexual relationship as its central metaphor (hey, I'll throw a bone to people who assume Song of Songs MUST be allegorical) then we can't avoid the truth that sexual selection and song are linked in a way that even the most conservative Christian can't deny.
Not that this necessarily is presented as a justification for polygamy but consider the two greatest kings in Israelite history, David and Solomon. Both were legendary for their abilities as song-writers and both had quite a few wives. Even if we are not presented with prescriptive teaching from Scripture that Levitin's hypothesis is correct the descriptive evidence of the biblical account is that Levitin's still right that the song and dance man impresses the women.
But I think even a non-Christian could argue that Levitin overstates the explanation of sexual selection. We know for a fact that not all songs are about getting the attention of the hot guy or hot girl. We learn songs to learn things we really need to know. Despite dismissive statements that music is a parasitic offshoot of language centers in the brain it's hard to ignore that we all learned the alphabet through some form of song. Music and memory are intertwined. We remember things when we sing them and Scripture supports this, too. God told Moses to teach the Israelites a song so as to remember what He wanted them to remember. Many of the Psalms are devoted to summaries of Israel's history. If these psalms have ever seemed boring keep in mind that it would be easier to read one of the Psalms covering Israel's history than to read the whole Torah. In a culture where literacy was rare using songs as an aid to memory was crucial. In cultures where written languages were not invented this role of music to aid memory and shared a common history would have been even more important.
Which is to say I think Christians and Christians who are musicians, should read this book and other literature dealing with scientific research into music and musical perception. Levitin's book is pretty easy to read and in some ways is boring because he deals with music at such a basic level for Western repertoire.
And people will justifiably complain that Levitin grossly oversimplifies all musical idioms in terms of Western thought. He's not covering Eastern music and assumes the half step is really the smallest interval the human ear can perceive. This is, to put it mildly, not even close to true! I've visited the Seattle Composer's Salon enough times to tell you that there's all kinds of micro-tonal music out there. The major/minor key system we take for granted still includes tiny distinctions that are real and practical for the notes E sharp and F natural. Enharmonic spellings don't mean the notes are necessarily ever really the same in terms of actual pitch. This is a distinction that people who played fretted instruments may not always care about but string players care.
So besides having a simplistic explanation of music as a way of getting nooky, Levitin's book fails to account for the wide range of ways in which humanity organizes sound and divides tones within the octave. In fact this is where things come full circle on the issue of biblical literature because we know so little about ancient Greek and Hebrew music it would be hard to say with any authority what those musical idioms would sound like beyond a few broad guesses.
What purpose does msuic serve? Levitin's question is still one we'll answer in each generation. I'm not sure there is a clear, cut and dried answer. To tie things back to Levitin's proposal of sexual selection, a lot of people in the modern West might only agree that music is connected in some way to sex and sexual selection but may not want th ekids that would be the natural consequence of sexual selection from the time in which Levitin proposes the evolutionary adaptation developed.
In the end I'd say that Levitin's attempt to explain music in terms of ancient human history actually puts him in the same boat as the theologian who attempts to explain our musical impulses in terms of divine revelation in Scripture. Either way we're dealing with material referring to events that can't possibly be replicated in a lab and is therefore the result of some guess work. The Bible doesn't attempt to explain our musical inclination so much as presuppose it and suggest some directions for where to put our musical inclinations.
Since I've spent quite a bit of time blogging in just two posts about this book I figure I'm done for now. :)
I skipped entirely Levitin's points about how brain development connects to musical taste because I think it basically speaks for itself and I've tended to think that people stop expanding their musical tastes around the time they think they've "grown up". Still, it's another interesting excurses Levitin touches on to explore why people seem to have expanding musical interests and tastes up to about their early 20s after which many, many people just stop listening to new music and keep playing that same album by Boston or Led Zeppelin over and over again.
But I think Levitin's explanation of sexual selection, while probably pretty accurate, seems incomplete. To assume we must explain music in terms of the earliest humans is actually a perfectly good idea, though, even if it's not clear that just one explanation of the use of music would do the job. Scientists are still not sure why any animals need to sleep so why would we necessarily have one cover-all explanation for music?
Still, Levitin's proposal that music is a form of sexual selection, that music signals a guy is a good suitor and mate, is something Christians can extrapolate from the Bible. The first song ever sung in Scripture is Adam's song to Eve. When the first song in Scripture is invented by a man for his wife when he sees her for the first time I defy any Christian to just dismiss Levitin's explanation of sexual selection as being inaccurate. It may be incomplete but the Bible pretty well backs it up as far as it goes.
For that matter, let's just look at the titles of biblical books. The Song of Songs is not actually about God except by means of theologians forcing it to be an allegorical exploration of God's love for His people or the individual believer by means of sheer historical accumulation of avoiding the more obvious content of the book. It's a series of love poems celebrating sexual love between a husband and wife. If the first song in Scripture is about sex and the Song of Songs, which advertises itself as the greatest of all songs, at least uses the sexual relationship as its central metaphor (hey, I'll throw a bone to people who assume Song of Songs MUST be allegorical) then we can't avoid the truth that sexual selection and song are linked in a way that even the most conservative Christian can't deny.
Not that this necessarily is presented as a justification for polygamy but consider the two greatest kings in Israelite history, David and Solomon. Both were legendary for their abilities as song-writers and both had quite a few wives. Even if we are not presented with prescriptive teaching from Scripture that Levitin's hypothesis is correct the descriptive evidence of the biblical account is that Levitin's still right that the song and dance man impresses the women.
But I think even a non-Christian could argue that Levitin overstates the explanation of sexual selection. We know for a fact that not all songs are about getting the attention of the hot guy or hot girl. We learn songs to learn things we really need to know. Despite dismissive statements that music is a parasitic offshoot of language centers in the brain it's hard to ignore that we all learned the alphabet through some form of song. Music and memory are intertwined. We remember things when we sing them and Scripture supports this, too. God told Moses to teach the Israelites a song so as to remember what He wanted them to remember. Many of the Psalms are devoted to summaries of Israel's history. If these psalms have ever seemed boring keep in mind that it would be easier to read one of the Psalms covering Israel's history than to read the whole Torah. In a culture where literacy was rare using songs as an aid to memory was crucial. In cultures where written languages were not invented this role of music to aid memory and shared a common history would have been even more important.
Which is to say I think Christians and Christians who are musicians, should read this book and other literature dealing with scientific research into music and musical perception. Levitin's book is pretty easy to read and in some ways is boring because he deals with music at such a basic level for Western repertoire.
And people will justifiably complain that Levitin grossly oversimplifies all musical idioms in terms of Western thought. He's not covering Eastern music and assumes the half step is really the smallest interval the human ear can perceive. This is, to put it mildly, not even close to true! I've visited the Seattle Composer's Salon enough times to tell you that there's all kinds of micro-tonal music out there. The major/minor key system we take for granted still includes tiny distinctions that are real and practical for the notes E sharp and F natural. Enharmonic spellings don't mean the notes are necessarily ever really the same in terms of actual pitch. This is a distinction that people who played fretted instruments may not always care about but string players care.
So besides having a simplistic explanation of music as a way of getting nooky, Levitin's book fails to account for the wide range of ways in which humanity organizes sound and divides tones within the octave. In fact this is where things come full circle on the issue of biblical literature because we know so little about ancient Greek and Hebrew music it would be hard to say with any authority what those musical idioms would sound like beyond a few broad guesses.
What purpose does msuic serve? Levitin's question is still one we'll answer in each generation. I'm not sure there is a clear, cut and dried answer. To tie things back to Levitin's proposal of sexual selection, a lot of people in the modern West might only agree that music is connected in some way to sex and sexual selection but may not want th ekids that would be the natural consequence of sexual selection from the time in which Levitin proposes the evolutionary adaptation developed.
In the end I'd say that Levitin's attempt to explain music in terms of ancient human history actually puts him in the same boat as the theologian who attempts to explain our musical impulses in terms of divine revelation in Scripture. Either way we're dealing with material referring to events that can't possibly be replicated in a lab and is therefore the result of some guess work. The Bible doesn't attempt to explain our musical inclination so much as presuppose it and suggest some directions for where to put our musical inclinations.
Since I've spent quite a bit of time blogging in just two posts about this book I figure I'm done for now. :)
Saturday, March 24, 2007
This is Your Brain on Music, part 1, summary
Daniel Levitin
This is Your Brain on Music
In 2006 Daniel Levitin's book This Is Your Brain On Music was published. I read about it in Salon. I don't usually take things in Salon that seriously because they're sirt if shriekingly paranoid half the time and often articulate political and social views that don't always gel. At any rate, whether or not their ideas make sense or are any good they can sometimes be an interesting read, which is really the most you can say about any magazine, and they had a review of this book that caught my attention.
Music, like almost any art, is the kind of thing where detailed study simultaneously demystifies and remystifies the nature of the art. When you figure out how to juxtapose two different chords whose roots are functionally a tri-tone apart and figure out how to do that in a piece of unabashadly tonal music it's just more fun all around than if you just stumbled on something without knowing what you're doing. Understanding how you understand music doesn't make music less fun.
It turns out there's debate as to how we understand music and what that means because there are competing explanations for why humans have music to begin with. Levitin approaches this topic from an evolutionary, socibiological angle (to simplify a bit and since he simplifies quite a few things I don't feel guilty doing to his work what he's done to the work of others, I don't think I'm really misrepresenting him).
The actual cognitive aspects of musical perception are what makes this book interesting. The first two chapters rehash so many basic points about music theory and in such a simplified way that anyone with a couple of years of music theory will find them dull. It was interesting to read that electrodes attached to the brain of a barn owl reveal that barn owls perceive rhythm in the same way we do. This simultaneously indicates that all animals have to perceive sound in real time at some comparable level but also that the governing intelligence behind perception may not strictly require sounds to be heard "as" music.
The most interesting part in the earlier chapters is that the ear itself does not do as much of the perceptual stuff as the brain. Air molecules hit the ear drum but it is the brain that grasps the distinction between discreet vibrations on the ear drum that might be the sound of my typing as I write this blog entry verses the sound of shuffling chairs in the living room upstairs where my roommates are having a meeting with some guests.
The capacity we have to perceive sound in direction is something Levitin could have explored in some more detail around chapters 3 and 4. That we can perceive in 360 degrees how we are immersed in a world full of sounds fascinates me but I guess I'll have to go for scholarly research on that rather than the pop science level Levitin is writing at, which is still interesting and informative. His explanation of how we learn to ignnore steady sounds like the sound of rain outside or the sound of a washing machine is a great explanation for how our alertness to sound connects to the need to be aware of dangers and of causal relationships between sound X and threat Y.
The book gets interesting for me as a composer around chapter 4 dealing with how we anticipate and perceive musical form. He uses language as a springboard and describes how we can recognize words as words despite constant variations in the lettering, font style, font size, the font itself. It's on page 113 for those who have read the book.
Here is an approximation of the effect Levitin uses but compressed into the first part of the sentence. Despite constant shifts in the font, font size, lettering style, and even the color of the letters you can still read the first four words of the preceding sentence because your brain has trained itself (or been trained by socialization, too) to understand that what I just wrote earlier is a comprehensible sentence. Levitin's example is on page 113 of his book, for those of you who have it.
Well, the same cognitive process that allowed you to read that sentence in the previous paragraph is what allows you to perceive musical form and recognize a melody despite a series of drastic transformations. Even if a tune is played at half speed or double time; transposed into any key other than its originalkey; even if the melody is transformed by means of modal mutation from major into parallel minor or from the dorian mode to modern natural minor; even through all of this you can recognize a tune. We know Greensleeves (i.e. "What Child is This?") whether it's played in the original dorian form or in the modern minor form because the melodic contours and rhythms remain unchanged despite modal mutation. Levitin doesn't flesh this out but he notes that perception of musical form tends to display activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain, traditionally associated with intellectual or abstract perception.
But this, too, may be simplifying a bit because we have been able to learn that perceiving music activates a whole range of areas in the brain, including lower segments of the brain associated with autonomic responses and emotion. Music moves us, obviously, but to perceive the emotional content of music we have to grasp its form and so a truly affecting piece of music will engage, at the risk of overstating Levitin's case, our whole brain and not just parts of it. What we have been discovering through research is that the left brain is involved in perceiving musical structure and that these regions are also involved in understanding sign language or any structure that must be conveyed over time (page 127-128). But perceiving musical form requires both sides of the brain rather than just the left side which is all that is in use for the perception of language structured over time.
The question naturally comes up, why? For something that seems to have little practical value like music the way we experience it as background sound in a shopping mall; or listening to some jazz masterpiece reduced to music you listen to while you're on hold; or the set list at your favorite band's concert in your town; why is it that music affects is so? Why is it that people can sing from memory songs they heard twenty years ago?
An interesting partial explanation for this that Levitin offers along the way is that in adolescence the brain is closing up its soon-to-be complete set of neural networks for perception. The way my brother would put it is that it's medical/scientific proof that people decide rock music is dead once they have grown up and that the new stuff has no soul or is crap. What has changed is not really musical style per se but the perceiving brain. The brain gets gone making its set of ocnnections and unless people continually seek out new styles of music (by new I mean styles that really are different from what they like, not merely finding new variations on a sound in which they've comfortably found their style-listening rut) the brain hits an end point, so to speak.
Unsurprisingly a crucial element in musical structural perception involves memory and it's in chapter 5 that Levitin has his most interesting material. Levitin introduces, in chapter 5 the debate between two theories of memory. One theory has held that memory functions as a record-keeping function, comparable to a VCR tape; while the other theory holds that memory allows us to retain relational observations without necessarily retaining all the details about the things we remember. It doesn't take long to see how both theories fail due to reductivism and Levitin spends quite a bit of time in chapter 5 explaining how each theory hit roadblocks in lab research in the 1990s. A theory that is now getting preference is the proposal that memory is connected to cues and that if a person is presented with the right series of cues for memory that they will remember something. This accords with common sense and the anecdotal experience of quite possibly every human on the face of the earth!
It also explains why people can remember things with a high degree of accuracy in some cases but not in others, and why people with brain damage can be incapable of remembering some things accurately. But more to the point for the sake of this blog, it demonstrates that memory and perception turn out to overlap when it comes to how we perceive musical form. We simultaneously construct or infer a musical form from a song as we're listening to it, or any music we have heard before or never heard before. Hindemith explained this in A Composer's World fifty years ago saying that if we hear a piece of music and our minds can't get around the form presented to us our reaction is bewilderment or amusement.
Between the summaries of Hindemith and Levitin in their respective books it's easy to suggest that memory is vital to the perception of musical form. If a form is too simple we find it dull and if it is too complex we find it infuriating or frustrating or simply puzzling. Our capacity to perceive musical form is mediated by how our memory developes. This is not a point Levitin necessarily makes, or makes a primary concern in his book, though.
I'm going to skip the content of the other chapters as they are sort of interesting but not so interesting I want to write an even longer blog entry than I planned to write. Suffice it to say that research suggests that there are no prodigies on the basis of "talent" so much as a vast amount of practice and training. As Hilary Hahn has said in interviews, she was never a child prodigy, just someone who practiced a lot.
Levitin spends his last chapters attempting to sort out what purpose music serves. A number of scientists have dismissed music as nothing more than aural cheesecake, some useless by-product of evolutionary adaptation. Levitin refuses to concede this particular point and attempts to explain music on other grounds. There are no cultures that have no music so music can't be dismissed as aural cheesecake if every culture has it. And if it is merely the by-product of evolutionary adaptations what adaptations were those? Levitin argues that musical ability is a form of sexual selection. Any ancient human from fifty centuries ago who had the leisure time to sing and dance was advertising to prospective mates that he had the time, health, mental ability, and will to sire offspring and, perhaps more importantly, enough time left over to RAISE those kids. Levitin argues that this means that music is not useless since it seems to be one of the main means for a man to attract a woman. Considering how many songs over the millenia are love songs it's pretty hard to ignore Levitin's point. Levitin also notes briefly that in every culture available for study music and dance are constantly linked.
Scientists who think that music is just useless sound probably haven't examined the nature of memory enough. Why is it that so many children learn the alphabet through song? Scientists who think music serves no purpose might want to consider whether something is lost if they go on a date and there's no music anywhere. It seems to have a history of setting a mood.
So this is a basic run-down on the more interesting ideas in Levitin's book. I think it's a good summary but some questions seem to linger. Certainly I can tell you conservative Christians who aren't inclined to assume a Darwinian explanation won't exactly dig Levitin's assumptions about music as an evolutionary development and may not buy his attempt to explain musical idioms in human cultures as chiefly being a form of sexual selection. But interacting with Levitins ideas and study and the way this may be read in interaction with biblical literature is something I will set off in another post.
This is Your Brain on Music
In 2006 Daniel Levitin's book This Is Your Brain On Music was published. I read about it in Salon. I don't usually take things in Salon that seriously because they're sirt if shriekingly paranoid half the time and often articulate political and social views that don't always gel. At any rate, whether or not their ideas make sense or are any good they can sometimes be an interesting read, which is really the most you can say about any magazine, and they had a review of this book that caught my attention.
Music, like almost any art, is the kind of thing where detailed study simultaneously demystifies and remystifies the nature of the art. When you figure out how to juxtapose two different chords whose roots are functionally a tri-tone apart and figure out how to do that in a piece of unabashadly tonal music it's just more fun all around than if you just stumbled on something without knowing what you're doing. Understanding how you understand music doesn't make music less fun.
It turns out there's debate as to how we understand music and what that means because there are competing explanations for why humans have music to begin with. Levitin approaches this topic from an evolutionary, socibiological angle (to simplify a bit and since he simplifies quite a few things I don't feel guilty doing to his work what he's done to the work of others, I don't think I'm really misrepresenting him).
The actual cognitive aspects of musical perception are what makes this book interesting. The first two chapters rehash so many basic points about music theory and in such a simplified way that anyone with a couple of years of music theory will find them dull. It was interesting to read that electrodes attached to the brain of a barn owl reveal that barn owls perceive rhythm in the same way we do. This simultaneously indicates that all animals have to perceive sound in real time at some comparable level but also that the governing intelligence behind perception may not strictly require sounds to be heard "as" music.
The most interesting part in the earlier chapters is that the ear itself does not do as much of the perceptual stuff as the brain. Air molecules hit the ear drum but it is the brain that grasps the distinction between discreet vibrations on the ear drum that might be the sound of my typing as I write this blog entry verses the sound of shuffling chairs in the living room upstairs where my roommates are having a meeting with some guests.
The capacity we have to perceive sound in direction is something Levitin could have explored in some more detail around chapters 3 and 4. That we can perceive in 360 degrees how we are immersed in a world full of sounds fascinates me but I guess I'll have to go for scholarly research on that rather than the pop science level Levitin is writing at, which is still interesting and informative. His explanation of how we learn to ignnore steady sounds like the sound of rain outside or the sound of a washing machine is a great explanation for how our alertness to sound connects to the need to be aware of dangers and of causal relationships between sound X and threat Y.
The book gets interesting for me as a composer around chapter 4 dealing with how we anticipate and perceive musical form. He uses language as a springboard and describes how we can recognize words as words despite constant variations in the lettering, font style, font size, the font itself. It's on page 113 for those who have read the book.
Here is an approximation of the effect Levitin uses but compressed into the first part of the sentence. Despite constant shifts in the font, font size, lettering style, and even the color of the letters you can still read the first four words of the preceding sentence because your brain has trained itself (or been trained by socialization, too) to understand that what I just wrote earlier is a comprehensible sentence. Levitin's example is on page 113 of his book, for those of you who have it.
Well, the same cognitive process that allowed you to read that sentence in the previous paragraph is what allows you to perceive musical form and recognize a melody despite a series of drastic transformations. Even if a tune is played at half speed or double time; transposed into any key other than its originalkey; even if the melody is transformed by means of modal mutation from major into parallel minor or from the dorian mode to modern natural minor; even through all of this you can recognize a tune. We know Greensleeves (i.e. "What Child is This?") whether it's played in the original dorian form or in the modern minor form because the melodic contours and rhythms remain unchanged despite modal mutation. Levitin doesn't flesh this out but he notes that perception of musical form tends to display activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain, traditionally associated with intellectual or abstract perception.
But this, too, may be simplifying a bit because we have been able to learn that perceiving music activates a whole range of areas in the brain, including lower segments of the brain associated with autonomic responses and emotion. Music moves us, obviously, but to perceive the emotional content of music we have to grasp its form and so a truly affecting piece of music will engage, at the risk of overstating Levitin's case, our whole brain and not just parts of it. What we have been discovering through research is that the left brain is involved in perceiving musical structure and that these regions are also involved in understanding sign language or any structure that must be conveyed over time (page 127-128). But perceiving musical form requires both sides of the brain rather than just the left side which is all that is in use for the perception of language structured over time.
The question naturally comes up, why? For something that seems to have little practical value like music the way we experience it as background sound in a shopping mall; or listening to some jazz masterpiece reduced to music you listen to while you're on hold; or the set list at your favorite band's concert in your town; why is it that music affects is so? Why is it that people can sing from memory songs they heard twenty years ago?
An interesting partial explanation for this that Levitin offers along the way is that in adolescence the brain is closing up its soon-to-be complete set of neural networks for perception. The way my brother would put it is that it's medical/scientific proof that people decide rock music is dead once they have grown up and that the new stuff has no soul or is crap. What has changed is not really musical style per se but the perceiving brain. The brain gets gone making its set of ocnnections and unless people continually seek out new styles of music (by new I mean styles that really are different from what they like, not merely finding new variations on a sound in which they've comfortably found their style-listening rut) the brain hits an end point, so to speak.
Unsurprisingly a crucial element in musical structural perception involves memory and it's in chapter 5 that Levitin has his most interesting material. Levitin introduces, in chapter 5 the debate between two theories of memory. One theory has held that memory functions as a record-keeping function, comparable to a VCR tape; while the other theory holds that memory allows us to retain relational observations without necessarily retaining all the details about the things we remember. It doesn't take long to see how both theories fail due to reductivism and Levitin spends quite a bit of time in chapter 5 explaining how each theory hit roadblocks in lab research in the 1990s. A theory that is now getting preference is the proposal that memory is connected to cues and that if a person is presented with the right series of cues for memory that they will remember something. This accords with common sense and the anecdotal experience of quite possibly every human on the face of the earth!
It also explains why people can remember things with a high degree of accuracy in some cases but not in others, and why people with brain damage can be incapable of remembering some things accurately. But more to the point for the sake of this blog, it demonstrates that memory and perception turn out to overlap when it comes to how we perceive musical form. We simultaneously construct or infer a musical form from a song as we're listening to it, or any music we have heard before or never heard before. Hindemith explained this in A Composer's World fifty years ago saying that if we hear a piece of music and our minds can't get around the form presented to us our reaction is bewilderment or amusement.
Between the summaries of Hindemith and Levitin in their respective books it's easy to suggest that memory is vital to the perception of musical form. If a form is too simple we find it dull and if it is too complex we find it infuriating or frustrating or simply puzzling. Our capacity to perceive musical form is mediated by how our memory developes. This is not a point Levitin necessarily makes, or makes a primary concern in his book, though.
I'm going to skip the content of the other chapters as they are sort of interesting but not so interesting I want to write an even longer blog entry than I planned to write. Suffice it to say that research suggests that there are no prodigies on the basis of "talent" so much as a vast amount of practice and training. As Hilary Hahn has said in interviews, she was never a child prodigy, just someone who practiced a lot.
Levitin spends his last chapters attempting to sort out what purpose music serves. A number of scientists have dismissed music as nothing more than aural cheesecake, some useless by-product of evolutionary adaptation. Levitin refuses to concede this particular point and attempts to explain music on other grounds. There are no cultures that have no music so music can't be dismissed as aural cheesecake if every culture has it. And if it is merely the by-product of evolutionary adaptations what adaptations were those? Levitin argues that musical ability is a form of sexual selection. Any ancient human from fifty centuries ago who had the leisure time to sing and dance was advertising to prospective mates that he had the time, health, mental ability, and will to sire offspring and, perhaps more importantly, enough time left over to RAISE those kids. Levitin argues that this means that music is not useless since it seems to be one of the main means for a man to attract a woman. Considering how many songs over the millenia are love songs it's pretty hard to ignore Levitin's point. Levitin also notes briefly that in every culture available for study music and dance are constantly linked.
Scientists who think that music is just useless sound probably haven't examined the nature of memory enough. Why is it that so many children learn the alphabet through song? Scientists who think music serves no purpose might want to consider whether something is lost if they go on a date and there's no music anywhere. It seems to have a history of setting a mood.
So this is a basic run-down on the more interesting ideas in Levitin's book. I think it's a good summary but some questions seem to linger. Certainly I can tell you conservative Christians who aren't inclined to assume a Darwinian explanation won't exactly dig Levitin's assumptions about music as an evolutionary development and may not buy his attempt to explain musical idioms in human cultures as chiefly being a form of sexual selection. But interacting with Levitins ideas and study and the way this may be read in interaction with biblical literature is something I will set off in another post.
Dark Side of the Moon as a tryptich and the structural function of the dorian mode
Here we are, the post I threatened to write earlier about how Dark Side of the Moon, as a concept album, uses the signature i-IV dorian chord change as a structural device and a harmonic leitmotiff to explicate the textual motiff of endless cycles, or a highly secularized variation of "vanity of vanities" or "a breath of a breath, everything is a mere breath". If Ecclesiastes were re-worked so that it wasn't Jewish but atheistic British-navel-gazing you'd get Pinkfloyd's magnum opus. And I still happen to like the album. In fact I appreciate it more now than I did in the past, I just happen to like Stevie Wonder in all his cheesiness a little better because he's the greater musical genius. But enough of that digression on Stevie.
The tracks on Dark Side of the Moon are listed as follows and include several chord changes I'll mark off in brackets:
1. Speak to me/Breathe (e minor)
2. On the Run (um, not quite tonal)
3. Time (F sharp minor, coda reprising Breath)
4. Great Gig in the Sky
5. Money
6. Us & Them
7. Any Colour You Like
8. Brain Damaged
9. Eclipse
The first actual song opens up with an e minor to A major chord vamp that serrves as the introduction to the whole concept album and lays out the most common harmonic motiff in the songs. "On the Run" is a piece of electronic music that has several chromatic bass lines moving by means of glissandi (for want of a better word) under a rapidly moving static line that oscillates around G with pentatonic notes (g d b d e, as best my ears can hear them). "Time" is written in F sharp minor with a standard i III VII progression at its core. These two songs don't employ the dorian mode and use natural minor or phrygian elements. Of course "Time" recapitulates "Breathe" with new lyrics and returns us to the dorian chord change that began the album.
The closing track on the first side of the record is "Great Gig in the Sky" This song presents us with a simple binary form that is played just twice but to great effect. On the LP this closes off the first half and it opens with an interesting and lengthy chord progression:
(all chords are held for one measure of 4/4 unless otherwise indicated)
b minor
F major
B flat major
D minor
G minor
C major
G minor
C major
F major
B flat major
C minor
F major
B flat major (half measure)
E flat major 7 (half measure)
B flat major (two measures)
This chord progression takes a full minute before the keys the keys slide up into G minor and the band oscillates between G minor and C major for Clare Torry's solo. This section lasts for about a minute and serves to provide a static harmonic point in the song to contrast with the fairly violent but steady harmonic changes in the opening section. The transition back into the first section comes through half measure shifts from G minor to D flat to G flat to B minor before playing through the entire sequence a second time, this time with greatly reduced textures and dynamics.
I find this interesting as an overall composition because the chain of fourths guides the whole process except at three points where a tritone substition or oblique motion are employed to affect a key change. For the most part the dorian mode is the underlying harmonic vocabulary of this piece even with the key changes. The tritone substitution is the first significant alteration of the harmonic motif, which makes sense since the song is about death, the one part of the cycle of life that we arguably can't completely reconcile ourselves to even if we claim we can.
"Money" is obviously the opener on side B. This is a simple blues number in b minor that is predominantly in 7/4 in the outer sections and 4/4 in the middle. It creates the impression of a ternary form despite being essentially a set of variations on a theme because of the change from assymetric to common meter.
"Us & Them" is in D major, the relative major to the preceding song. At the risk of putting it crudely the song uses a prettified variation of the chords we hear in "Louie Louie". Tonic, submediant superimposed over a droning tonic, passing to a dominant chord, which proceeds to a subdominant chord and on back again. This is a chord progression that in terms of functional harmony sounds cool but doesn't go anywhere, per se. This works well for the song's lyrical conceit that things don't change, that cycles of violence, death, bigotry, and decay continue on and on.
The chorus consists of the chord changes B minor, A major, G major 7th (probably), and C major. Once again a violent sequential change takes place but this time instead of a tritone substitution like we saw opening "Gig" we get a stepwise descent in root movement that sets up a rising root movement of a fourth to the neapolitan chord of B minor, which is used as a subtonic for a harmonically weak transition back in to D major for the second verse. The chords are still moving in predominantly stepwise motion but they've been deprived of the harmonic pedal point that existed throughout the verse and have been subjected to change through oblique motion. If the verses sustain the motif of the set-upon, indifferent "Us" the chorus introduces the motif of "them", who invariably break in upon our indifference and destroy our peaceful indifference, usually through violence or simple death. Fun, huh?
Where "Us & Them" ends is to use the C major chord to create a deceptive ending that leads straight into "Any Colour You Like", which is just a big jam session on i IV but this time in D. "Brain Damaged" retains the tonic-subdominant chord progression but through modal mutation presents them to us through alternating dominant seven chords. D7 G7 D7 E7 G D E7 G D through the verse.
The chorus gives us G A C G, played twice, with a quick transition of B minor, E minor, A to get back into the verse. What's interesting here is that the chromatically altered supertonic lets the band retonicize G as the tonic of the chorus in place of D. That's one of the great things about repeating phrases is that when you employ a harmonic sequence in transposition it does the modulating for you and the listener can expect it.
The final song is basically a classic passacaglia, a compound meter piece with a steadily descending chord progression. D C B flat A throughout to the final cadence in D major.
Now despite the fact that LPs are supposed to be flipped over for a continued listening experience the album wasn't designed with the CD format in mind. But this is an album that, whatever it may lose in getting transferred from vinyl to CD (I don't feel like getting into the debates of audiophiles while I'm writing about this as a song cycle) there is an advantage to cramming the album on to a single disc.
And it is in the CD format that the tryptich pattern becomes apparent. The first song opens with a i-IV progression and "Gig" opens with a tritone substition but eventually gets us back to the i-IV but in a new key. From here follow two more songs before we get another appearance of i-IV, this time in the key of D minor. This is why I've color-coded the three different segments to show how the triptych plays out on CD. The keys in which the signature harmonic gesture occurs are E, G, and D, a sort of extension of the chord progression of "Time" but without any cyclical resolution back to tonic.
But I would never say the members of Pinkfloyd or their production team actually planned the songs as a song cycle in advance, even though a case could be made for that. They planned a concept album dealing with the life cycle but the modulations and harmonic gestures seem more to have come from what comes easily to the fingers rather than through deliberately mapping out every key change and chord change across the entire album. I don't mean this in a bad way but if you're in a rut exploring the same set of ideas then a concept album is a good way to go because your literary and musical gestures will overlap and reinforce each other. This is why I think Dark Side of the Moon actually is a concept album and Seargant Pepper is merely considered to be one, because Pinkfloyd created a musically cohesive whole where the Beatles didn't.
The keys the songs are in are all keys we'd expect a bass and guitar driven band to play in rather than keys that a keyboard player might pick (i.e. there are no songs except "Gig" that employ flat keys. The first side of the album tends to have pieces in E minor or F sharp minor while the second half of the album is predominantly in D. I think the overall effect is that the songs have moved down in overall pitch (a gimme, since that's how it works for the string instruments). It reinforces the downer motif of the album and the persistence of the dorian mode and chains of fourths reinforces the idea of the lyrics that the life cycle is what it is and everything would be perfect if it weren't hopelessly screwed up. It's a kind of art rock exposition on the theme of Ecclesiastes but without any hope, as such.
I still love this album because the musical vocabulary at the formal and harmonic level reinforces that lyrical conceit of the album as a whole. I think this is why the album holds up well and is also why some people don't like it and have gone so far as to say there aren't any really great songs on it. I think that particular view and explanation is patently silly but for people who are looking for individual knock-out songs that you remember apart from any context then, yeah, Dark Side of the Moon doesn't give you that; instead Pinkfloyd gives you a type of rock gestalt. If you listen to it all the way through you can hear that the album is a great deal more than the sum of its pretty good parts. Since no one in the band that I'm aware of is Jewish or Christian my comparison of Dark Side of the Moon to Ecclesiastes is purely speculative on my part. For you it may just be a great rock album or a total bore. I'm just blogging here to lay out the structural and harmonic things about the album that still make the album fun for me to listen to seventeen years after I heard it for the first time.
The tracks on Dark Side of the Moon are listed as follows and include several chord changes I'll mark off in brackets:
1. Speak to me/Breathe (e minor)
2. On the Run (um, not quite tonal)
3. Time (F sharp minor, coda reprising Breath)
4. Great Gig in the Sky
5. Money
6. Us & Them
7. Any Colour You Like
8. Brain Damaged
9. Eclipse
The first actual song opens up with an e minor to A major chord vamp that serrves as the introduction to the whole concept album and lays out the most common harmonic motiff in the songs. "On the Run" is a piece of electronic music that has several chromatic bass lines moving by means of glissandi (for want of a better word) under a rapidly moving static line that oscillates around G with pentatonic notes (g d b d e, as best my ears can hear them). "Time" is written in F sharp minor with a standard i III VII progression at its core. These two songs don't employ the dorian mode and use natural minor or phrygian elements. Of course "Time" recapitulates "Breathe" with new lyrics and returns us to the dorian chord change that began the album.
The closing track on the first side of the record is "Great Gig in the Sky" This song presents us with a simple binary form that is played just twice but to great effect. On the LP this closes off the first half and it opens with an interesting and lengthy chord progression:
(all chords are held for one measure of 4/4 unless otherwise indicated)
b minor
F major
B flat major
D minor
G minor
C major
G minor
C major
F major
B flat major
C minor
F major
B flat major (half measure)
E flat major 7 (half measure)
B flat major (two measures)
This chord progression takes a full minute before the keys the keys slide up into G minor and the band oscillates between G minor and C major for Clare Torry's solo. This section lasts for about a minute and serves to provide a static harmonic point in the song to contrast with the fairly violent but steady harmonic changes in the opening section. The transition back into the first section comes through half measure shifts from G minor to D flat to G flat to B minor before playing through the entire sequence a second time, this time with greatly reduced textures and dynamics.
I find this interesting as an overall composition because the chain of fourths guides the whole process except at three points where a tritone substition or oblique motion are employed to affect a key change. For the most part the dorian mode is the underlying harmonic vocabulary of this piece even with the key changes. The tritone substitution is the first significant alteration of the harmonic motif, which makes sense since the song is about death, the one part of the cycle of life that we arguably can't completely reconcile ourselves to even if we claim we can.
"Money" is obviously the opener on side B. This is a simple blues number in b minor that is predominantly in 7/4 in the outer sections and 4/4 in the middle. It creates the impression of a ternary form despite being essentially a set of variations on a theme because of the change from assymetric to common meter.
"Us & Them" is in D major, the relative major to the preceding song. At the risk of putting it crudely the song uses a prettified variation of the chords we hear in "Louie Louie". Tonic, submediant superimposed over a droning tonic, passing to a dominant chord, which proceeds to a subdominant chord and on back again. This is a chord progression that in terms of functional harmony sounds cool but doesn't go anywhere, per se. This works well for the song's lyrical conceit that things don't change, that cycles of violence, death, bigotry, and decay continue on and on.
The chorus consists of the chord changes B minor, A major, G major 7th (probably), and C major. Once again a violent sequential change takes place but this time instead of a tritone substitution like we saw opening "Gig" we get a stepwise descent in root movement that sets up a rising root movement of a fourth to the neapolitan chord of B minor, which is used as a subtonic for a harmonically weak transition back in to D major for the second verse. The chords are still moving in predominantly stepwise motion but they've been deprived of the harmonic pedal point that existed throughout the verse and have been subjected to change through oblique motion. If the verses sustain the motif of the set-upon, indifferent "Us" the chorus introduces the motif of "them", who invariably break in upon our indifference and destroy our peaceful indifference, usually through violence or simple death. Fun, huh?
Where "Us & Them" ends is to use the C major chord to create a deceptive ending that leads straight into "Any Colour You Like", which is just a big jam session on i IV but this time in D. "Brain Damaged" retains the tonic-subdominant chord progression but through modal mutation presents them to us through alternating dominant seven chords. D7 G7 D7 E7 G D E7 G D through the verse.
The chorus gives us G A C G, played twice, with a quick transition of B minor, E minor, A to get back into the verse. What's interesting here is that the chromatically altered supertonic lets the band retonicize G as the tonic of the chorus in place of D. That's one of the great things about repeating phrases is that when you employ a harmonic sequence in transposition it does the modulating for you and the listener can expect it.
The final song is basically a classic passacaglia, a compound meter piece with a steadily descending chord progression. D C B flat A throughout to the final cadence in D major.
Now despite the fact that LPs are supposed to be flipped over for a continued listening experience the album wasn't designed with the CD format in mind. But this is an album that, whatever it may lose in getting transferred from vinyl to CD (I don't feel like getting into the debates of audiophiles while I'm writing about this as a song cycle) there is an advantage to cramming the album on to a single disc.
And it is in the CD format that the tryptich pattern becomes apparent. The first song opens with a i-IV progression and "Gig" opens with a tritone substition but eventually gets us back to the i-IV but in a new key. From here follow two more songs before we get another appearance of i-IV, this time in the key of D minor. This is why I've color-coded the three different segments to show how the triptych plays out on CD. The keys in which the signature harmonic gesture occurs are E, G, and D, a sort of extension of the chord progression of "Time" but without any cyclical resolution back to tonic.
But I would never say the members of Pinkfloyd or their production team actually planned the songs as a song cycle in advance, even though a case could be made for that. They planned a concept album dealing with the life cycle but the modulations and harmonic gestures seem more to have come from what comes easily to the fingers rather than through deliberately mapping out every key change and chord change across the entire album. I don't mean this in a bad way but if you're in a rut exploring the same set of ideas then a concept album is a good way to go because your literary and musical gestures will overlap and reinforce each other. This is why I think Dark Side of the Moon actually is a concept album and Seargant Pepper is merely considered to be one, because Pinkfloyd created a musically cohesive whole where the Beatles didn't.
The keys the songs are in are all keys we'd expect a bass and guitar driven band to play in rather than keys that a keyboard player might pick (i.e. there are no songs except "Gig" that employ flat keys. The first side of the album tends to have pieces in E minor or F sharp minor while the second half of the album is predominantly in D. I think the overall effect is that the songs have moved down in overall pitch (a gimme, since that's how it works for the string instruments). It reinforces the downer motif of the album and the persistence of the dorian mode and chains of fourths reinforces the idea of the lyrics that the life cycle is what it is and everything would be perfect if it weren't hopelessly screwed up. It's a kind of art rock exposition on the theme of Ecclesiastes but without any hope, as such.
I still love this album because the musical vocabulary at the formal and harmonic level reinforces that lyrical conceit of the album as a whole. I think this is why the album holds up well and is also why some people don't like it and have gone so far as to say there aren't any really great songs on it. I think that particular view and explanation is patently silly but for people who are looking for individual knock-out songs that you remember apart from any context then, yeah, Dark Side of the Moon doesn't give you that; instead Pinkfloyd gives you a type of rock gestalt. If you listen to it all the way through you can hear that the album is a great deal more than the sum of its pretty good parts. Since no one in the band that I'm aware of is Jewish or Christian my comparison of Dark Side of the Moon to Ecclesiastes is purely speculative on my part. For you it may just be a great rock album or a total bore. I'm just blogging here to lay out the structural and harmonic things about the album that still make the album fun for me to listen to seventeen years after I heard it for the first time.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Legends, Atanas Ourkouzounov & Mie Ogura
Well, this is the new CD by Atanas Ourkouzounov and Mie Ogura and it's a fun little album. I've been listening to it for a while and it's mainly all new material or recently arranged material. The only stuff on here that has been recorded before is Ourkouzounov's Labrynthes, which appears on his first CD Contes de Balkans that he recorded with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble.
Whereas his first CD included just chamber music for the guitar this new disc on Gendai Guitar contains some solo guitar works, which is nice. Both his first and second CDs are full of chamber music, though, so if you pick up a disc of his expecting solo stuff be prepared to get tons of chamber music instead. It's one of the reasons I like his work.
You can find this CD on Gendai Guitar's website, though you will have to navigate the Japanese version of the website and share some emails with them before they'll be able to complete your order--that is, of course, unless you read Japanese fluently but I don't read Japanese at all.
http://www.gendaiguitar.com/
Product number is GGCV1003
I had planned on making a basic track listing and then writing about things from there but now that I'm finally blogging I want to make this relatively short and sweet. If you have any love for chamber music for classical guitar you really ought to buy this CD. Repertoire for the flute and guitar is fairly rich and there are lots of great pieces out there. We can all find at least some recording of Histoire du Tango, Castelnuovo-Tedesco's charming Sonatina, and if you do some digging there's even more than one recording of Koshkin's Sonata for flute and guitar. And those are all great pieces. But Ourkouzounov is doing his own thing, which is a good thing, and why I got his second CD. First get Contes des Balkans and then get this CD.
The CD opens up with Quatre Legends, four short movements with evocative titles (I'll just use the translated titles). Masquerade opens with an upbeat dance in a dark, dorian cast. The Macedonian song is a beautiful slow piece that also has some dorian elements. Naughty Petar comes across as a pretty vivid musical portrait of a little boy (or an older fellow who's the wrong kind of boy at heart) who women don't necessarily want around. This piece uses great special effects from both flute and guitar to create a musical portrait. Ourkouzounov employs harmonics on the guitar to suggest how sneaky Naughty Petar is and the shrieking breath-tones Mie Ogura produces on the flute, well, if you hear the pieces you'll get a very clear musical portrait. It's the most intriguing and amusing of the four pieces and something I'd like to take a stab at playing one day. Traditional Fair is the last piece in the opening set and it most resembles Ourkouzounov's earlier works from his CD Contes des Balkans from the KLE label. It's got a great propulsive drive to it and shifting accents and rhythms.
The next track is actually unusual for Ourkouzounov on this CD and his previous CD. "Toryanse" Tales is a work for solo guitar, it's actually long compared to his other works (almost 10.5 minutes) and it's unusually dark and brooding for him. There are a lot of coloristic and spatial elements to this work but in a really good, way sort of like a fusion of Brouwer with Takemitsu of the sort you might hear in Hika.
Ourkouzounov or Ogura proceed to transcriptions of Romanian Folk Dances from Bartok. These are all great because, well, almost anything from Bartok is great anyway. Labyrinthes is a three-movement work that appeared on Ourkouzounov's earlier CD with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble. In case you have the Ourkouzounove Ensemble CD this is still worth having even if you've heard it on the earlier CD.
Next comes "En Bateau" by Debussy arranged for flute and guitar. It's a nice arrangement, as all the arranged works on this disc are. Ourkouzounov steps into arranging jazz on this disc and ventures into flute/guitar transcriptions of Gershwin and Jarrett. It's great stuff and speaking as an American I'm happy to say (for whatever this may be worth) that I think Atanas gets what makes jazz fun to listen to and fun to play. I don't think I've had this much fun listening to an album of flute and guitar music since Nikita Koshkin's incredible Oratorium CD on the Kreuzberg label.
As can be heard on his first CD Ourkouzounov loves to play with special effects that are unique to the instruments he's writing for and things like key clicks, multiphonics, and breath-tones show up regularly. While I admit that in some of his earlier works this could sometimes feel just a tad gimmicky to me he's really nailed down how to use these kinds of coloristic effects without over-doing them now. Plus he's always good at employing a musical form that is appropriate for the ideas he's exploring.
I admire that he devotes so much material on both of his CDs to chamber music. This means that when he takes a few spots on record to record solo guitar works or works for guitar duo he's always picked pieces that are really interesting and not just the usual suspects that are all great music but end up taking on the quality of filler because so many guitarists have recorded them already. It's also nice to be able to put on a CD by a guitarist composer I like and hear how he is both branching out into things he hasn't recorded before and still exploring aspects of his musical voice from his earlier work. I wish Atanas the best and hope to keep seeing more CDs from him down the road. Atanas, if you happen to read this, consider putting out a CD of solo music some time down the road. Toryanse Tales has gotten me interested in hearing more of your solo guitar repertoire.
Whereas his first CD included just chamber music for the guitar this new disc on Gendai Guitar contains some solo guitar works, which is nice. Both his first and second CDs are full of chamber music, though, so if you pick up a disc of his expecting solo stuff be prepared to get tons of chamber music instead. It's one of the reasons I like his work.
You can find this CD on Gendai Guitar's website, though you will have to navigate the Japanese version of the website and share some emails with them before they'll be able to complete your order--that is, of course, unless you read Japanese fluently but I don't read Japanese at all.
http://www.gendaiguitar.com/
Product number is GGCV1003
I had planned on making a basic track listing and then writing about things from there but now that I'm finally blogging I want to make this relatively short and sweet. If you have any love for chamber music for classical guitar you really ought to buy this CD. Repertoire for the flute and guitar is fairly rich and there are lots of great pieces out there. We can all find at least some recording of Histoire du Tango, Castelnuovo-Tedesco's charming Sonatina, and if you do some digging there's even more than one recording of Koshkin's Sonata for flute and guitar. And those are all great pieces. But Ourkouzounov is doing his own thing, which is a good thing, and why I got his second CD. First get Contes des Balkans and then get this CD.
The CD opens up with Quatre Legends, four short movements with evocative titles (I'll just use the translated titles). Masquerade opens with an upbeat dance in a dark, dorian cast. The Macedonian song is a beautiful slow piece that also has some dorian elements. Naughty Petar comes across as a pretty vivid musical portrait of a little boy (or an older fellow who's the wrong kind of boy at heart) who women don't necessarily want around. This piece uses great special effects from both flute and guitar to create a musical portrait. Ourkouzounov employs harmonics on the guitar to suggest how sneaky Naughty Petar is and the shrieking breath-tones Mie Ogura produces on the flute, well, if you hear the pieces you'll get a very clear musical portrait. It's the most intriguing and amusing of the four pieces and something I'd like to take a stab at playing one day. Traditional Fair is the last piece in the opening set and it most resembles Ourkouzounov's earlier works from his CD Contes des Balkans from the KLE label. It's got a great propulsive drive to it and shifting accents and rhythms.
The next track is actually unusual for Ourkouzounov on this CD and his previous CD. "Toryanse" Tales is a work for solo guitar, it's actually long compared to his other works (almost 10.5 minutes) and it's unusually dark and brooding for him. There are a lot of coloristic and spatial elements to this work but in a really good, way sort of like a fusion of Brouwer with Takemitsu of the sort you might hear in Hika.
Ourkouzounov or Ogura proceed to transcriptions of Romanian Folk Dances from Bartok. These are all great because, well, almost anything from Bartok is great anyway. Labyrinthes is a three-movement work that appeared on Ourkouzounov's earlier CD with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble. In case you have the Ourkouzounove Ensemble CD this is still worth having even if you've heard it on the earlier CD.
Next comes "En Bateau" by Debussy arranged for flute and guitar. It's a nice arrangement, as all the arranged works on this disc are. Ourkouzounov steps into arranging jazz on this disc and ventures into flute/guitar transcriptions of Gershwin and Jarrett. It's great stuff and speaking as an American I'm happy to say (for whatever this may be worth) that I think Atanas gets what makes jazz fun to listen to and fun to play. I don't think I've had this much fun listening to an album of flute and guitar music since Nikita Koshkin's incredible Oratorium CD on the Kreuzberg label.
As can be heard on his first CD Ourkouzounov loves to play with special effects that are unique to the instruments he's writing for and things like key clicks, multiphonics, and breath-tones show up regularly. While I admit that in some of his earlier works this could sometimes feel just a tad gimmicky to me he's really nailed down how to use these kinds of coloristic effects without over-doing them now. Plus he's always good at employing a musical form that is appropriate for the ideas he's exploring.
I admire that he devotes so much material on both of his CDs to chamber music. This means that when he takes a few spots on record to record solo guitar works or works for guitar duo he's always picked pieces that are really interesting and not just the usual suspects that are all great music but end up taking on the quality of filler because so many guitarists have recorded them already. It's also nice to be able to put on a CD by a guitarist composer I like and hear how he is both branching out into things he hasn't recorded before and still exploring aspects of his musical voice from his earlier work. I wish Atanas the best and hope to keep seeing more CDs from him down the road. Atanas, if you happen to read this, consider putting out a CD of solo music some time down the road. Toryanse Tales has gotten me interested in hearing more of your solo guitar repertoire.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
the beginnings of new blog entrys, I hope
But first I feel like I need to get outside and do something once in a while. It can't hurt, you know. Of the writing of blogs there is no end. I at least feel like just playing guitar or something. Besides, I posted a bunch of old poetry earlier in the week. Still, I gotta write something about a few CDs here soon.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Hmm, a curious trip down memory lane, this poem
For my Teddy Bear revised 8-26-98
You're older than some of my friends,
old enough to drink wine if you could,
but of course you can't.
I still have you next to my bed
after 21 years.
Your leather paws the same as they always were,
counterpoint to the now rough coat.
Strange how your skin went from silk to gauze to burlap.
I see your sunken chest as you sit by my bed.
Maybe the years of neglect broke your spirit
but you're still there, if missing an eye.
I can't remember all my crimes against you.
I know promised not grow up.
My body broke that promise
It was too late by the time I realized
the rest of me had.
I can't even say I'm sorry.
Only that I'm sorry crime led to crime.
You can always stay by my bed.
Let it be enough that I remember the day
Mom sewed you for me, when we were both young.
I know when I was a kid I didn't particularly thrill to the idea of growing up but this feels a bit overdone. I suppose I can respect the sincerity of the sentiment but now that I'm nearly 33 instead of 24 this poem seems like a weird reminder of things about myself I don't like. On the other hand, I really do still have the teddy bear next to my bed. It's one of the stuffed animals my Mom made for me herself and I've never had the desire to throw it away. This probably only goes back as far as my being about four years old when I think my Mom had to fix the bear for me. I'll try to make a point to not post too many poems that actually include biographical information in the future.
You're older than some of my friends,
old enough to drink wine if you could,
but of course you can't.
I still have you next to my bed
after 21 years.
Your leather paws the same as they always were,
counterpoint to the now rough coat.
Strange how your skin went from silk to gauze to burlap.
I see your sunken chest as you sit by my bed.
Maybe the years of neglect broke your spirit
but you're still there, if missing an eye.
I can't remember all my crimes against you.
I know promised not grow up.
My body broke that promise
It was too late by the time I realized
the rest of me had.
I can't even say I'm sorry.
Only that I'm sorry crime led to crime.
You can always stay by my bed.
Let it be enough that I remember the day
Mom sewed you for me, when we were both young.
I know when I was a kid I didn't particularly thrill to the idea of growing up but this feels a bit overdone. I suppose I can respect the sincerity of the sentiment but now that I'm nearly 33 instead of 24 this poem seems like a weird reminder of things about myself I don't like. On the other hand, I really do still have the teddy bear next to my bed. It's one of the stuffed animals my Mom made for me herself and I've never had the desire to throw it away. This probably only goes back as far as my being about four years old when I think my Mom had to fix the bear for me. I'll try to make a point to not post too many poems that actually include biographical information in the future.
Another undated poem that's probably from about 1998
Some questions about prophets
Am I a fool for wanting to see
The coal that burned Isaiah’s lips?
The seraph that plucked it from the fire
As the prophet stood in the Temple?
Is it wrong to wish I could scorch
My fingertips on the ember
Or blacken a nail on it?
What was it like to see such a thing?
And where are the wheels within wheels,
With the eye-covered spokes, that Ezekiel saw?
How could ravens feed me in the desert?
What could they bring?
And what privilege is it,
What ineffable status,
That makes the difference between
Being fed by ravens
And searching for locusts and wild honey?
And if protection is being saved
By the enemy of your people,
Who have thrown you in a cistern to die,
What keeps you crying in the wastes
They call the Promised Land?
I think this one was supposed to have more images or ideas in it but I just abandoned it. I didn't feel like adding more to the poem by way of references to Ezekiel 1 or 2. A no-prise to the person who figures out who the last two prophets are.
Am I a fool for wanting to see
The coal that burned Isaiah’s lips?
The seraph that plucked it from the fire
As the prophet stood in the Temple?
Is it wrong to wish I could scorch
My fingertips on the ember
Or blacken a nail on it?
What was it like to see such a thing?
And where are the wheels within wheels,
With the eye-covered spokes, that Ezekiel saw?
How could ravens feed me in the desert?
What could they bring?
And what privilege is it,
What ineffable status,
That makes the difference between
Being fed by ravens
And searching for locusts and wild honey?
And if protection is being saved
By the enemy of your people,
Who have thrown you in a cistern to die,
What keeps you crying in the wastes
They call the Promised Land?
I think this one was supposed to have more images or ideas in it but I just abandoned it. I didn't feel like adding more to the poem by way of references to Ezekiel 1 or 2. A no-prise to the person who figures out who the last two prophets are.
Another undated poem but from around 1998 or 1999
Hand me your big black umbrella
Hand me your big black umbrella
I’m walking out and it’s raining.
I won’t be long, a few minutes,
And it will be back in your hands,
Wetter, of course, and colder, too.
I was just thinking the only part of you
An umbrella keeps dry is your head.
That’s good enough,
Enough to keep the tumbling clearness
From blinding me as I walk.
I don't really know why I still like this one but as soon as I wrote it I liked it. I'm fascinated by how water, as clear as it is, can blind us in so many ways. This is another poem about the nature of perception and how the barriers we observe between us and what is can help us see things more rather than less clearly. It's sort of a poem about writing and perception for me, I guess, and it's another hat tip to Frost.
Hand me your big black umbrella
I’m walking out and it’s raining.
I won’t be long, a few minutes,
And it will be back in your hands,
Wetter, of course, and colder, too.
I was just thinking the only part of you
An umbrella keeps dry is your head.
That’s good enough,
Enough to keep the tumbling clearness
From blinding me as I walk.
I don't really know why I still like this one but as soon as I wrote it I liked it. I'm fascinated by how water, as clear as it is, can blind us in so many ways. This is another poem about the nature of perception and how the barriers we observe between us and what is can help us see things more rather than less clearly. It's sort of a poem about writing and perception for me, I guess, and it's another hat tip to Frost.
undated but probably from around 1998
The Lizard
God, I’m a lizard you caught by the tail
And I shed my tail as all lizards do.
Then you caught me by the ribs and I had
No escape.
But instead of killing me you made me your pet,
Fastened a gold chain around my neck.
Now I sit on an ivory stool by your throne
Wondering why I miss my old tail at all.
A more accurate rendering of the proverb that inspired this would probably be the spider but it's less poetic that way for the conceit of the poem. :)
God, I’m a lizard you caught by the tail
And I shed my tail as all lizards do.
Then you caught me by the ribs and I had
No escape.
But instead of killing me you made me your pet,
Fastened a gold chain around my neck.
Now I sit on an ivory stool by your throne
Wondering why I miss my old tail at all.
A more accurate rendering of the proverb that inspired this would probably be the spider but it's less poetic that way for the conceit of the poem. :)
A really old poem I still like
There is rarely a silent night 6-30-96
There is rarely a silent night.
If there aren't cars on the street then
the lights overhead will sing to
the road their tedious song,
their orange eyes riveted open.
Crickets will chirp, hidden in grass;
frogs croak in suburban ditches;
and fans and clocks will count hours
by the turn of their blades and hands.
In the woods, where all other sounds
seem missing, someone camping will
hear blood in his veins,
hear the wind in her lungs, or the
buzz of her nerves
that keeps her awake until day
Even though I wrote this eleven years ago I still feel pretty happy with it. The monotony of the language reinforces the theme of insomnia and the allusion to the legendary Christmas song is also a lot of fun. In hindsight this was one of a number of poems inspired by an as yet undiagnosed sleeping disorder.
There is rarely a silent night.
If there aren't cars on the street then
the lights overhead will sing to
the road their tedious song,
their orange eyes riveted open.
Crickets will chirp, hidden in grass;
frogs croak in suburban ditches;
and fans and clocks will count hours
by the turn of their blades and hands.
In the woods, where all other sounds
seem missing, someone camping will
hear blood in his veins,
hear the wind in her lungs, or the
buzz of her nerves
that keeps her awake until day
Even though I wrote this eleven years ago I still feel pretty happy with it. The monotony of the language reinforces the theme of insomnia and the allusion to the legendary Christmas song is also a lot of fun. In hindsight this was one of a number of poems inspired by an as yet undiagnosed sleeping disorder.
This one pretty much explains itself, too
Sonnet for Eucharist
However it is that the blood resides
In the cup, it is memory that guides
Us through the holy supper and memory
that brings to mind what has gone before.
Whether barley, corn, wheat, or rice the bread
Will never tell us if his skin was red,
If his laughter was like an untuned horn.
The bread will only tell us he was born,
That he lived and died. This we remember
As we drink wine that tastes like vinegar:
Cast-out demons and leprous hands made clean.
A vision of God heretofore unseen
Has walked the earth, more than a mere vision,
Whose flesh and blood buys our salvation.
However it is that the blood resides
In the cup, it is memory that guides
Us through the holy supper and memory
that brings to mind what has gone before.
Whether barley, corn, wheat, or rice the bread
Will never tell us if his skin was red,
If his laughter was like an untuned horn.
The bread will only tell us he was born,
That he lived and died. This we remember
As we drink wine that tastes like vinegar:
Cast-out demons and leprous hands made clean.
A vision of God heretofore unseen
Has walked the earth, more than a mere vision,
Whose flesh and blood buys our salvation.
a really short one
11.03.01
no one is more dead
than the stain that was a spider
forgotten, on a winow sill
no one is more dead
than the stain that was a spider
forgotten, on a winow sill
A poem for office space
Restructured Olympus 5.23.01
The mouse does not take instruction
I have tapped on its head in vain
And so I have seen the downfall
Of another one-eyed idol.
When little gods are outwitted
They seek the help of bigger gods,
Yet now Zeus will not deign to help
Even his favorite son.
It looks like a new, restructured Olympus
Has arrived.
The mouse does not take instruction
I have tapped on its head in vain
And so I have seen the downfall
Of another one-eyed idol.
When little gods are outwitted
They seek the help of bigger gods,
Yet now Zeus will not deign to help
Even his favorite son.
It looks like a new, restructured Olympus
Has arrived.
I don't remember when I wrote this one
Studies in Sound
1.
The brakes of the truck at a stop light
Whine like a dog with a wounded paw
2.
That you may know the folly
Of pent up rage: Listen.
A wasp under glass.
3.
The flutter of pigeon wings
Is the gentlest cry of terror
I have ever heard.
1.
The brakes of the truck at a stop light
Whine like a dog with a wounded paw
2.
That you may know the folly
Of pent up rage: Listen.
A wasp under glass.
3.
The flutter of pigeon wings
Is the gentlest cry of terror
I have ever heard.
A little Robert Frost tribute
January 27, 2002 to February 26, 20002
I can’t see any stars tonight
Past all the clouds and city light
So I can’t wish upon a star
It makes a difference who you are
The street lamps say, “You’ve gone too far.
Why should you wish upon a star?
Should you not wish on what is near?
Things good for wishing are right here.”
So should I wish upon the cloud
That many bright stars does enshroud?
“Why no!” they shout, “That’s not allowed
Your wish must be on something proud.”
“You see the stars you talk about
Are ones that long ago burned out
So tell me do you have the right
To wish upon that long dead light?”
“The cloud is dumb and only wears
The light from anything that glares
You cannot wish upon a cloud
Your wish must be on something proud.”
I’m sure you’d say it isn’t sound
To wish on something on the ground.
If I were wishing what should I
Then wish upon that’s in the sky?
The street lamps say, “It’s good you ask
The orange light in which you bask
Is just the light for wishing on
And we shine well from dusk til dawn.”
”Don’t wish on dead light long delayed
Or on the clouds we have inveighed
To stay your mind on and be staid
Use light for which your taxes paid.”
Say what you will but realize
Your granting wishes is no prize
Your orange glow is still on loan
At least the star’s light is its own.
And don’t you stand upon the ground?
To wish on you would be unsound.
The wish you grant would not suffice
A wish my taxes paid for twice.
I can’t see any stars tonight
Past all the clouds and city light
So I can’t wish upon a star
It makes a difference who you are
The street lamps say, “You’ve gone too far.
Why should you wish upon a star?
Should you not wish on what is near?
Things good for wishing are right here.”
So should I wish upon the cloud
That many bright stars does enshroud?
“Why no!” they shout, “That’s not allowed
Your wish must be on something proud.”
“You see the stars you talk about
Are ones that long ago burned out
So tell me do you have the right
To wish upon that long dead light?”
“The cloud is dumb and only wears
The light from anything that glares
You cannot wish upon a cloud
Your wish must be on something proud.”
I’m sure you’d say it isn’t sound
To wish on something on the ground.
If I were wishing what should I
Then wish upon that’s in the sky?
The street lamps say, “It’s good you ask
The orange light in which you bask
Is just the light for wishing on
And we shine well from dusk til dawn.”
”Don’t wish on dead light long delayed
Or on the clouds we have inveighed
To stay your mind on and be staid
Use light for which your taxes paid.”
Say what you will but realize
Your granting wishes is no prize
Your orange glow is still on loan
At least the star’s light is its own.
And don’t you stand upon the ground?
To wish on you would be unsound.
The wish you grant would not suffice
A wish my taxes paid for twice.
Mephistopheles by a copy machine
Mephistopheles by a Copy Machine
February 28, 2002
I wish I could photocopy your soul.
I admit it isn’t admirable
But you have a soul so worth copying.
To think I have found such a wondrous thing!
Rest assured I would give you your soul back
After I’m done copying it. In fact,
If it were possible, I’d improve it.
Two souls like yours would be even more fitting
And suppose, as some say, there is no soul?
Then there’s nothing wrong with my wish at all
Since a wrong is wrong only if it’s done.
Can there be two souls if there isn’t one?
Let me try the un-do-able for you
Let me have your soul so I can make two.
Not quite a sonnet in the strict sense but the mistakes were intentional, really. It helped underline the motiff. I was inspired to write this poem by listening to a woman sing a jazz tune. I don't remember precisely why the first line popped in my head but it seemed like a funny line for a love song. But it seemed funnier as a sales pitch from the devil and that's the theme I ran with.
February 28, 2002
I wish I could photocopy your soul.
I admit it isn’t admirable
But you have a soul so worth copying.
To think I have found such a wondrous thing!
Rest assured I would give you your soul back
After I’m done copying it. In fact,
If it were possible, I’d improve it.
Two souls like yours would be even more fitting
And suppose, as some say, there is no soul?
Then there’s nothing wrong with my wish at all
Since a wrong is wrong only if it’s done.
Can there be two souls if there isn’t one?
Let me try the un-do-able for you
Let me have your soul so I can make two.
Not quite a sonnet in the strict sense but the mistakes were intentional, really. It helped underline the motiff. I was inspired to write this poem by listening to a woman sing a jazz tune. I don't remember precisely why the first line popped in my head but it seemed like a funny line for a love song. But it seemed funnier as a sales pitch from the devil and that's the theme I ran with.
this light little poem explains itself
This one is a language game, no more, no less.
Same Endings in Different Places
3.11.2002
A little old man was pushing a plow
In his garden when a strong wind did blow.
He folded his arms and stifled a cough.
He whispered: “Why has the wind got so rough?
I can’t plow the ground in this kind of wind
Season’s almost done and I’m in a bind.
Soon there’ll be rain and should I make a trough
When the rain will make my garden a slough?”
He looked down and saw a wind-beaten moth
“Didn’t notice you, the wind hates us both.
It goes to blow one way and then it rescinds
It always rescinds as much as reminds.
Bah, wasn’t what Heraclitus said nice?
You never can walk through the same river twice.”
Same Endings in Different Places
3.11.2002
A little old man was pushing a plow
In his garden when a strong wind did blow.
He folded his arms and stifled a cough.
He whispered: “Why has the wind got so rough?
I can’t plow the ground in this kind of wind
Season’s almost done and I’m in a bind.
Soon there’ll be rain and should I make a trough
When the rain will make my garden a slough?”
He looked down and saw a wind-beaten moth
“Didn’t notice you, the wind hates us both.
It goes to blow one way and then it rescinds
It always rescinds as much as reminds.
Bah, wasn’t what Heraclitus said nice?
You never can walk through the same river twice.”
Two poems about perception
Filling a Water Bottle 6.20.2002
The once empty bottle is quickly filled
With water that must come from somewhere else
Maybe the drinking fountain in this building
(chiming in pipes like soft-ringing bells),
Maybe the water comes from my kitchen
And whispers from far off like ocean swells.
The old plastic bottle seems to fatten
But only what I see through water grows,
Only what’s seen, not the seen itself, when
The table distorts through what water shows.
Like splinters of sunshine found in the stream
Pouring out summer’s warm garden hose
These things remind me of how things can seem,
How meaning is not what it is to mean.
Playing with a ball-point pen.
05.09.2002
Column of ink, enclosed in clear plastic,
Enclosed in another clear, plastic shell
The sight of you is clear but elastic,
Refracted. What layers of plastic tell
Is stasis and flux as my fingers turn.
The column of black widens and thins and,
In seeing this, there is something to learn,
Something almost easy to understand.
This might have been the start of a sonnet that I dropped because it seemed to get to its point in less time than that. The first poem is in terza rima, obviously. Chalk these up to my Wallace Stevens phase. :)
The once empty bottle is quickly filled
With water that must come from somewhere else
Maybe the drinking fountain in this building
(chiming in pipes like soft-ringing bells),
Maybe the water comes from my kitchen
And whispers from far off like ocean swells.
The old plastic bottle seems to fatten
But only what I see through water grows,
Only what’s seen, not the seen itself, when
The table distorts through what water shows.
Like splinters of sunshine found in the stream
Pouring out summer’s warm garden hose
These things remind me of how things can seem,
How meaning is not what it is to mean.
Playing with a ball-point pen.
05.09.2002
Column of ink, enclosed in clear plastic,
Enclosed in another clear, plastic shell
The sight of you is clear but elastic,
Refracted. What layers of plastic tell
Is stasis and flux as my fingers turn.
The column of black widens and thins and,
In seeing this, there is something to learn,
Something almost easy to understand.
This might have been the start of a sonnet that I dropped because it seemed to get to its point in less time than that. The first poem is in terza rima, obviously. Chalk these up to my Wallace Stevens phase. :)
Don't read this if you like Pablo Neruda
He's got his moments but after reading about twenty of his poems I just got fed up with him and scribbled this.
After reading Pablo Neruda
03.01.2003
Your name is like a pony,
A pony sold for far too much!
The silent hooves of your pony name
Run quickly on the fog of sadness
And the pony of your name is rustled
By a rain of tears!
How I would drive your pony name
Into the raging sea of tears
And drown it there as I escape
To drink a few more beers!
After reading Pablo Neruda
03.01.2003
Your name is like a pony,
A pony sold for far too much!
The silent hooves of your pony name
Run quickly on the fog of sadness
And the pony of your name is rustled
By a rain of tears!
How I would drive your pony name
Into the raging sea of tears
And drown it there as I escape
To drink a few more beers!
My token attempt at imitating Denise Levertov
12.21.2002
I
Any fat robin will do
Any could feed him, hopping gracelessly in the grass
Any chickadee by the feeder would do
Provided he could catch two
Sparrows are no more than token food
For a hunter of his size and skill
As his desires drift like dandelion seeds on the windy day
II.
We are a city of clouds that rarely promise rain
We lay under blankets but do not sleep
Until we do not expect sleep
It seems all our weather men are false prophets
Meteorologists, if you prefer.
And every ology has its limits
Even the darkest cloud will promise just so much.
III.
Oil
Oil on water
What weighs on the heart
Rests lightly on what is clear
And, of course, you can see through it
What we need is so much simpler than what we want
Mixing oil and water
We stare at bubbles,
And the ghosts of our own desires
Phantoms of oil on water
And here's another poem I wrote the same day, much shorter. It's not quite really a poem, more an aphorism loaded with famous literary allusions.
12.21.2002
we are trapped by our own metaphors
the rosy –fingered dawn
an ever blooming rose
a grand inquisitor
a guard at the door
I
Any fat robin will do
Any could feed him, hopping gracelessly in the grass
Any chickadee by the feeder would do
Provided he could catch two
Sparrows are no more than token food
For a hunter of his size and skill
As his desires drift like dandelion seeds on the windy day
II.
We are a city of clouds that rarely promise rain
We lay under blankets but do not sleep
Until we do not expect sleep
It seems all our weather men are false prophets
Meteorologists, if you prefer.
And every ology has its limits
Even the darkest cloud will promise just so much.
III.
Oil
Oil on water
What weighs on the heart
Rests lightly on what is clear
And, of course, you can see through it
What we need is so much simpler than what we want
Mixing oil and water
We stare at bubbles,
And the ghosts of our own desires
Phantoms of oil on water
And here's another poem I wrote the same day, much shorter. It's not quite really a poem, more an aphorism loaded with famous literary allusions.
12.21.2002
we are trapped by our own metaphors
the rosy –fingered dawn
an ever blooming rose
a grand inquisitor
a guard at the door
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