Category Archives: Music and Musicians

Public Musicology – How to Get There

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http://chronicle.com/article/Making-a-Public-PhD/130716


Highlights:
Yale University has a public humanities initiative. As one of its American Studies professors puts it: “Students have to invent their own jobs.” Similarly, a Yale historian says: “Historians have to get out and reach the broader public…the ultimate audience. … If academic historians don’t get involved, we have no right to complain about what we see at public historical sites.” A professor at another institution says: “I’m alarmed that there aren’t more people with strong history backgrounds actually doing public history.”


Followup: 
In a related vein, George Mason University has the Center for History and New Media, which has a Ph.D. program in digital history, dozens of IT professionals and developers, a number of original software tools, and over one hundred web-based projects with more than 16 million users annually.


“Public history” should certainly be expanded to include “public musicology” (public music history & culture, etc.). However, musicology presently exists almost exclusively within music departments, as one of a number of music sub-disciplines that focus mainly on “specialized knowledge” about classical music performance, music theory, and so on. Musicology thus almost never participates in such humanities’ contexts as Yale’s or even in what is arguably the ultimate public forum: the internet. However, it absolutely can and should!


The American Musicological Society’s brand-new professional development guide (188 pages) spends only two pages (i.e., that aren’t document samples) on the non-academic world, yet it exclusively seems to mean by that such contexts as museums. In addition, the document does not update the sample documents from the Harvard Arts & Sciences publication that it borrowed for this purpose. Those resumes and cover letter do not have anything to do with music or music graduate degrees, and they are also all nearly twenty years old.

The Grammy Awards

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I really want to like what Dave Grohl said last night at the 2012 Grammy Awards. However, I have to say that just because some people use Auto-Tune, etc. fairly cheesily doesn’t mean that other people don’t use technology in MUCH more interesting ways than what white, male rock bands (even Grammy-winning ones) supposedly do with their hearts and heads.

Anything I’ve heard by Foo Fighters is frankly not any better or worse than other mainstream, post-grunge hard rock music–such as by Nickelback (who, at least, weren’t once the drummer of Nirvana). I’m sure that this sentiment is going to surprise people who think I sit around all day listening to Rush, but I’d much rather listen to almost anything by Laurie Anderson than almost anything by Foo Fighters. The Grammys are meaningless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNfTXQ5BzI4

P.S. As for Adele (what I’ve heard anyhow, especially her distinctive voice), I actually like her. Apparently, so does Dave Grohl, although I suspect he may have just been sucking up in order to “play nice” among his likely, fellow award-winners.

“The Last Waltz” (the Band, etc.) – Classic Albums Live

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I’m looking forward to the Classic Albums Live performance of the Band’s 1976 farewell concert “The Last Waltz” at Kitchener, ON’s Centre in the Square this evening. I wonder how authentic it will be, though: copious amounts of cocaine, “Joni Mitchell” not quite knowing what to sing in the verses of “Helpless” by “Neil Young” (himself at first unable to remember how the song goes), “Eric Clapton’s” guitar strap breaking, “Robbie Robertson” pretending to contribute to the backing vocals (while otherwise MC’ing as though it was “his” band), whether “Garth Hudson” uses a Lowrey organ instead of a Hammond, not being able to see Stratford, ON native “Richard Manuel” (d. 1986) singing lead vocals behind all of the guest artists onstage, “Levon Helm” being relatively pissed off about the whole ordeal, and so on. I can see faking Ronnie Hawkins, Neil Diamond, and Van Morrison (hell, I can fake them!), but who on Earth will be able to fake Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan? The Classic Albums Live folks are out of Toronto, though, so the percentage of Canadians could actually be even higher than in the original!

Canadian Chamber Choir and DaCapo Chamber Choir (concert)

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There was a good concert on Friday, January 20, 2012 at Kitchener’s St. John’s Anglican Church, by the visiting Canadian Chamber Choir and the Waterloo area’s DaCapo Chamber Choir. Many recent Canadian pieces were performed, including several competition winners. Featured were Erik Ross’s “Icarus in the Sea,” “Patrick Murray’s “The Echo,” Leonard Enns’ “This Amazing Day,” two pieces by Jeff Enns (no relation to Len), Imant Raminsh’s exquisite “Ave Verum,” and a piece I’ve heard DaCapo sing before and which I think is very good: Don Macdonald’s “Tabula Rasa.”

I’ve sung in similarly excellent chamber choirs, including Toronto’s Exultate Chamber Singers and the Elora Festival Singers. At one point, I sang professionally in as many as six or seven choirs in a given week, including section-lead or core positions in church and community choirs. However, without also doing a lot of solo-work and voice-lesson teaching, professional choral singing caps out at only about a quarter of a proper salary. That’s why I’m bemused by the idea of such “professional level” (i.e., unpaid) choirs. The CCC somehow manages (in our present age of collapsing arts organizations) to find enough money to fly its singers all over the country. However, can that sort of thing possibly continue indefinitely?!

Laurie Anderson – “Another Day in America” (live performance, 2012)

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Laurie Anderson’s “Another Day in America: A New Solo Work in Progress” arrived as a 90-minute show in the atrium of Waterloo, Ontario’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics on Thursday January 19, 2012. Anderson’s most recent album, Homeland (2010), features quite a lot of music:  singing, synthesizers, samplers, Vocoder, strings, world music voices and instruments, and even (in one song) rock guitars and electronic dance music. She developed Homeland over several years’ worth of live shows, and I suspect she’s doing the same thing now, but for a spoken-word-with-accompaniment album. She did a similar transition from her 1994 pop-rock album Bright Red (produced by rock producer Brian Eno) to her 1995 performance-art-based The Ugly One with the Jewels (based on her stage show, Stories from the Nerve Bible).

As far as I know, in the new performance, Anderson didn’t really include anything from her previous work, although a pair of songs alluded to Homeland‘s “Another Day in America” (which she had spoken in “voice drag” to lower her voice electronically, although the new piece did not) and 1983-84’s Garden-of-Eden/snake-related “Langue d’Amour.” Musically, she mostly played samples and loops from two small keyboards and/or a notebook computer, speaking over them her often witty, philosophical, and/or political ideas about people, places, dreams, politics, and even her pet dog Lolabelle, who was shown playing a keyboard in some YouTube-like video clips (for a similar “performance,” from just before Christmas 2010, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YVnm2ZYD0s). Anderson also used several electronic effects devices and such things as pedals, triggers, and switches. On several occasions, she was much more overtly “musical,” playing her “electric violin,” which can electronically provide incredibly-dense textures and complex chord variations from only a few strings and/or pitches. Once or twice, she also played the instrument in the context of “live looping.” However, this particular Anderson work is not really concerned with the “singing” side of music at all, even though she does otherwise sometimes engage with that.

Anderson’s album Homeland includes quite a lot of Vocoder use (electronically making spoken or sung words seem like they are also being sung by an instrument), but she avoided that in this performance, possibly because she instead wanted to explore some different things. For example, she used a small pillow-speaker inside her mouth to “play” (“voice?”) a weird approximation of a violin solo. In one case, she also combined her spoken voice with a “voice drag” lowered version of it, instead of her more usual approach of keeping the two things separate (usually in different songs) or combining her spoken or sung voice with a simultaneous, electronic Vocoder part.

The audience of perhaps two hundred attentive and enraptured people consisted of a combination of middle-aged art and culture aficionados (artists, musicians, professors, etc.), science and technology professionals (some in the audience, probably from Research In Motion and various start-ups, but also including “lurking” employees of the Perimeter Institute), and younger people who were probably university students (including graduate students). Anderson knows that the audience for her more experimental and less music-oriented work is much smaller than for her pop-rock work, so it is highly commendable that she does not even remotely rest on her laurels, even though she is about to turn 65.

See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70eZbksZET8.

The Music Discussion Network (MDN)

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The YouTube Channel for the Instructional Videos of the Music Discussion Network (MDN) is http://youtube.com/MusicDiscussionNet. MDN’s website is http://Music-Discussion.Net/, which includes the same videos, but also Additional Information and Links, as well as Discussion Areas. So far, I have completed instructional videos on Bob Dylan, Josquin, Laurie Anderson, Handel, Rush, Chopin, and Music in The Simpsons.

Music Discussion Network – ROI (Return On Investment)

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You know you’re in the bottom of the 99%, when you have to look up the acronym “ROI,” because you truly and honestly have no idea what it means in the thing to which you’ve just been invited: a debate called “Be it resolved: That social media initiatives must pass an ROI test to be worthwhile.”
I would agree that a return on investment is necessary once one gets past the development stage of a website and its related content. However, if you’re doing something comparatively specific (http://youtube.com/durbow, http://music-discussion.net) and you haven’t invested anything other than your time and expertise (because that’s what you have), the “return” would presumably involve other people participating in the website with their own time and interest, such as in discussions.

Tori Amos – Midwinter Graces (2009)

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I just listened to Tori Amos’s 2009 “seasonal” album Midwinter Graces for the first time. Not surprisingly, it’s not overly “church-y,” which is consistent with the “reacting against her religious background” aesthetic of some of her earlier songs. What she mainly does is take segments of existing, “traditional” Christmas carols (various combinations of words, tunes, rhythms, chords, etc.) and folds them into “arty” songs that are thus perhaps each around 60% original and reflective of her view of the season as being most usefully seen as not being particularly “Christian” OR “secular.” It reminds me a little of Jane Siberry’s live, 1997 album Child: Music for the Christmas Season.

Amos often somewhat modifies a carol’s familiar words to de-emphasize its religious tone (although she also retains certain Latin words), and in some cases she combines aspects of two carols with her own ideas. Flowers, stars, candles, harps, and angels thus become relatively “generic” (both in her adaptations and in her original “Snow Angel”), and she transforms the idea of a “silent night” into an original love song: “A Silent Night with You.” I found her combination of “Lo, How a Rose” and “The Holly and the Ivy” (“Holly, Ivy and Rose”) to be the most effective.

Almost all of the instrumentation is for orchestra and/or piano (or the occasional synthesizer or harpsichord), sometimes with a modest amount of percussion. Thus, the ninth track (the original “Pink and Glitter”) is fairly jarring when it suddenly introduces a kind of Sarah Vaughan, big-band jazz sound, which then abates for the following adaptation of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the two, concluding, original Tori Amos songs: “Winter’s Carol” (very Kate Bush-like, and with its words from the 1864 fairy tale “The Light Princess”) and “Our New Year.”

Metal Evolution (TV series)

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The TV series Metal Evolution is 6 episodes too long (11) & spends as much time on glam & grunge as thrash & on Poison & Nickelback as Metallica, etc. Anyone who doesn’t care about heavy metal is going to find more than two episodes quite enough, and anyone who does is probably going to know way more than anything provided in the series. (The questions asked are just not good enough, the biggest problem being that actual pieces of music are almost never discussed.) I don’t CARE if Nickelback plays more interesting stuff live than evidenced in its radio hits: its radio hits are terrible (although I do find “Bottoms Up” a half-decent example of an irresponsible, excessive-drinking song), and Creed was mostly just warmed-over (and thinned-out) early Pearl Jam.

Carlo Gesualdo

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Alex Ross (the music critic of The New Yorker) has “helpfully” suggested that Schubert (d. 1828) and Wagner (d. 1883) trace an “eerie harmony” continuity from Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (the Prince of Venosa, ca 1566-1613) to the “present day” (i.e., Italian nobleman and composer Francesco d’Avalos, a descendant of the family of the unfaithful wife Gesualdo famously murdered). Vaguely suggesting that d’Avalos’s son Andrea may have been the one listening to some unspecified hip-hop as you left the ancient building in Naples is seriously NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I could find only one photo of “Prince Andrea d’Avalos” – with dark, short hair and glasses, wearing a tux at some kind of international fundraising event in 2003, probably around 25 then. No signs of hip-hop! There are too many other people with the non-Prince name, though, to figure out much more.

Was Gesualdo (1) a tortured genius who blasted through the boundaries of harmony two or three hundred years before anyone else did, or (2) a person of considerable means who didn’t have to follow any rules (in his personal life, such as killing his unfaithful wife and her lover, OR in his music) and thus also didn’t really have to know what he was doing? Either way, the correct parallel is probably not so much Wagner or the Second Viennese School, as Ives! If you’re interested in this, you might also like Werner Herzog’s 1995 biography on him (Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices). It definitely has some strong-minded Option 1 types, but I think I’m still going to go with Option 2!