Zoso What

Turns out that it takes more than a desk job to get me to post. Without reliable Internet that I can get my filthy hands on, my feedreader lies barren. Read ten times as much as you write.....so on so forth, very good, right away. Anyway if I seem horrible out of touch with some meme or trend that's going on, it's because I am. And yes, I know that Pavarotti died.

Once many moons ago, a compatriot of mine and I were admonished by a comic book store owner for discussing Foghat, stating we were clearly too young to have any idea what we were talking about. Thus discussing Zeppelin is probably way out of my jurisdiction, but I'll do it anyway.

I'm an admitted addict of metal rumor site Blabbermouth (NSFW, probable word salad), and a little over a week ago they did their usual rumouring thing about, of all things, a Zeppelin reunion hit. No one else was talking about it at the time, so I figured it weren't happening. The annals of history are scattered with so many warmed-over Zeppelin half reunions I figured Jimmy Page was just commandeering another band.

But then just today, sure enough, the damn thing is going to go down. (And finally with obvious choice Jason Bonham in the drum chair, no less) But is this anything to be excited about? It's one gig by a band that hasn't played together for at least 19 years, if our last point of reference is the 1988 hit for Atlantic Records 40th anniversary.

It's definitely a gambit considering how defensive Zeppelin has been about their legacy. One of the reasons that there are so many assholes wearing that freakin' 1977 tour t-shirt is that getting to see the live Zep (many say the true Zep) was only available by actually getting to a show. I'll invoke the Rolling Stones since they're really the only apt comparison, but everyone has seen the Stones live. For a stretch in the 90s every other Stones album was a live recording, whereas live footage of Zeppelin totals less than six hours. However ultimately the Stones have had the advantage of playing together for the last million years and it's even starting to show. A Bigger Bang was their best album since Tattoo You, easily.

Of course I've never took the whole Zeppelin/Jimmy Page black magick thing very seriously. Everyone already knows the best bands are affiliated with Satan. I certainly hope some of the more musicologically minded of you out their have heard of the 33 1/3 series, and in between the rumor and realization of the Zeppelin reunion I picked up the volume on Zeppelin IV. (Or Zoso, or Runes, or whatever you want to call it, asshole.) I only read the introduction and already find the author willing to take Zeppelin far more seriously than I am willing to. Perhaps the best way to academically discuss their Tolkien-laced posturing is by taking it entirely at face value. Either way, I decided to put it aside in favor of less recreational reading, but will report back upon finishing it.

I'm Shipping Up To Boston

Actually I'm already here, but what's more Boston than a Dropkick Murphys reference?

Posting should improve, I realize this is primarily because I'm back at a job that places me before a computer for hours at a time.

Most of the recent days have been spent moving into my new apartment. Whereas all of my classmates have retreated to the suburbs I've stubbornly remained in the Fenway. I watched a special on Boston during the summer on High Living or some other useless digital cable channel and was irked when the local hotspots they mentioned avoided Boston proper entirely. However, as I watched the bevisored masses carry up leather couches and big screen TVs and cinder blocks to put the couches and TVs on, I realized that no local in their right mind would pay the rent to stay so close to the center of town. Either way, as I cleaned up my apartment listening to Josquin, I began to relish my inevitable role as the weird guy at the end of the hall.

I might resume my If I Ran The Zoo bit once the season gets going and if my hazy understanding of Google Analytics tells me anyone read that to begin with.

Stupid Machine!

Two weekends ago I ventured to the western side of the state for the last time this summer for a two friends' wedding. (To each other. Congratulations Joel and Miranda) Being both musicians there were a few people there to wax musicological with, including a post-doc fellow from Lawrence and a friend starting her doctorate at Northwestern this year. (Congratulations Elissa) As conversations with other people tend to go I felt stupid and over my head by the end of it.

It's different kinds of stupid and over my head each time, however. This time I left the reception wondering just how ill-prepared I was should I attempt to continue on in musicology. It's not that I've taken less music history than the average performer, but most everyone else has had the opportunity (or obligation) to crawl inside many of the great masterworks, be it through song or orchestra or string quartet or whatever. Even at my most evangelical I can only find a handful of guitar pieces that might make mention in a general textbook.

Most of the major landmarks of the guitar repertoire, often the ones most responsible for extending the instrument's vocabulary such as Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal and Manuel de Falla's Homenaje a Le Tombeau de Debussy, are speedbumps in the respective composers' careers. A notable exception to this is Elliott Carter's Changes (no YouTube video, sorry), marking his turn towards production for solo instruments.

There are three exceptions to this quagmire, that I see anyway. One has managed to worm its way into the cultural zeitgeist, to the point where it practically defines the music of a region. By this I mean Rodrigo's Concerto de Aranjuez, particularly its Adagio. Yeah, it's famous and all, but taken in context a lot of its appeal comes from its quaint neoromantic stylings. The second is one of two appearances of any fretted instrument in the venerable Norton Anthology, John Dowland's lute song "Flow, my tears". That's cool , but it's really in there more to show how vocal songs became instrument works (see Lachrymae Pavan) and c'mon, it's the fucking lute.

I've got one tricksy weapon up my sleeve. Even passing musicologists know of Luis Narvaez's Guardame las vacas, a vihuela tune from the 17th century. Since it's the first documented example of a theme and variations. Booyakasha!

Perhaps I'm being too sad sacky about all this. While I lack the forced knowledge that playing important pieces brings, I also won't have the baggage that someone who bombed through said pieces in youth orchestra might have. Furthermore I'm sure people who've played dumber instruments have had success. Anyway, if you're unfamiliar with any of these hawt geetar jamz, all of the preceding links are to YouTube performances. So enjoy with gusto.

Pool image snagged from the Google Earth forums, photographer alas unknown

The Guard's Question Time III: Back to Schooled

Soho the Dog apparently is going to make this gatling quiz of his a regular occurrence. Since I was either outstanding or foolish or a combination of the both enough to make his gold star round-up of the last one, I am obligated, nay demanded, to participate in this one. I'm a sucker for them anyway.

1. What's the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?

Ha ha! You didn't say classical music! I could say when Lenny's "America" shows up at the beginning of Metallica's "Don't Tread on Me"!

2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.

Alarm Will Sound/Aphex Twin "Acoustica"

3. Great piece with a terrible title.

This is actually the hardest one to answer. Probably La Monte Young's naming system for his performances. They're difficult to drop into conversation. (Just as he is himself!)

4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?

Britten, unless Tippett has written something for the guitar and then I might have to reconsider.

5. Who's your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)

Does Anne-Sophie Mutter count? For safety's sake I'll say Alice Coltrane, also.

6. Terrible piece with a great title.

Zappa's "I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth." Sorry Frank, too noodly this time. And there go everyone's web filters.

7. What's the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?

Cavalleria Rustica in Godfather III almost makes the film watchable.

8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.

I'm really surprised that no one has smashed the Sting Dowland album yet. But now Josh Groban! Barf barf barf.

9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?

Marvin Gaye, if solely for his rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.

10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.

Frank Gehry, or Michaelangelo Antonioni

The Hetfield of Cooking

Just when I thought Anthony Bourdain couldn't get more awexome.

"I know there's deep inside (me) some lazy hippie who'd be perfectly happy to lay on the couch, smoke weed and watch `The Simpsons' all day," he said.

"I'm really afraid of that guy. I don't like him. I don't want him around. And my whole life is kind of constructed to avoid reverting to that guy: Stay busy. Stay focused. Try not to mess up."

The man is seriously the best thing on television. If it were not for the fact that they are separated by the network divide, a No Reservation/Feasting On Asphalt mashup would be the only thing that could supercede it. Alton Brown's worship of Americana combined with Bourdain's hatred of it would made for compelling TV.

Quote snagged from this Yahoo! article

That Noise Is Bootleg, Man

Perhaps that crack with me mentioning the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Lynyrd Skynyrd in the same breath merits some further explanation. I didn't always hold the idea that "all recordings are bootlegs" even in the past day I've realize some of the folly of such extremism. Say, for instance, perennial Guard favorite "For Ann (rising)"? As far as I know a performance of it is merely mashing go on the jambox, so is the individual listener less qualified to do that?

Electronic art music aside, my aphorism is a mashup of Alex Ross's stance of "All recordings are fakes" and some reviewer of Brian Wilson's Smile (I want to say Rolling Stone but then that would be admitting to reading it) calling it "the best bootleg of [his] original vision." The term fake seems too harsh to me, as though any pleasure derived from it is somehow dishonourable. Bootlegs, at least in the Phish tape-trader sense of the word, to me implies a lovingly made but essentially flawed product.

And it was the BSO that really hammered this home. Perhaps the naysayers are right that the imperceptible information that modern codecs does contain all the voodoo that makes a performances, or whatever. I was able to pay attention all the way through Beethoven 6!

From my original statement it does sound like it was Southern rock that opened my rock the powah of the rawk show. In fact Skynyrd was my first rock show; I went there with my bestest gentleman friend and his parents at the age of 13 (I know, late start). Too bad it was spectacularly terrible. The sound system was bad, the vocals were clipping the whole time, the playing was apathetic. To add insult to injury we had to cheer for 12 goddamn minutes before they put us out of our misery with their encore. If Johnny Rotten had come up to me putting a caring hand on my shoulder and asked if I had been cheated, I would have said yes.

But why? I'm crabby after attending a mediocre performance, but this sucked. For all the things are awexome for the Beatles destroying the songwriter/performer dialectic, it stands that a Skynyrd show is the only place where the yelling of "FREEBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRD!" is acceptable, so you think they'd honor their exclusive rights and at least try to play it okay. I am not upset when listening to a Stravinsky performance because he isn't there, and yet rock covers always have a taint about them. So here's a case where the bootleg far exceeds the performance. Rock music is weird.

You Can't Hear What You Can't Hear

A real post instead of apologies. I willingly identify myself as a young'un as far as musicology goes, so my kneejerk reaction to AC Douglas and the San Francisco Chronicle's curmudgeonry about iPods and the MP3 format is likely something less than unexpected. Hopefully here's a more polite version.

The concept of psychoacoustic models can be made to sound spooky: outright discarding of music! But the point of throwing away what you can't hear is that you can't hear it. You brain will fill in the gaps. Perhaps the audience replies "But I can hear it that." And that could be true, you may be one of those people, musician or audiophile, that has trained your ears to pick up on those subtleties. However therein you've accept the implicit burden of any connoiseur, other people en't going to even pick up on the details that you find pleasure in. It's sort of like standing at a liquor store deciding between Oban and Glenmorangie to look over and see three guys in visors holding a sleeve of red Solo cups and a case of Keystone Light. Maybe a better analogy is the difference between a scotch and water and a scotch and 7-Up. Whatever, I can't afford scotch.

Recall the size of the Interwub's pipes back in 1995 when the MP3 format went public, any other compression scheme that got a sound file to that realm was similar to listen to an AM radio over a telephone. It was the MP3 format that finally introduced real music (as opposed to instrument-based a la MIDI) to the Internet, which most people can agree has had positive consequences. Not just in terms of digital distribution but anywhere there was limited storage capacity.

Of course without reasonably sized digital music files there would not have been a market for digital music players. Now the iPod can plausably blamed for a number of things: the decline of the album, people not saying hello on the street, walking into traffic, etc. However discouraging people to attend live performance and the propagation of inferior sound files aren't two of them.

The first is old territory. A combination of the BSO and Skynyrd have taught me to treat all recordings as bootlegs. Very accurate bootlegs at times, but bootlegs none the less. The one overwhelming advantage of these bootlegs, especially in combination with my iPod, is the ability to put them into whatever context I choose. To refer to me as being part of the Great Unwashed Masses because I greatly relish listening to Michael Gordon's Trance during rush hour in Copley Square or Kenny Garrett by a river is bullshit. The loss in fidelity in MP3 compression is nothing compared to a shitty performance.

But yelling at the iPod for poorly compressed files is yelling at the wrong people. 90% of everyone is going to use the defaults, so the defaults will have to change for the better for the cloud of data to improve. And this happening. MP3, despite having survived for a decade of notoriety, is not a format for the ages. (For comparison, the ZIP format is 18 years old. GIFs are 22.) A growing number of files are using the AAC format due to its endorsement as the format for the iTunes music store. The touted DRM-free iTunes Plus files are also at a higher bitrate, and hence discard less material.

The audiophile's most likely savior, as it is mentioned in the Chronicle article, is the endless quest for more storage. The average MP3 for a 3 minute pop song, even when crushed to a paltry 64kbps, is still bigger than 1.44 MB and would have been considered immovable by floppy-era standards. Over the past five years iPods have leapt in capacity from 5GB to 80GB. Even an audio-completist such as myself hasn't been able to expand their library by a factor of 16 in that time. Even with videos, all this extra space will quietly lead to an improvement in lossy formats and maybe eventually a switch to lossless ones. (Although a biggening of the series of tubes may be more imperative as more and more people get their music that way.)

Alas, the standard of audiophilia goes up as well. 96 bit recording, 4 times that of the previous norm, is becoming the de facto standard, especially for 5.1 digital recording. Just as the old story goes that the length of a compact disc was dictated by Beethoven's Ninth, so could it be the yardstick again. Those of you that fear MP3s can finally join the digital music player cause, at 96 bits the Ninth perfectly fits an 80 gig iPod.

Farm Team

Just as soon as I start to regain some semblance of a rhythm to this (Rhythm! Har!), fate sweeps me back to the farm. This one is a expected absence as opposed to an absence of sloth or ill inspiration. I'll try and post if I decide to be creepy and huff off of an unsecured wireless connection in my car.

In case any of you were interested in this farm I keep mentioning, here's a Flickr set of the mighty Hanson manor.

Not That I Endorse That Sort of Behavior

A couple tidbits from Google Analytics that I meant to mention in the last post. Don't worry, I'm not going to be talking about numbers since that's about equivilent on the rudeness scale as talking about money. (Although Blogger's cannibalization of Feedburner has doubled my subscriber rate. Yatta!)

More literate and awexome sections of the audience probably recognize where I got the name of this blog, but many more of you are likely aware of the other implications of the word "torrent" on the Intarwebs. While the BitTorrent medium is used to legitimately distribute massive amounts of open-source and Creative Commons stuff, it is less often the case than a virus labeled as the new Lil Jon single. (worst case scenario)

I didn't realize what sort of implications this had for me until I once checked the Keywords section of my Analytics. (For those you don't obsess over your Analytics or *gasp!* don't blog, this shows what phrases people have punched into The Google Machine to get here.) After the usual suspects I was surprised to find "the bad plus torrent". For the records I've actually purchased all the Bad Plus records, even Suspicious Activity?. So I began to wonder what else people were hoping to illicit acquire from my little knowledge shack.

Other selections include Pippi Longstocking, Point Black, Boston Beatdown, Kenny Garrett, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pit Fighter, the Amen break, Black Lab's remix of the Transformers theme, and Samuel Adler. Which I guess, really sums up what this whole operation is about. Most unusual, one of the more popular phrases was the terrifyingly specific "torrent sibelius complete symphonies 2 bso colin davis". Good luck with that.

POSTA HUNN DREAD!!!111

Milestones are just a reason for celebration when there's no other reason, and since I clearly need quite the reason nowadays to actually get around to posting these days. *le sigh* In past weeks I've traveled to Tennessee and am currently working for a hotel kind enough to employ me for a single week of 12-hour shifts. (Which will at the moment remain nameless, lest they have some sort of blogging clause.) So it's not like a haven't been doing anything.

I realize that my significantly downgraded posting schedule probably has less to do with me summering in Wisconsin and more with the incongruous decision of musicians to take the summer off. This will be tested in a little less than a month when I'm back in Boston before the "season" starts up. Originally I was hoping to have my hundredth post about a month ago when I would have turned one (how metal is it that started on 6/6/06?) but that didn't work out and I lost interest. Much like the lolcomposers problem once I decided that I was going to do some sort of retrospective post I couldn't actually write about anything else until I got around to doing it.

So far I'd put this site in the Double-A level (to use a baseball metaphor), capable of a few decent hits but lacking consistency. This is mainly the fault of my ass-backwards method of reading not just the music blogs I subscribe to, but all the blogs I subscribe to before I even start writing. See also the previously alluded to lolcomposers writer's block. I could also stand to try and tailor things so that they are more unique to my perspective, say classical guitar for example. I blame this on the fact that I read infinitely more musicology blogs than classical guitar blogs. Are there classical guitar blogs? Anyway, now that I've gotten to triple digit posts I feel like I've ejected a decent amount of thoughts onto teh Intarwebs. Nothing quite like On an Overgrown Path, but I'm carving out my share.

Back to work!

Happy Freedom Explosion Day

Am I the only person in the America not way pumped about Joey Chestnut defeating Tageru Kobayashi in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest? I know that today is supposed to be all about Freedom and 'Merica, but ESPN commentators were about to make me have a reversal. "The belt will return to America on this Independence Day, not far from where George Washington clashed with British forces!" Seriously, I didn't make that up.

Now I am all for the socially acceptable jingoism that is the motivator behind international sport, throughout my stay in Ellsworth I was furiously texting to find the results to the CONCACAF Gold Cup. (Which we won.) But these are hot dogs, guys. Sure it's just a different set of arbitrary conditions, but it's not like every country (that can afford to have competitive eating, whoops!) sent an digestive representative.

Besides, Kobayashi is 29 and has arthritis in his jaw. That's like saying you beat Jordan when he was on the Wizards.

We're Not Professional Apologizers, We're....Musicians

I've dropped the ball before, but this was a month. Holy crap. So here I go explaining myself.

Luckily I can begin by blaming another people. Apparently just like bowling, musicology is not a summer sport. So Dial M decide they are going to be agitators and start themselves a meme. Now lolcomposers should be right up my alley, since I'm a big advocate of both lolcats and lolbots. Unfortunately I had the WORST WRITER'S BLOCK I'VE HAD IN MY LIFE. I was going to post an attempt, but I can't even get it to work in GIMP. I am teh sUke. I could have really used that built in iPhoto support.

About the time I decide to let that go I spent three days entertaining and wandering around Illinois, including a visit to Northwestern. Any of you guys in the program there? I'm vaguely interested in the musicology/library sciences combo platter, but don't really need to have three masters degrees.

However, this all culminated in my grandfather passing away last Tuesday. I've spend the balance of the past two weeks at the ancestral farm, which lacks access to the Global Interweb Machine but to its credit has housed five generations of Hansons. (Seven, if you count intermittent vistors.) I did jack into the world briefly, but I had to go wardriving around the nearby town of Ellsworth just like those creepy guys they tell you about on the television. I'll have some stories from the countryside and maybe about my grandpa too, but we all know how I am about promising posts.

But now I am back in my rightful place, sitting with my laptop in front of the television alternating between SportsCenter and Headline News. Except now I'm watching Fist of Fury (Bruce Lee!). Let's go July.

By Succeeding I am Failing to Fail

Things I somehow didn't do in my first year in Boston, and may be inexcusable.

• Go to the top of the Pru. I managed most other touristy things like the Freedom Trail, but this one eluded me. I did however point to the top of the Pru during orientation week and declare if we didn't go to the top of it within that week we never would. This has held true.
• Go to a goddamn Red Sox game. This isn't so inexcusable considering that tickets are somewhere in the realm of eleventy billion dollars, but it was infuriating considering I could see Fenway Park out of my window.
• Go to a show at the Middle East. I sure may not have any at all indie cred, because the amount of hipsterati weird at the epicenter in Cambridge should have been a siren song to tempting to resist. Even worse is that I only really went to two (2) rock shows the whole year.
• Fung Wah it to New York. I suppose not really a Boston thing, but plenty of other new music wonks will tell you that it is the Center of the Universe. Alas, I wasn't able to clear out a weekend so I could hang with my posse icelu.
• Go to a show at regattabar. See Middle East entry, replace indie with jazz.
• Meet any other Boston music bloggers. Most especially you, Mr. Guerreri. Isn't that library you mention on occasion the same one I work at fifteen hours a week?

Did I miss anything really crucial? My activities have been rather Back Bay-centric. As you see most of my failures are outside those bounds. I have at minimum one year to correct these errors.

Tasty Tunes

A comparison between food and music isn't really groundbreaking, Soho did a bit on composer recipes a while back and the Dial M gents are compiling a collection of musicological cocktails. My attempt won't be as clever or utilitarian as either of those, but I got thinking when I read a blog post from chef Bob del Grosso about an article from the Guardian's art critic. (I guess British papers get to still have those.)

Jonathan Jones, the Guardian's critic, argues that food isn't art because it doesn't have the freedom to disgust the way that other artforms do. Del Grosso counters by saying that it wouldn't be hard to find someone more disgusted by Ferran Adria's aerosol spaghetti than Damien Hirst's preserved cows. Of course both of them are right, cuisine is an artisan craft. As is so often stated on Top Chef and such shows "food is for eating". Once a dish abandons that, it turns from cuisine to sculpture from edibles.

However more important, and more applicable to music, is Bob del Grosso's response that this is sort of a bullshit definition for art. Shouldn't it be more along the lines of discussing something as opposed to being able to discuss everything? Placing the line of legitimacy at the point of repulsion does undermine the merit of things that are, shall we say, "pretty". It's a rather sophomoric stance (i.e. the one I was taking about a year ago). You'd think even with the pluralism of the times and the minimalism movement being now in the post-post stage or whatever that consonance would be okay, but the composition studios in both of the schools I've attended often treat it as something to be poked with a stick. Even the BSO's premieres for this season, all three came from composers (Wuorinen, Saariaho, Schuller*) who work in angular voices of varying densities. Yes, I realize I've given the BSO shit for being conservative but I think I was more giving the audience shit.

So, cuisine might not be able to discuss the horrors of Abu Ghirab or something similiar, but I could see a perfectly edible dish become a discussion of nationalism. You know, like a lot of music has been.

* Did that Schuller ever get performed?

And Offered Him A Doughnut

Apparently in addition to bloggining and refreshing good taste in music, Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions and I also share our alma mater of Lawrence University. In fact we even both took advantage of the whacky two-degrees-in-five-years program. However, in the words of one of my professors: "Chemistry is physics without understanding." (That's not going to help me in the next list.)

Elsewhere on the Internets:

Darcy James Argue is in the middle of braving the entirety of the Bang On A Can Marathon, and liveblogging it to boot.

A decent answer to eternal question "Beatles or Stones?"

And in honor of National Doughnut Day (two days ago, alas) here's a map of everywhere in Boston proper to score yourself some doughnuts. No word yet on how many of those are Dunkys.

Truth In Advertising

Introductory tangent: Last night I saw Maria Schneider have her picture taken with a man wearing only an apron. I lead a bizarre life.

Newsweek has a story this week of one Jon Bauman (better known as Bowzer from Sha Na Na. Yeah, those guys.) as part of a Truth in Music committee, crossing the nation promoting similiarly named laws. According to Bauman, doo-wop and other pre-MTV musical groups are particularly susceptible to musical imposters due to their faceless radio popularity. Could you pick out one of the Temptations off of the street?

This leads me to think about another sort of faceless musical group. Can you name a member of the Guarneri Quartet? Would you recognize someone from the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet? Orchestras have the very visible figure of the conductor to lead them and ascend to rockstar-dom, but chamber groups (I suppose the pre-MTV analogue would be pre-Internet) normally don't have such as "face". Of course the answer of why there aren't any fake Takacs Quartets and such running around is simple: there isn't any money in it. I'll posit some other ones anyway.

There is the temptation (get it? get it?) to say that chamber audiences are more educated about the performers than doo-wop fans, but especially in the case of big-ticket concerts that's not really the case. However, I will say that chamber audiences, especially in the case of touring groups as opposed to seasons, are coming for the performance overall as opposed to particular songs. That's not to say that when I saw the Assad Brothers I wasn't hoping they'd do Piazzolla's Tango Suite, but there isn't the same sort of obligation to play the hits.

There are a lot of recognizable chamber groups now, either by being explicitly constructed as such (Il Divo, Bond or whatever those girls are called, those insufferable piano playing children) or badasses that also market themselves well (Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, Los Angeles Guitar Quartet). Also most groups are business entities unto themselves rather than entirely slaves of a record label. Lastly, except maybe in the case of string quartets you can't just get away with putting a 70-year-old man on cello so everyone can elbow each other saying "That's the real one!"

Heaven Underwater

I know two Pauls, and they both compose. Neither of them had works on the composition concert I recently attended, but that's because one of the Pauls, Paul Karner, had his senior recital/lecture in the near future. I made it back up to Lawrence for it, realizing that even though I'd been in the guitar studio with him and worked with him at WLFM for years I hadn't heard any of his compositions. I had heard his emo band however!

Paul's lecture was on the concept of venue and performance, revolving around the curious case of the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee. The Pabst has been in continuous operation since 1895 and maintained the original decor but now specializes mainly in this "rock and roll" you may have heard about. The first six rows of seats are removable to allow for a proper pit and as you can imagine the Blue Ribbon flows like wine there. It's a fantastic case study of a number of different bands performing in a venue with the poise of a classical concert hall, despite very little concert music appearing there.* Those in Boston might notice this to be the inverse of BMOP, where the same ensemble can be found in staggering disparate venues.

Paul compared his experiences at the Pabst seeing Cursive, darlings of ANABlog, and Devendra Banhart. Neither, he said, seemed particularly comfortable at the Pabst. Cursive seemed to be filling too large a space, whereas Banhart and his orchestra, having just come off of an affirming stint at the Lincoln Center, seemed cramped and condescending to the Midwest audience. Alas, his lecture touched on too many points to summarize here. Hopefully, as I start to mull lecture ideas for next year I'll be able to take his ideas and run with them.

The whole proceedings took place not at Lawrence's recital hall but in one of the art building's studios, making the entire recital an exercise in venue. The atmosphere did seem much more relaxed, but the players were also dressed down so the controls were thrown off. (I'm also not sure whether an audience of musicians would succumb to the suffocating aspects of the concert hall.) The three composed pieces preceeding the lecture revealed a complicated and intriguing compositional voice. Paul is definitely a man with one foot in his indie rock roots and one in the bracingly avant-garde comp studio at Lawrence. All of the works used long lyrical melodies either complimented or contradicted by repeated molecular phrases or pointillistic bursts of extended technique.

After his lecture, Paul played two acoustic folk songs he'd written. (Hey, fuck you! He composed them and it's his composition recital!) I must say that I felt a pang of jealousy that he got away with it, seeing as I was in a rock band at the time of both of my recitals and my grad school auditions. Here I think the idea of venue came back into play, this ending may have seemed forced in Harper Hall. But in that art studio, it was the most logical extension of a portrait of a composer.

* This may be slightly skewed by the fact that we are entering the summer months, but the only vaguely "classical" show on the calendar is a performance of the Nutcracker by the Moscow Ballet, which I feel were just in Boston. This sentence also makes me realize the inherent stupidity of the term "concert music", but it's still better than "classical".

Boston Without A Lens III

In addition to the Populist comparison I've posted the balance of the two rolls I shot over the past semester, including a couple candidates for my Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day shot. Some highlights:

After mentioning both the pit class I lectured to and the smaller listening section I teach every week, here's some illustration of them.

This will likely be my submission for WPPD, I took it just after midnight, since the Citgo sign was off already. I took a couple shots of it that night but probably won't get the roll developed in time.

I also added some shots from Wisconsin in the wintertime. The extremely short exposures seem to have a different feel than my normal urban and interior shots.

As per usual, the rest are on my Flickr stream. As may seem obvious, the Wisconsin shots aren't in the Boston set. I'll get around to making another one.

Populism Redefined

Musical Perceptions is doing their Top 51 Classical Music Blogs semi-annually, and for the second time I fall short of cut. They're using Technorati authority as their criteria, which some may say is a self-propagating blogger-circle-jerk sort of thing. (But that's loser talk.)

So it only took me five months to get through two rolls of film in both of my Populists. Yes! A second iteration! My dad's instructions lead to the new version, which adds a tripod mount and simplifies the clicker mechanism. My Populist has a slightly smaller pinhole, leading to faster exposure times at the expense of sharpness. Here are a couple shots of the MFA's lobby to compare.

Old Populist. 3.5 minute exposure.

New Populist. 1.5 minute exposure. I was originally going to also do a 3.5 minute exposure with the Populist DX but I guess that one was a whiteout.

Scarcity of Material

Last week was the first time I've been to a concert at Lawrence since my time in Boston (I somehow avoided it while home for Christmas) and suitably to my new music wonkiness I got the chance to revisit my friends in the composition studio. All and all a pretty gnarly concert, my friends Graham and Wilmer produced two fantastic solo works for piano and percussion respectively, in addition to the best passacaglia written the past three months.

One of the compositions by an freshman struck me as well, a piece for tape, string quartet, and percussion entitled Winners & Losers. It was divided into two movements, both named for the snippets of speech the tape part used. Both of these sounded as though they came from some sports-related motivational film, likely reaped from a public domain archive like AV Geeks. It was really an enjoyable work, but I noticed it for being exceptionally candid with its influences.

The first movement for tape and string quartet lended itself to unavoidable comparisons to Different Trains. The speech pattern, "The Changes In Your Life Will Be Dramatic and Permanent", remains largely intact with the quartet following it. The second movement subjected the tape part to much more brutality, and added three percussionists doubling the chopped-up speech. (Or was the tape doubling the percussion? Eh.) If that doesn't scream Jacob ter Veldhuis I don't know what does.

The concept of copying as a way of assimilating certainly isn't new, think of those Vivaldi concertos in Bach's hand, but is interesting in this case. The difference between undergraduate and graduate study as an instrumentalist in my mind is best explained as going from parroting your instructor to synthesizing various sources of instructions into your style. This seems like not as obvious path to take with composition. There seems to be much more of a emphasis on being an artiste rather than incubating and developing a craft, especially in an environment such as Lawrence where the lack of a graduate division gives freshmen less time until the spotlight is on them.

However, since the composer was a freshman and I am officially Olde by their standards I likely won't be able to talk to him and see if it was unconscious homage or conscious bravery.