As a person who likes to play guitar with my hands, I’m especially impressed with people who play guitar with their feet. Here’s another good foot-guitar player:

Harry Shearer has put together this little “number.” It has a simple theme that everyone should be able to follow.

Hilary Hahn is a brilliant young violinist. She is incredibly musical (not all musicians are musical), and I return to her music on a regular basis for inspiration and energy. Here is a link to her bio on her website.

I recently found a few YouTube videos of Hilary Hahn performances. Until this point, I had heard her music, though I hadn’t seen her perform. Enjoy!:

And here is a bit of a documentary, including Hilary talking about her music:

Will.i.am has done another impressive job of assembling a huge talented group of people to convey his message.

To learn more about this video, visit Soupy Trumpet.

The great Leonard Cohen with the equally great Sonny Rollins and gospel-inspired backup.

This is basically Leonard Cohen’s version of the Rosh Hashanah prayer Unetaneh Toker:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

(from the Orthodox Union web site)

Guilt and Pleasure magazine quotes Cohen as deriving the song “from the melody which I heard when I was sat in a synagogue. And of course the ending of my song is something different. ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ This is my kind of prayer: who is it, or what is it, which determines man’s life?”

Would the world be a better place if young Leonard had been spared the “child abuse” of hearing this prayer in synagogue? Who knows?

And he does it well. This is no silly stunt.

I’d never seen anything like this before (I learned about it after reading a post at SoupyTrumpet). It’s a song based on a speech Barack Obama delivered in New Hampshire on January 8, 2008. The music is performed by will.i.am of the rap group Black Eyed Peas, assisted by a large ensemble:

Jesse Dylan, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, Tatyana Ali, Nick Cannon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, John Legend, Kate Walsh, Aisha Tyler, Amber Valletta, Taryn Manning, Nicole Scherzinger, Adam Rodriguez, Alfonso Ribeiro, Austin Nichols, Ed Kowalczyk, Eric Balfour, Esthero, Harold Perrineau, Johnathon Schaech, Kelly Hu, Maya Rubin, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

The video was obviously the result of an incredible job of editing, as well as a highly coordinated performance. Somehow, despite all of the technical hurdles faced by the performers and technicians, the video is also, at its core, musical. I’m not the only one impressed; the video has more than one million views on YouTube, despite being posted a couple days ago.

[Note: SoupyTrumpet http://soupytrumpet.com/ is a new site run by the designer of this site, Nick Smith.]

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

That’s the conclusion of this article in The Economist.  The recording industry is going through wrenching changes, many of them well-deserved.

“‘Comes with Music’ is a recognition that music has to be given away for free, or close to free, on the internet,” says Mr Mulligan. Paid-for download services will continue and ad-supported music will become more widespread, but subsidised services where people do not pay directly for music will become by far the most popular, he says. For the recorded-music industry this is a leap into the unknown.

About a month ago, I wrote an e-mail to one of my heroes, the great jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson.

I have been listening closely to Oscar, mesmerized, ever since I started appreciating and playing jazz (when I was 17 years old, back in the mid-1970s). I saw Oscar perform in Champaign, Illinois about 25 years ago. About 20 years ago, I attended an outdoor concert Oscar gave in Boston. I owned about a dozen Oscar Peterson record albums and I studied these relentlessly, until I could anticipate much of his improvisation. It’s one thing to anticipate the music, but it is another to carefully hear it, much less play anything resembling it. I will never come close to playing music like that, no matter how hard I work at it. It’s just a fact of life and it is not a cause for any sadness that I will never come close to playing music at that level. In that regard, I am a member of a huge club.

For those of us who play jazz, it is difficult to decide what to like best about Oscar Peterson. Was it his beautifully arpeggios that spilled like rapids or was it his multi-textured chords, or was it that ebullient left hand that was never content to assume a subservient role to that explosive right-hand? Or was it Oscar’s equanimity, or his unrelenting effort to reinvent and expand his musical scope, or was it the care he took to never musically stomp on those with whom he played, or was his deep-rooted never-ceasing musicality that was never overwhelmed by his surreal technical abilities?

When I wrote my e-mail to Oscar (I found his e-mail address on Oscar’s website), I felt a bit conspicuous. After all, I’m a 51-year-old man who was writing a fan letter to a musician who probably received buckets of fan mail every month. Nonetheless, I wrote an e-mail to Oscar Peterson. In that e-mail, I attempted to express to Oscar how much his playing inspired me over the years. I told him that my favorite album was Tristeza (although it was difficult to decide on a “favorite”). I tried to explain to Oscar that his music was more than just music.

I knew that Oscar had had a stroke in 1990s, losing the use of his left hand for two years. though he worked his way back to playing concerts. I had read, however, that his health was not good in 2007, so I ended my email to Oscar by wishing him well and expressing hope that he was in good health.

Three days ago, on Christmas Eve, Oscar Peterson died of kidney failure. Like most people who truly love jazz, I felt I knew Oscar more than I knew most of my friends. That’s how it is when you listen to someone with such musical intelligence so carefully for so long. What kind of musician was Oscar Peterson? It’s time to show, rather than tell. The following video is a performance of “You Look Good to Me,” performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1977. It’s an unusual combination of musicians, as you’ll see–it includes Oscar playing along with Ray Brown and Niels Pedersen, both playing the upright bass. Notice how Oscar takes a very simple tune and develops it-—this was not the only time Oscar took a quiet simple song and injected it with an overflowing musicality; this was one of his trademarks. Notice the intense collaboration among the musicians. You simply won’t find better jazz musicians anywhere or anytime (the bass solos of Brown and Pederson are also exquisite). With regard to Oscar, you’ll never see a keyboard player with a better command of the keyboard, a consequence of Oscar’s intense study of classical music along with jazz.

Here’s what MSNBC had to say about Oscar on Christmas Eve:

Oscar Peterson, whose early talent, speedy fingers and musical genius made him one of the world’s best known jazz pianists, has died. He was 82. (more…)

I’m a newcomer to an extremely popular website called Lifehack.  The site specializes in “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.” 

There is obviously a lot to consider at Lifehack.org.  One might wonder, though, how much time one should spend on productivity lest one’s productivity sags.  Despite this self-limiting concern, Lifehacks marches on relentlessly, reporting on hundreds of ideas, big and small, that claim to enhance productivity. 

I really enjoyed a post called:  “Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus.”  Mingus was a highly respected bass player, composer and band leader. 

I’ve played a fair share of jazz guitar over the years (I’ve long been inspired by the music of Wes Montgomery).  that experience often has me wondering how much of those jazz techniques transferred over to other activities.  In particular, is jazz playing merely good subliminal therapy, mental chiropractic, or do some of those jazz skills have clear relevance to other domains?

The author of this Mingus post, Dustin Wax, was inspired by Mingus’ autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, arguing that some jazz techniques do indeed transfer to other walks of life.  To me, Wax’s arguments make intuitive sense.  His article is succinct and well-crafted.  Here’s a sample:

You don’t play alone: Too many people think about the great Jazz geniuses as exemplars of individualism: free minds striving for greatness. Here’s what Mingus would do when a soloist thought too highly of his own genius — he’d direct the band to stop playing, leaving the soloist hanging without any backup, looking like a fool. Improvisation is as much about the relationships between people as it is about our own self-expression; work with the input of those around you instead of trying to stand out against it.

Here are some of Mingus’ jazz rules Dustin Wax found to be useful beyond jazz playing.  I found myself nodding agreement to each of these:

Go with the flow

Learn the rules so you can break them

Play by ear

Embrace limits (Infinite choice is paralyzing)

When you make a mistake, keep playing

But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game…

That’s about the only song I can stand to listen to the Rolling Stones do.  Musically, thematically, it all comes together for them.  It’s perfect.  Beyond that, while I certaiinly like a lot of their songs, I cannot abide listening to the Stones.  Particularly, I can’t tolerate Mick Jagger’s sorry excuse for a singing voice.  Call me old fashioned, but a hoarse tenor croak is not pleasant to listen to.

(To be fair, I can’t stand Tony Bennet, AC/DC, Rod Stewart. Or Bruce Springsteen, largely for the same reasons.)

I start this piece with that bit of personal revelation for a reason.  Voice, to me, is very important.  Getting it right, using it properly, saying something meaningful…they all work together.  One may argue over style vs. substance—and there is validity to the argument, for certainly some people have nothing but style (Celine Dion comes to mind) and it would be nice if they had something to say—but ultimately, to get across what you mean, the two must work hand-in-glove.

When Erich invited me to contribute to Dangerous Intersection, I agreed under the proviso that I use a pseudonym.  My reasons were many, but mainly I wasn’t sure how good I’d be at it, and I wanted to practice.  But practicing in public can be…dicey.  So while I learned better how to do this, I elected to do it behind the cloak of an alter ego.

Jason Rayl is my creation.  In many ways, he is me.  He is a character in an unpublished novel I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, the first novel I ever completed.  It’s a big sucker and may never see the light of day, but the main character is very much me.  Or, at least, a very idealized version of who I thought I was and who I thought I’d like to be.  I grew out of him, but from time to time he’s been useful.

My name is Mark W. Tiedemann and I write science fiction.  You can find my books on Amazon.  I’ve posted a link to my own website, which I’ve just finished revamping.  It’s not all done yet, but done enough.  There, you’ll find a page called The Distal Muse, which is where I post news and assorted ramblings, and may now be posting much of what I’ve been posting here.  If Erich permits, I may cross post.

It’s not so much that I think I’ve mastered this form of writing—I wonder how many ever master their words—but I think the experiment has paid off and frankly I’m not in the least ashamed of anything I’ve put on Dangerous Intersection.  I would not be ashamed of the content in any event, but the voice….ah, the voice.  From time to time in my life I’ve committed actual songwriting.  Whatever other merits my attempts may possess, I do not sing them myself.  I don’t have the voice.

When Stephen King did away with Richard Bachman, he declared that Bachman had died “from cancer of the pseudonym.”  In Jason’s case, it was bad cold.

I said I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, fifty plus short stories.  Writing fiction of any kind forces one to grow perspective.  Writing science fiction requires an appreciation if not a full understanding of how systems work and why things come together the way they do.  Historical writing shares this.  What it has done for—or to—me is cause me to see as many sides of an issue as I can grasp.  Consequently, I cannot abide doctrinaire positions, ideologues, Us Or Them thinking.  This has also caused many friends to view me with frustration and consternation, because they can’t pin my sympathies down.  Am I a liberal?  A conservative?  Reactionary, radical, libertarian?  Relativist?

See all of the above.  More often than not I take a “curse on both your houses” approach, because more often than not the primary issues are overlooked, run down, trampled, or twisted in the name of political expediency.
This has caused me to draw back from posting on some topic on which I have strong feelings, but can’t quite find the center of, and don’t wish to shortchange the complexities of what may really be going on in the interest of presenting a solid front for one position or another.

For instance, this whole mad, trendy, fashionable rush for bio-fuels.  I have friends who two years ago would never have admitted to any sympathy with Green anything and are now on the bandwagon for ethanol.  Why?  “We need to become independent of foreign oil.”  And when I say, “oh, so we should become dependent then on foreign sugar?”  they look at me as if I’d just farted at the birthday party.  See, they now support this for political reasons, not environmental reasons, and I find that just as objectionable as unthinking support for Big Oil.  It will solve nothing, just shift the focus of the problem.  The issues are far more complex than party politics allow.  Even though the bedrock issue is as simple as first-year algebra, and no one really wants to talk meaningfully about it.

Which means I stand outside both groups and lob stink bombs.  Not a comfortable place to be.

But it’s where I am and where I live.

So I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself.  So now you know who and what I am and can accept or reject what I say with full knowledge that you’ve been addressed by a Science Fiction writer.

Excuse me?  The bedrock problem?  Oh, sorry.  Population.  Very simply, there are just too damn many people on the planet, with no obvious possibility of curtailing the growth rate.  People don’t want to talk about that.  In order to live, to survive, to be what we may potentially be, we have to burn energy.  We have to burn something.  What that something is, frankly, is less important in the long run than the fact that we have to burn it.  Solar is passive, sure, but make solar panels we have to use petroleum, heat, the kind of high tech that has emerged as a legacy of a burning economy.  Hydropower is also pasisve, but building dams has other environmental drawbacks and is not transportable everywhere.  Geothermal?  Well, sure, but we may be releasing heat.

No simple answer.  The one factor, which if addressed could begin to solve some of these problems is population, but people insist, in aggregate, that they are separate from “nature” in this instance.  We take for ourselves the unhampered right to reproduce at will, without restraint, and that means that all the solutions we come up with for this overcharged fossil fuel existence are band-aids.  What could be sustainable and manageable at a billion people is a horrific problem at seven billion.  The planet isn’t getting any bigger.

There have been science fiction writers talking about this for decades.

Anyway, if you’ve a mind, come over to my website occasionally.  Or, if the whole pseudonym thing has put you off, stop reading me altogether.  I’m done with the experiment and feel that I have gotten from it what I needed.  So from now on, it’s me you’ll be dealing with.  Not Jason.  Oh, he’s not gone.  He always was part of me and always will be.  But he’s on my advisory board now.  Retired from public life for the time being.

Pleased to meet you…hope you get my name.

It’s getting harder and harder to sell recorded music, though live concerts are still viable, according to this article by the London Times.

What looks like commercial suicide is, in today’s reality, sound business sense. Records, CDs or downloads now have all become downgraded to the status of promotional tools – useful to sell concert tickets and fan paraphernalia. While there is still good money to be made in music, and particularly on the concert circuit, the record business – blame it on piracy, too many CD giveaways or the advent of the recordable CD – is a busted flush.

“If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.”  Mario Andretti

Like most people I know, I try to keep quite a few balls in the air.   Those balls represent things such as prosecuting lawsuits against large unscrupulous businesses.  

Today, for instance, the two lawyers who constitute my firm’s consumer class action practice area (I’m one of the two) sued a large corporate dairy that has been distributing “organic milk” to large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target.  The problem is that the milk was not organic.  A federal investigation recently determined that the dairy engaged in willful violations of organic dairy farm standards.  Our plaintiffs are asking that the customers who paid big premiums for the “organic” milk should be refunded their money, at least the difference in cost between the price of the organic milk and the plain milk.  The plaintiffs in our suit are both mothers of small children.  They both reached deep to pay the extra money so that their children would not be exposed to the hormones and antibiotics of conventional cow milk.  One of the women is a chemist and the other is a biologist.  They had detailed reasons for paying the extra money for the organic milk.  Another reason is that they didn’t want cows to be mistreated in order to provide milk.  These women (and the thousands or millions of other customers in this potential class) were cheated out of substantial sums of money.  Just add up the cost of several gallons of organic milk per week for several years. 

At the law firm where I work, some of us operate on a sad assumption.  If there is a way to cheat customers and probably get away with it, some business, somewhere, will try to cheat its customers.  Cheating customers is not fair to the customers, of course.  But it’s also not fair to those other businesses that play by the rules.  In this dairy farm case, we suspect that the big dishonest dairy probably put some honest organic dairy farmers out of business.  That would be a terrible shame, and that is part of our motivation for suing dishonest businesses. 

Here’s another thing.  This case makes me wonder how many other “organic” foods are not organic.  My gut feeling is that half of the organic food out there is not appreciably different in the way it was grown compared to non-organic, yet people are paying big premiums for it, often to protect their children who are in neurologically sensitive development windows.

Filing lawsuits is only one aspect of my life.  It takes enormous numbers of hours to file and try lawsuits.  It’s can also be physically exhausting work, but it feels compelling and important.  We try to do things right, so we would be proud if anything we did appeared on the front page headline of the newspaper. 

Here’s a problem, though. Doing this demanding work drains hours from other important parts of my life.  I am the father of two young children who are bursting with thoughts and insights, with joyous curiosity.  They still enjoy spending time with their father–I understand that this won’t be the case in a few more years when they are teenagers. I want to take advantage of this time, to spend many hours with them so that I can look back someday and believe that I was a real parent.  There is nothing more important to me than spending time with my children and actively listening to them.  Doing the work of a parent doesn’t allow shortcuts.  A few hours of good quality time here and there doesn’t substitute for the many hours required to be a real parent. I am married to a wonderful woman who makes me laugh and makes me try extra hard to run my life in a way I am proud of.   I wish I could spend many more hours with my family than I do.  We do have bills to pay, though . . .

There are also the other things that are important to me.  We need to keep a household running, which requires cleaning and fixing the house and bill paying and cooking.   Sometimes, believe it or not, we lose things and we have to look for them!  

What are the other important things that require my energy?   Being part of the community, and supporting do-gooder organizations.  We support organizations like Free Press and Public Citizen and Children International.  All of this takes time and money.

What else takes time?  Exercising.  I do that by combining bicycling and commuting.  It’s one attempt at efficiency.  And oh, yeah.  Blogging.  That’s a big commitment.  For whom do I do it?  I won’t pretend.  I do it because it forces me to think more clearly before I hit that publish button.  I makes me analyze ideas more closely than I did before I blogged, because I don’t want to be embarrassed and I don’t want to confuse people.  I do it for because it helps me think more clearly, though I’m honored that others come to visit this site.  I’m amazed and honored, plus I really enjoy the interactions.  I think that blogging has changed me for the better.

What else is important to me?  Playing music (I play guitar and keyboard, occasionally performing in public).  It’s fun but also therapeutic.  Each of these things is a big part of me, but they sometimes tug at me at the same time and this disorients me.

I’d like to spend more time doing each of these things (and many other things I haven’t mentioned), but there are no additional hours.  Every hour at work is an hour away from my family.  Every hour writing is an hour not sleeping. Here’s a danger of trying to live multiple lives: if you take on one thing too many it doesn’t just feel as though you are failing in doing that one additonal activity. Instead, it can feel like everything you do is inadequate, faulty, defective.  But you often don’t know that you’re over that edge until you actually step over to the other side and feel the pain.

I’ve often try to be more efficient.  Sometimes I almost become almost obsessed with efficiency but I truly can’t think of many more ways to squeeze more life out of each week.  There are only 168 hours in each week.  That number is burned into my mind because it feels like a modest handful of time.  It wasn’t always that way. (more…)

I have a seven year old daughter. It would be fun to watch her play the drums as well as this seven year old guy, but that will never happen. Not that I’m at all disappointed!

This is a truly extraordinary exhibition. This video left both of us shaking our heads. It is a performance originally aired on the Johnny Carson Show many years ago. I don’t know the specifics, and I can’t quite make out the name of the drummer. I’m wondering whether he ended up making a living as a professional drummer . . .

This is crazy enough to share. Mozart goes on the road.

The subtitle of “Protest Songs Rise Again,” from the recent edition of Rolling Stone (May 3-17, 2007 issue): ”Everyone from Ozzy to Maroon 5 weighs in on the worst president ever.”

According to this article, rock has now entered “its most politically charged phase since the late Sixties.”  Tom Morellos’s new solo album (The Nightwatchman) “is packed with protest songs that all but call for armed uprising.” 

Political music has been gaining popularity since Bush’s 2004 re-election:

Among the most striking statements were Bright Eyes’ Dylanesque folk song “When the President Talks to God” and Neil Young’s Living With War, which included “Let’s Impeach the President.” “It’s almost impossible to ignore everything that’s going on right now,” says Sum 41 leader Deryck Whibley, who has several fervently anti-Bush songs on his band’s new album, due this summer. ‘You can’t really escape it.”

Some of the most outspoken protest songs this year are from artists whose music is anything but confrontational: Norah Jones sings that the president may be “deranged” on her new song “My Dear Country.” “It just sort of came out in the writing - it wasn’t a decision we made,” she says. Amos is even more direct on her upcoming new album, American Doll Posse. “Yo, George/ Well, you have the whole nation on all fours,” she sings on “Yo George.” Says Amos, “Something in me refused to stand by anymore and watch the war continue without doing something about it.”

Not nearly enough, I think, has been posted on DI about things which I consider just as important as politics, economics, and social issues.  That’s all well and good–DI offers a necessary forum for viewpoints which, while becoming more available in the public discourse, nevertheless need all the voices it can find.  But if we’re talking about the “human animal” then some attention ought to be paid to the things that feed into the soul, if you will, of human beings.  And they can be just as political, just as inflammatory, just as controversial as stem cell research or new taxes or who the A.G. fired this week.  We need to remember occasionally why we even have something called Civilization.  So I want to talk about something important.

Music.  Specifically some discs I’ve acquired in last year or so that I think need some attention.

I live inside music. Sometimes I have a soundtrack playing inside my skull during the day. Growing up going to movies as a weekly ritual with my parents, it always seemed sad to me that “real life” didn’t have a score–things would be so much sweeter, you would know when the momentous event was imminent by the way the string section swelled ominously, or when you were about to get kissed…

Anyway, I sometimes joke that if I had it do all over again, I’d be a jazz pianist. I stumbled on jazz rather late in life, after having first gone through rock’n’roll and classical. I don’t play well enough to actually make money as a musician, but I’ve been gigging once a month at a church open-mic for the past year (I know, I know, I’m an atheist, what am I doing at a church?  Well, there are friends involved and it’s music and…never mind), and it’s been pure joy. So who knows? I may yet find myself with a third career.

But what I wanted to talk about here is some newer music that most folks, I’ll wager, don’t even know about.

Classical.

Probably like most people, I used to think of classical (which includes Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Neoclassical, and so forth) as just “old music” written by dead guys with no amps. The three Bs–Bach, Beethoven, Brahms–and all their musical progeny. I always believed it was sacrosanct–that if, for instance, you didn’t like something, the problem was yours, that you didn’t understand it, not the music’s. It never occurred to me as a teenager that this kind of music had continued to be written and performed, continuously, even up to the present day, even with one example hitting me in the ear every time I saw a movie.

Some of the best 20th Century classical music is locked up in soundtracks. We all know about Korngold and those glorious Robin Hood-type excursions. John Williams is an heir to Korngold. As pure music, some of that material is incredible, and some very heavy composers wrote some of it. Vaughan Williams did a few soundtracks, and Leonard Bernstein did the soundtrack to “On The Waterfront.” It’s snobbery that implies “serious” composers never did movies–Stravinsky did stage plays, as did Prokofiev, so what’s the difference?

That said, however, as pure music, the form has suffered a bit of neglect on the part of audiences. I’ve been to symphony premiers of new pieces and seen empty seats in the hall. It’s a shame and we should be ashamed. This is the fountain from which musical aesthetics flow to all forms, whether we recognize it or not, and it deserves attention.

I have in front of me three CDs I’ve acquired in the last couple of years, one I just bought this weekend, and I want to recommend them.

I have little patience with those “orchestral” versions of rock band oeuvres. The first one I heard, decades ago, was an Andre Kostelanetz album of Chicago’s music. Chicago only had three studio albums out at the time. Mr. Kostelanetz, like so many of his generation, really didn’t “get” rock music, and it showed. He sensed there was meat there, something substantial, that had things to offer the musical connoisseur, but he failed to capture it, and the album was awful. I’ve never heard much improvement.

Until. Youth and Jaz Coleman got together and produced an orchestral album of Pink Floyd. The London Philharmonic plays it. The thing that makes this light years ahead of all the other orchestralizations is that these two gentlemen Got It. They did not do transcriptions of the Pink Floyd originals and then arrange them for orchestra–they took the music apart and rewrote it as if it had been intended for orchestra in the first place. They caught the soul. It is a glorious album. (An example of this reimagining is demonstrated on the album itself by the presence of two versions of Time, and while both are the same melody and theme, they are very different renderings.) All the tracks are taken from Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. The breadth of what orchestral music can do is there, to be turned up and immersed in.

The second album is by another rock artist, guitarist Steve Hackett formerly of Genesis. Hackett is an incredible guitarist. His solo work has transcended most of what he did with Genesis, and when he was with Genesis the band was at a creative peak. I would argue that Genesis in the 70s was the quintessential bridge band, between rock and classical/romantic. Live they were superb. Most of Hackett’s solo work has been in electric guitar, rock format, but I found this one offered through a Classical Music club–A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Acoustic guitar with the Royal Philharmonic. They are tone poems and program pieces set to the Shakespeare, Hackett’s impression of the play. He proves here to be a composer of the first water. It’s sort of a concerto format, the orchestra counterpointing his solo guitar work, but it’s not composed in traditional concerto style. Eighteen tracks, blending together artfully, more like a motion picture soundtrack, but without the obvious predetermined aspects–you know, the love theme, the chase, the revelation, etc.

Now we come to the reason I decided to write this. The newest one. Not quite so new, it was released in 1997, but new enough.

Conversations In Silence, conducted by Paul Gambill leading the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

There are six pieces on this album, two of them compositions by a woman who has clearly drunk deep of Aaron Copland–Conni Ellisor. She wrote the two pieces under commission for the NCO, and the one that caused me to buy the disc is called Blackberry Winter. This is a remarkable piece. First, it’s a concerto. A dulcimer concerto. Right, I thought, a dulcimer…but the range she manages to draw out of it is stunning, and the string sections are redolent of autumn mountains, cold springs, and the possibilities of–

Well, everyone has their own response. I lie listening this music and am continually amazed at the emotions that rise to the surface, drawn by the deep confluence of motif and theme, and the complexity of sounds possible only through the vision of someone who really understands what music can do.

She has another piece on here, Conversations In Silence, which seems based on a different American composer’s template (I’ll let you guess who), and there are four other pieces by different composers.

One of these composers is Samuel Barber, who died in 1981. I was surprised he was still alive then myself. Barber was one of the best American composers of the 20th Century, but also one of the most neglected and underappreciated. His Adagio For Strings has become a movie soundtrack staple–almost a cliche–but a good deal of the rest of his body of work is considerably less well known, which is tragic. He was truly great. He had the range of the finest European composers of the day–like Benjamin Britten and William Walton–but with that uniquely American voice throughout. I have read that Barber was a bitter man in his later years. The piece included here is one of his last.

I have a reasonably good classical collection–not nearly as comprehensive as I’d like, but not bad–and one of the sections in it that has grown is the 20th Century section. I do not believe that, outside of a self-selected group, most of the American composers of that century are known. One of my favorite composers is Howard Hanson. He was a self-defined romantic composer and he can take his place beside Dvorak and Saint-Saen easily. Another American composer I admire greatly is Walter Piston–again, relatively unknown. Both these men should be in the libraries of any serious collector.

Sometime in the 50s, I think, an unfortunate event took place–the splitting of American culture into “popular” and “high”. Radio, 45 rpm records, the juke box, and, finally, television all contributed to divide the public. Now, people chose their taste all on their own, since no one forced them to stop listening to “serious” music. Many stations then played a great deal of the stuff, with educational commentary, some of it live performance by the best orchestras and conductors on the planet. But taste is something that all too often needs time and patience to acquire, and the advent of the “hit” record worked against that patience. The last truly serious music that had broad popular appeal in this country was jazz, and it very nearly died of neglect by the end of the Sixties.

You could argue that rock became serious. Much of it did. But it was not serious music when it drove jazz out of the marketplace, it was largely two-minute hit wonders with a catchy tune and a cute hook. Later, when serious musicians entered the rock idiom and tried to make substantial music with the form, another division occurred and the spectacle of people fighting about what was “good music” in rock centered on the difference between “danceable” and “listenable”. What the argument really was about had to do with whether one could assimilate all the nuance of a given tune on the first listen–popular–versus music that required–huh–patience and attention and maybe several listens.

So contemporary orchestras struggle for funding and societies are established for the express purpose of “preserving” great music. Static art–paintings and sculpture–have it a bit easier with museums. Music needs musicians to live and breathe and that requires more than a building in which to house the work.

I went through what may be a typical cycle for someone like me. Pop tunes led to hard rock led to a rediscovery of some of the classical underpinnings of progressive rock led to jazz led to…

Led to what? Led to a place where I can perceive music as a pure abstraction and hear it on its own terms, whatever the idiom. I listen for depth and richness and intent. The three combine in most of what we think of as “classical” music, and a lot can be found in jazz. It’s a mistake not to learn how to hear it, but once you do find your way into that level of soundscape, a lot that passes for “good” music just isn’t. The trouble is, it can take a long time to learn how to hear it.

In school, we may be exposed to compressed courses of classical music, which more often than not does to our music taste what lit classes do to our reading tastes–leach the joy out of the music (the books) and leave us feeling that if it was written by dead white males, it’s stale and useless.

Do yourself a favor and check out the three discs I’ve mentioned here. Between the three, you may discover that joy you thought this music lacked, and come to find that it’s not so dead after all.
 

[E]ven though people are spending as much time in their cars as they used to, consumers have been turning off music stations in droves. 27 per cent since 2001, I believe, about on par with the declines of CD sales.

You would think this means people are just listening to stolen music played on their Ipod Nanos, but consider this: Sales from independent labels are actually holding steady.

To oversimplify things just a little, this indicates that the labels have been putting out a steady stream of prepackaged junk in an effort to appease the radio programmers and that consumers have been rejecting it.

In his post on Huffpo, Jacob Bernstein puts much of the blame on the commercial consolidation of radio.

This morning I tried to visit a site called OLGA (on-line guitar archive), a place where I had often gone in past years to check out chord progressions for pop/rock tunes.  Many guitarists had worked out tunes as best they could, then posted them at this site.  Over the years, the contributions to the site had been inconsistent on OLGA.  Sometimes many of the chords were incorrect, but they served to get you started to figure the rest out.  Some of the others progressions were truly excellent. 

OLGA served as a cyber-place for thousands of guitarists to exchange chord arrangements for songs.  I’ve played guitar for many years, and this is exactly what guitarists do in person.  It is the best way to learn tunes—we exchange scribbled out chord progressions.

But we won’t do this any more on OLGA.  You see, the owners of the site received a “take down letter,” and that was the end of OLGA.  You can read the letter here.  What are the damages, if one is taken to court?  Up to $30,000.  According to this letter, these guitarists who were merely exchanging chord arrangements were a threat to the livelihood of professional musicians who created the songs.  Never mind that all of those professionals got to be professionals by trading chord progressions.

Here is the legal basis for the take down letter. 

Once again, the little person has been knocked around by big corporations.   I say this because people trying to learn how to strum tunes on their guitars don’t have the money to pay off politicians in order to have an exception carved for their own benefit.

What if you DO have millions to spend (i.e., Disney)?  There’s almost no limit to what money can buy.   If you are a corporation, you likely own lots of the intellectual property.  After all, you’ve squeezed it out of your employees over the years.  And whenever you publish a tune or a photo or movie, you now have the right to monopolize it for the shorter of 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation.  That’s the benefit of the 1998 “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”

You might be wondering how this period got to be so incredibly long.  You wouldn’t be the first.  After all, 50 years ago, here is what was deemed fair:  “28 years, plus the work could be renewed for 47 years, now extended by 20 years for a total renewal of 67 years. 

What is distressing to me is that there is no rational balance between the “rights” of corporate intellectual property owners and the right of society to freely (eventually) enjoy the cultural artifacts were made popular by the people, after all. 

Now we know that guitar players trading chord progressions are a menace to society!  Don’t think about it too much, though, or you’ll realize that all prominent guitarists have traded chord progressions. But now we know that this important part of educating future guitarists is highly illegal.  The horror . . .

Here’s a good article on how Disney obtained the best copyright laws money could buy.  Here’s another. 

In the meantime, I’ll be figuring out the chords to tunes more slowly, on my own.

I might owe some people an apology.  

I recently posted about a song from “Scrubs the Musical,” a television episode that aired a few weeks ago.  The title of this tune is presumably “Everything comes Down to Poo.”  It is a clever and funny tune, but it is also dangerous.

For me (hopefully not for you) that song morphed into an “earworm,” another name for a song that can get stuck in one’s head.  This crazy tune from Scrubs has been following me around relentlessly for the past two weeks.  It has sometimes been distractingly annoying during the day.  It even kept me awake one night last week.

What to do?  I just happen to be reading a cogsci/music book: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. Here’s what I learned from Levitin: There is relatively little scientific work done on the topic of earworms.  What is clear is that

musicians are more likely to have ear worm attacks than non-musicians, and . . . people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms—in some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects.

Hmmm . . . This makes me wonder whether Walgreens carries any over-the-counter medications for OCD . . .

Levitin suggests that the neural circuits representing a song somehow get stuck in “playback” mode, but usually only a small fragment of a song (15 to 30 seconds) is involved.  Ear worms are most likely “simple songs and commercial jingles.”

Marketing professor James J. Kellaris, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati has also studied earworms. (Kellaris has also done some interesting research about customer reactions to the use of music by busisnesses).  He has found that nearly 98% of people have had songs stuck in their heads.  He has found that people tend to be haunted by their own idiosyncratic demon tunes. Musicians are more often bothered by non-musicians. He also notes that women are afflicted significantly more than men. (more…)

I know.  You took lots of lessons and you therefore know how to read music . . .

So play any of these, then.  Delightful and impossible.

I’m in the middle of reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a delightful work by Daniel J. Levitin.   I plan to write about this book when I’m finished reading it, but one thing he wrote in his introduction especially intrigued me.

Levitin writes that our culture makes a distinction between “expert” performers and the rest of us.  We defer to experts to produce music.  In most traditional cultures, it wasn’t that way.  In traditional cultures, everyone who could talk was expected to sing.  Singing and dancing were both natural activities involving everyone. 

Nowadays, expert performers command high prices for their often high-quality work.  “Two concert tickets can easily cost as much as a week’s food allowance for a family of four …”

It seems as though we’ve turned over many important functions to the experts.  Sports is now something that should be done by experts.  The rest of us pay to see them play sports.  This is true, even though many of us who pay the high prices for those sports tickets could really use a lot more workouts ourselves instead of sitting on our butts downing overpriced beer and nachos.

In fact, when most of us try to play music or compete athletically, we do so feeling decidedly inferior, because we have been convinced that we are nothing compared to those well-known performers, X, Y or Z.  Many woman have developed psychological complexes about wearing clothes, due to the constant notoriety given to professional models.  Those “experts” are intimidating.

The same goes for all forms of art, though Youtube and other Internet sites are starting to change that with regard to music and writing.  This site is one of the many blogs written by people who are not paid a living wage to write about these sorts of topics (in fact, none of the writers at this site has been paid anything at all to write at this site).  Bloggers are thus breaking a taboo of sorts. Is this a source of some of the resentment expressed against bloggers by some members of the mainstream media?

In some fields, it’s really not true that all well-known performers are far superior to all amateurs.  Perhaps the experts got an early break and perhaps their continued financial success is path dependent on that early break.  I’m especially thinking of music, where many high paid performers have mediocre talent while many local low-paid performers are superb musicians. 

The general rule, promoted by the media, however, is that the experts are the experts and the rest of us are the amateurs.  With regard to many of the relevant skills, this is literally true, of course.  Most of us couldn’t compete with the experts.  Most of us would look foolish if directly compared with Albert Pujols or Eric Clapton.  But it seems as though a harmful broader message has also been spread in the process:  amateurs shouldn’t even try.

We seem to be a culture that doesn’t simply admire the skills of experts. We give homage to them.  This makes me wonder whether there’s any connection between this general tendency give homage to experts and the willingness of so many Americans to defer to half-baked religious “experts” rather than doing the hard work to carve out their own meaning of life. 

I’m still thinking this one through.

If you like music and animations, you’ll love this music animation.   The linked site doesn’t indicate the creator, but, I learned from the first commenter that this is the work of Animusic.

The Bible version of God doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t believe in any traditional sort of God.  I am not that sort of person who finds any purpose in worshipping or asking favors from invisible Beings.  I don’t ascribe any emotions or sentience (certainly, no vindictiveness) to any Person or Thing that might have created our universe.  How the universe came into being is beyond what I can know. 

I do cherish my universe, though, and I realize that I am an incredibly tiny and incredibly ignorant part of it. Many fervent believers (though not all) would characterize my beliefs as “atheism” although that word, as commonly construed, would characterize me in a misleadingly cartoonish way.  

Given my beliefs, most people would be surprised to hear that I sometimes go to church to be inspired and energized. What’s my secret?  I go to church when no one else is there—I like to go to empty churches.  When nothing else is going on other than one’s own breathing, meditating, thinking and writing, going to church can even be exhilarating.

With a pad of paper and a pen in my hands, in search of solitude, I walked to church twice this week.  I had previously noticed a huge church a few blocks from a courthouse where I sometimes work.  Only after walking to this church on Monday did I learn that it was called “Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Cathedral” in Belleville, Illinois.  Here’s a photo I took on Wednesday (yes, a dreary looking day), just prior to my second “visit.”

The majestic interior of the church is also a treat to the eyes.  The thick stone walls morph into the peak of the ceiling as they rise to meet each other 70 feet in the air. 

               
Even on a dreary day, the natural light works its way into every pew.  Every tiny noise launches up into that vast inner-space like a dissipating butterfly. This incredible space, and the solitude it allows, more than make up for the musty church smell and the uncomfortable pews.  We mustn’t complain about uncomfortable pews, we were told as children.  After all, Jesus had nails driven through his hands for us.

When a church is empty, the overly-pious stained-glass images do not antagonize me.  (more…)