Around the horn

Here are a few posts from other blogs that have me thinking:

• Scott Speigelberg asks What is a musical experience?"
  
• Peabody Double Bass Blog posts about outliers (see my most recent post for more on outliers).
  
• (via Paul Bailey) Musoc.org's page that sets out the criteria for what constitutes art music (the organization is dedicated to the preservation of art music as distinct from popular music).
  

RIP Michael Jackson 1958-2009

(From the Motown 25 special: the Moonwalk debuts near the end of the video)

I have two very vivid memories of Michael Jackson from his superstar days. The first was clutching the Thriller album in the backseat of my parents' car and being eager to get home and listen to it. I can't recall, but it may have been the first record album I owned (well, co-owned with my sister).* My second recollection was going to my neighbor Jenny's seventh (?) birthday party. Her parents had rented (!) a VCR and the full-length video of "Thriller" for us to watch. We were all pretty scared in advance and we went down into the basement to watch it in the dark...

I was just thinking the other day about some of the early 1980s pop superstars--MJ, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and the like. What about them as people, their lives, the culture in general resulted in so many megastars appearing in such a short time. Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Outliers. Clearly, all of them were very talented individuals, but so were many others. Some of the material below is taken from Garofalo's Rockin' out.

At the height of the disco craze, record companies were signing anyone and anything that recorded anything resembling a disco song. At the beginning of the 1980s, the recession that had worsened during the Carter administration caused record companies to consolidate their resources behind a few people. Key to this was finding artists who would relate to the largest number of fans.

At about the same time, MTV was in its infancy, the result of cable deregulation in the early 1980s. MTV was one of the most heavily focus-grouped TV networks ever to take to the airwaves. They knew their demographic and wanted to maximize their advertising potential. Because MTV was such a visual medium, the way an artist looked and/or performed suddenly became very important.

The demographic to whom these artists appealed were (like me) children of baby boomers--Generation X. I suspect there were a lot of us with a little bit of disposable income (i.e., our parents' income) to spend on record albums.

Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna were all born in 1958; Whitney Houston and George Michael were born in 1963; Bruce Springsteen and Lionel Richie were born in 1949. The first five would have been about 25 years old at the height of their popularity; the latter two would have been about 35. Jonathan Pontell would lump the first five into his Jones generation, which came of age between the baby boomers and the Generation X'ers. It seems to me that 25 is the perfect age to appeal to the younger (i.e., teenage) demographic: they're a little bit older than people like me, but not old enough to be fuddy-duddies. Richie and Springsteen would have been about the same age as my parents, perhaps appealing to that demographic as a result.

So, the changing strategies of the record companies in the early 1980s, the rise of MTV, and a handful of "Jones generation" artists all combine to create a perfect storm. Among the feats that Michael Jackson accomplished:

• Thriller was #1 for 37 weeks and spent 122 weeks on the Billboard charts
  
• He earned a total of 12 Grammy awards
  
• Of the nine songs on Thriller, seven of them became top-ten hits.
  
• Thriller has sold nearly 62 million copies, behind only the Eagles' Greatest hits, 1971-1975 (which had nearly ten more years on the shelf than Thriller
  

Springsteen's Born in the USA also produced seven top-ten hits. It sold 11 million copies and spent nearly two years in the top 40.

I can't help but wonder if the rise of the cassette (which was cheaper and more portable than the LP) and walkman (which was cheap and portable) impacted the megastar phenomenon as well. By the end of the decade, cassettes were outselling LPs at a rate of 13 to 1.


*Actually, this may have been the first one. Oddly enough, one of the members--the bass player--is on the faculty here at TTU

Today's food for thought

(from pictureisunrelated.com; may not be suitable for all viewers)

What does it mean for a performance to fail (or to be considered a failure)? Can a performance be considered a success if there is one wrong note? Five wrong notes? Flagrant disregard for the composer's intention (I'm deliberately handing you the can of worms...)? An inability of the performer to live up to his or her own personal expectations and abilities? Is it even possible for a performance to fail? Might we distinguish between a failed improvisation and a failed realization of a work?

If you don't know the piece "Failing" (a very difficult piece for solo double bass) by Tom Johnson, submitted for your approval is the inimitable Gary Karr performing it.

Metal Monday IV: Son of Metal Monday

This week's Metal Monday features possibly my favorite metal band (Metallica is the only one that gives them a run for their money): Nuclear Assault. As previously mentioned, a few members of Anthrax left the band early on to find a "more aggressive outlet" (Allmusic.com).

Nuclear Assault was the sort of band that you could point to when your parents were convinced that all heavy metal bands promoted Satanism. Nuclear Assault couldn't have been a better influence on the youth of America. Long before Al Gore and An inconvenient truth, Nuclear Assault was spreading a message of environmental awareness. One only needs to look at the cover of their albums (Handle with care (1989) in particular) to get a sense of their message:

The video for "Critical Mass," the big single from that album, is a variation on the standard heavy metal performance clip (along with a gratuitous appearance by Jessica Hahn). In the video, the band stands in front of a couple of oil wells. Interspersed throughout are clips of traffic, landfills, and the like. Of particular interest here is that the band actually presents all of the lyrics to the song along the bottom of the screen using an adaptation of the classic Mitch Miller follow-the-bouncing-dot technique.* The band clearly felt that the message they were presenting was important and not to be missed in spite of John Connely's less than perfect diction.

The video also begins with some bumper material from the old Headbanger's Ball starring Riki Rachtman, and he introduces the video. Before he was a VJ (or a DJ), Rachtman was the proprietor of the Cathouse, one of the premier venues for heavy metal in Hollywood where Guns 'n' Roses got their start.



*In this case, the bouncing dot was Nuclear Assault's mascot, a one-eyed mutant "Have a nice day" smiley face.

Improvisation vs. aleatory

I've posed this question to a few colleagues, but I'd be curious to hear from the loyal readership:

Is there a difference between improvised music and aleatory music?

One of my colleagues suggested that aleatory applies moreso to contemporary, post-tonal music and improvisation applies to everything else. It seems to me that improvisation might have more of a performer/performance-centered connotation whereas aleatory seems to have a composer/composition-centered connotation. Another way to put that might be that the creative impulse resides mainly with the performer in the former and mainly with the composer in the latter.

What about pieces that are composed using chance methods, the results of which are then fixed in the score? It seems to me that these are different from a piece where, say, the performers are given a deck of cards to shuffle and play from.

Thoughts? Am I just splitting hairs?

Why do I need to know this?

I received a call yesterday from a woman whose daughter is getting married in a few weeks. Instead of the typical wedding day music, they've chosen to use music from the Pride and Prejudice movie soundtrack. They found sheet music for all but one of the tunes. Unfortunately, their musicians (a violinist and pianist) can't play by ear (!!), and they've spoken to just about everyone in town in the music business--they were ultimately directed to me. They would like a transcription of this song for violin and piano.

The tune, called "Can't slow down" goes like this:



I've actually been asked to do this a few times over the course of my career and I find it a fun challenge. Here's my working method.

1. Find the form of the piece. If the form is repetitive (as it is in this one), you've saved yourself an awful lot of work. The form of this particular number is:

AABBABABABB

Whew--now I only really have to transcribe two sections and I'll let the copy-and-paste feature of Sibelius do the rest. The next-to-last AB section is faster than what came before it, and the last AB section is faster than that. The first A section is played by violin alone.

2. Determine global parameters. This is a term that Karpinski uses to describe all of the stuff at the beginning of a staff: time signature, key signature, tempo, clef, instruments, etc. This piece is for violin and strings; I'm arranging it for violin and piano. It's in G major and in a 6/8 time signature. The tempo is allegro, approximately dotted quarter = 104 (I have a metronome that you can tap in the tempo).

3. Figure out measure and phrase lengths. I like to do this to create little boxes into which I can drop chords and melodic fragments. In this case, the A and the B sections are both six 6/8 measures long. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to notate the melody across the barline (i.e., starting with an anacrusis) or not.

4. Sketch out bass line and harmonies. In general, the A sections are in the tonic key and the B sections stay mostly in the dominant key. There appears to be some sort of secondary dominant in the B section that leads us into the key of IV. At this point, I'm more concerned with the framework and not the actual bass line. I'll adapt the bass line once I get some of the melody line down.

5. Learn the melody line. Listen to the thing over and over again until you can sing the melody line. I'll probably focus on one section at a time. Again, I'm more concerned with the big picture here: I'll add the fancy little trills and mordents later.

Here's a sketch of the melody and bass lines. Letters indicate solfege syllables:

6. Compare the melody and bass lines. Make sure they add up to the harmonies you hear and make sense with one another.

7. Copy and paste. Once you have the A and B sections notated, fleshing out the piece is as simple as copying and pasting. I like to copy and paste and then I'll make changes to the different iterations of the sections so that it doesn't sound like... well, copied and pasted.

8. Add in details. In a case like this where the music is quite repetitive, I'll try to vary the details as well. I'm not interested in something that matches the recording exactly; rather, as long as the finished product is pretty close (i.e., laymen couldn't tell the difference) and sounds good as music, I'm happy.

I do much of my preliminary sketching and note-taking on paper and only later put it into Sibelius. The computer program, of course, can let you hear what you've written as you go. I'll then send it off to them, probably in PDF format, with a separate violin part and piano score.

I plan to work on this in the next day or two and will post some of my work along the way.

Metal Monday III

This week I give you Anthrax.

Well, that didn't sound so good.

The featured band on this week's edition of Metal Monday is Anthrax. Anthrax was unique among metal bands for a few reasons. They were one of the few successful bands on the scene that didn't hail from Los Angeles, where heavy metal originated in the 1980s. Anthrax was from New York City. Consequently, they were to some extent outsiders to the west-coast heavy metal scene, but they did have front-row seats to many of the developments that were taking place in the realm of hip-hop. I've chosen to profile Anthrax because of two of their songs that engage with the rap world in important ways.

Anthrax was a band also known for their sense of humor. "I am the man" was released in 1987 as an EP that featured three different versions of the title track. "I am the man" is a clever parody of many classic rap topics as they might pertain to a few white boys from New York City. This is one of the very first rap/rock (or rap/metal) collaborations: Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith's "Walk this way" appeared only the year before. The "Extremely Def Ill Uncensored Version" is a live cut that features their great sense of humor as well as their interaction with the audience. Here's a video of the censored radio version:

Click here for video (embedding was disabled)

In 1991, Anthrax released a collection of B-sides, covers, and other rarities called Attack of the Killer B's. On that collection was their collaboration with Public Enemy, "Bring tha noize." The track also appeared on Public Enemy's 1991 release, Apocalyse '91: The enemy strikes black (the original song--a true classic--appeared on It takes a nation of millions to hold us back). The video appears below:



The collaboration highlights some of the concerns shared by the two movements: disenfranchised youth, rebellion, noise, etc. Anthrax paved the way for many bands of the 1990s and 2000s like Rage Against the Machine, Linkin Park, and other metal/rap collaborations.

Early in the band's history (after the release of Fistful of Metal), bassist Danny Liker decided to go his own way. He wanted to play music that was faster, louder, and more aggressive than Anthrax. He and John Connely (who also briefly played with Anthrax early on) formed Nuclear Assault, the subject of next week's post...