Posts tagged music

I'm loving the typography here, and all the other idiosyncrasies (the over-adornment of the band name, the separate "when" and "time" categories, the image of 9–14-year-olds dragging their own drums and pianos to the audition). And as Stephen Dubner points out, any young group with the organizational skills to book a New York room for two weekend days running has a decent chance they'll stick with the enterprise until they're actually good.

children, discipline, horizons of the possible, music, new york, practice, talent

Nate

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[Psychologist Anders Ericsson’s] work, compiled in the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

I've recently been rediscovering Pierce Pettis—his album State of Grace makes me want to turn in my Yankee identity card and claim my Southern heritage—and he only gets better with time.

music, pierce pettis

Andy

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Since 1996’s Making Light of It, Pettis’s lyrics have become increasingly spare.

The result is lyrical coherence, in the sense that laser light is coherent: every wave in step, reinforcing the entirety to an unexpected intensity.

Pettis’ latest release, That Kind of Love, is in that vein, another step on the way to making every note and rest crucial to the whole. . . . What struck me immediately about the realizations on this CD is how much Pettis has slowed the tempo.

“I am Nothing,” a call to artistic humility (“I am nothing / But the angels sometime whisper in my ear…. / Sometimes I like to make believe / I hear”), pulses at half the speed I heard it in Santa Fe or Cincinnati. “Farewell,” recalling one of Pettis’s ancestors who left Rhode Island at sixteen years of age for an arranged marriage to a man in Alabama, has slowed to a Chopinesque dirge, each chord ringing long and beautifully without sacrificing the melody’s sad energy. Anyone who attends to this song without some struggle against tears is surely dead from the neck down.

All of which returns me to a dilemma I’ve felt with particular acuity since the Over the Rhine twentieth anniversary concerts this past December: if music can so powerfully, effortlessly, and immediately move the human heart, why am I wasting my time with words alone?

For those who are comfortable with the idea of enemies, the question that launched the parable of the Good Samaritan, "Who is my neighbor?" can be incredibly uncomfortable and crucial. For those comfortable with a broad-strokes, "we're all neighbors and it's all good" approach, the question "Who is my enemy?" can, I think, be equally clarifying.

enemies, horizons of the possible, music

Nate

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The following week, Bono and I have one final conversation, and I ask about the album’s last lines: “Choose you enemies carefully, ‘cause they will define you/ Make then interesting, because in some ways they will mind you/ They’re not there in the beginning, but when your story ends/ Gonna last longer with you than your friends.”

Bono “Yeah. Yeah. They’re are going to be closer than your friends. They are going to shape you.”

SOH Are you singing from experience here?

Bono “In a way, I guess. I think one of the things that has set our band apart is the fact that we chose interesting enemies. We didn’t choose the obvious enemies - The Man, the establishment. We didn’t buy into that. Our credo was: no them, there’s only us. Think about it. Every other band was us and them. The Clash, our great heroes. Then U2 arrived and it was no them, only us.  

“What that means is that we picked enemies that were more internal - our own hypocrisy. The main obstacle in the way of our band we always saw as ourselves and our limitations. We never blamed the record company. We never blamed the radio [laughs]. You never heard that from us in 25 years. It was always, can we be better? Can we make the song better, the show? What you’re really dealing with then are the obstacles to realising your own potential. They are nearly always of a psychological, if not a spiritual, nature. The spectres that hold you back, they were our enemies. It was always, ‘You’re supposed to be in a rock’n’roll band. You’re supposed to be rebellious, but you don’t rebel against the obvious.’ And we’d go, ‘No, we don’t. That’s the point.’”

I've gone through three stages with the prerecorded inaugural quartet. First, during the event, awe at what I thought was a live performance in frigid conditions. Second, the next day, a shrugged "of course" when I learned it was a recording. Third, ever since, a growing sense that however understandable the desire to ensure a pitch-perfect performance, it was a huge mistake. This terrific commentary by Eric Felten helps to explain why. The lip- (and bow- and key-) synched world is a gnostic world of false perfections. We must resist it, because it perpetuates one of the world's oldest lies: that we would be better off without bodies.

failure, music, performing arts, technology

Andy

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“There’s too many variables to go live. I would never recommend any artist go live because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance,” [explained Jennifer Hudson’s producer regarding her prerecorded Super Bowl anthem.] His justification echoed Itzhak Perlman explaining why the all-star classical quartet at the inauguration was prerecorded. “It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way,” Mr. Perlman told the New York Times. “This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.”

My, what a standard of perfection is now demanded. No longer is a good or even a great performance good enough. Now we must have performances free from the “slightest glitch.” And since no one—not even a singer of Ms. Hudson’s manifest talent nor a violinist of Mr. Perlman’s virtuosity—can guarantee that a live performance will be 100% glitch-free, the solution has been to eliminate the live part. Once, synching to a recorded track was the refuge of the mediocre and inept; now it’s a practice taken up by even the best artists.

A revival of West Side Story, directed by the 90-year-old author of the 1957 musical's book, aims to redress the original's anti-Puerto Rican bias (or just plain inaccuracy). I hope at least one of the gangs will hold on to the dorky-cool ballet swagger. But even if not, it'd be worth it to hear the songs in Spanish.

broadway, cultural worlds, dance, language, music, performing arts, spanish, theater

Nate

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Added excitement comes from the bilingual reworking of the libretto. When Maria sings I Feel Pretty it comes out as: “Hoy me siento/Tan Hermosa/Tan preciosa que puedo volar/Y no hay diosa, en el mundo, que me va a alcanzar.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the recent hit musical In The Heights, which focuses on a poor neighbourhood of Manhattan’s Washington Heights faced with gentrification, was recruited to rewrite the lyrics. The Sharks sing in Spanish, with English surtitles, while the delinquent Jets sing in English.

Laurents was given the idea of a bi-lingual show after his companion, Tom Hatcher, who died two years ago, saw an all-Spanish staging of the musical in Colombia in which the Sharks – the Capulets of Shakespeare’s play – were transformed into heroes, the Jets into villains.

Laurents intends to make the new version darker and more threatening than previous stagings, certainly more so than the film, of which he is disparaging. “I thought the whole thing was terrible. Day-Glo costumes and fake accents!” he told the Washington Post.

Having watched way more black and white movies than most people I know, I'm relatively familiar with rehashed versions of the Vaudeville—Broadway—Hollywood transition—last week I watched "Broadway Melody of 1929," which was featured the requisite Florenz Ziegfeld stand-in (Eddie Kane as "Francis Zanfield"). Still I have trouble wrapping my mind around the popularity and cultural ubiquity of Ziegfeld and the cultural artifacts—not least the Broadway musical—he helped create. The cinematic references just seem like an inside joke I'm just shy of getting.

cultural worlds, entertainment, music

Nate

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A century is a mere blink in the history of mankind, but it’s a long time in the history of show business. Just about a hundred years ago, a Chicago-born talent manager started a franchise called the “Follies” that set New York on its ear. He apotheosized the showgirl and changed the entertainment rulebook by making the revue an ethnic stew. He later went on to produce “Show Boat,” the first great American musical. But who knows much about Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. today? To most New Yorkers he’s just a name on a dinosaurish single-screen movie house in Midtown.

Even the stars he showcased — Fanny Brice and Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Miller — are mostly just names in the pages of theater histories. Among Ziegfeld’s long A-list of “Follies” regulars, W. C. Fields alone forged a big-time career in the movies, ensuring the only kind of immortality that seems readily marketable today, the kind that can be uploaded onto YouTube in easily digestible nuggets.

To end this little series about reactions to early 20th-century avant garde music, I found this lovely apologea from the poet William Carlos Williams, about George Antheil's "Ballet Mechanique"—whose orchestration called for "16 player pianos (or pianolas) in four parts, 2 regular pianos, 3 xylophones, at least 7 electric bells, 3 propellers, siren, 4 bass drums, and 1 tam-tam." (Here's a video of a modern performance by a robot orchestra). Williams' enthusiasm gets at the idea that valuable art should not (or not only) be an escape from the world but something that equips us to dive back in and make something new of our old surroundings. I'm still not convinced that the "Ballet Mechanique" effect would work more than once or twice for a given listener, but what a once or twice!

horizons of the possible, modernity, music, noise, poetry, robots

Nate

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Here is Carnegie Hall. You have heard something of the great Beethoven and it has been charming, masterful in its power over the mind. We have been alleviated, strengthened against life—the enemy—by it. We go out of Carnegie into the subway and we can for a moment withstand the assault of that noise, failingly! as the strength of the music dies….

But as we came from Anthiel’s “Ballet Mechanique,” a woman of our party, herself a musician, made this remark: “The subway seems sweet after that.” “Good,” I replied and went on to consider what evidences there were in myself in explanation of her remark. And this is what I noted. I felt that noise, the unrelated noise of life such as this in the subway had not been battened out as would have been the case with Beethoven still warm in the mind but it had actually been mastered, subjugated. Antheil had taken this hated thing life and rigged himself into power over it by his music. The offense had not been held, cooled, varnished over but annihilated and life itself made thereby triumphant. This is an important difference. By hearing Antheil’s music, seemingly so much noise, when I actually came up on noise in reality, I found that I had gone up over it.

More adventures in audience reaction to variations on the "noise orchestra," in this case a 1923 work by Edgard Varèse, composer and practicioner of what he termed "organized sound." What's interesting to me is how these works seem simultaneously intellectual and anti-intellectual—that is, conceptually daring (breaking down and building up the very idea of what it means to listen, and what listeners are supposed to notice, both in and out of the concert hall) but at the same time not particularly substantial (except perhaps in terms of decibels) once the novelty has worn off.

cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, listening, modernity, music, noise

Nate

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Hyperprism was performed again in November by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with a siren borrowed from a local fire company. The Philadelphia premiere went “splendidly,” according to the conductor; “practically all the audience remained to hear it.” Olin Downes, music critic for the New York Times, could only describe it as a medley of “election night, a menagerie or two, and a catastrophe in a boiler factory,” but others were more willing to accept the piece on its own terms. The Herald-Tribune‘s Lawrence Gilman thought the work “a riotous and zestful playing with timbres, rhythms, sonorities.” While the audience “tittered a bit” during the performance, after its conclusion they “burst into the heartiest, most spontaneous applause we have ever heard given to an ultra-modern work.”

Here's the first of three excerpts about the initial reactions to early-20th-century experiments in avant-garde "noise music." While I think that Andy's comments in Culture Making about John Cage's most (in)famous work—that in the end it amounted to "a provocative but fruitless attempt to cut off the cultural tradition of music"—are certainly worth bearing in mind. Still, there is something thrilling about the passion evident on both sides of this particular audience dispute. In the next excerpts we'll from some of the more thoughtful (and less pugnacious) early listeners.

creation and cultivation, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, modernity, music, noise

Nate

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The first public performance of the noise orchestra took place on 21 April 1914 at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. According to Russolo, the audience of conservative critics and musicians came only “so that they could refuse to listen.” As soon as the orchestra began to play, the crowd broke into a violent uproar. The musicians continued undaunted while fellow Futurists hurled themselves into the audience and defended the Art of Noises with their fists. In the end, eleven people were sent to the hospital, none of them Futurists, as belligerence was a central component of the Futurist approach to art and life, and many were talented boxers.