Archives for 2009

So, I know I got a little “Bah! Humbug!”-y on the ol’ Christmas tunes last week. I admit that memories of suburban shopping frenzies and endless cocktail parties have turned me a bit dark when it comes to the holiday classics. But the internet being, well, the internet, a few gems turned up to make me change my (yes, I’m going there) tune. (The holiday punch helped also.)

First, the talented and adorable Pomplamoose bring us this warm and fuzzy (and non-denominational!! and good cause $$ generating!!) tune “Always in the Season.”

The real ear-opening experience, however–aside from the Christmas song about the hippopotamus (?!?!) at least–came with Ted Hearne’s arrangement of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Somehow, I must not have been paying close enough attention these past 30 years. It took Ted’s arresting sonic manipulations to rouse me from my sugar-induced cookie stupor and wake me up to what this song was actually supposed to be about. When you’re ready to leave behind the saccharinely sanitized “let your heart be light” lyrical rewrite, go and listen to Ted’s take on the original version here.

If the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the roundtable discussion that accompanied its release last week are the kind of thing that floats your boat, I tossed my two cents into that pond here.

Aside from the clear need for a reassessment of the parameters we use when surveying American adults about their arts experiences (i.e. what counts as art in these times of dissolving definitions/genre hierarchies), the big, future-looking question the survey left me with was this: With all we have seen in the evolution of communications technology, is it possible that a trend of cultural participation will actually be seen and strengthened as audiences transition from a position of passive consumption to one of active and engaged parallel creation?

Last night there was some seriously joyous (if wordless) caroling here in Baltimore.

Then, on waking late to grey and drizzly skies, the latke-making got the kibosh put on it in favor of some simple eggs and toast (interestingly the New York Times‘ “oatmeal buttermilk blueberry pancake” recipe was running a brisk distribution as the “most emailed article”. Guess we were all looking for some form of cozy Sunday morning comfort). A little while later, however, we did get into the non-denominational seasonal spirit with a little cookie baking (I swear even my hair now smells of chocolate). This was accompanied by the obligatory downloading/endless looping of Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Which led me back tonight to Drew’s challenge to lay out the best and worst in holiday music. I hate to be a Scrooge about it, but as I was musing earlier, aural memories can carry a lot of buried information, and for me these familiar refrains conjure mostly shopping malls and stress.

More than anything, however, the ten basic tunes of carolers everywhere call to mind those endless holiday party quartet gigs we played for gas money in high school. These interminable events effectively stamped out any joy the music may have once inspired in me. Every medley had a “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” transition and a stinger of false excitement for an ending. From time to time, a guest enjoying some serious holiday cheer would hand me her glass and request a refill. I don’t blame her. “Jingle Bells,” played in ten different international “styles,” would inspire anyone to indulge in extra eggnog.

So I don’t know about you, but while I find a lot of joy in the season–in old traditions and in new–it’s not usually a classic holiday song that triggers a desire to deck the halls.

After watching this video for Flypt, an iPhone app that let’s users remix music using some basic effects, I got to thinking again about the new ways these and other programs are bringing musical creativity into people’s lives. No, it’s not necessarily the equivalent of learning to play the cello, but it’s flexing muscles in people that I assume most music professionals appreciate seeing toned. Doesn’t the future of music seem brighter when playing music isn’t simply turning on the radio but actually thinking about the process of making sound? In some ways, it seems like a return the engagement experienced when lots of people played an instrument “a little” to meet family/community demands, but with the added bonus that professional music is also all around us.

It also brought to mind once again Lessig’s book (and our conversation on MTG) covering the role of remixing in contemporary culture. From simple linking to complete overhauls of message, the way we are digesting information and trading ideas is exploding off the screen. I admit I worry it’s all flying at me so fast that I’m missing a great deal of the actual content and only catching 25% of any particular thought. Is my mind truly benefiting or is it slowly crawling deeper and deeper into a hole due to idea shell shock? Maybe perpetual stimulation is not to be feared, but adjusting to this kind of high-speed collective processing is exhausting (good thing I didn’t go to Oberlin, then, I guess). In the end, I know I’m jumping the gun, because we’re still playing with these new tools/toys–twisting and pulling on them to see not just what new technologies can do, but what we can do and become alongside them. Maybe that process will never end, but how profoundly will it end up altering the way we think about, well, everything?

UPDATE: Information Overload: Americans Consume 34 GB of Data Daily

There’s been quite a bit of chatter out there in response to Brian Eno’s assertion in Prospect magazine that “the idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.” Is he out of touch with reality or is he the indisputable cool person saying we are all cool now?

Oh, wait, wait, no. Not all. Seems classical music didn’t jump onto this train to popularity:

There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance. As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting–ambient music–has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”)

Ah, if only he knew of our nomenclature headaches! But seriously, whether he thinks classical missed the boat to this party or not, if Eno’s core idea is mixed with a bit of Long Tail theory (death of the mainstream combines with the benefits of digital distribution) it seems to suggest that while new opportunities may not be as deep, the pool is now much, much wider. While your shot at a spot in the Philharmonic’s clarinet section may have shrunk, you now have a chance at realizing your previously too far fetched dream of forming a successful bagpipe band.

Or at least I hoped that was where we might be headed. Then the realities of making money in the digital age smacked me on the forehead. Ouch.

I acknowledge that this little gadget 1) caught my attention because I was procrastinating. And then very quickly 2) I was sucked in by the extreme pro and con reactions some commenters had to a video that is, at root, simply a demonstration of a very cool (if expensive) piece of technology.

Though for some reason the Eigenharp has drawn a few comparisons with toys like Guitar Hero, in truth it seems like a mash-up of ideas re: real-time digital interfacing for effective music performance. Further research turned up this show-and-tell video which really makes the instrument’s capabilities seem extensive, even if some of the timbres it delivers hurt my teeth a bit. Dudes will jam in basements, and it’s more compelling viewing to see them rock these “bassoons from the future” than watch as they stare into blue computer screen light while furtively…scrolling.

Still, if commenters can be trusted (ahem) it seems that even in the 21st century there are audiences unwilling to see this as legitimate music making. I’m not sure why that is, especially when we are not talking about professional livelihoods but about personal creativity (albeit for those with a fat wallet–the Eigenharp retails for £3,950). Whatever got us here, this fence disturbs me but also makes me wonder why this is the line where some have chosen to dig in their heels. Commenter djb0622 noted it in a way that particularly smarted in an age where definitions are fluid and there’s supposed to be an app for everything: “knowledge of key signatures and chord theory do not make a ‘real’ musician. it makes a western classical composer.”

Friend of Mind the Gap John Pippen sends in this photo snap from a recent visit to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I can’t help but wonder/wish that these were someone’s record bins, and that I could reach in and see what was stored under each tab. It looks like a totally reasonable filing system for music these days, and one that’s way more intriguing than the usual distinctions.

Yes, yes, borders between genres have been ripped up a bit. So have the fences between a lot of things. And while I’m sure there are those in the room who think it wise to fight these trespasses in art, food, and society, I have never had much interest in that side of the conversation (or arguments about what we call it when it happens, though I am sympathetic to the plight). What I have always been interested in, specifically in the area of music, is what each camp needs to learn from the others in order to create great work and how they effectively (socially and professionally) go about doing it: sharing recording knowledge, improving composition chops, polishing performance skills, gaining business acumen. In the 21st century, if everyone wants to not only build their own art, but also create their own frames, that’s great and amazing and exciting stuff, but that also takes a great deal more skill to pull off well, no? Or it requires a better kind of tag-team playing and creating than we have ever yet seen, but are perhaps perfectly poised to achieve. 

Even though the weather has turned cold, I am thinking tonight of summer camping trips to Lake Erie, and more specifically of my adopted grandfather singing old Scout songs with as much gusto as he could manage on the 15th repetition, all in the name of making the travel time go a bit faster for the eight-year-old kid (me) in the back seat.

Oh, the cannibal king, with the big nose ring, fell in love with a lusty ma-a-aid. And every night, by the pale moonlight, across the bay he’d wa-a-ade…

Admittedly, some of the lyrics would not make for nursery-friendly group sing-alongs these days, but I loved the tune so much that I made a habit of crying out for encores, requests that my adult self can hardly believe were always honored. Now that’s love.

It’s often noted how a familiar smell can transport you across decades in a flash, but  it’s amazing to me how deeply the roots of a sonic memory can grow and how powerfully they can do something similar. I find this especially true when it comes to the sounds of once familiar routines. Those same camping trips were also colored by the comforting habits of pre-dawn mornings in a small pop-up camper. The open and shut of the flimsy aluminum door, a heavy footfall on the detachable red felt step, the pop of a cupboard door when a jar of instant coffee was retrieved. It was the excited boil of an electric kettle that carried real meaning, however, and the clink of a spoon against a mug that signaled morning had come and another day’s adventures were about to begin.

Last week I was at a dinner party when a guest to my left suggested I update my thinking about the gender gap from a glass ceiling to a window. Something on par with the views afforded by the floor-to-ceiling sashes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps?

I promised I’d think it over and have been ever since, though I admit it has me troubled like a riddle I can’t quite parse. Am I to take away from this visual analogy that rather than unsuspectingly hitting my head, in 2010 I can expect only to have to bloody my fist on the forward charge? With a well-applied heel of my hand to the frame of the window, can I nudge it upwards with a little patience and minus any permanent damage to myself or the transom? All these scenarios demonstrate some interesting parallels when it comes to interpreting the state of play out there as far as gender politics goes. Look and see what’s around you, note all that has changed (Gail does the research, January cracks the jokes). Maybe question if the window is really even there at all (well, if you want to get all mystical about it, at least).

Same dinner party, but this time the guest seated on my right is explaining how lost he has felt  ever since a new music director came on board at his orchestra. The new maestro was great, he acknowledged, but he was just so…so different, you know? “As in Wife Swap different?” someone inquired. And we all paused and tilted our heads and imagined what that would look like, and how close it already was to how things run in many orchestras, what with the game of musical chairs played by new hires and guest visits and the like. Drama all around. The Reality TV part, though? Well, we all laughed nervously for a second about that, and then the guest on my right disappeared to make a few phone calls. Hmm.

Aside: Though no one smokes at dinner parties anymore, you should be able to smoke at concerts, “other than, you know, the Symphony Orchestra,”–performances which are apparently not “hardcore” enough to warrant lighting up.

When it comes to the new music/experimental side of my iTunes library, it doesn’t often happen that a once-heard track echoes in my ears as I walk the city streets. But trips outside the boundaries of my professional genre areas do sometimes adhere to my brain as if playing through phantom earbuds on endless repeat. Usually it’s a line or a turn of phrase that isn’t even particularly remarkable, but it will lodge–lodge, I tell you!–in my skull.

Of late it wasn’t Jay-Z as the new Sinatra that was hard to shake, but Alicia belting it out in Times Square (guess I was a little homesick or something).

And then, though Taylor clearly didn’t want to talk about it, I couldn’t stop her from telling me–over and over again.

La, la, la, so yeah. And if you’re worried things are getting a little light and flaky around here, go get caught up on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.