Music Theory Blog

One of those gigs...

2011-12-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

There's so much more to being a musician than just playing the notes. You need to know the music, have good aural skills, good ensemble skills, and good communication. I had a gig this weekend that tested every musical skill that I've honed over the years. The concert was a Holiday-themed concert, with one rehearsal before the concert. This would be no problem if we were just playing Leroy Anderson's greatest hit over and over. I've written before about the strange animals that pops concerts tend to be, but this was not exactly a pops concert...

We arrived at the rehearsal to find the complete book for La Boheme on our stands, along with "Nessun Dorma." We were going to add the finale to act I of the opera to the concert. To save time, the conductor recommended several cuts. The problem here is that at some point, there are duplicate rehearsal numbers (at least in our part), and someone else had marked a different set of cuts in the part. So the other bassist and I wound up picking our way through ("Sounds like we're... here!"). This is tough music to do on one rehearsal because of all of the liberties with the tempo.

We then went on to rehearse Rimsky-Korsakov's entire suite from Christmas Eve, which no one in the orchestra knew or had played before (the conductor confirmed this by asking for a show of hands). We had the opportunity to play through it once. At some point, the bass part was inexplicably missing sixteen measures. I checked IMSLP on my iPhone at break to confirm that they had the score (and parts!) and we'd have those sixteen measures for the concert.

Johann Strauss's overture to Die Fledermaus was on the program as well. That piece I think is deceptively difficult. It's short and there are so many abrupt tempo changes/transitions. To make matters even more difficult, there are many conventions in that piece that aren't in the score (i.e., the Viennese oom--pah-pah; the caesura before the big waltz tune, etc.). It's a piece you have to have played several times before to know all those little details. We played it once through.

The real challenge came with the Nutcracker Suite, which we performed in a very unconventional fashion. The powers-that-be thought it would be great if the orchestra accompanied a video of the dances. A little bouncing ball cued the tempo for the conductor, and he was to follow that throughout (and we were to follow him). Due to the nature of the video, in rehearsal, we always had to go back to the beginning if we goofed up--you can imagine how much time that ate up.

The concert rolls around, and we arrive to find cuts for the Rimsky-Korsakov on our stands; the conductor cut about three pages (of the bass part) out of the concert. We hung on for dear life through that and the Nutcracker (which came off remarkably well in performance, considering all that could have gone wrong).

The second half of the concert was a little easier on the brain. The last number of the concert was a soprano/tenor duet of "O Holy Night," and the singers came in two beats early in the second verse. Most (if not all) of the orchestra caught it within a few beats and was back on track pretty quickly.

Never a dull moment... This concert succeeded because the ensemble consisted of a bunch of seasoned players who knew all the music and details, and naturally play well together. There were so many opportunities for catastrophe (and a couple of very near misses!). And people wonder why musicians can be so expensive...

A world without art?

2011-11-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

I was having a conversation with someone this weekend about the disappearance of arts organizations. There have been a few orchestras in this neck of the woods that have either folded or come awfully close. I'm sure I don't need to make the case here that the arts are suffering considerably in this economy to anyone who reads this blog.

It just so happens that I'm reading a book at the moment called The world without us by Alan Weisman. The book is an extended thought experiment that seeks to answer the question, "how would the Earth respond if all human beings suddenly disappeared from the planet?" He talks about what would happen to animal and plant life, human-built structures, and so on. It's a pretty interesting book (I'm only about 75 pages in at the moment).

I got to thinking, what would happen if all art on Earth suddenly vanished, in an instant? What would the consequences be for our civilization? It's far from a simple question with a simple answer. I think any answer would first have to draw some sort of line as to what is art and what is not: painting, yes; fiction, yes; music, yes; architecture, maybe; non-fiction writing...?

There would be considerable economic impact: many would lose their jobs. These people would not only be artists per se, but would work at businesses that count on, say, symphony patrons to dine there on a weekend, or artists to buy their materials there.

I'm also not thinking retrospectively, i.e., if there was no art, Hitler would not have been a failed art student, there wouldn't have been World War II, no Holocaust, etc.

What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and there were no art? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts via the comments. I'll leave this thread open for a while and try then to synthesize the results.

The things I carry

2011-11-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

Having played professionally in a variety of contexts over the years, I have found the need to carry all sorts of things in my gig bag; one never knows what to expect on a gig. I played a pops concert out of town this week and it got me to thinking about all of the stuff I take with me in my bass case (and using some of it, too!).

Here's the list:

A pencil (of course!)
Tuning fork (old school!)
Extra black bow tie
Nail clippers
Clothespins (for outdoor gigs in particular)
Earplugs
Medical tape (good for saving fingers on pops concerts with lots of pizzicato)
Post-it notes (good for marking cuts, particularly in show books)

There is, of course, the obvious: I carry two bows, at least two cakes of rosin, and extra strings. I just happen to have a spare bridge in my case as well...

I have a variety of apps on my iPhone that I use regularly, too: Cleartune chromatic tuner, Tempo metronome; of course, e-mail, phone and GPS features are super-handy.

Anyone else carry anything somewhat unusual?

Pete Seeger teaches us how to sing

2011-10-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

[n.b. This is a sample final project for my history of rock 'n' roll class at the University of Washington Tacoma]

[Introduction; opens with a bit of historical context] During the civil unrest of the 1960s, many young people used music to express their disapproval of the state of affairs in America. Prior to the 1960s, rock 'n' roll was more about the beat--more about dancing--than lyrical content; however, the 1960s brought a shift in focus from the music to the lyrics. Music became less about recreation and more about education.

[Discussion of musical characteristics] Several important changes took place in musical style in the 1960s, resulting in the rise of the folk music movement, exemplified by artists such as Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. Among these changes were the use of a single acoustic instrument such as the guitar or banjo to accompany a solo singer. This thinning of the musical texture allowed the lyrics to be presented with maximum clarity and minimum distraction.

Music in the 1960s also became a tool for uniting groups of people. The various means of musical transmission (radio, television, recordings) enables music to reach a large number of listeners in geographically disparate locations. A second advantage of music is that it does not rely on literate consumers: one does not need to know how to read in order to comprehend the message that is being sung. Musical preferences (tastes) bring people together under a common interest. [thesis statement:] In this project, I intend to show how Pete Seeger, one of the leaders of the folk movement, brought people together by teaching them how to sing with him, thus turning the audience into active participants rather than passive listeners.

(Image courtesy of the Guardian)

Pete Seeger was one of the most prominent voices of folk/protest music in this era. His music remains relevant even today; the themes are universal. Here, he discusses the origins of "We Shall Overcome."

Listen to the mp3 provided below: it is a live version of Seeger performing "We shall overcome."

Following the spoken introduction, Seeger begins with the simple melody and the crowd joins almost immediately. The melody comprises two notes a step apart--this is about as simple as a melody can be. (In solfege, the melody is sol-sol-la-la-sol---fa-mi). [demonstrates knowledge of musical terms] The song is in a simple strophic form with a refrain: different lyrics are sung to the same music for each verse. Just before the beginning of the second verse, Seeger quickly shouts out the lyrics to that verse, making it possible for those who don't know the song to join in with ease.

Prior to the third verse, he does the same thing, shouting the lyrics. Once the verse starts, however, Seeger begins singing lines that form good counterpoint with the melody. First, he sings a middle voice part (sol-mi-fa-fa-do---sol) then the bass line (I-IV-I; do-do-fa-fa-do----). By this point in the song, he has provided the audience with the lyrics (which are repetitive) and the audience basically knows the form of the song. Those who are able can listen to the harmonies that he is singing and sing them as well, creating a multi-part choral work on the fly, so to speak.

Seeger's music features timeless themes and has been adopted over the years by many causes. He is still active today, and continues to teach audiences how to sing, uniting them in song. This recent video features him teaching the crowd a new song about the BP Oil Spill:

Notice that this song has many of the same features as "We Shall Overcome:" simple melody, repetitive lyrics and structure, and a transparent accompaniment. Notice his invitations to sing as well as his instructions to the audience.

[conclusion] Music has long been used to bring people together. I hope to have demonstrated in this paper how one artist, Pete Seeger, united people by teaching them how to sing. Seeger's approach broke down the traditional barrier between artist and audience to create a unified choir that actively protested the incivilities of the 1960s.

Fun with transcription part II

2011-10-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

Today in class we listened to both Little Richard's and Pat Boone's versions of "Tutti frutti." It occurred to me (after the fact, of course) that asking each student to write down what they hear as the words in the chorus would be a useful way of illustrating the problems inherent in transcribing sound.

From several internet lyric sites:

Metrolyrics.com: "Tutti frutti, oh Rudy... A whop bop-a-lu a whop bam boo"
StlLyrics: "Tutti Frutti, all over rootie... A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop bam boo"
LyricsMode: "Tutti frutti, aw rutti... A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop bom bom"

And an analysis (tongue in cheek, I certainly hope) from elsewhere on the internet:

The last two verses are obvious and straight forward. It is the first verse that requires analysis and translation which I shall do below.

"Tutti frutti" is the American name for Neopolitan icecream.

"Oh rutti" is a corruption of the French "en route" which means "on the way".

So the first verse sings like so,

Neopolitan icecream, on the way,
Neopolitan icecream, on the way,
Neopolitan icecream, on the way,
Neopolitan icecream, on the way,
Neopolitan icecream, on the way,

--from SongMeangings.net

Fun with transcription

2011-10-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a course on the history of rock 'n' roll this year. It represents quite a (welcome) change for me. I'm using Garofalo's Rockin' Out for several reasons. First, it's very thorough and detailed. It does a great deal to illuminate the industry, changes in technology, and the general cultural and social milieu surrounding this music. Second, more pragmatically, I've used it in the past.

What I don't like about the Garofalo is the lack of focus on the "music itself;" being a theorist, that's what interests me the most. The listening guides by my TTU colleages Angela Mariani and Chris Smith go a long way toward addressing this.

I will confess that much early rock is new to me. I did not grow up listening to it. As longtime readers of this blog probably know, I'm first and foremost a classical person; rap and metal comprise most of the rest of my listening, along with some other contemporary popular music.

So I'm trying to acquaint myself with Johnny Cash, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and his Comets, etc. I tend to learn quite a lot about music by playing it, so I'm trying to learn many of the songs I'm discussing. Most of them are no problem: twelve-bar blues, pick a key, etc. The bass line may be walking, like this:

Some feature more of a "country" bass line, but in the framework of a twelve-bar blues:

Some are more complicated because they change keys or play with the form a bit:

There are two songs that are vexing me, however--testing my aural skills training in a rather enjoyable way. First, Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire:"

There are portions that are in 7 (3+4): the bass line on the recording I have goes: G-D-C | G-D-G-D; on this video, the bassist plays G-D-D | G-D-G-D. There are also spots in the chorus where it sounds like the vocal arpeggiations are outlining a different key than the bass line suggests; I think this is an illusion, though, since both are pretty straightforwardly in G major:

s-t-r-r | d-d-l-s | s-t-r-r | d-d-l-s | d-m-s-- | f-r-m-s | r-t-d
V | IV I | V | IV I | I | (I) | (I)

The bass line does arpeggiate C-E-G, where G is the root of the I chord. The arpeggiation makes it sound like the fifth of the IV chord. And to me, the "Burns, burns, burns..." coming to rest on scale degree 5, perhaps suggests an arrival on dominant, but the bass support is tonic.

The second song that is vexing me is Elvis's early "Good rockin' tonight:"

It sounds to me like the bass starts roughly two beats after the guitar, but when it enters, it sounds so much like a downbeat to me that I have a hard time reconciling where the guitar then fits. The bass and the guitar seem to go in and out of phase in this song (listen to the first guitar solo, around :50).

Different ways of reading

2011-08-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've blogged a bit before on writing for different audiences. I think it is an important skill that is too often overlooked. My varied summer projects got me thinking about different ways of reading.

1. Proofreading: I've done a fair amount of proofreading work this summer. When proofreading, I don't read for content: I might read an entire article, catch a bunch of mistakes, and have no idea what it's about. I look at words as shapes on the page, and I look for abnormalities in those shapes. I have a fair amount of experience in proofreading material in different languages (I was a bit of a "specialist" in transliterated Russian and Japanese when I worked at RILM). While my Russian then was better than it is now, my Japanese has always been nonexistent. I think in a roundabout way, it helped that I didn't know the language. I wasn't interested in content at all (I couldn't be); I just wanted to make sure the shapes on the page were always identical. Proofreading also involves looking closely at every bit of text on the page, things that many people probably overlook when they skim or read.

2. Skimming: When doing research, sometimes I need to read things quickly--webpages, articles, or even entire books--to determine if they're useful. In this case, I'm reading for general content. I might read the introduction (if there is one), the first and last paragraph of every chapter, and the first and last sentence of every paragraph. I will definitely look at any charts, diagrams, and examples. The goal here is to get a good sense of the content in the shortest amount of time.

3. Reading for content: If I decide that a source is worth using, then I'll read it in detail. This is usually where the red pen comes out (instead of a highlighter, I read with a red pen. I underline or bracket important bits--I have my own little system of relative importance worked out--and like having the pen to write notes in the margin). In general I will read every word (unless I've determined that a chapter or section is simply not relevant to the project) and make notes to myself.

4. Reading editorially: This is what I do when I'm grading or when a publication asks me to review a submission. This includes all of the steps above as well as consulting additional sources along the way. The goal here is to help out the writer: did he/she miss an important source? Is the essay structured logically? Is the topic timely and interesting? Is it easy to read? I read a very densely mathematical article this summer that was very difficult to get through because the author used numerals exclusively, even in the running text. By changing some of the numerals to text, the article became much easier to read and didn't lose any of the mathematical rigor.

I'd be curious to hear from others--does this mirror your strategies/experiences?

Listening to popular music (revised)

2011-08-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

(The concept and prose come from Paul Friedlander's Rock and roll: A social history; the graphic is mine):

One interesting way to learn about an artist or group, and to judge the impact of a song or album, is to ask yourself, What part of the body is most affected by the music? We created the Anatomically Correct Rock and Roll Doll for just such an exercise.

Consider the three major British invasion groups: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. My students would say the Beatles and the Who appeal to both the head and the heart--even though they don's sound very much alike. The Stones appeal to the genitals and feet. What do you believe? Try it with other artists.

Classical crossover, part II

2011-07-25T00:09:00.000-07:00

Many of the artists that appear on the iTunes or Billboard classical charts could be considered crossover artists; in fact, I think iTunes identifies them as such. The “crossover” moniker works nicely with our categorical perception approach: there are liminal works that have features of both classical and popular music to such a degree that differentiating the work from one category or the other becomes difficult. To facilitate discussion, I would like to outline four categories of crossover in this section: 1) newly composed classical music that has popular features; 2) newly composed popular music that has classical features; 3) classical music transcribed into popular idioms; and 4) popular music transcribed into classical idioms.

1) Newly composed classical music that has popular features. The harmonic and melodic content of this music is probably tonal or modal. The meter is probably regular and danceable, although one might find irregular meters used to parody danceable meters. Instruments might include those most closely associated with popular music, including electronic keyboards, turntables, electric guitars, or drum sets. Subject matter and/or lyrics might be drawn from contemporary popular culture. Ensembles are probably non-standard, more like a rock combo than a conventional orchestra or string quartet. Forms may be simple strophic, verse-chorus, or other repetitive types. These works may quote well-known popular riffs or “topics” (cf. Ratner). Some representative pieces include Michael Daugherty’s What’s That Spell? (a three-movement work about Barbie dolls), Michael Torke’s Adjustable Wrench (based on a riff by Madonna’s one-time producer Jellybean), Laurie Anderson’s Only an Expert Can Deal with the Problem, and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s song cycle Penelope.

2) Newly composed popular music that has classical features. The harmonic and melodic content of this music is probably chromatic and/or atonal. Meter can be regular or irregular, often featuring rhythmic complexity. Conventional popular instrumental combinations may be augmented by the addition of orchestral instruments (either live or synthesized). Subject matter and/or lyrics can vary widely. Forms tend to be longer than conventional pop song formats and thus will feature more variety and/or development. These works may quote popular classical themes. Examples of this crossover include Muse’s “Exogenesis Symphony” from their album The Resistance; Bjork’s “Hunter” from Homogenic (which owes considerably to Ravel’s Bolero), and Sting’s “Russians” from the album The Dream of the Blue Turtles (which is based on the Romance from Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije suite).

3) Classical music transcribed into popular idioms. In these instances, a preexisting classical work is transcribed for a popular ensemble. The classical work remains largely intact. One key to the success of these transcriptions is the use of an established popular artist and/or instrumental grouping. Instrumental melodies may be transcribed for voice, and lyrics may be added. Examples of this include Carlos Santana and Dave Matthews’ “Love of my Life” from Supernatural (which features material from the third movement of Brahms’s third symphony, rewritten in duple meter), Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (which sets the well-known first movement of the symphony to a disco beat), and DJ Tiësto’s techno version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

4) Popular music transcribed into classical idioms. In these instances, a preexisting popular work is transcribed for a classical ensemble. The popular work remains largely intact. Key to the success of a transcription such as this is the use of a standardized classical ensemble that is recognizable as a classical ensemble: examples include orchestras, string quartets, woodwind quintets, and the like. Very often in these transcriptions, the lyrics of the original song are removed; the vocal line is often rewritten for an instrument. Examples of this include the Kronos Quartet’s version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” 2Cellos’ version of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” David Garrett’s “Rock Symphonies,” and Christopher O’Riley’s transcriptions of Radiohead songs.

In answer to myself...

2011-07-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Over at the other blog, I recently posted about the top 10 classical albums on the Billboard charts. The charts seem to contain little that I would call "classical," but I wouldn't be so quick to call them "popular," either. I've been thinking a lot about this topic over the last week or so, and it seems like it's on the top of the minds of others, too. My hope is to write a series of posts examining this issue from several different angles over the next week or so. Enjoy!

First, I would like to go on the record as saying that categories in general are never as cut-and-dried as we want them to be. As human beings, we have an innate desire (need?) to classify things, to group things that are alike. I suspect that such a strategy eases our cognitive loads; we don't need to remember individual dog breeds, we can just lump everything with dog-like characteristics together and create a prototypical dog. Items within a category are considered to be more alike than different; items in different categories are perceived as more different than alike. This is called categorical perception (a nice overview of the concept can be found here).

Apropos the present discussion, Billboard, iTunes, record stores (remember them?), and individuals make these same/different judgments regarding music all of the time. I suspect that most people, in answer to the question "what kind of music do you like?" respond with the name of a category: classical, rap, country. We group music on the basis of musical features: if a song has these features, then it belongs in this category. In order to study these categories, we must abstract those features of the music that bestow its categorical membership. In a very broad--perhaps naive--sense, this is easy to do. In the non-musical world, ask someone what makes a dog different from a car, and you'll probably be met with laughter. Most people might react similarly when asked to say what makes popular music different from so-called classical music. Classical music, they might say, doesn't have words (or the words are in a different language); it uses an orchestra; it's long; etc. Popular music uses electric/amplified instruments, has words, songs are about three minutes long, etc.

If we dig a little deeper, we see that there are a variety of possible musical features. We might talk about individual instruments (what's the difference between the violin, a "classical" instrument, and the fiddle, a "country" instrument?), harmonies, melodies, rhythm and meter--all of the traditional elements of an introduction to music theory class. Classical aficionados might argue that the harmonies and melodies of popular music are far less sophisticated than those of classical music; popular music fans could respond by asking them to commit even the simplest popular tune into standard musical notation.

We can step back a bit from the purely musical features and talk about subject matter and lyrics. Just as there is popular music in every language, there is classical music in every language. Heavy metal often deals with death, the occult, and other macabre topics; these topics were standard fare for 19th-century composers like Schubert, too. Contemporary classical music deals with hot-button political issues like the death penalty, terrorism, and homosexuality just as popular music does.

We can look at the social and cultural aspects of music as well. The stereotypical audience for a classical concert comprises a sea of elderly, well-dressed, wealthy people who can afford a ticket to the opera. The stereotypical popular concert-goer is young, humbly dressed, and... well, can afford a ticket to the concert (which actually probably cost more than a ticket to the opera, believe it or not). Both populations buy CDs, or download mp3s; they read about their favorite artists; watch videos and so on.

In summary, given my comparisons above, what really distinguishes popular music from classical music? Both are musically sophisticated (or, quite simple), deal with the same subject matter, and are produced and consumed in much the same way. Perhaps the distinction is along the lines of Potter Stewart's famous definition of hardcore pornography: "I'll know it when I [hear] it." Tune in later for the next installment...

Maslow on creativity and education

2011-06-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Nothing really original here, but I've been reading lots of Abraham Maslow recently and came across this, which has really gotten me thinking:

[C]reative art education, or better said, Education-Through-Art, may be especially important not so much for tuning out artists or art products, as for turning out better people. If we have clearly in mind the educational goals for human beings that I will be hinting at, if we hope for our children that they will become full human beings, and that they will move toward actualizing the potentialities that they have, then, as nearly as I can make out, the only kind of education in existence today that has any faint inkling of such goals is art education. so I am thinking of education through art not because it turns out pictures but because I think it may be possible that, clearly understood, it may become the paradigm for all other education. That is, instead of being regarded as the frill, the expendable kind of thing which it now is [n.b. 1971], if we take it seriously enough and work at it hard enough and if it turns out to be what some of us suspect it can be, then we may one day teach arithmetic and reading and writing on this paradigm. So far as I am concerned, I am talking about all education.

Abraham Maslow, "The Creative Attitude," in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. 55-68.

I think there's a slightly larger project in the works here based on this and its intersections with some other things I've been reading. Stay tuned...

Cleverbot

2011-06-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've been talking to many of my colleagues about the difficulties of teaching students to write. We're coming to realize that the problem actually doesn't stem from writing so much as it does from reading; more specifically, lack thereof. Students are bad writers because they don't read enough to assimilate elements of language, style, and usage. This is another reason I think that it's so easy to pick up on plagiarism: the minute you realize there's a shift in voice or style (something you could only detect having encountered a wide variety of voices in the first place.

Enter the good folks at Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts. I was listening to a program of theirs called "Talking to machines" and they profiled Rollo Carpenter, the inventor of Cleverbot an artificial intelligence conversation machine. Carpenter said that he first created a program (in the 1980s, if I recall) that included a variety of pre-programmed responses to questions; he would type a question, the computer would provide an answer. Another incarnation of the program was designed to learn from conversations. The program started as a blank slate. Carpenter typed "Hello," and the program "learned" that word: it would now respond with "hello." Carpenter then typed "How are you doing?" The computer now knew "Hello" and "How are you doing?" and could respond with either of those. Cleverbot would learn new phrases from every conversation it had. At the moment, it has engaged in more than 20 million conversations with a diverse body of interlocutors via the internet. Here's a transcript of a recent chat (I am the user):

User: What is music theory?

Cleverbot: What kind of music do you like?

User: I like classical music. What kind of music do you like?

Cleverbot: I like basically everything but rap and country.

User: I love rap music!

Cleverbot: Who do you like in rap music?

User: Ice-T is my favorite rapper.

Cleverbot: Yes.

User: Who do you like in rap music?

Cleverbot: No.

Is the conversation a bit awkward? Sure. Is it approaching human-human interaction? I think so, as do many others (the website currently boasts "42% human"). As Cleverbot accumulates a deeper pool of responses to choose from, no doubt it will begin to appear more and more natural.

I think this offers a nice model of why students have difficulty writing. The pool of possible "responses" is not as deep as it should be, but that pool can be deepened by reading more and more. The more you read, the greater your grasp of style will be, and the easier it will be for you to write naturally.

The bigger question, of course, is how do we get students to read good writing? I think they spend plenty of time reading texts, Facebook notes, blogs (wait a minute... I said good writing!) etc...

And we're off...

2011-06-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

The new site is up and running with its first posts: an introduction and a set of questions regarding Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Music theory job outside of academia?!?!

2011-06-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

From our wire services:

Organization and Job ID

Job ID: 300927
Directorate: Energy and Environment Directorate
Division: Coastal Sciences
Group: Coastal Sciences
.

Job Description

Killer whales are vocalizing marine mammals. They communicate within and between family like groups using a language consisting of a large number of ¿calls¿ or vocalizations that differ with behavior in structural features such as frequency content and other characteristics. Mathematical treatment of these calls to classify them into behavioral categories is being pursued. The calls fall within the range of human hearing. It is possible that a musician trained in music theory may be able to assist with development of strategies for classification of killer whale calls. The intern would work with a team of scientists and assist with identification of alternatives for classification of killer whale calls into behavioral categories by applying basic music theory and music transcription software.
.

Minimum Requirements

Candidates must be degree-seeking students enrolled at an accredited college or university. Candidates must be taking at least 6 credit hours and have an overall GPA of 2.5. All staff at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory must be able to demonstrate the legal right to work in the United States.
.

Qualifications

1. Must have basic music theory.
2. Must be able to read and write music notation.
3. Must have mathematics through calculus.
4. Must be familiar with the use of basic computer programs such as Microsoft Excel and Word.
5. Must have good English speaking and writing skills.
6. 3.0 GPA, or higher, is preferred

Submitted for your approval...

2011-06-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've been combing the job boards here in the Pacific NW and came across the following ad for the continuing education faculty pool at an area community college:

THE SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE WILL DEMONSTRATE
Excellent customer service skills; including establishing, building, and maintaining internal/external customer satisfaction.
An appreciation of diversity and the benefits of a commitment to cultural awareness and sensitivity in the workplace.
Ethics, integrity, and sound professional judgment.
Experience using a variety of technology and tools both in and out of the classroom to enhance learning.
Professional and courteous interactions with students, faculty, and staff.

I did not edit this. Why on Earth is "excellent customer service skills" here? There's really only one thing that mentions teaching (granted, it seems to me that they're looking for people out in the industry to come teach a course in whatever it is that they do; they're not looking for professional academics).

This brings me to my next link. When I'm not cruising the job boards, I'm wasting time on Facebook. One of my colleagues posted a link to the following (admittedly, it's from the Examiner): In what other profession?. The gist of the article is that lots of non-teachers seem to take pride in telling teachers how to do their jobs. The author observes, "You seldom, if ever, hear 'that guy couldn't know anything about law enforcement--he's a police officer.'"

These two things conspire to make me ask: if customer service is job #1, and the customer is always right, then what possible reason could anyone have for going to school in the first place? Or, what does such an attitude do to undermine the expertise we're supposed to have and that we've worked so hard to acquire? Isn't our job to let the "customers" know when they're wrong? Or to tell them about products heretofore unbeknownst to them that might make their lives easier?

The end?

2011-05-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

As some of you may (or may not) know, I've left Texas Tech University and relocated to Tacoma, WA. Please stay tuned as I puzzle over what to do with this blog. Also, please keep an eye out for the new blog, which is under construction and will be appearing soon at: listeningto20thcmusic.blogspot.com

New Project

2011-05-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of things that I've found frustrating as I teach post-tonal theory (and as I think about post-tonal music on my own). First, I have been frustrated by the available textbooks. Straus's book provides an excellent overview of set theory and serial techniques, but is difficult to use for repertoire that doesn't sit well with those techniques. Roig-Francoli's covers a broader range of material, and I like the anthology, but there are things about the text that I don't like. I tried this semester to use Morris's Class notes as a supplementary outline, but the outline format was a blessing and a curse, and the dense mathematical language was a bit much for some of my students.

My frustration with available post-tonal ear training materials led to my article in Indiana Theory Review a few years ago, but even that is not entirely adequate for a good bit of repertoire.

The ubiquity of set theory and related tools as well as our general dependence of the score coupled with the inadequate post-tonal ear-training materials has me thinking about a "listening to 20th- (and 21st-) century music project.

As I am currently envisioning it, this would be an online modular resource that takes advantage of everything the internet does well as far as delivery of multimedia and availability of recordings and score (the prohibitive cost of scores and/or licensing is another factor under consideration here, too). I envision a curriculum of mostly so-called "art" music, with some popular music and jazz interspersed.

Another fundamental change here would be asking students what they hear, not telling them what to hear (or, what notes to circle). A graded set of questions about the piece as heard would be provided, enabling the materials to be used for any population, ranging from undergraduate non-majors to graduate students. Hyperlinks will be available to related biographical materials and ancillary sources.

I intend to start another (!) blog to roll out this project--stay tuned here for more information. Thoughts, comments, and suggested repertoire/resources would be welcome via the comments...

Some questions

2011-05-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

I sent the following e-mail to my freshman harmony classes, who (presumably) are diligently preparing for their final exam. I have been very frustrated grading their homework lately: their work has been very inconsistent with many (I hope) careless mistakes. In an effort to reconcile what I'm seeing on paper with what may be going on in their heads, I present the following:

Hello,

I'd like to pose the following rather philosophical questions to you in preparation for the exam. If there is a consensus, we can discuss them in class tomorrow; otherwise, we can find an alternate way to discuss them (perhaps extra credit for thoughtful responses?)

1. What is the purpose of inverted chords? For years, theorists did not recognize a similarity between a chord and its inversion: the "chord of the fifth" (root position) was a distinct entity from the "chord of the sixth" (first inversion). What might have accounted for this?

2. John Adams's "On the transmigration..." begins with parallel fifths. Why can he do it and you can't? (BTW, congratulations to those of you who performed--I saw the Saturday night performance) Assuming you're not John Adams, what are some strategies for avoiding parallel perfect consonances (i.e., parallel fifths and octaves)?

4. What is the function of embellishing tones? Note that they are sometimes referred to as "non-chord tones" or "non-harmonic tones." Why privilege one term over the other?

5. Is music composed horizontally (i.e., harmonically) or vertically (i.e., melodically)? Is music experienced horizontally or vertically?

6. How does the work we do in theory class relate to your daily lives as performing/teaching musicians? Put another way, what do you study when you study music theory?

7. What do Roman numerals tell us? What don't they tell us?

N.B. They just performed "On the transmigration..." this weekend as part of our big gala scholarship concert.

Thoughts?

Tax day

2011-04-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I went in to class and returned a large stack of papers to the students: a few homework assignments, a quiz, and drafts of their final projects. After everything was returned to them, I said "I spent a LOT of time grading this weekend, as you can probably tell. But as a result, there's one important thing I forgot to do."

I held up a 1040 form; they gasped.

"Yup. My taxes. They're due today, right? If you don't mind, why don't you go over the work that I just handed back to you. I'm going to sit here and do my taxes real quick." (Oddly, they seemed fine with that proposition.) I asked if anyone knew how to fill these forms out because I didn't think to print out the instructions. I received all kinds of advice (they're good kids): "Try this program online..." "File an extension..." "My sister's fiance is an accountant..."

I asked them what would happen if I didn't fill it out on time--the rest of my day was sufficiently busy and I was concerned that I might not have time to do them. One said that I had until midnight. Another assured me that, since I didn't make very much money, probably nothing would happen to me.

I summed up my predicament to them: "Well, this is a fine mess. I put this off until the last minute, I don't have the instructions, I was planning to take time during class to do it, and the penalties are severe if I turn it in late..."

A light bulb came on over one student's head: "OHHHHHH... there's a MORAL to this story..."

I assured them that my taxes were done a long time ago...

Oh the irony...

2011-02-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

[a draft of a talk that I'm giving at this conference. Feedback is always welcome.]

This talk was originally going to be a brief exposition of how I teach my graduate students to write analytical papers, the slant being that I privilege the process of writing over the product of writing in a variety of ways. Few educators would disagree, I imagine, that teaching students how to research and write is important, particularly at the graduate level. Many of these students will pursue careers in academia where the “publish or perish” mentality is still alive and well. However, as I was thinking through what I wanted to talk about I realized that I had been ignoring a fundamental question, namely: why is it important to teach students how to write the “old-fashioned” way in a culture that’s dominated by Web 2.0 technologies?

For years I had been disappointed in the kinds of papers that students in my analysis of twentieth-century music class were turning in. Each student had to write a “standard” graduate-level research paper: 10-15 pages, roughly 10 sources—no Wikipedia!—that critically engaged a piece of music using one of the analytical approaches we discussed in class. This is not an exercise in regurgitating and reorganizing facts; it’s more book report than author biography, I’d say.

This what we do in graduate school, right?

I started to read Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur at the same time I was preparing this talk. Keen laments the demise of record stores, bookstores, and human expertise in general as the Internet, its algorithms, and—most disturbingly—its amateurs commandeer knowledge and culture. While I’m not quite the prophet of doom that Keen is, I do see a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. In a culture that valorizes both collaboration (which I think is a good thing) and the “noble amateur” (which I think is a bad thing), why is it important to teach students how to research and write a “traditional” paper? The humanities in particular seem to value single-author research papers with copious footnotes that document every bit of material—quoted literally or otherwise—from another source. Proponents of Web 2.0 culture seem to laud precisely the opposite. An article in the journal Nature from August 2010 lists over 57,000 co-authors who generated data by playing a video game. In 2007, Penguin Books experimented with a user-generated wiki-novel cleverly called A million penguins:

Nearly 1500 individuals have contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, contributing over 11,000 edits making this, in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive, ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history‘. 75,000 people have visited the site and there have been more than 280,000 page views.

Perhaps most shocking is the vision of Kevin Kelly, who argues that all books ever written should become one “liquid” book that is constantly evolving and changing, reflecting the predilections of anyone, anywhere, at any time. If this is the way the world is going, what is the point of teaching students how to write a research paper?

One argument used by proponents of Web 2.0 culture is that truth is not fixed—objectivity is dead and subjectivity is in; the text is not important, it’s what you bring to the text. Truth is merely what the majority of people agree to be true: if tomorrow, we collectively decide that the sky is not blue, but green, then, well, the sky is green. The malleability of Web 2.0 is simply a reflection of this postmodern worldview, right? This argument does not hold up because the truth has always been in flux. For decades, people believed that the Earth was flat, that the sun revolved around it. Now, we know better; it’s entirely possible that those truths could be overturned at some point as well. Today, change seems to take place at a much more rapid pace thanks in no small part to computers, the Internet, cellular phones, and other technologies.

Second, we now have more knowledge of widely varying quality available to us than ever before, and most of this can be accessed in an instant from anywhere. Gone are the gatekeepers—the publishing houses, record label executives, librarians, journalists, and others—whose expertise we relied on to separate the wheat from the chaff. In the age of Web 2.0, each of us is now expected to sort through this heap of knowledge on our own and to determine what is useful and what is not, what is true and what is false. This takes an inordinate amount of time, which is ironic because time is precisely the valuable commodity that technology is trying to help us conserve. Research and critical writing teach students how to evaluate source materials and how new knowledge emerges from synthesis: it creates the next generation of gatekeepers.

Third (and finally?), much of the information that is readily available on the Internet is common knowledge, not expert knowledge. I might even go a step further—walking in Keen’s shoes—and argue that much of the information available online is not even common knowledge, it’s popular knowledge. Many sites, including search engines like Google and Bing (which may be the same thing, come to find out) and aggregators like Digg and del.i.cious rank top hits or stories by popularity, not by any measure of authority. The only reason we have common knowledge or popular knowledge is because expert knowledge has trickled down into the collective wisdom. Our society will never progress if common knowledge is simply recycled over and over; we need to continue to generate new knowledge—expert knowledge—to advance. Teaching research and writing skills obviously provides our students with tools to generate this expert knowledge.

All of this Web 2.0 technology does have a positive side: more people are writing in the form of blogs, wikis, Tweets, Facebook notes, and the like (see Nicholas Carr's The Shallows), and knowledge is available instantly, anywhere. This is a good thing: perhaps then it’s not writing that we need to emphasize but critical thinking, which is becoming more and more important in our information-saturated society. The “old-fashioned” research paper with its thesis statement, footnotes, and single author, remains one of the most effective ways to teach students how to think critically.

Opinionated much?

2011-02-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

I've found myself spending a lot of time on the All Music Guide site recently (for a variety of reasons). I came across this blistering review of Darryl Worley's "Have you forgotten?"

If Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue" made Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" seem complex and nuanced, Worley makes Keith seem worldly and wise. Worley twists every piece of logic and emotion regarding the War on Iraq and 9-11, treating the two as if they were interchangeable. First, he claims that "this war" is about fighting for "this piece of ground," something that is simply untrue. Then, he forgets that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are not the same person (then again, polls indicate that a majority of the American population believe there were Iraqis on the 9-11 planes, when there were not), then makes a ludicrous leap in logic in claiming that protesters against the Iraqi War are saying we "shouldn't worry 'bout Bin Laden," an argument that has never been made. Worley is attempting to fuse the anger of Keith with the tear-jerking Jackson, and he's come up with an utter mess, something that feels calculated, not heartfelt. So, perhaps it's only appropriate that the title song on this disc -- which is more compilation than proper album -- and the haphazard, thrown-together, opportunistic nature of the record overshadow the material from his first two albums, the material that suggests he's a neo-traditional country singer with some real promise. Unfortunately, all that promise is overshadowed by his sour patriotic hucksterism on Have You Forgotten?

Does this cross some kind of line? On the one hand, I appreciate the author's willingness to take a stance; on the other, parts of it seem to be just plain mean. (In the interest of full disclosure, I don't really care for the song all that much, but I can't envision writing a review like this.)

Speed dating

2011-01-26T18:53:00.000-08:00

I tried something new yesterday in post-tonal theory. The topic du jour was harmonic structures in early 20th-c. music. I split the class in half (6+6) and gave six of the students a slip of paper with a concept and definition (i.e., Quartal/quintal harmony consists of stacked fourths/fifths. They can be augmented or diminished) and I gave each student in the other half a piece (Ives songs, Stravinsky, an early Scriabin prelude, some Debussy preludes). One "term" student was paired with one "piece" student, and they had two minutes to determine if they were a "match." After two minutes, they had to move on to the next person. In some cases, there was overlap: Ives's song "Majority," for instance, contains tone clusters, quintal harmony, and some non-functional triads as well. We then went over the material as a class, ensuring that everyone had definitions for all of the terms and an example to go with it.

My TA Megan suggested doing something similar as an error detection exercise: give each of the students in one half a specific part-writing error to look for and have the other half examine their counterpoint or partwriting exercise for that error.

No, no, no!

2011-01-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

I had a thought today as I was teaching first-species counterpoint to my freshmen. I think the received wisdom is that music theory is a long, long list of rules that you have to learn, and that most of these rules are cast as prohibitions. I realized that I was telling them what not to do (i.e., avoid parallel perfect consonances, avoid dissonant intervals, don't write more than three of any interval in a row, don't this, don't that...) more often than I was telling them what to do.

Thoughts?

TSMT @ TTU

2011-01-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

This year, Texas Tech will be hosting the annual meeting of the Texas Society for Music Theory. Click here for information on local arrangements and the program. Michael Klein from Temple University will be the keynote speaker.

Arts Advocacy

2010-12-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

re: Museum, cornerstone of downtown redevelopment, would close under budget plan

Feel free to copy, paste, and amend as you see fit.

To whom it may concern:

I was dismayed to hear about the budget cuts, particularly as they impacted the State History Museum. My wife--a Tacoma native--and I are both deeply involved in the arts: she is an arts administrator; I am a music professor and performer. Having spent a fair amount of time this year examining the relationship between the arts and crisis situations, I feel compelled to share some thoughts. Generally, when budgets need to be cut, the arts and humanities are often the first thing on the chopping block because society deems them unnecessary: witness the recent cuts in the humanities department at the State University of New York at Albany. As members of the arts community, I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t always represent ourselves well, nor do we mount sufficient defenses. While I certainly would not propose doing away with programs like food stamps and law enforcement, I beg you to reconsider the importance of the arts and humanities to the vitality of the community.<

One of the first things any invading force attempts is the destruction of the victim's artistic and cultural heritage.In his efforts to conquer Poland, one of Hitler’s main interests was the destruction of art, music, and libraries, with the understanding that, to erase a civilization, one needed not only to eliminate the people, but also to eliminate their culture—that which transmits all that is important to them. He very nearly succeeded. Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest living Holocaust survivor, was once a concert pianist before she was shipped off to a concentration camp. In a recent interview, she asserted: “men don’t need to eat food.. maybe we don’t need food, when we have something spiritual. Music was our food. Through music, we were kept alive.” Out of the economic ruin of the Bronx in the 1970s emerged rap music which—like it or not—has become one of the most popular and vital American art forms since jazz. Throughout history, in situations where the basic needs of human beings—food, shelter, safety—are not being met, art is still created. Perhaps one could argue that the arts, too, are a fundamental human need?

I am very aware of the impact that arts and culture can have on local economies. Richard Florida argued this perhaps most cogently in his book “The rise of the Creative Class.” As the headline suggests, the closure of the museum will have a ripple effect on local business that rely on the tourism generated by the museum to sustain themselves.

While it may be too late to do anything at this juncture, I urge you and your colleagues to consider the importance of arts and culture to the community as you continue to work with the budget.

Respectfully,

MB

P.S. Please note that it is illegal to use state resources to communicate with government officials; if you choose to use this letter, don't do it from a school computer or e-mail account.

End of semester ethics questions

2010-12-16T07:47:00.000-08:00

Submitted for your approval: all three students are in the same class (with different professors)--let's call it musicianship I. What would you do in these situations?

Student A has to earn a 100% on the midterm to end up with a 69% for the semester. She would need 70% to take the musicianship II class, but she's changing her major. A 69% could result in damage to her GPA, endangerment of her scholarships, etc. (anything below 70% is basically failing in a course in your major degree program here). Do you "comp" her the extra point, knowing that her deficiencies in this subject ultimately won't affect her in the future?
Student B has a 79% for the semester. He could presumably go on to musicianship II with no (official) problems. However; student B is transferring to another institution of comparable repute, where he will still be a music major. The transfer institution offered student B a good deal of scholarship money contingent upon the fact that student gets all A's and B's this semester. Student has already canceled housing, registration, etc. at TTU. Do you bump him up to a B, knowing that you a) won't have to deal with them again; and b) that you don't want to be the one to cost said student all this scholarship money and ruin the chances of him transferring.
Student C has a 69% for the class. Student C does not perform at a level that makes me comfortable advancing them to musicianship II. Student C is staying here at TTU, continuing on in the music major. Does student C receive different treatment than students A and B?

Do you just play by the numbers--they get what they got? Does the student's attitude play into the equation? Their work ethic? Any other factors? Discuss...

I like to watch them squirm...

2010-12-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

Hi Stu Dent,

I have some concerns about your final paper:

First, there are no sources from after 1968, yet music therapy has grown by leaps and bounds since then. I'm curious as to why you didn't pursue more recent scholarship; much of it is easily accessible via JSTOR, EBSCO, and other library databases.

Second, the case studies seem oddly out of place, as if they were pasted in. There's no setup, no discussion, etc.

Third, I'm curious to know how you got your hands on an unpublished manuscript, "The effect of music on drawing," from 1951, as well as the couple of master's theses you cite in your bibliography.

Finally, there are some unusual shifts in voice/tone in the paper. Some writing is in a casual first-person; other sections are in a formal, passive voice.

Any insight you could offer would be appreciated.

MB

The grain of the AM voice

2010-12-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to a lot of "old-fashioned" Christmas Carols--by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole, Andy Williams, etc. Harry Connick Jr. also came up in the playlist. I noticed that they all have a similar quality to their voice, which, for lack of a better word, I'm going to call "velvety." I got to wondering about the relationship between this vocal quality and early methods of musical dissemination--AM radio and early records. Were these voices privileged because they sounded good on AM radio (they do, I think--better than on FM)? Were they popular because they recorded well on the early recording technology? A bit of both? None of the above?

Thoughts would be welcome. I'd be surprised if someone hasn't looked into this in some way.

Happy holidays!

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-06T05:55:00.000-08:00

For the holidays, two very popular blog posts:

Ontology of the season looks at how so many things can still be called "Jingle Bells."

Koppangen. To my surprise, this might be the most popular post ever on this blog.

Enjoy!

At the speed of light

2010-12-06T05:39:00.001-08:00

The TLTC (Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center) here on campus hosts a conference every year on Advancing Teaching and Learning. Jose Antonio Bowen is this year's keynote speaker (the conference is coming up in March 2011). He's well known for advancing his "teach naked" idea, which I've blogged about briefly earlier this year. The conference is soliciting proposals for workshops on pedagogical topics. I'm thinking along these lines:

Everything today is available instantly. No need for diet: get your stomach stapled. Can't wait for dinner? Microwave a burrito. Need an answer? Google will find it for you in 0.00024 seconds (along with a million other possibly related answers). Not only that, but now, with smartphones, you can get that answer anywhere. Want to watch a movie? Just click "order" on your remote control. No need to go to the video store anymore, or even to get off of your couch.

Studies have shown that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything. These same studies have also demonstrated that there are no shortcuts to this goal--even child prodigies put in 10,000 hours; they just do it sooner than most of us.

It stands to reason that people will take any opportunity to shorten that 10,000 hours, and with the availability of so many sources of instantaneous gratification, it seems very possible to achieve expertise in less time than this.

This raises several questions to me. First, as a teacher, do we embrace the new technology and teach to it? Do we try to slow our students down? Is the means what's important here (i.e., learning how to learn) or is it the ends (i.e., being an expert)? Can one be an expert without knowing how to learn?

Proposals are due in a few short days. I'll keep you posted if and when this develops into something. I thought it might be fun to recruit a panel and have some folks argue both sides of the question.

We're famous

2010-12-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

Sort of. Mastersdegree.com has listed our humble blog as one of the top 50 blogs for learning about classical music. We're in some good company, too, alongside Alex Ross, Jason Heath, Drew McManus, and Kyle Gann.

I guess this means I need to post more regularly...

The iPhone, aural skills, and you

2010-10-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Here are a few ways that you can use your iPhone (or other smart phone, presumably) to help you with aural skills. Of course, all of these suggestions apply for “old-fashioned” versions of these apps, too (i.e., if you have a real metronome), and these suggestions are just as valid for practicing with your instrument—not just aural skills!

Voice memos: record yourself doing the sight-singing exercises, then play back your performance. How accurate was it? What kinds of mistakes did you make? Correct the mistakes, and record again.

iPod: Listen to music!
• Try to determine the meter, possible time signatures, the modality (major or minor), the instruments that are playing, possible dynamic markings, possible tempo markings.
• Practice memorizing music. Listen to a fragment, try to sing it back. Listen to it again and check your accuracy

Metronome: I like Tempo (Frozen Ape; $1.99 from the iTunes store).
• Use it to practice singing with a steady beat behind you.
• Use it to practice conducting and keeping a steady beat.
• Set it to different note values and practice the same melody: set it to tick half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, or whole measures. You can also set it to tick divisions and subdivisions.
• Use the Tempo (Tap) feature to practice tapping a steady beat

Tuner: I like Cleartune (bitcount; $3.99 from the iTunes store)
• Use the chromatic tuner feature to practice singing accurate pitches
• Use the pitch pipe feature to play a drone (i.e., the tonic or dominant pitch of the melody that you’re singing—whichever is most prominent in the melody). Make sure that when you sing that pitch, it matches the drone. Listen carefully to other intervals created as you sing.

Piano keyboard: I like MiniPiano (one octave keyboard; JYProduct; free from the iTunes store)
• Use the keyboard to check do or other important scale degrees as you sing.
• Use it to play simple harmonies as you sing
• Use it to pick out songs that you know

Music Theory Pro: (Joel Clift; $0.99 in the iTunes store)
• Use this to drill fundamentals like key signatures, pitch reading (treble and bass), intervals, and chords. There are also some simple ear-training drills (as well as a near-impossible “guess that tempo”)
• The drills are timed: try to beat your best time. You can also post your scores to Facebook and compete with your friends!

There are, of course, other fairly obvious uses: use the clock feature to keep track of practice time; use the stopwatch to time yourself spelling scales or intervals; use the notes feature to keep a practice log; watch YouTube videos of performers…

"List" songs

2010-10-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the recent lack of postings. My life has been taken up by two writing projects, a tenure dossier, and other stuff. Here's a quick post about something that my wife and I discussed at dinner last night.

R.E.M.'s "It's the end of the world as we know it" came on the radio at the restaurant, and I remarked that someday I'd like to do a paper on "list" songs. I'm not quite sure what I would write about other than to mention that they're all basically lists of things, typically delivered in a rapid manner. My wife pointed out that it tends to cut across genres, which is interesting. Here are some examples:

(Obviously) R.E.M.'s "It's the end of the world as we know it" (sorry--embedding is disabled for this video)

Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire"

INXS, "Mediate" (thanks to my wife for the suggestion)

Blackalicious, "Chemical calisthenics"

There's a whole subgenre of rap (in particular) that offers a list of female conquests:

Jay-Z, "Girls, girls, girls"

Ice-T, "99 problems" (sorry for the homemade video; this is definitely NC-17)

Ludacris feat. Nate Dogg, "Area codes"

Beastie Boys, "Girls" (not the official video, but quite entertaining!)

Of course, these songs are not new in the history of music. Consider:'

I'd welcome suggestions for other songs. If you have any thoughts about the topic, those would be welcome too.

Matching pitch

2010-09-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Every so often we get a student in our freshman aural skills class who can't match pitch. I worked with one student yesterday in an effort to help her start matching pitches. This student is neither a singer nor a pianist. Here's what I did to diagnose and help her.

First, I asked her to sing back some pitches that I played on the piano. Second, I sung some pitches and asked her to sing them back. She was unable to do either of these things. That she couldn't do either suggested to me that it wasn't a question of instrumental timbre.

I then sung some pitches and asked her to try to pick them out on the piano. She was unable to do that. This tells me that the problem is not one of poor vocal control.

I then asked her to sing a pitch, I sung a different pitch and gradually slid up in pitch to match her. We did this a second time, and I sung a pitch higher than she did and slid down. We reversed roles and I asked her to slide up or down into the pitch that I was singing. My intent here was to model a very fundamental pitch-matching task.

Following this, I asked her to sing the lowest note that was comfortable for her to sing. I recorded this note as her lower boundary. I asked her then to sing the highest note she could comfortably sing and labeled this as her high boundary. I asked her to sing two more notes: one would be a high-middle and the other would be a low-middle. I then started playing pitches on the piano and asked her to match them (to sing them back). I started by choosing among the four notes we had just identified, and she was able to match these quite easily. I then started adding pitches that were a half-step above or below her "anchor" pitches. This was more difficult, but she was able to tell me that they were close to a boundary or middle pitch. After a while, she was able to bend up or down by a half step from her boundary pitches into the notes I was playing.

It struck me later that this approach is actually not too far off from the octave-framing approach to post-tonal ear training that I outlined in a recent Indiana Theory Review article.

I'm curious to hear about other strategies for helping students learn to match pitch. This is the first time I've tried this and I was pleased with the rather speedy results. I'll try to post updates over the course of the semester.

Twitter in (and out) of the classroom

2010-09-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

I went to a seminar at the TLTC the other day about using Twitter in the classroom. This is something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for a while now. I'm still not sure that I've figured out how to exploit its full potential, but I'm trying it on a small scale. Below is the text of an e-mail I sent to my students. I teach two sections of aural skills (#muth1103) and an Honors seminar titled Music and Crisis (#hons3304).

If you’re interested in participating in class via Twitter, here are the “rules”:

1. Follow me at professor_berry

2. I will not follow you back. This way, you can tweet freely without worrying that Dr. Berry is looking over your e-shoulder. (BTW, I have a separate personal Twitter account, so you won’t be all up in my business either.)

3. If you want to discuss material relating to class, or retweet something that may be of interest to your classmates, please use the hashtag #muth1103 (that’s our course number). This way, others can search that tag and see everything related to our class.

4. There is no credit for participating; there is no penalty for not participating. I just think this might be a neat way for us to interact outside of our class meeting time.

5. Please use Twitter for more casual interactions. For business (i.e., scheduling appointments, grade inquiries, absence notices, etc.) please continue to use e-mail.

I had three followers from one class in the time it took me to walk from the classroom to my office. I'll try to update here as the semester unfolds.

Slowing things down

2010-08-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Here are a few things that crossed my desk that all seem to be related.

Justin Bieber's hit "U Smile" slowed down 800%.

That reminded me of Leif Inge's "9 Beet Stretch,", which I've blogged about before (n.b., the links on that post no longer work)

Also, via UbuWeb's Twitter feed, Morton Feldman's epic six-hour second string quartet available for download (it occupies five CDs).

UbuWeb also alerted me to this video by Wim Delvoye, which seems to me to stem from the same aesthetic place as the first two links here--it's a video of something shot at extreme close range. It's a little on the gross side; I suggest reading the description before viewing it.

Collaboration

2010-08-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

As a result of my involvement in the Art and the transformation of space project, I've become the go-to guy in the School of Music on the topic of collaboration (which I find amazingly ironic, since I can't think of a single occasion beyond this class where I collaborated with anyone). I was asked to write an article for our College of Visual and Performing Arts magazine, Ampersand, about music and collaboration. Our publicity coordinator, Liza Muse (who is a fellow cyclist!), suggested an interesting approach based on a segment that she saw on CBS's Sunday Morning program. Here's the article in its present state.

Music, collaboration, and human nature

Music has long been a collaborative endeavor. Members of a chamber ensemble must collaborate as they shape the group’s interpretation of a new work. History abounds with great collaborations between musicians and other artists: Mozart and da Ponte; Verdi and Boito; Stravinsky and Nijinsky; Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg; George and Ira Gershwin; Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Recently, musicians have begun collaborating with specialists outside of the arts in a variety of interesting ways. Musicians are helping to smooth political situations, they are helping teachers to effect change both in and out of the classroom, and they are helping medical professionals to heal the sick.

Musical diplomacy
The great jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie and his band toured portions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and southeast Asia at the request of the U.S. State Department in 1956. Gillespie and his colleagues were the first of many groups later labeled “Jazz Ambassadors.” Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck followed in Gillespie’s footsteps, bringing their unique brand of American culture to heads of state, small communities, and schools in an attempt to cast America in a more positive light.

In a recent interview on CBS’s Sunday Morning program, Dave Brubeck recalls a particularly memorable moment in his career. President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were in talks at a summit in Moscow when negotiations came to a standstill. Brubeck and his musicians got up to play and, before long, "The room started keeping time," Brubeck said. "All these people who almost hated each other were swinging, all together." Then Secretary of State George Shultz credits Brubeck and his musicians with “saving the summit.”

Teaching artists
The field of teaching artists has grown rapidly in the recent past. According to Eric Booth, a well-known actor and teaching artist, a teaching artist is “a practicing professional artist with the complementary skills and sensibilities of an educator, who engages people in learning experiences in, through, and about the arts.” Teaching artists are not music educators or arts educators, per se; rather, they generally seek to use their art to teach and to reinforce material presented in the regular classroom. Teaching artists might compose a song to help students remember spelling words or demonstrate musical instruments unique to a particular culture or region as an aid to understanding a different population.

Some teaching artists go beyond the traditional classroom in their efforts. Philadelphia’s BuildaBridge program is an “arts education and intervention organization that engages the transformative power of the arts to bring hope and healing to children, families, and communities in the tough places of the world” (buildabridge.org). The organization facilitates a variety of projects aimed at helping those in high-risk situations. Their projects include:

Using music therapy to help children impacted by the Haiti earthquake
Learning to make and play traditional Native American flutes as an illustration of Native American history and culture in Montana
Teaching students good behavior by having them attend professional live concerts

In every instance, the teachers use art as a tool to foster the development of healthier, more socially acceptable behaviors. Programs such as these help people learn to express themselves and to deal with difficult feelings in a positive way.

Music Therapists
The idea that music could be used to heal the sick goes back at least as far as the writings of Plato. The discipline as we know it emerged between the two World Wars, when doctors and nurses in veterans hospitals discovered that music eased the pain of wounded soldiers. Today, music therapy is a treatment option that is available as part of a treatment plan for a variety of ailments. In fact, since 1994, Medicare has considered music therapy a reimbursable service. Music therapists must complete an accredited degree program and be certified by the Certification Board for Music Therapists, a national licensing organization.

In his recent book Musicophilia, the neurologist Oliver Sacks offers several music therapy success stories. One patient, Samuel S., had lost his ability to speak following a massive stroke. Years of speech therapy had been unsuccessful in helping him to reclaim his ability to speak. A music therapist overheard him singing “Ol’ man river” one day; the melody was intact but he was omitting some of the words. After working with the music therapist, Samuel was able to reclaim some speech through singing and could eventually formulate short spoken responses to questions. Sacks presents several cases of music being used to animate patients immobilized by Parkinson’s disease. Those who could not initiate movements themselves could be coaxed into dancing; those who moved in an erratic and jerky fashion found their movements smoothed out when accompanied by music. Sacks also notes that music can impact the mood, memory, and behavior of dementia patients.

In conclusion, music has historically been rife with collaborations among other arts. In the last century, we have seen music venture outside of the realm of art and appear in collaboration with diplomats, teachers, and medical practitioners. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker asks, “What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to making plinking noises? ... As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless… It could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” Daniel Levitin takes precisely the opposite view in The world in six songs: he argues that music must be essential to human existence or natural selection would have left it behind eons ago. Music’s successful fusion with these other disciplines points to what many researchers are just now beginning to argue: that music not ancillary to human life—it is necessary.

[P.S. As a result of writing this article, I had a bit of a Usual Suspects moment, which I will share in a future post.]

Elīna Garanča 2.0

2010-08-04T14:23:00.000-07:00

I'm even stealing the title of Opera Chic's blog post title where I first saw this very, very weird video:

I posted in February a clip of the "old" Garanča singing. As per one of the comments on the YouTube page, she should find whoever suggested this to her and fire that person immediately.

Music and crisis: Addendum

2010-07-30T07:58:00.001-07:00

I forgot to mention this in yesterday's post, but there are three fundamental questions that the class seeks to answer (one could maybe argue that they're shades of the same question):

How do communities use music to deal with crisis situations?
What is it about times of great crisis results in great art?
In a crisis situation where people struggle to have basic needs met (i.e., food, shelter, clothing), why is it that music also appears to be a basic human need?

Certainly, one could replace the word "music" with "the arts," or any of the other individual arts. It's just that I'm a musician and that's where my interest and expertise lie. I'd like to someday expand the course to include other art forms, I just have to learn more about them.

Music and crisis

2010-07-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the idea of music as a response to crises has been on my mind, and this fall, I'll be teaching an upper-level undergraduate seminar in the Honors College (to predominately non-majors) on this very topic. I'm working on the syllabus and doing readings now. Here's the provisional game plan:

Topics: I've narrowed down the list of topics considerably. We're going to cover (in this order; basically reverse chronologically):

Music and 9/11
Music and AIDS
The rise of hip-hop in the Bronx
Music and the Holocaust

Readings: I'm trying to avoid "scholarly" readings as much as possible in this class. I'm more interested in students recreating the moment of crisis and sympathizing with those involved. To that end, we're reading:

Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS memoir
Jonathan Mahler, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (which must have one of the longest post-colon subtitles I know)
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

There will be some scholarly readings as well as contemporaneous newspaper clippings. For 9/11, I toyed with the idea of having them read some of the 9/11 Commission Report, but, in an effort to save them (and me!) time--so that we can dive right into something at the beginning of the semester--I'm having them watch excerpts from the September 11 Television Archive. It's creepy to watch Matt Laurer interviewing someone and then get piecemeal information as things unfold, knowing as we do now the full extent of what happened on that morning.

We're going to look at a wide range of repertoire from popular and classical idioms:

9/11: Toby Keith's "Angry American," Dixie Chicks "Not ready to make nice," Barber's Adagio (which for me was the soundtrack of that day as I listened to Pacifica Radio), Beastie Boys "An open letter to NYC"
AIDS: Rent, Roger Bourland's Hidden Legacies, some popular songs by Prince, Salt-n-Pepa, as well as "That's what friends are for."
Hip-hop: Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee Starski (iTunes has a great collection of some of his parties as well as the complete battle with Kool Moe Dee), and Boogie Down Productions
The Holocaust: Schoenberg, A survivor from Warsaw, Messiaen, Quartet for the end of time; Krasa, Brundibar (which has possibly the most horrifying story to accompany any piece of music--I just found out about this piece yesterday.)

In addition to all of this, the students will have to keep a journal. It can include reflections on class discussion or readings, ways that they use music, or anything else (within reason) that suits their fancy. There will, of course, be the ubiquitous final paper as well.

I'm looking forward to the class, especially studying this material with the students (and I deliberately chose my words there--I have a hard time "teaching" the Honors students because many of them are smarter than I am!). I'll keep you posted as the semester unfolds.

Experience

2010-07-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

(Source)

I've been meaning to write this post for some time now; here goes.

I recently (i.e., a year ago... maybe two) read a couple of books back to back which I initially thought were unrelated. The first was Sound moves: iPod culture and urban experience. The book is an ethnographic study of iPod users in large urban centers. Based on hundreds of survey respondents, Bulls discusses how iPod users use the device to mediate between themselves and their surroundings. The sentence that struck me the hardest appears on p. 133: "In iPod culture, successful experience is invariably mediated experience." Here are a few representative quotations from the survey respondents:

Oddly enough, I'll use my cellphone over my headphones with the music on quite a lot these days. It really changes how you view your conversations, because the other person's voice is coloured by what you're listening to. (Ashvin, p. 57)

A person with headphones on gives off an appearance of not wanting to be disturbed. There are times, mostly at work or walking to and from work, when I just want to be left alone. Wearing the iPod insulates me from other people in my surroundings. (Amy, p. 32)

There are many more quotations along these lines; many of them were fairly shocking to my sensibilities. It's a good book. I'm personally hoping for a second edition: I think the book came out just on the edge of the iPhone explosion, and, while Bulls does discuss mobile phones quite a lot, I think a chapter on the iPhone (and smart phones in general) would be a tremendous addition to an otherwise very interesting book.

The second book (again, totally unrelated--I thought) was Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which is the story of Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate from a well-to-do family, who gave up everything to roam the country. I don't know that the passage would have stood out to me had I not just finished Bulls's book, but the following really caught my eye:

McCandless had graduated in June 1990 from Emory University in Atlanta, where he distinguished himself as a history/anthropology major and was offered but declined membership in Phi Beta Kappa, insisting that titles and honors were of no importance. His education had been paid for by a college fund established by his parents; there was some $20,000 in this account at the time of his graduation, money his parents thought he intended to use for law school. Instead, he donated the entire sum to the Oxford Famine Relief Fund. Then, without notifying any friends or family members, he loaded all his belongings into a decrepit yellow Datsun and headed west without itinerary, relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. (italics are mine)

(Incidentally, you can read a good sized excerpt of the beginning of the book here; the passage above appears on page 3)

Here's an interesting dichotomy between those for whom successful experience is mediated and those for whom successful experience is completely unmediated. Lately, I've found myself running without my iPod more often than with (quite possibly because I'm doing shorter runs these days; you need something to distract you when you're running for three hours). I'm doing my best to wallow in unfiltered experience: clearing my mind, paying attention to my body, my surroundings. Same thing with my time on the bike (I would never wear headphones on a bike for safety reasons). I'm content to take in my surroundings and just think.

Which category do you fall into? Why? Talk amongst yourselves...

Advice for aspiring musicians

2010-06-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Charles Noble, a violist with the Oregon Symphony and blogger offers 10 things he wishes he knew as an aspiring musician. This is worthwhile reading for any music student.

Thought experiments

2010-06-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

Here are two articles--thought experiments--from Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal.

The first one asks us to consider a world without regional orchestras (i.e., the kind I play with all the time). Are these entities still relevant? A source of civic pride, perhaps? Or should they go the way that most regional newspapers went in the wake of the Internet?

The second one calls for a moratorium on masterworks, including Handel's Messiah, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, and every impressionist painting ever.

Both of these thought experiments have me losing a lot of money as a freelance musician! I do think his points are worth considering a little more deeply, however. Should regional orchestras be abolished? I don't think so. Should the be restructured in such a way that they're more flexible, resilient, and useful? Definitely. The Midland-Odessa Symphony and Chorale, an orchestra I played with for a few years, has a nice model, I think. The orchestra consists of a small core of players--something like 4-4-3-3-2 in the strings, pairs of winds and brass (something like that--I don't remember the numbers exactly). The principal string players comprise a resident string quartet; the principal winds, a wind quintet; the principal brass players, a brass quintet. They can hire more people to supplement their core if they're performing a larger work. They do several pops concerts a year in an old hangar that's been converted. The atmosphere is very loose, and there's a bar in the back. People get a glass of wine, wander around the hall and take in the music. Masterworks concerts are more traditional performances, and typically take place at a big local church.

I certainly agree with the second "experiment," too. Beethoven's fifth is great and all, but why does no one seem to perform his second symphony? What about the symphonies of Franz Berwald? I think they're great, and I'll probably never, ever play one of them. I do my best to pull from my store of lesser-known works when I'm looking for a CD to play, and I've certainly bought things on a whim just to hear what they sound like. (I bought several discs of Karol Szymanowski's music, having never heard any of it, simply because I thought his name was cool. Turns out I really like a lot of it!)

Extreme Theory!!

2010-06-08T10:14:00.001-07:00

TTU is offering a summer master's degree program in music education. Students will be able to complete all of their coursework by attending class only in the summer. In order to accommodate this, we've broken up the first summer session (which is roughly four weeks long) into two mini-mesters of two weeks each. Classes meet every day for four hours. And yours truly is teaching the graduate harmony review class for students who have been away from theory for a while and did not pass our placement test.

So this week's project is figuring out how to compress what amounts to the entire undergraduate theory curriculum (admittedly in review form) into a two-week class. To keep things interesting for the students (and for me!), I've asked them to buy the Dover collection of Schubert song cycles: that book will serve as our anthology. Other materials will be drawn from the vast collection of textbooks that occupy my office.

I think the two biggest problems are content--what's important and what can I leave out and how much time should I spend on each topic--and how to keep everyone (including myself) interested for four straight hours. Homework is another issue: how much can I reasonably expect them to get done overnight, and how quickly can I grade the work and turn it around (I would basically need to turn it around immediately).

I'll keep you posted as the course unfolds.

Art and the transformation of space X

2010-06-08T05:51:00.001-07:00

Evidently, we're not the only ones transforming found spaces. I've sent this story to my colleagues as an idea for the next incarnation of this class...

Art and the transformation of space IX

2010-06-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the big night!

Dress rehearsal went very well last night. The faculty and students both seem very pleased with how things came together. The director of marketing and public relations for the CVPA was there, and she brought a photographer. Turns out the next issue of Ampersand (our college magazine) is going to be about collaboration, and I think this thing of ours is going to be the cover story!

If you're nearby, come see us tonight. The performance is about 20 minutes long, and the students are going to repeat it several times over the course of two hours; feel free to come and go as you would at a gallery, interact with the performers and the space, and enjoy!

Details:

When: 6:00-8:00pm Friday, June 4
Where: In the courtyard between the Art and Architecture buildings:
(Click here for a map)
What else: This event is on the First Friday Art Trail. There are also events going on in the art building. One is a celebration of West Texas Women artists, along with a book signing of a new book about West Texas Women artists.

Art and the transformation of space VIII

2010-06-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

Our dress rehearsal is tomorrow night; our performance is Friday night from 6:00 until 8:00. The students spent most of the week coming up with ideas, trying them out, keeping some, jettisoning others. They currently have a 20-minute long routine (performance? thing?) that they intend to repeat several times during the two hours, incorporating periodic breaks and some other materials.

We (the faculty) have tried to stay more or less out of the way. Mostly we've offered a few observations and clarifications of things that seem to be in the air but that the students couldn't quite make concrete. Today, the students were vigorously corresponding via e-mail with all kinds of ideas. The faculty worried that things were becoming a bit unfocused, and we were especially concerned given the limited amount of time that we had left.

Last week, we had mentioned how art sometimes can be seen as an attempt to solve a problem. In an effort to focus the students, we had them write down what problem this project was an attempt to solve. Most students wrote something about integrating all of the disciplines, and transforming the space was also a common theme. We (the faculty) looked over these statements in an effort to create a "thesis" statement for the entire project. Here's what we came up with:

Integrating the disciplines and transforming the space are givens: they are means, not an end.
There is interest in students leaving a "mark" of some sort on one another, and possibly on the space itself.
Prevalent in some of the statements, and obvious from the sorts of things the students have been doing, there's a general interest in the idea of being connected. We suggested two possible "scripts:" first, start separately--come together--become entangled--disentangle--return to separate locations. The second one is basically the inverse: start together, entangled--separate yourselves--come back together, become entangled.

The first structure is modeled on their current performance; we might experiment with the second one a bit tomorrow night in a very improvisatory sort of way.

Rob Devet, a a graduate student in the School of Music (I'm not partial...) has done some really neat electronic music using everyone (!) in the class singing, playing with bottles, and windchimes.

Marianna Glynska, a graduate student in photography has taken some really stunning portraits of the students in the class that are going to be incorporated into the final product as well.

(I certainly don't mean to diminish the input of the other students in calling those two out. Many of the ideas seemed to emerge from the group in a fairly organic fashion, so it's hard to say to whom any one particular idea belongs. Rob and Marianna both produced these concrete things in their particular area of expertise, hence my singling them out.)

Art and the transformation of space VII

2010-05-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos from our experiments today (click on images to enlarge):

Art and the transformation of space VI

2010-05-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, we started by putting the students in pairs with the people they "empathized" with (see yesterday's assignment). They were to discuss their answers to the three questions. After about 10 minutes, we changed the pairs, then changed them again. We then combined the pairs into one group of four and one group of six, the intention being to continually narrow down and refine the answers to the three questions. Following that, we came together as a group in an effort to arrive at a sort of group problem statement and solution(s). This seemed to work pretty well and generated a considerable amount of discussion, some rather esoteric and some quite down-to-earth.

On Thursday, by popular demand, I gave a lecture on entrainment, which is the spontaneous synchronization of movement. We looked at examples of entrainment from the world at large, non-musical human activity, and musical human activity. I talked about entrainment as a metaphor for analysis (something that I hope to write a paper on in the not-too-distant future). We concluded by talking about the coalition signaling hypothesis and brainwave entrainment.

That all took about 45 minutes, after which we went out into the space and I led them in a variety of musical improvisation exercises. I had asked all of them to bring something that could be considered a musical instrument. People brought drums, a beer keg and drum sticks, a bucket, a frisbee, sticks, kitchen utensils, and a variety of other thingamajigs. My hope was to get them a) thinking about entrainment in music; b) thinking about what musicians have to do when they perform; and c) reacting and responding to one another in musical ways. Those activities lasted about twenty minutes.

Following that, Melissa had brought several large sheets of green polyester that the students began playing with (for lack of a better word--"improvising with," perhaps?) and that, along with discussion and wandering about the space seemed to generate some concrete ideas of what to create for the final project.

Today, the students have a "work day." They get to spend all of their time in the space, with the expectation that something fairly concrete will begin to coalesce. We had also asked that we have a "needs list" assembled by the end of the day so that we can try to secure whatever they might need to create this project successfully.

Art and the transformation of space V

2010-05-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

Today, the students had roughly an hour to explore the space which we will be transforming--in this case, a courtyard between the art and architecture buildings on campus. They were encouraged to explore every nook and cranny, take in it from a variety of perspectives (including from the 10th floor of the architecture building) and come back with some ideas on what to do with the space. While they did that, the faculty read the journals that we've asked them to keep in an effort to pick up on some themes, questions, and ideas for the final project.

The students returned after about an hour, and told us some of their ideas about the space. We responded by telling them what we uncovered in their journals. Common themes included gesture, line, working outside one's comfort zone, questions of audience, and questions about the purposes of art in general and this project in particular.

We talked about how art--contemporary art in particular, I think--can be viewed as an attempt to solve a problem. To that end, for next time the students are going to bring in an index card with answers to the following questions:

1. What problem are you (we) trying to solve with this art project?
2. What is most important to you in this art project?
3. What do you think might be most important to [some other member of the class] in this art project?

We'll use these as a springboard for discussion.

Art and the transformation of space IV

2010-05-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

Today (which is to say Monday), Genevieve Durham DeCesaro led us through a variety of activities that got us to thinking about the role of the audience in art. We also discussed movement and did some exercises. Below is the text of a summary e-mail that she sent to the class that summarizes the day better than I could:

Major themes:
1. Exploring concepts of art as: human-crafted artifact; aesthetic experience of the audience; inherent characteristics of an object.
2. Identifying problems with locating “art” as something external to the audience: this is the “tree in the woods” question...if there is no audience to receive the art, is it art at all? In other words, is the audience what gives art its meaning?
3. Challenging ideas about the body as separate and less valuable than the mind, while negotiating the practical paradigm of “body as object” in reference to identifying the artifact of dance.
4. Embracing the centrality of the arts to education by virtue of their dependence on imagination, without which (as argued by Greene), students passively receive, rather than interact with and participate in, their educations.

So, all of these things have to do, more or less, with questioning: why do we call objects art? How can the human body be valued in dance when claiming that dance is art requires looking at the body as object? Why are math and science more academically valuable than the arts? How does the association of various academic subjects with gender characteristics function in the way those subjects are perceived and valued? (And on and on...)

In closing, the Bill T. Jones work is, I think, a rather nice summation of this complex web of ideas that we’ve gotten ourselves into: here is a human telling his story in a dance/spoken word performance. The audience for this artwork, this artifact, is challenged to hear the implications of racism and prejudice while watching a gay, black man engage in an art form that is perceived as distinctly feminine. While aesthetic experiences may, at first, seem to emerge in the form of sympathy for this man’s suffering, or appreciation for his skill, I would argue that those experiences are, at their roots, realizations of similarity between audience and performer. Is this, then, art? A series of intangible, ephemeral, totally subjective moments wholly dependent on the lived experiences (meaning body and mind) of both the artist and the audience? I don’t have a good answer for this, but I encourage you to ask the question!

Art and the transformation of space III

2010-05-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I talked about gesture in music: understanding the score not so much as the object of musicological/music-theoretical study, but as a document of the initial human actions required to create specific sounds, and a prompt for others to reproduce those actions (sounds) in the future. We did some conducting and played air piano.

Today, Terry Morrow, who teaches drawing classes at TTU, talked about the gesture and involvement of the body in painting and, by extension, drawing. Using Jackson Pollock as an example, we talked about how what's on the canvas is a reflection of the gestures (and tools) used to create the painting:

We spent the remainder of the class drawing a live model, who changed poses every ten seconds or so. The idea was to empathize with the model and create our lines appropriately, using gestures that reflected how we felt (or, more accurately, how we think the model felt). We were instructed to draw using circles, S-curves, our non-dominant hand, and a piece of chalk on the end of a stick.

Professor Morrow had us stand while drawing--he insisted that good drawing, like a good three-point short in basketball, comes from the feet and is a whole body activity. It was interesting to hear him say this, because I feel the same way about bass playing. In orchestra, for purely practical reasons, I sit on a stool. Often when practicing at home, and always when playing solo, I choose to stand. I feel more connected to the instrument when I do, and I'm more able to move with it. I'm able to initiate gestures from my legs and feet if need be.

On Monday, Genevieve is going to talk about artifacts in dance, and lead us through some movement exercises.

The students have their first paper due on Wednesday, and the guidelines are as follows:

For your first (and possibly only) paper, you are to discuss the manifestation of one of the concepts we've covered in class (i.e., harmony, line, gesture, variation) in an artform that is not your own. The idea behind this is to get you thinking comfortably outside of your discipline--a sort of artistic empathy. We don't expect meticulous footnotes and ground-breaking insights; rather, we want you to reexamine a familiar concept that you most likely take for granted. You are welcome to draw comparisons to your artform where appropriate, but it should not be the foundation of your paper. You are welcome to use outside sources of any kind, but they must be cited appropriately. Examples to support your arguments are encouraged.

Papers should be 4-6 pages long (graduate students, please aim for six pages), double-spaced, 12-point font, one-inch margins, etc. and should be submitted electronically to all of us by noon on Wednesday, May 25.

We've developed a grading rubric that will average all four of our grades on the papers (imagine that--the faculty are collaborating on a class about collaboration!)

Art and the transformation of space II

2010-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today, Melissa Merz led us through a discussion of the fundamentals of design. She had distributed a section from a theatre design textbook that presented a variety of terms and their definitions as they relate to set and costume design. Most of these terms are terms that musicians, dancers, architects, painters, etc. use all of the time. The motivation for today's class was to explore the intersections and differences in meanings of these concepts to all of our artforms. Here are some of the terms and a few definitions from the costume textbook:*

Line: A relatively narrow, elongated mark. Lines have dimension, quality, and character
Shape: Any line that encloses space creates a shape.
Texture: The visual or tactile surface characteristics or appearance of an object
Position: The relative location of adjacent shapes or masses (mass: three-dimensional manifestations of shape)

It's interesting to think about how we use these terms in music. For instance, I mentioned that musical lines are most often "dotted" lines that we perceive as contours. We also tend to use shape as a verb in music more often than as a noun.

Melissa also showed us a series of photos in the second part of class that drew parallels between fashion and architecture throughout history. Consider:

and

Interesting, no?

*J. Michael Gillette, Theatrical Design and Production, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.

Church gigs

2010-05-18T05:40:00.001-07:00

(can you tell school's out? I can blog all the time!)

I seem to have a bunch of church gigs this month. The first was this past weekend at the big United Methodist Church in town. They hired a pretty good sized orchestra for graduation Sunday that meant, in addition to accompanying the hymns and the choir anthems (a different one at both services), we played Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance as the recessional. I have one this week and next week at a Presbyterian Church. In the one case, I'm accompanying a handbell choir (!). Here in Lubbock (evidently the buckle of the Bible belt) one could almost make a living on church gigs, many of which pay more per service than our local symphony orchestra.*

Church gigs to me are very interesting in a number of respects. First, in many cases they're like pit work: you need to be on guard because you're accompanying singers and participating in the drama of the service. Most times, the performances are on one fairly short rehearsal. The orchestra is often front and center, in full view of the congregation, which is not unusual (musicians do that all of the time) except that for most of the service, we're just sitting there. They're early on Sunday mornings, which historically is not a good time for working musicians (typically creatures of the night).

And finally, there's the question of participation: I'm (personally) not Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Methodist--do I follow along and recite the responses and prayers with the congregation? How do I fit in with the congregation in these cases? What about shuffling music around during a prayer because I know we're playing immediately after they're finished? Is that disrespectful?

I'm curious to hear from the readership about church gigs. I think they require a very unique mindset and skill set, distinct from more "conventional" orchestra or chamber gigs.

*Last I checked, Lubbock had more churches per capita than any city in the country with a population greater than 100,000. I think the figure was one church for every 514 people, and we're a city of 200,000.

Art and the transformation of space I

2010-05-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

A few of my colleagues in the College of Visual and Performing Arts here at TTU have conspired over the last few years to create an opportunity to engage in collaborative artmaking. The College doesn't really have much like this, and even our Fine Arts Doctoral Program has been criticized as "multidisciplinary" as opposed to "interdisciplinary."

So today, the fruits of our labor are beginning to show. We had the first class meeting of Art and the Transformation of Space, an interdisciplinary course that is team-taught by myself and three of my colleagues. You can find some details and a syllabus here. The class is going to meet daily for three weeks with the outcome being some sort of collaborative art project to be presented at the First Friday Art Trail in June. My hope is to chronicle the unfolding of this class on the blog.

Today, after the usual introductory stuff (introductions, why we're here, syllabus, etc.) Melissa Merz started us off with a discussion of the relationship between cooperation and collaboration. According to many of the students in the class, the words overlap considerably in meaning, but we decided that cooperation tended to be more physical and spontaneous; collaboration more mental and planned. We talked about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the cyclical nature of both, and the end result of each process.

Genevieve Durham DeCesaro then talked about some collaborations in the 20th century. She mentioned the collaboration between Nijinsky and Stravinsky at the Ballet Russes, which produced Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. She went on to talk about Merce Cunningham's collaborations with Copland and Louis Horst (a composer whose name was unfamiliar to me--I guess even I have homework!), and finished by discussing the collaborations of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. Theirs was a sort of collaboration without cooperation in that each typically worked independently of the others, and they only assembled the parts sometimes as late as the first performance!

In most of the cases discussed above, the music can be (and often is) performed separately from the dance and the stage design, suggesting a sort of dependence among the forms. One of our goals for the class is to have the students create a work whose parts are inseparable. The final project will involve transforming an outdoor space on campus into a work of art.

Terry Morrow suggested that collaboration involves a cycle of action and reaction, which prompted a physical improvisation exercised led by Genevieve, where we clumped ourselves together, held hands, then had to untangle ourselves.

To conclude, we watched two videos about the collaborations between Cage and Cunningham, one of which you can see here. The other was called (I think) The Collaborators and was more of a sit-down interview with Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg.

Tomorrow, the students and faculty are presenting mini-personal histories, to comprise portfolio sorts of things, hobbies, etc. so that we all might get to know who it is we're working with and each person's strengths and potential contributions.

Thinking about Webern

2010-05-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

As a final project for our fourth (and final) semester of harmony, I had my students write a paper about Webern's op. 5, III. Here's a video of the entire quartet in a good performance by the Quartet Casals. The third movement starts about 4:30 into the film.

Most of the questions that I asked the students were fairly straightforward set theory kinds of questions: what's the form of the movement, what musical elements delineate the form, discuss the prominence of set classes (014) and (015), talk about Webern's use of whole-tone subsets, and point out canonic passages.*

Most of the papers were quite good: they did a nice job of analyzing the piece, many of them going well above and beyond the call of duty and uncovering some interesting things. After reading 50 of them, I picked up on a few common trends that I'd like to mention here, framing them in slightly more sophisticated theoretical terms than the students had been exposed to.

The first thing that the assignment asked them to do was to listen to the piece a few times without the score, to talk about how they hear the form of the piece, and to discuss the mood projected by the piece. The one thing that most of the students remarked on in answer to this first question was how difficult it was to hear the cello (presumably because he's playing so softly at the beginning). I sent them the recording I linked to above to use in their analysis. Looking at the video again and thinking about the answers my students gave, I think the quietude of the opening seeks to establish an intimate relationship with the listener, drawing him or her closer. One must be extremely close to the ensemble to experience the pizzicato C#2 (marked ppp) in the cello that opens the movement. And, to see the video above, the audience is right on top of the quartet, which I think is sort of cool. To me, the string quartet historically has been considered an intimate genre: I think this piece makes a very strong case for the continuation of that aesthetic.

This, sadly, is one aspect of live performance that is difficult to recreate through audio technology. If you can't hear the notes on the recording, you simply turn it up until you can; when it gets too loud, turn it down.

Webern's dynamics remain for the most part hushed during the opening six measures: there are two ff chords played pizzicato (which still isn't very loud) by the upper strings at the end of m. 3. Measure 7 again features pizzicato ff, followed by ff col legno (with the wood of the bow): again, still very quiet as a result of the technique employed, despite the dynamic marking.

The other thing is a topic that's been weighing on my mind for a bit now: if I have time over the summer I'd like to write it up. I hadn't considered including this piece in the project, but I think it would be ideal. Long-time readers of this blog no doubt know of my interest in theorizing performance, and one topic that has interested me of late is the notion of entrainment. Entrainment is the spontaneous synchronization of human movement. Metaphorically speaking, we can use entrainment as an analytical narrative. Many of my students pointed out the striking independence of the voices throughout this quartet: the contrast between the cello and upper strings in the beginning; the contrast between violin I and the lower parts in the second half of the piece; the canonic passages; and the striking ending.

How might such a narrative unfold? At first, the cello is steadily providing the beat, and the upper three strings are for the most part rhythmically synchronized for the first eight measures or so. This creates two unique personae, each behaving differently from one another. The canonic passages that comprise most of the middle section show voices trying to align--they're playing the same musical material (sometimes in transposition or inversion), but they can't seem to do it at the same time. In the final big section of the piece, the cello begins another pizzicato ostinato, and the second violin and viola start off together. Despite the cello's best efforts to keep everyone together, after a few measures the second violin and viola "fall apart" and start playing in canon with one another. The lyrical violin 1 line that begins on top of the canon is another strikingly different persona and is not in line with any of the others. In the last two measures, out of the preceding chaos, all four instruments spontaneously synchronize and play the same melodic figure in octaves, fff, to close the piece.

Throughout the piece, we have different personae trying to get along and synchronize; it's not until the final two measures of the piece that we actually achieve that stability, and it's only briefly.

*Their project was adapted from an exercise in the Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis, which is soon to appear in its second edition, much to my delight.

When PowerPoint attacks!

2010-04-28T11:29:00.001-07:00

Having written previously on the pros and cons of PowerPoint, I thought I should share the following PowerPoint slide, used to explain the situation in Afghanistan to various military types:

Got it? Good! Now go out and fix everything.

(for the story with which this image is linked, please click here)

2010-04-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

Interesting results of a collaboration between some of our doctoral students in the Fine Arts Doctoral Program. It's a pleasure to work with students who share a common goal and are exploring unique ways to achieve it:

Above are links to the first two (of four) movements of The Dragon King's Daughter by Jason Berg, who is a doctoral student in composition. Berg comes from a strong background and attempts to synthesize his jazz training with more traditional classical compositional techniques. The inspiration for the work comes from the Lotus Sutra. The video images are by Christian Conrad, who is working toward a Ph.D. in fine arts with an emphasis on visual art. The text for the second movement was adapted from the Lotus Sutra by Kathleen Blackburn, an alumni of the School of Music and an aspiring writer. The third movement features dance, choreographed by one of the students in the dance department, Rachel Spaugh.

The performance was recorded live on February 7th, 2010 in Lubbock, featuring an ensemble comprising TTU students. Jeannie Barrick (who teaches music theory for us!) is the soprano.

Cool stuff going on in these parts!

April fools' joke from Khachaturian?

2010-04-01T08:36:00.001-07:00

Ahhh... the joys of being a bass player. At least my pay-per-note ratio is quite high.

Loudness wars

2010-03-31T08:35:00.000-07:00

Interesting posts over at tungblog, which is a new blog to me, about the "loudness wars" in popular music. He explains all of it far more eloquently than I ever could, so I'll just point you in that direction:

Very interesting stuff!

Casual Friday

2010-03-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

I'm really feeling the singer-songwriter thing this week. I've had an out-of-town gig, and I like to bring this music along with me in the car and sing along (loudly). Usually, I'll sing Paul Simon's part on the way to the gig, then Art Garfunkel's part on the way home.

Don't laugh. If you're considering coming to music school, this actually helps you develop useful musical skills.

Enjoy!

Postscript to entitlement

2010-03-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Reading an article in a magazine about a guy today made me think of another aspect of the entitlement issue. I'll not write about said person here, because this person is one who has worked hard for what he has achieved: the story, however, tries desperately to tug at our heartstrings and make us sympathetic--that he has achieved what he has achieved in spite of (or because of) all of the adversity he's faced in his life.

This seems to be more and more the case on American Idol, where the stories of the contestants are nearly as important as their singing ability. There's the single mother busking on the streets, the person whose mother died when the kid was very young, the person who is looking after a loved one with some sort of chronic medical condition, etc. Are we voting for these people because they are best singers (and performers), or are we voting for them because we feel sorry for them and this is their one chance to change their life and make all of their problems go away? Mr. Cowell repeatedly reminds us that it's a singing competition, but more than a few contestants made it through to Hollywood partially as a result of their story.

It's the same sort of thing that we read into composer biographies: does it really enhance our understanding and appreciation of a work if we know what the composer had for breakfast that morning, or what debilitating disease he was suffering through? (Can you tell I'm a theorist and not a musicologist? ;) )

Are there people who deserve a break? Absolutely. I had a student confide in me some situations that he was facing and he was worried that it would impact his studies. He's not the most gifted performer on his instrument, and he doesn't have the highest average in my class. But this student is working incredibly hard to earn his music degree and, after talking with him for a half an hour the other day, I would say he could use a break--some sort of helping hand. But the key here is that he's working hard, and I respect that. No one is entitled to a break by birthright.

Like a car accident

2010-03-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

Originally posted by Roger Bourland, I can't stop watching this. It's so very, very strange:

Entitlement

2010-03-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the long delay in posting, but seeing how this is the 200th post, I wanted to make sure I had something interesting and substantial. The following has been bubbling around in my mind for some time now, and I felt like I needed the last piece of the puzzle to bring it all together. I found that last piece of the puzzle on (of all places) American Idol last week. Here goes:

Item 1: A student approached me, unhappy because she failed aural skills. This student was not in my class; she approached me in my role as undergraduate theory coordinator after speaking with her instructor. According to the student, she did well on the sightsinging and dictation quizzes all semester long, but didn't turn in any homework. Homework represents (if I recall) 10% of the final grade, but we have a clause in our syllabus that students must earn at least 70% on the homework portion of the grade or they will fail the class, regardless of their performance in other areas. Now, regardless of whether or not that policy is fair, it is in the syllabus, which is given to every student on the first day of class. She felt that she was entitled to pass the class--that this particular rule should not apply to her, even though it applies to everyone else--because she could do the sightsinging and dictation and that is the point of the class.

Item 2: Watching the audition weeks of American Idol. In one city (I forget which one) a young man is shown making the long elevator ride down to the lobby after an unsuccessful audition. He is in tears, and sobs "I just wanted this so badly."

Item 3: Last week on American Idol, one of the contests, Siobhan Magnus, was being profiled before she sang. When she talked about winning a spot in the top 24, she made some comment to the effect of "I just wanted to show them how passionate about music I am."

Item 4: A passage from a book I read quite some time ago called SHAM: How the self-help movement made America helpless. The passage that comes to mind is the epigraph(s) to chapter 5:

"He's supremely confident. He knows he's going to do what he wants." --Baseball player David Bell, age thirty, explaining what makes former teammate Barry Bonds such a great hitter, in the Morning Call, (Allentown, PA), April 27, 2003.

"He has the best batting I've I've ever seen, and probably the quickest hand to the ball as well. And his upper-body strength is almost superhuman." --Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, age fifth-three, explaining what makes Bonds so great, quoted later in the same [...] article."

All of these situations seem to imply that belief in something (or desire for something) is the key to success. In the case of Item 1, the student failed because she didn't do the work. In the case of Item 2, the gentleman didn't move on to the next round because he was not a very good singer. Same with Item 3: Ms. Magnus did not advance because she was passionate about singing (or more passionate about singing than the next person). In the case of Item 4, the distinction between the quotations comes from the younger player suggesting that Bonds gets whatever he wants; the older player (i.e., from the previous generation) is pointing to objective criteria that make Bonds the superior player (well, and there are the steroids, but that's another story for another day).

If passion for singing was the only criteria for success, then this guy would be a mega-star:

People seem to have stopped taking responsibility for their actions, shifting the blame towards others in a fairly passive-aggressive sort of way. The reason the violinist wins the section position in the orchestra is because she is a better violinist than the others: she has practiced longer and more thoughtfully, presumably had a better education, was more well-rested, or any number of measurable criteria. To suggest she wanted it more than the others is to suggest (as SHAM's author argues) that the other people showed up not caring whether they got the position or not. Clearly this is not true.

I wish I had solutions for this problem: it is amazingly widespread (all you need to do is watch people drive in Lubbock!) I'm sure that motivation is a key to getting at the root of this problem. Understanding what motivates people, and how to motivate people, could allow us to reshape the sorts of feedback we give as teachers (coaches, bosses, whatever), and the sorts of outcomes and assessments we craft as teachers. I'm sure grade inflation plays into this in academia, and the "participation trophies" that go to everyone--winners and losers alike--are probably responsible. We cannot be afraid of hurting someone's feelings now, because ultimately we are doing our students a service.

As a young teacher, I wanted to be liked by my students, and I wanted everyone to succeed in my classes. I had a very hard time failing students, even when they clearly deserved to fail (i.e., had missed dozens of classes and turned in next to no homework). I even went so far at one point as to offer a "homework amnesty" day, where students could turn in homework from any point at the semester and not be penalized for it. (Talk about a lot of grading--that was easily the first and last time I did that!) It occurred to me, though, that I was doing these students a disservice. I really wanted them to learn and understand music theory, but I did this at the expense of teaching them real-world lessons such as accountability. In most cases, giving a student the grade they deserve provides a valuable lesson. If you don't turn in your homework on time, you pay the consequences. Learn that now, so that when you need to submit that grant report to keep this high school band that you direct afloat, you'll understand the value of submitting things on time. If you don't do well in a jury, use that as a learning experience to determine what you need to do better next time, and focus on those problems. Now, I like to think that I teach more than music to my students.

Work hard and smart and you will reap the rewards. As the saying goes, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for his whole life."

Muse

2010-02-13T13:11:00.000-08:00

I had seen the band Muse on the Late Show with David Letterman and later, on Saturday Night Live. They sort of grew on me and so I downloaded their album. One track in particular struck me while I was out running--I actually listened to it four times in succession. The symphonic scope of their music really struck me, particularly the middle section of "I belong to you".

Cool stuff, I thought (despite the fact that it evidently appears on the New Moon soundtrack).

I was driving home from some errands today and heard the Met's broadcast of La fille du Regiment.* In the midst of some dialogue, one of the characters sung the middle section of this song! "How odd," I thought "that Donizetti would have borrowed something from a popular music group some 200 years into the future!"

Well, after a quick bit of Googling and YouTubing, I found out that it's actually an aria from Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila. I found Elina Garanca singing the aria on YouTube:

The strange thing is that I didn't recognize the aria in the Muse tune (other than to observe that it sounded "classical"), but the instant I heard the shimmering string introduction to the orchestra, I realized I had played this aria within the past few years!

*Incidentally, Juan Diego Florez is pretty unbelievable:

Friday

2010-02-12T04:25:00.001-08:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Enjoy the weekend!

Concert etiquette, continued

2010-01-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

To continue where I left off in the previous post, the book continues by offering an extremely detailed account of what to do when you attend a classical instrumental concert. Here are some more things you shouldn't do:

"Do not hand out individual tickets to each person [in your group]--the ticket-taker and usher will give you dirty looks!" (22)
"And haven't we all sat in front of someone who feels the need to say the most obvious things? These people are... well, "idiots" is the word some other audience members may use for them. We're always embarrassed for them and you really don't want to be that person (24).
"If you do laugh out of context, people will think you're an immature idiot... and they will be right, on some level!" (24)
"People have actually been known to step on, put gum on, or otherwise deface an unwelcome garment that has invaded their territory..." (24)

My argument here is that the authors are painting the typical concert-going audience as a bunch of angry, gray-haired people who are already annoyed by you, presumably a young, naive concert-goer who dares to intrude upon their highbrow, sophisticated evening out. Particularly in the context of the rest of the book (attending jazz and rock shows, for instance), classical music concerts do not sound appealing at all. After reading the chapter, even I didn't want to attend a classical concert.

(By the way, a brief aside. The authors do say that you don't have to applaud a performance that you didn't think was very good. They do, however, advise against booing: "Most likely, you'll be viewed as a moron by your fellow audience members and probably by your date" (25). I wouldn't mind seeing the occasional really terrible performance get booed. Apparently, I'm not alone in this (see also here). The authors also say that standing ovations should only be given when the performance is "surpassingly good [...] It is a sign of inexperience and naivete to leap to your feet at the end of every show or concert" (25). AMEN! I would give them a standing ovation for that sentence alone. Standing ovations in these parts happen after every concert, sometimes after every piece. I think it's the equivalent of crying wolf. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of all involved, concerts go badly. C'est la vie. OK, that was a long aside.)

Basically, everything that the book (and others like it) suggests is to dampen your body's natural reaction to music. Don't tap your foot, don't sing along, don't say anything except quietly during applause (and even then, the authors permit you only one word: "wow"). Classical concerts are presented as stifling environments that are inhospitable to neophytes. So why would anyone want to come to something like this?

Part II

At a committee meeting of a symphony orchestra of which I am a member, the conversation turned (as it often does) to bringing more people--especially young people--into concerts. Lubbock is very much a university town, and we have 30,000 students looking for stuff to do on the weekends. We talked about moving concert times up to 6:00pm so that people could go out afterward, as some orchestras are apparently doing. As the sole young person in the room (by about 20 years), I pitched the crazy idea that, just as we have children's concerts for the elementary school students, we should consider sort of "young adult" concerts. I based my thinking on a concert staged at Arizona State University about two years ago (read about it here and here). Why not offer a concert where it's OK to bring your laptop? What about someone talking newcomers through the experience via a podcast or live audio stream (headphones required, of course)? ("Now, the violins are playing the first theme again. We call this the recapitulation"). What about a Twitter feed? Tweet your thoughts on the concert to @symphonyconcert and you can see what others are saying on the big screens in real time.

Naturally, I thought this would be a great idea (I wouldn't have brought it up otherwise!) Most of my students are permanently attached to all their gizmos and would probably relish the opportunity to interact (silently--that's the best part) during the concert. Others are thinking about ways to use technology to engage audiences.

Well the committee heard me out and the response was (sadly, not surprisingly) "Well who would want to go to something like that?" "What's a Twitter?" "I almost told the person texting in front of me that I don't care where they want to go to dinner!"

If you want to know how to get young people into the concerts, why not listen to what the young people (OK, I'm not all that young) have to say, or at least listen to what the people who deal with the young people that you're targeting all day long have to say?

I'm not suggesting all concerts need to be this way. One of the local movie theatres does a "Mom's day at the movies" where they show a rated-G movie in the middle of the day, and the place welcomes little kids running around and screaming. It's great for moms who need to get out of the house and want to take the kids to a movie. I will never go to that showing because I don't want kids running around and screaming during my movie. One day, when I have kids, I'll probably bring them to that showing, and I'll go with the expectation of kids running all over, etc. There are also "contemporary" and "traditional" worship services at many churches. One is no less "church-y" than the other: it's just different strokes for different folks.

There are many other things that could be done to welcome new folks into the concert hall--to make it a less stifling experience. But that's another post for another time...

Concert etiquette

2010-01-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

The behavior of concert-goers is growing more and more irritating to me, but perhaps for reasons different from what you might expect. At the Susan Graham concert mentioned below, the audience applauded after every. Single. Movement. Of. Every. Piece. That. We. Played. On the one hand, I genuinely appreciated their enthusiasm. I had overheard several folks talking in the parking lot who had never been to the symphony. I was happy to have them there. I know also of others for whom this was their first concert-going experience. I'm sure they had no idea how to behave, just as I wouldn't know how to behave during my first Japanese Tea Ceremony. I'd do my best to get along, and show my appreciation for what I was participating in. On the other hand, we don't get paid by the hour.

So these people came and saw our orchestra and evidently really enjoyed themselves and hopefully they'll come back. Can they be trained to behave according to the rules of Western Art Music Concert Etiquette? If so, how? I can't imagine lecturing the audience for 10 minutes before the show about how they should and shouldn't behave, nor would I want to sit through that as an audience member.

Here's where so-called music appreciation classes come in. Most of these classes have a concert report assignment of some sort, and the professor generally goes over how one behaves at a concert. (I'm not pointing fingers--I've done plenty of this myself and, presented with the opportunity, probably would again.) Recently a chapter of a new book crossed my desk that caused me to think a lot more about the concert-going experience.

The book is Attending and Enjoying Concerts by Ken Bloom and Josh Wellman. This book was part of a Pearson Reading Hour project organized by the publisher, and Chapter 3 came across my desk as a sample to read and review (note: ~~I never got around to reading it and sending anything to Pearson~~ I did read it; I never responded to the questions Pearson sent). Chapter 3 is titled "Classical instrumental performances." The book includes chapters on opera-going, as well as chapters on jazz, folk, and rock concerts.

The chapter proceeds pretty much as one might expect. You should learn about the composers' lives, listen to recordings of the pieces you'll hear, listen to other music by the composer, etc. Do these activities really enhance your appreciation of the concert, especially if you've never been to a concert before? I'm not really sure. That's something I might do, but I'm already a card-carrying member of the society.

As the chapter unfolds, however the authors make me very uncomfortable about attending a classical instrumental concert. They suggest that one arrives 20-30 minutes early for the show to take care of the basic human urges and to get to your seat early. You wouldn't want to show up in the nick of time and have to climb over "angry people to get to your seat" (20). The preliminary section concludes as follows:

While you are preparing your mind to experience a sophisticated and highly-evolved event, always keep in mind that your brain is inside a body. That body is basically that of an animal, so you have to address the human animal’s basic needs. If you’ve cleared your head and taken care of those other needs before the concert begins, you have gone a long way toward preparing yourself to have the best possible experience; if you’ve gone further and done some homework first, you’re even more likely to have a good time and like what you hear (20).

Really? "Sophisticated and highly-evolved?"

So, now on to what to wear:

Classical music performances usually call for a button-down shirt and nice dress pants for men and a nice dress or stylish outfit for women. You don’t have to get decked-out like you’re going to prom or even wear a suit and tie, but you’ll feel more comfortable if you’re just a little dressed up. This is especially true in large concert halls—you’ll see a bunch of gray hair and a bunch of suits, but you don’t have to wear that to feel comfortable. Here are some basic guidelines—minimum and maximum—to help you make the right choice:
Men: At a minimum, wear a nice button-down shirt and khaki pants. At the maximum, the suit and tie noted above will not usually be out of place. You will be underdressed if you wear jeans, a T-shirt, or sneakers; you will be overdressed (and possibly mistaken for one of the performers or an usher) if you wear a tuxedo.
Women: At a minimum, wear a nice skirt or slacks and a blouse or sweater. At the maximum, wear a nice cocktail dress. If you are in the lower level of the theater, you will be underdressed if you wear jeans, a T-shirt, or sneakers; regardless of where you sit, you will usually be overdressed if you wear a fancy gown.
If you are seated in the upper reaches of the theater near the rear, jeans can be perfectly acceptable attire, but don’t wear jeans with holes, and no T-shirts—and that rule applies to men and women alike! (20-1)

Lots of gray-haired folks in suits? I might be mistaken for an usher? Jeans might or might not be OK depending on where I'm sitting? I can't wait.

Among the things you should bring to a concert: two [!] cough drops (but don't unwrap them during the performance--only during applause or intermission "Because no matter how quietly you try to unwrap them, they will make a little crinkling noise that is extremely irritating to everyone, everywhere (21)."

So here's the typical concert-going audience as painted (so far) by Bloom and Wellman:

I've rambled on long enough today. I'll continue this in the not-too-distant future...

LSO with Susan Graham

2010-01-22T08:13:00.001-08:00

Metropolitan Opera superstar and Texas Tech alum (!) Susan Graham is performing with the Lubbock Symphony tonight at 8:00 in the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center. She's been great to work with--very kind and easy-going. She's singing Berlioz's Les nuits d'ete, a Mozart aria, and something from Lehar's Merry Widow.

The orchestra is playing Strauss's Tales from Vienna Woods, Weber's Der Freischutz overture (GREAT music--the overture and the opera. If you don't know it, check it out. It's German Romanticism at its most Romantic, I think). We're also doing a few selections from Bizet's Carmen (orchestral suites, not with voice).

To that end, my stand partner suggested I watch this:

Teaching in the digital age, part II

2010-01-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

So after suggesting just moments (alright, days) ago that PowerPoint might not be all it's cracked up to be, I stumbled upon a good use of the program that's already received rave reviews from students.

I played some education concerts with the Lubbock Symphony on Tuesday (4 x Peter and the Wolf and Tales from Vienna Woods + 2.5 hour rehearsal = tired). As the kids were filing in, there were slides with orchestra trivia ("What is the name of the conductor of the LSO?" "What are the four families of instruments in the orchestra?" etc.). When the music started, the PowerPoint simply showed the title of the piece. Not too interesting, methinks. I thought it was a missed opportunity to show, say, pictures of Viennese woods (or better yet, Schwarzwalderkirschtorte) or pictures of Peter, and the cat, and so on, so that the students could begin to associate the musical themes with the pictures.*

I'm teaching two sections of harmony IV this semester back to back in the same classroom (one at 8:00am and one at 9:00am). The classes are large (for me): 20 and 30 students, respectively. So I've been trying to find ways to be more efficient and to maximize class time.

I put together a short (maybe 10 slides) PowerPoint show and set the slides to change every 15 seconds. I included observations about their homework, "Today in music history" (from here), advertisements for upcoming concerts, reminders about office hours, etc. I have this playing when the students come in, so the early birds have something to do, and I resume it during the ten minutes between classes. Here's the show from the first day:

Feedback was immediately positive from the students, which excited me greatly. One remarked that she felt like she was at the movies. To that end, I'm going to work in "Please silence your cell phones" and "Enjoy a Coke (just not in class!)" sorts of things as well.

*All that having been said, I think there's a perfectly good reason for not showing any pictures: having the students focus on listening to the music and not being distracted by the images.

Teaching in the digital age

2010-01-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

A recent thread on the AMS discussion list examines what seems to be an abnormally high number of students who are repeating their music history/appreciation classes because they've failed them the first (or second!) time around. I have a number of second-timers in my theory classes, but I don't know that I've witnessed an increase in recent years.

Pursuant to that, the AMS is also hosting a pedagogy session at their 2010 meeting in Indianapolis that addresses teaching in the Digital Age. The CFP referenced a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Article on teaching naked (no, it's not what you think). Jose Bowen, the dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has removed much of the technology from the classrooms there, suggesting that PowerPoint and similar systems diminish student involvement in the classroom. Students, apparently, are upset because they can no longer sit back and just passively receive information (from the article): "The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix."

I agree with this, and it's certainly easy for me to do what's comfortable. I'm a big proponent of active learning (which I think is much easier to pull off in the harmony and aural skills classes than it is in the history classes--especially the large appreciation classes).

It's interesting to speculate if the two phenomena are related. The initial post to the AMS list wondered about altering content so that it was fresh to students. A number of respondents mentioned creating PowerPoint slides and the like. Many of the solutions proposed suggested giving the students a more active role in the classroom, one of which included using PowerPoint to deliver short oral quizzes at various parts in the lecture. Could it be that, because students are less engaged in the class--they have to do very little in the Age of PowerPoint--that they're less successful?

Thoughts?

Who's TED?

2010-01-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

I've been bumping into these "TED Talks" in a variety of places. They're pretty good, albeit maybe a bit Tony Robbins for me.

Here's one on leadership lessons from conductors:

Here's another one that a colleague forwarded to me concerning motivation (I'm interested in it as it applies to student motivation):

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "flow":

How to write an analytical paper

2010-01-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I wasn't going to post about this, but Editor Kitty inspired me. I've been frustrated in the past by the quality of my students' writing, particularly in the domain of analytical papers (in contrast, say, to more historical or biographical papers). So this semester in my post-tonal theory class, I'm going to do my best to teach them how to write an analytical paper as we learn about post-tonal music. I intend to devote about a half an hour a week to teaching writing skills. Here is the plan I've attached to the syllabus. Note: the course is cross-listed as graduate (MUTH 5316) and undergraduate (MUTH 3316).

One of the subtexts of this course is instruction in writing an analytical paper. Over the course of the semester we will look at some of the more troublesome aspects of writing analytical papers. Below are some guidelines and due dates.

The first step is to choose a piece to analyze. I would prefer you choose a piece that you know well, preferably one for your instrument. In the case of a larger work, you might select a movement of the piece or a discrete section. You will then need to develop a thesis statement that will shape your paper. What is it that you intend to show in the paper? Why should the reader be interested in your research? Your choice of work along with a thesis statement is due February 2, 2010.

What (if anything) have others written about your piece? There are a variety of ways to discover pertinent research on your topic. Perhaps someone has written about another piece by the same composer using a methodology similar to yours. Perhaps someone has written about a different work by a different composer, but employs an analytical approach that you think is relevant. Biographical information is typically not relevant in analytical papers, but a brief biography might be warranted for an unfamiliar composer. A bibliography detailing the sources you intend to use in your paper is due on February 9, 2010. The bibliography must be formatted according to the guidelines found in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. You can find abridged guidelines at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

Examples (musical and otherwise) and quotations are two key components of an analytical paper. We will spend some class time discussing how to use examples and quotations correctly and effectively.

Editing and proofreading are among the most important skills for aspiring writers to develop. To that end, you will bring a substantially complete draft to class on March 4, 2010 and it will be reviewed by your classmates. Spell-check and related programs are a good first step, but nothing can replace the careful eyes of a live human being.

The final paper is actually due near the middle of the semester on March 23, 2010. My intention is to limit procrastination and to avoid the mountain of work (for you and I) that tends to accompany the end of the semester. Guidelines for formatting are:
• Typed, 1.5- or double-spaced, in a legible, 10- or 12- point font.
• 1”-1.5” margins all around
• Examples in the body of the paper
• Works cited list at the end (note: there is a difference between a works cited page and a bibliography—we’ll discuss it)
There are different content and length guidelines for MUTH 3316 and 5316:

For MUTH 3316 (Undergraduates)
• 6-8 pages
• Roughly five sources (NO internet sources, except in special cases; exceptions include print works that can be found online, i.e., through JSTOR or Oxford Music Online)

For MUTH 5316 (Graduates)
• 10-12 pages
• Roughly ten sources (NO internet sources, except in special cases; exceptions include print works that can be found online, i.e., through JSTOR or Oxford Music Online)

One of the most important and often overlooked writing skills is the ability to write for different audiences. After you have received your graded and corrected papers, we will discuss how to translate your scholarly work into something intended for more general readership—in this case, program notes. The program notes will be considerably shorter than your paper (2-3 pages; same formatting guidelines) and should be accessible to anyone who might come to a concert on which the work would be performed. The program notes are due April 20, 2010.

Finally, since some of you may aspire to a career in academia, presentations at professional meetings will be an important part of your job. We will talk about how to distill your work into a proposal for a conference. Typically, these are intended for expert readership, and are usually around three to five pages. Often, you will be asked to submit an abstract in addition to (or in lieu of) a proposal. Abstracts typically have a 250-word limit, making it difficult to condense fifteen pages of work into a paragraph. The proposal and abstract are due May 4, 2010.

Some thoughts on Sweet anticipation

2009-11-17T17:24:00.001-08:00

I've had a strange coming-together of reading materials and experiences lately. One of the books that I've spent some time with (we looked at it in my current trends course) is David Huron's Sweet anticipation. Chapter 5 in particular seems to have quite a few potential uses, two of which I want to explore in this post. In Chapter 5, titled "Statistical properties of music," Huron provides a list of five things that most melodies do. Here is the list, with my abbreviated definitions. Of interest is the fact that he surveyed a vast number of melodies, both Western and non-Western.

Pitch proximity. Melodies typically use sequences of tones that are close in pitch (74).
Step declination. Large intervals are likely to ascend and small intervals are likely to descend (75). It follows that, since most melodies use small notes as per #1 above, most melodies tend to descend.
Step inertia. Small intervals tend to be followed by other small intervals in the same direction (77).
Melodic regression. Large leaps tend to be followed by a change in direction (80).
Melodic arch. Phrases and melodies tend to assume an arch shape.

The first situation in which I think this information would be useful would be in undergraduate theory and aural skills. It seems to me that many of us can make these claims on the basis of musical intuition, and Huron's data supports our intuitions. I've listened to a lot of music, and if you asked me what music tends to do, I would probably respond with observations that are much like those that Huron cites. I think, though, that many of my students don't have a grasp of what melodies tend to do and that this information might be useful to them. I often tell my aural skills students in particular to think of what music typically does when they're stuck during dictation. It seems to me that dictation might be made easier if students were aware that, for instance, most large leaps tend to ascend, and they tend to be followed by a step in the opposite direction.

This information could also be used as a set of guidelines for writing melodies and/or cantus firmi for counterpoint exercises. As it happens, Jeppesen's Counterpoint book happens to be next to the Huron on my bookshelf. In discussing an Ave Maria by Palestrina (given below), Jeppesen notes:

"Note in the melody above that stepwise progression predominates" (85) and that "this preference for conjunct motion is most characteristic of the Palestrina melody (as it is of the Gregorian chant) (85).
"[W]e see that the larger intervals are subject to very particular treatment in that they are compensated by stepwise progression... It is thus normal in the Palestrina style that skips are compensated by stepwise progressions or--as is also somewhat common--by skips in the opposite direction" (85-6).
"In descending motion, on the other hand, the smaller intervals generally precede the larger" (86).
"The line of the Ave Maria melody forms a curve which begins relatively high on E, moves downward to the A, then rises again to the E..." (84).

Incidentally, Huron's essay "Tone and voice" could also be easily and profitably incorporated into the undergraduate classroom, offering the same sort of empirical "proof" for the rules of voice leading that the list above offers for melodic writing.

The second, and by far more nefarious use, comes from my reading of Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy. Davis draws connections among the rise of statistics in the nineteenth century, the emergence of a culturally constructed sense of disability, and eugenics. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, there was a need for people to run the machines, and the machinery demanded an able-bodied person of average size, etc. Statistics facilitated the emergence of the "average man" and, in many cases, aberrations from the average were seen as disabled.

I should offer the disclaimer that Huron is not making any claims like this: this is my own conflation of these two ideas. I'm sure Huron doesn't want people to use his ideas for evil, but I can't resist. I wonder if we could use such a statistical model of melody (remember--he examined melodies from all over the world) to argue for the exclusion of, say, twelve-tone music. Consider, for example, just about anything composed by Webern:

(It's my personal favorite). Does it exhibit any of the properties given by Huron?

Pitch proximity. NO
Step declination. NO
Step inertia. NO
Melodic regression. NO (well, sort of. The movement is balanced around A4)
Melodic arch. NO

Ergo, this melody is of no use to us: it doesn't conform at all to any of our expectations; it doesn't do what music is supposed to do. Should we expunge it from the canon? Is it disabled, in a sense? (Of course, we could probably create a statistical survey of atonal music and come up with five or six principles evidenced by the majority of atonal music, in which case much of tonal music would be excluded from our "survival of the fittest.")

I've yet to finish Sweet anticipation. As I continue through it, I'll post any other thoughts that come to mind, as well as any amendments to the ideas I've posted above.

2009-11-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry--this is becoming a repository of YouTube clips. One of these days I'll write something substantial.

From a student of mine: Why Family Guy needs aural skills (wait until about :40 seconds in):

Short films for the end of time

2009-11-06T06:29:00.000-08:00

I came across these videos on Alex Ross's new blog, Unquiet Thoughts. The videos were commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The first video features music from the seventh movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the end of time, titled "Clusters of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time." The second video features music from the eighth and final movement of the Quartet, titled "Praise to the eternity of Jesus." The videos are really quite beautiful. As many of you probably know, Messiaen was affected with synaesthesia, which meant that he saw colors when he heard sounds. In his composition treatises, he actually describes the colors associated with the different harmonies in his music.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Assorted tidbits

2009-10-29T06:37:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting at the airport waiting to get on a flight that's delayed so that I can try to make my connection in Dallas at another terminal in exactly 13 minutes so that I can get that flight to Atlanta where I'll catch a flight to Montreal so that I can attend the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory. I'm really looking forward to this--seeing old friends, hearing the latest research, checking out Montreal, and an assortment of other cool stuff. Plus, I need a break from Lubbock and this will do just fine.

So, while I'm waiting for my plane to arrive, you all get to listen to (er, read) my rambling.

First things first: a bit of shameless self promotion. I had two article appear in two online journals on two consecutive days. The first one is an article on performance enhancement in music and it appears in the journal TRANS: Revista Transcultural de Musica. The article brings together such diverse subjects as recording technology, embodiment theory, bicycling, and Viagra. Actually, it had its origins in a post on this very blog!

The second article grew out of a talk that I gave at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Music Theory and it appears in the latest edition of Music Theory Online. In the article, I examine the importance of looking at musical performances and the types of information that can be communicated visually in performance. The article focuses on the music of Sofia Gubaidulina (her low string music in particular), and features clips of yours truly playing the bass.

Two articles in two days is a difficult pace to maintain, but I'll do my best to keep the scholarship flowing!

The latest issue of Opera News had me surfing the YouTubes. Here's some stuff I found:

Martina Arroyo on the Tonight Show:

Joyce DiDonato singing "Una voce poco fa." I only knew her as a... personality (i.e., doing interviews backstage at the met; showing up in ads for things). But holy cow can she SING!

It's 8:50 and my plane's supposed to depart at 8:55 and it's still not here. Oh well. More blogging later, perhaps?

If any fans of the blog will be at the conference and want to meet up, leave a comment or drop me a line.

Beethoven and Shostakovich by the numbers

2009-10-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

On a lark, I decided to wear my heart rate monitor during the last Lubbock Symphony Orchestra concert. The first half of the concert was Shostakovich's ninth symphony; the second half was Beethoven's ninth symphony.

During the Shostakovich, my average heart rate was 74. It topped out at 101 at some point (I'm not sure when). The duration of the piece was about 29 minutes. I think I burned 99 calories during the piece.

I tried to get data for the individual movements of the Beethoven.

Mvt. 1: duration = 17:55 avg. HR = 70 max = 86
Mvt. 2: duration = 13:31 avg. HR = 72 max = 91
Mvt. 3: duration = 18:09 avg. HR = 65 max = 86
Mvt. 4: duration = 23:53 avg. HR = 82 max = 152 (!)

I was able to sneak a glance right after the last chords of the last movement and I was around 139 or so. My guess is that the 152 came somewhere in the last few minutes of the piece (after the vocal quartet cadenza).

I burned a total of 398 calories over the course of the concert--about what I burn in a 5k race. For purposes of comparison, my max HR is around 180; my resting heart rate (first thing in the morning) is around 40.

Current trends II

2009-10-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

This week in my current trends course, we discussed embodiment. The structure of the class is such that each week, we cover a new topic. On Tuesday, we read literature from the non-musical sphere; on Thursday, we look at musical applications of those theories. For example, when we discussed gender and music theory, we read selections from Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex and Judith Butler's Gender trouble. On Thursday, then, we read Fred Maus's "Sexual categories and musical categories" and Suzanne Cusick's "Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem." Of all of the topics we're discussing in this class, I had the most difficult time finding a general reading for embodiment (I'll still take suggestions!). I had considered "Toward an embodied cognitive science" by Andy Clark, and eventually settled on Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" I enjoyed the thought experiment that the article takes the reader through; I'm not sure my students got from it what I was hoping they would.

So I decided to assemble a little lecture along the lines of "what embodiment means to me." A sort of transcript of that lecture appears below.

I positioned Descartes' formulation "I think, therefore I am" as the point where the mind and the body were initially separated. According to Descartes, there are concepts and ideals that exist only in the mind, and that we can even rationalize our bodies using simply our minds. Descartes tries to disprove his own theory by suggesting that we might simply be brains in a jar (I'm paraphrasing, of course) and that our whole reality might be the work of an Evil Deceiver, who could be deceiving us about not only our existence, but also everything else that we hold to be true (2+2 might not really equal 4 if there was an Evil Deceiver).

I then got into some "problems" of consciousness that make some of Descartes' formulations problematic. We discussed here "what it is like to be a bat," the idea being, if an organism has consciousness, there must be something it is like to be that creature. Nagel tries to get us to embody "bat-ness," pointing out the problems inherent in the approach as he goes. More interesting to my mind* is Michael Tye's book, Ten problems of consciousness. We went through each of the problems, giving examples as I went. Of particular interest to our present class were the last two:

9. The problem of the felt location
10. The problem of the alien limb

The first problem is that when we feel something we actually feel it in our mind, not in the place where we perceive it. For example, if we prick our finger on a thorn, it feels like the pain is in our finger, but in actuality, it's really felt only in our brain. This is borne out in cases such as those documented by Oliver Sacks. We looked at a few cases from his The man who mistook his wife for a hat, including the case of a sailor who had his right pinky amputated, but continued to feel it for some 40 years--to the point where he was still worried about poking himself with the phantom finger.

The second problem also alludes to a condition documented by Sacks. He recounts the story of a patient who wound up on the floor one night after finding a severed leg in his bed. He tried to throw the leg out of the bed, but it turns out that it was in fact his leg. He believed that his leg was an alien limb that didn't belong to him: when he threw it out of the bed, the rest of him followed.

The task of embodiment argues that our bodies are necessary and inseparable from our minds. Many of the conceptual metaphors (a la Lakoff and Johnson) that we use to structure our everyday experiences are rooted in the orientation of our bodies in space. This dependence upon our bodies goes beyond using our senses (which are certainly important). All of our socially constructed notions of gender, disability, and the like have a body (or, more accurately, the idea of bodily difference) at their core. We also discussed how tool usage in the conventional sense (i.e., hammers, violins, etc.) as well as the more abstract sense (i.e., words, language, writing) enable us to think about our world.

We moved on from here to ecological perception, much of which was taken from the Clark article mentioned above as well as a book by Eric Clarke called Ways of listening. For our purposes, we focused on the following aspects:

That our bodies interaction with our environment in meaningful ways. In some cases, our environment governs how our bodies operate. Clark gives the example of the bluefin tuna which, on paper, is not a very strong swimmer. As a result of its ability to interact with its environment and read currents, create vortices with its tail, etc., it's actually one of the stronger swimmers in the ocean.
The perception-action cycle. Sounds stimulate us to do things. When the mailman opens the mailbox outside my front door, my dog recognizes that sound and comes immediately to the defense of our house. My dog's barking stimulates me to chase him around the house in an attempt to quiet him down and reassure him that nothing is wrong.
Learning as differentiation. Our environment is a complex, chaotic amalgamation of things, sounds, stimuli. As we grow, we learn to distinguish among the objects that comprise our environment. Musically speaking, studies have shown that inexperienced listeners recognize a chord as a single object; trained musicians can discriminate the individual tones.
Affordance (which is closely related to the perception-action cycle). Any stimulus affords a rich web of possible gestures. In a chapter in a forthcoming book on music and gesture, Rolf Inge Godoy provides a great example of this from the Charlie Chaplin film, The great dictator:

In this scene, Chaplin's movements are not musical per se, but they embody some of the characteristics associated with making those sounds on an instrument.

Fundamentally, an embodied theory of music positions music as something bodies do and suggests that we comprehend music in terms of our body's familiarity with the movements required to produce these sounds. Elsewhere in the literature, Godoy and his colleagues have done some fascinating work on air-instrument playing, studying non-musicians and expert musicians. I won't spoil the ending, but the articles are quite interesting.

On Thursday, we did a little experiment. I had the students play air-piano to a recording of Glenn Gould playing Liszt's transcription of the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony. I then had them play air-something to a recording of the orchestral version of the same piece and had them describe the difference between the two experiences. There is a great sentence in one of Godoy's articles. He writes: “The point is that orchestration affords an intrinsic choreography of sound-producing gestures, a choreography that in turn may be appreciated by listeners as rich gestural affordances of the orchestral sound.” One of my students proved this point exactly when he said that he had a difficult time deciding which air instrument to play during the orchestral version.

I'd welcome any comments, suggested reading, etc. on this post. It's a fascinating topic to me, one that I think is still very much in its infancy, but one that has the potential to be very rewarding.

*In a jar or not.

Current trends I

2009-08-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, we had the first meeting of my current trends in music theory course. The class comprises graduate students from a variety of disciplines: we have a theorist, a few composers, an ethnomusicologist, a few conductors, several percussionists and some vocalists. Following the usual administrative first-day presentation (introductions, going over the syllabus, etc.) I asked my students a series of questions and had them write down their answers. The questions were:

What is music theory?
Is music theory different from musical analysis? If so, how?
What does music theory (and/or music analysis) attempt to show; that is, what is the ultimate goal of doing an analysis?

Most of the answers were pretty much what I (and many of you, I suspect) was anticipating. Most people said something about uncovering the structure of the piece. A few mentioned something about expression, and a few mentioned something about helping people perform the piece.

I then set them to task analyzing Schubert's "Du bist die Ruh." I had no particular reason for choosing that piece, other than it was short and had a text. I gave them no specific direction beyond "analyze this as though it were a final project in an upper-level undergraduate theory class." They were allowed to interpret "analyze" in any way they chose. I played a recording of the song, sung by Ian Bostridge.

Most students (again, as expected) went through and identified the key. The majority of them then looked for large-scale form and worked their way down to the smaller details of the piece (again, pretty much as I expected). One student--one of the vocalists--examined text setting in some detail. I put a hasty Schenkerian graph of the first phrase on the board to show them another possibility. After a general class discussion, I then asked them what their analysis didn't tell us.

A few people brought up the notion of cultural/historical context. In order to understand a piece fully, we need to know the circumstances under which it was composed. One person brought up the issue of translating the German, which, it occurs to me now, could have been an interesting point of departure for talking about interpretation. That is to say that we can only be so accurate when we translate from German to English: German, for instance, features gendered articles (der, die, das) whereas English only features the neutral article (the).

What emerged from that discussion was that music analysis (theory?) as it tends to be taught to our undergraduates is very much a structuralist approach. It presumes that most everything you need to know about a piece can be found in the notes themselves. If everything we need to know about the piece can be found in the notes themselves, then we could argue (as many theorists throughout the ages have) that there is a sort of objective truth implicit in the music that can be revealed through the thoughtful application of our analytical tools.

The conversation then veered toward subjectivity and how different people at different times understand music differently. I brought up the fact that there are a number of settings of "Du bist die Ruh" (Fanny Mendelssohn is the only composer that I can recall) and that, if we listened to her setting next, we'd need to examine it in light of what we (now) know about Schubert. We are also listening to it through ears that have heard not only Fanny Mendelssohn, but also Stravinsky, the Beatles, rap music, a variety of world musics, film music, etc. So try as we might, we can never fully understand the circumstances under which the piece was first composed or experienced. We talked about intention and the difficulties (impossibilities?) of knowing what the composer intended. We talked about a sort of embodied understanding (a la Mead's "kinesthetic empathy"): singers understood the piece--felt the piece in a very different way from the percussionists (who shared that they focused mainly on the rhythm).

This week, we're reading Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A very short introduction and trying to put names with the faces of topics that started to emerge at the end of last class period. I've given them the option of reading Barthes' "The death of the author" and Althusser's "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses." If that doesn't scare them off, then I don't know what will! :)

TA boot camp

2009-08-25T04:59:00.001-07:00

School is starting to get underway. We had our first faculty meeting yesterday and classes start on Thursday. This morning, we have our fourth annual TA Boot Camp. We've done this right before school starts for the past few years as a way of giving our TAs a leg up in the classroom. We get a variety of graduate students with a wide variety of teaching experience. Boot camp provides them with an opportunity to meet the faculty and each other, pick up some quick and dirty pedagogical advice, and get basics like the syllabus, textbooks, and room keys taken care of.

In years past, we've devoted an entire day to the boot camp. We start with an icebreaker activity and discuss first day of class strategies. This was followed by a roundtable with the theory faculty members that covered issues of academic integrity, classroom management, and asking and answering questions. This was followed by good harmony teacher/bad harmony teacher--easily the best part of the day. One of our faculty would get up and demonstrate good teaching practices for 20 minutes, which was followed by a ten-minute discussion period (what was good about what you saw?). This was followed by 20 minutes of bad harmony teacher, where one of us would get to have a bit of fun demonstrating bad pedagogical practice. One of my colleagues one year just stood in front of our "class" and read in a monotone from the Kostka/Payne for 20 minutes, yelling at anyone who laughed. This, too, was followed by a ten-minute discussion of things that were bad and/or could have been done better.

Following a break for lunch, we had another roundtable on pedagogical practices. We discussed testing, grading, teaching ear training, and cooperative and active learning strategies. We also touched on closely-guarded faculty secrets like FERPA and passcode to the smart classroom equipment. This was then followed by another round of good teacher/bad teacher, this time with aural skills.

This year, for a variety of reasons, I've had to scale it back to two and a half hours. I'm basically going to do a PowerPoint show with a variety of group activities scattered throughout. We'll basically cover the same topics: we just won't have time for the good and bad demonstrations. If I get around to it, I'll try to post my slideshow here.

I think even if the students only get to know us and one another, and can take away a handful of new--if fairly small--teaching tricks, then the boot camp was successful. For those with little or no teaching experience, it puts them somewhat at ease. For those with considerable experience, it provides a forum for the exchange of ideas.

Criminalizing music

2009-08-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

I listened to an interesting podcast the other day from the Library of Congress' Music and the Brain series. The podcast was about using classical music to deter crime, which I've written about briefly here.

The interviewee, Jacqueline Helfgott, spoke about the criminalization of certain types of music; namely, rap, punk, and heavy metal. This got me thinking about a few things. First, how does music become criminalized? (She mentioned the work of an author, Jeff Ferrell, who has evidently written quite a lot on the topic. I hope to read some of it before too long.) Is the music criminalized because of the people/places that are associated with it? Are there power structures that criminalize music? The PMRC comes immediately to mind. Is there something in the music itself that warrants criminalization? The lyrics?

I'm sure Jacques Attali has something to say about this. It's been a while since I've read his book. Might be time to revisit it.

I bring this all up now in light of my recent post on Christian heavy metal (and, to a small degree, rap). I think the view of certain genres as "criminalized" adds a more sophisticated wrinkle into my earlier confusion. If it's the music (i.e., the actual sounds) that's criminalized, then can the Christian lyrics redeem genre? If it's the lyrics that criminalize the song, then what role does the music play in our understanding? If there are power structures in place, by what criteria do they determine what is criminalized and what isn't? What about the behaviors and/or social situations of the listeners? I'm a middle-class white guy living in a small(-ish) town in Texas. I happen to love rap music and heavy metal. Am I guilty of something by association? Does my liking the music somehow decriminalize it?

*Sigh*... so many questions. I see this growing into a paper before too long. Stay tuned.

Metal Monday VI: Tuesday edition

2009-08-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

My guilty pleasure reading in Santa Fe this past weekend was a recently released biography of Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. The book, written by Joel McIver, features a nice blend of recollections, research, and technical information about Burton's playing (!). Burton was an early hero of mine: his bass playing I think was rivaled only by Geddy Lee of Rush and Primus' Les Claypool.

One of the fascinating revelations of the book is just how seriously Burton (and his parents!) took music. He studied piano and, later, electric bass privately, and actually outgrew several teachers. He learned to play in a variety of different styles: his last teacher actually had him playing Bach transcriptions. He listened to a wide variety of music as well, including the Misfits, R.E.M., Black Sabbath, Rush, and Return to Forever (a fusion group featuring super-bassist Stanley Clarke). His eclectic tastes rubbed off on his fellow band members, who also learned to listen to and appreciate a variety of music.

Burton was quite well read, had good grades, and studied music in college. His parents were very supportive, offering to support him while he was in school. They made a deal with him: we'll support you through school, but if the music thing doesn't work out, then you're on your own.

Although most of Metallica's material was written by James Hetfield (the vocalist and rhythm guitarist) and Lars Ulrich (the drummer), Burton's musical knowledge was held in high esteem among the band members, and his suggestions were taken very seriously:

Cliff also knew more about time signatures than the others, but to this day the Metallica canon is largely bereft of unusual times. As Kirk shrugged: "The only person who was able to figure out a time and write it on a piece of paper was Cliff. He had an immense knowledge of timing, musical harmonies, and music theory in general." Perhaps Cliff's knowledge of time signatures failed to rub off, but the other members of the band certainly learned a lot about other aspects of theory as the months passed. Some of this came from Cliff's teaching, and some of it was simply because he played different kinds of music (82)

Once he joined Metallica, he apparently continued to practice (on his own) four to six hours a day. He inspired the other band members to keep learning on their instruments, too. Ulrich relates that he and the others would often take lessons when they had down time between tours and recording. Ulrich said something to the effect of "what's the point of doing something if you have no room to grow?"

Among the hallmarks of Burton's playing are his use of his fingers, not a pick (significant in light of the sheer speed of some of Metallica's songs); his use of distortion and effects; and his ear for melody. He wasn't exactly the lead voice or the frontman of the group (in the way that Les Claypool or Geddy Lee was), but he was often given ample opportunity to shine. In fact, on Metallica's first album, he was allowed a bass solo track:

Here are a few examples of his playing:

"For whom the bell tolls," live

Soloing with his first band, Trauma:

I feel compelled to dig out the electric bass and try to remember all the Metallica songs I learned in high school...

BTW, Half the reason this is all so interesting (to me, at least) is that Burton died tragically in a tour bus accident in 1986. He was 24 years old.

Practicing

2009-08-05T09:04:00.001-07:00

One other thing on the to-do list (which is, sadly, often the first thing to go when other business comes up): practicing. I have a busy two weeks in September:

Concert no. 1, Sept. 15

Mozart, symphony no. 39
Wagner, Siegfried Idyll
Bach, Brandenburg concerto no. 2

Concert no. 2, Sept. 18-20

Saint-Saens, Carnival of the animals (I'm playing the Elephant solo!)

Concert no. 3, Sept. 25-26

Shostakovich, Symphony no. 9
Beethoven, Symphony no. 9

The Mozart, Saint-Saens, and Beethoven are all at the top of the list of double bass excerpts. If I had to prepare any one of them for a given week, I'd have my work cut out for me. The Shostakovich is also proving quite tricky. It's been a while since I've played the Wagner--I don't recall it being too difficult (for the bass). And Bach will always be Bach.

I've been trying to get in at least an hour a day, and have been marking my parts meticulously with fingerings, bowings, metronome marks, notes from the previous day's practice, etc. so that I can work as efficiently as possible. I fully expect to be snowed under with the first week of school, so the more of this stuff I can get under my fingers now, the happier I'll be.

Motivation

2009-08-05T07:44:00.001-07:00

Some sound pedagogical advice, courtesy of Rosetta Stone:

Class participation (or, 'Tis the season)

2009-08-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

Reality is setting in and it's time to start thinking about the fall semester. My wife and I are going to Santa Fe this weekend to see Mozart's Don Giovanni and eat some proper food. Then some friends of ours are coming in from out of town to spend the better part of a week with us. Then it's off to Cleveland for another friend's wedding. Then classes begin. Since I've been at TTU, the faculty have been required to report the week before classes start: we'd show up on Monday, have faculty meetings, TA boot camp (more on this later), etc. and then classes would start a week later--the next Monday. The week offered a nice transition period from the freedom of summer to the craziness that is the first few weeks of school. This year, we report on Monday and classes start on Thursday.

All of this is to say that I don't have all that much time between now and the first day of school to get my act together. I'm teaching two sections of aural skills III, my current trends in music theory class (more on this later, I hope) and a seminar through the Honors College designed for (non-music major) freshmen (it's called a First-Year Experience course; more on this later, too, maybe) that's an introduction to Performance Studies. I'm really looking forward to this semester for a variety of reasons. I like the classes I'll be teaching quite a lot and I'll only be on campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Every year it seems like my syllabi get longer and longer. As a state institution, we're required to put all kinds of language in our syllabi about religious holidays, students with disabilities, the last day to drop a class, etc. My theory pedagogy syllabus last year I think ballooned to about 15 pages. As I see it, this is all good: the syllabus basically acts like a contract between you and the student. If something goes wrong, you can simply point to the syllabus and say "this is what we agreed upon at the beginning of the semester. It says the policy is ______."

This year (for reasons that I won't get into) I'm adding a class participation rubric. Class participation has long been one of the slipperiest things to assess and it's gotten me into trouble on a couple of occasions. It seems to me that participation should be relatively straightforward, especially at the graduate level. Do the readings, analysis, whatever; come to class; talk about it.

I found a rubric online from which I am borrowing heavily in the creation of mine. Here's a link. I like that it incorporates attendance: obviously you can't participate if you're not in class. I also like that it stresses that students must demonstrate these criteria. I had a student once ask me if nodding in agreement with his peers constituted class participation. Now I have something to point to and mark in the grade book. The rubric also distinguishes between students who contribute freely and those who must be called on; it distinguishes between factual recall and analysis and synthesis of the material.

So it's one more page on the syllabus, but hopefully it will alleviate some aggravation (for me and the students!) in the long run.

Metal Monday V

2009-07-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been absent from blogging of late. The Tour de France was on. For three weeks. With like five hours of coverage a day. I don't feel bad losing most of my July to watching bike racing, since I'm not a sports fan in general and don't spend most of my weekends glued to ESPN, Monday Night Football, whatever.

It is still Monday, so I'm going to slide one of these in just under the deadline. I think, though, that the Metal Monday series might come to a screeching halt after this one, since I've found a tremendous blog about all sorts of heavy metal music, culture, etc.: METAL INQUISITION. Be warned: although it's quite an informative, entertaining blog, occasionally the contents are... well... not safe for work (although, I suppose it depends on where you work). Henceforth, I'll leave you in their capable hands.

At any rate, today's post is on Vengeance Rising, a Christian metal group. A friend of mine let me borrow one of their tapes in high school and I had no idea they were a Christian band (I had no idea my friend listened to Christian music, for that matter--his hobbies included shooting cats with a BB gun). Much like Christian rap, Christian metal seems to have quite a lot of bias to overcome. Both genres seem to be strongly affiliated with many things that Christianity frowns upon. The lead singer sheds some light on this conundrum:

(video courtesy of--you guessed it--METAL INQUISITION)

Bands like Slayer* (to take perhaps an extreme opposite example) are more along the lines of what most people think of when they think of heavy metal: dark lyrics about death, hell, Satan, etc. Bands like Vengeance Rising, however, use many of the same tropes to present a message of hope and salvation. There seems to me a sort of cognitive dissonance when I hear Christian metal (or Christian rap): how can this really be Christian? Musically, they're aligning themselves with a variety of non-Christian values. The intent is to lure people (like my teenage self, no doubt) who have questions about life, the universe, and everything; who like Slayer and Megadeth (I was never a big fan of either of those two bands, come to think of it) or Metallica and to speak to them in their vernacular. They're more like chameleons, I'd say.

One of these days, I think I'd like to write a book on the contradictions inherent in Christan metal and rap. So far, I have yet to find a Christian rap artist that can hold a candle to a mainstream rapper (although T-bone is pretty darn good). Most of them sound pretty cheesy, I think--their metal counterparts were more successful at blending in. Perhaps it's just a matter of time?

In the interest of fair and balanced, there were some pretty cheesy Christian metal acts, too:

*Obviously this isn't the "official" video. I chose it because of a) the album cover (Show no mercy); b) the song title; c) the actual music.

Around the horn

2009-07-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T06:56:00.001-07:00

(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

2009-06-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-06-10T06:22:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

~~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...

Metal Monday II

2009-06-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

This week's Metal Monday band is Kreator. I saw my first Kreator video on the Headbanger's Ball, back when it used to be three hours long and have interviews, etc. (That was back when MTV actually had something to do with music.)

I was an avid electric bass player in high school. Unlike many of my peers (and many other electric bass players period) I refused to play with a pick. Some of this was no doubt a result of my training as a double bassist, but there was part of me who wanted to have the bragging rights of being able to play as fast with my fingers as my friends could with a pick. I also didn't like the percussive attack of the pick, come to think of it. So I was constantly on the lookout for bands whose music would challenge and ultimately improve my technique. I went from playing with two fingers to three fingers. Four fingers didn't work for me so well: my pinky was too short.

I had been doing pretty well playing Metallica, Anthras, Danzig, and Nuclear Assault (the topic of an upcoming blog post): Kreator provided the biggest challenge. Here was the song that introduced me to them (sorry--I can't embed it):

Kreator: Betrayer

The other great thing about Kreator is the voice of the lead singer, (Mike) Petrozza. He is credited with being a pioneer in the realm of Cookie Monster singing.

Here's the real pioneer of Cookie Monster singing.

New composer

2009-05-31T05:13:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had the pleasure of working with composer and conductor Nick White. I'm playing his Magnificat with one of our local church choirs. It's really a great piece--I would encourage you to head over to his website and have a look (and listen) around.

Metal Monday

2009-05-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

I know, it's not Monday. I've been revisiting many of the bands that I listened to in high school. I was excited because Kreator was going to be in Lubbock on Sunday (!), but they didn't show up. Exodus was there instead. I'll write about both of those bands later, but I wanted to kick off this series with the most extreme metal band I can remember, Nitro. Here's there video for "Freight train," their only real hit (and I use the term loosely):

Nitro comprises Jim Gillette on vocals, Michael Angelo Batio on guitar, T.J. Racer on bass, and Bobby Rock (not the producer) on drums. Everything about Nitro was remarkably overdone. Gillette boasted a five-octave range: according to Wikipedia, they were signed to a record deal after he shattered three wine glasses with his voice at a gig. Batio was (and still is, I think) a hero to shredders everywhere: his over-and-under left hand technique (see at the beginning of the video) and the infamous quad guitar that descends from the heavens at about 2:18 into the video set him apart from other metal guitarists at the time. And, let's face it, the hair is second to none.

Gillette is now married to the first lady of heavy metal, Lita Ford. Batio has a solo career and has been releasing instructional videos such as this one:

Watch Michael Angelo Batio VERY INFORMATIVE shred lesson !!!!!!! in Comedy | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Magical double bass?

2009-05-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

In doing some research on (i.e., Googling) the double bass in Russia, I stumbled across this, which is old news, apparently:

Tonya Grotter and her Magical Double Bass

It's a Russian parody/unauthorized copy/cultural adaptation of the Harry Potter books (which I'm proud to say I still haven't read, despite working at a Barnes and Noble at the height of their popularity). But it's totally different--the girl attends Abracadabra Magic School and flies around on a Double Bass.

The book is (not surprisingly) not available in English translation. I'm not going to get into all of the legal problems surrounding it. I did manage to find an unauthorized (!) translation* of part of it:

Chapter 4: "They forged Rvakli?"

"Tsviang!" hummed the string third from the end, which Tanya pressed
closer to the middle of the fingerboard. Hardly had the sound faded
when on the loggia sprang up a fat round head in a copper helmet. It was
about the same size as a decent cauldron, and fearsomely rotated its
gaze. The head's appearance, frankly, was like a robber's. Its curved
nose had at some time been dented by a fist, and on its cheek it
displayed a long scar.

"They forged Rvakli?" it asked, when its gaze settled on the little
girl.

"They didn't forge Rvakli...I made a little mistake...." mumbled
Tanya, attempting to hide behind the double bass.

[...]

Tanya backed up in fright and, hoping the head would disappear,
quickly ran the bow across the neighboring string.

"Bzhiangg!" droned the string thickly. No, the head didn't
disappear. Instead there immediately arose another right alongside,
even more bandit-like than the first and adorned with fluffy feldwebel
whiskers.

*Do two wrongs make a right? What about my unauthorized reproduction of the unauthorized translation of the unauthorized parody/copy?

Proofreading

2009-05-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

I've been reading quite a lot of student papers this past week and I'm bothered (as I usually am) by the lack of proofreading that takes place. Students--proofread your papers! Read them out loud. Print them out and read them and mark them with a red pen. The best thing, I've found, is to have someone else proofread it. Some recent favorites:

I attended a performance of Candied by Leonardo Bernstein
After the first half of the concert, there was a fifteen minute intervention
The next piece I heard was Beethoven's "Stephen King" overture, op. 117.

Something else that I've noticed in quite a few papers is sudden changes in font size and/or style. For me, this is an immediate red flag that plagiarism is afoot.

Here's Taylor Mali on the the impotence of proofreading (WARNING: this is rated PG-13, at least):

If you're still not convinced, here's a real-world example. I was on the search committee for the recent theory/composition opening that we had here at TTU. We had around 95 applicants for the position. When you have to wade through 95 CVs and cover letters, you look for just about any reason to eliminate one of them. One of the first people I ruled out was someone who thought that he would be a great fit for the University of Alabama School of Music.