The 101st

The 101st
Franklin Bruno
available on Local Currency: Solo 1992-1998

Intro:
F# B / / | F# / B / | x4

Verse:
g#
Why does the front of my new notebook say
F#
"College ruled" when I know it sucked?
g#
Flat-out fucked in the aqueduct as we
F#
Cross the garden to take a look around.

Interlude:
a# / / / | / / / / | C# / / / | / / / / |
d#add9 / / / | / / / / | C# / / / | Badd9 / / / |

Verse:
Frozen hands couldn't play guitar, so I
Inventoried my penny jar.
Spiral-bound couldn't make a sound, so I
rooted 'round in the mulch and found--

Chorus:
   a#             g#        B
The hundredth song about you said the
a#                g#   B     cdim
Same thing as the very first I
a#/C#       a#       d#           a#
Came across before I opened up my drawer.
  a#/C#             a#
So excuse me while I burst into the 101st.

Intro

Bridge:
          a#                      d#
There's an accordion file and it's wheezing away
D                  A       C#
Sixteen, seventeen hours a day.
         F#                              a#
With your Debordian guile there's nothing left to survey.

Verse:
The broken glass on the backyard path
You could cut your foot where the TV smashed.
Like copper coils from the polygraph
As you weed the wheat out and save the chaff.

Chorus:
The hundredth song about you said the
Same thing as the very first I
Came across before I opened up my drawer.
Unrevised and unrehearsed, just like the 101st.

Intro (end on a#)

***

Is this even a song?

I mean that more metaphysically than physically. The song's got some formal irregularities (the form suggests AABA-with-chorus more than it is one, the rhyme scheme in the verses verges on free-associative), but those seem largely irrelevant. Franklin Bruno's written enough by-the-book songs that it should be safe to assume intent here.

The lyrics help us out a little more, specifically the chorus. We find out the speaker has written 100 love songs about the same person. He launches into the next section by proclaiming he's about to start into #101, i.e., the 101st of the title. So really, this isn't a song, this is a song coming into being. That seems to justify the verses' free associations.

Isn't that weird?

***

I would like to develop a format for presenting tabs I've done with some commentary on what got me excited about the song, i.e., something that's mixes the practical and academic. I'll be playing with the proportions between the two, but please leave any comments for improvement below.

Ethics & Aesthetics, or "I can't believe my brother watches reality TV!"

I've been watching this show called Kitchen Nightmares. Each episode features a different restaurant that has hit the skids. Gordon Ramsey swoops in (via SUV, sports car, motorcycle, or Amtrak, depending on the location) to set them back on the righteous path.

Viewers familiar with his other shows will recognize his foul-mouthed persona. He never misses an opportunity to scream and castigate. He's a ready-made Guy Who Makes a Scene, an archetype that our culture has a lurid fascination with these days.

At least, that's how he comes off initially. He's never short on bile, but he lacks the selfishness that usually comes with GWMSs. He doesn't have the imperial aim of leaving little Londons in his wake. Instead, he lines up the restaurant's existing strengths with any untapped market niches he spots around town. One restaurant was advised to step away from fine dining, because what the neighborhood really needed was a place to get a decent burger. So what's his problem?

He's not angry that they can't cook fish his way. He's angry that they can't cook fish the right way. He has a set of aesthetics, a set of values that he feels to be universal and inviolable (so much for the death of the monoculture). Ramsey's more astonished that those chefs aren't offended by themselves than he's offended by them (his display of that happens to allow him to benefit from this cultural moment).

Plenty of people on the show get in a huff over Ramsey's behavior, but he has every authority to act as he does. His personality is well-documented and he is asked by the restaurant owners help them out. They should know what they're in for. But what about day-to-day stuff with us plebes? Is it okay for me yell at a performing musician if he's out of tune? How about a hissy fit if a co-worker named a variable poorly? Is there accounting for taste? In short, do aesthetics have moral force?

This is where things get hazy fast. It can be tempting to confront people (there's that cultural moment again!), but your right to do so ultimately depends on which cultural communities the parties involved belong to. These communities affect quite a bit of life, from how much you owe in taxes to whether your roommate thinks you actually cleaned the bathroom. The chefs in that clip belonged to a community that didn't mind over-cooked fish. When Ramsey came into the picture, they implicitly asked to join his and were turned away at the gate. They end up choosing to leave the restaurant over changing their behaviors. Struggles between communities go on every day in big and little ways. And as it turns out, they make for good television.

Devil's Advocate

Just when I thought music was dead, I get wind that we've got ourselves a savior. Thank goodness.

In related news, a few people recently got bit by the "compression is bad" bug. Now, I'm hardly going to argue with the general complaint. However, I think it's worth pointing out that compression is a tool just like any other. Good cooks use only enough salt so that you don't taste it, you know? The IEEE piece focused on such "overseasoning" issues, but there are recordings that use extreme compression quite artfully. Take a look at the waveform of Fiona Apple's "Limp":


Parts of the track are quite compressed and quite loud. They are preceded, though, by quieter sections with a more pronounced dynamic range. The contrast makes the aggressive refrains ("call me crazy / hold me down / make me cry / get off now / baby") more aggressive. The more delicate verses pick up more tension and uncertainty than a more consistent dynamic range might've suggested. Those max amp spikes you see in the last refrain are when the drums come in to accent "baby," pushing the song over the emotional edge it had been otherwise holding back from.

An entire album of music like this would be very fatiguing. The song which follows on the album ("Love Ridden") has an entirely different attitude:


The softer instrumentation (no percussion, only piano and strings) and dynamic range give your ears a chance to rest without forcing a break in the action.

Winding Down

Here I am, another blogger reemerging after the end-of-semester wrap-up. Diehard readers will be glad to know that I managed to sneak in a little extracurricular musical analysis between finals. I'd been listening on and off to William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes for a little while now, but only recently got a chance to check out the score. In case you're not familiar with the music, they're tightly written piano pieces that rarely cross over the three minute mark. On the surface they sound minimalist, but they do not dramatize process in the same way early works by Reich and Glass do. Duckworth's music is usually classified as "postminimalist."

As the Wiki entry indicates, one of the major differences between minimalism and postminimalism is how they interface with other styles. Echoes of popular music are all over Reich and Glass, but their personal styles dominate the texture. No one's going to mistake any of Duckworth's preludes for a genuine bluegrass piece or a snippet of North Indian classical, but when other styles poke their heads out, they're allowed to stick out. The reason he can do this is because of another major difference between minimalism and postminimalism: how the structure relates to the materials.

Think about the iconic riff of Piano Phase. As it slides again itself, new harmonies and melodies emerge. Reich didn't choose any old motive. He wrote one that would react well to the phase process. The structure and materials are "codependent" in a way. Throw any old diatonic motive into the same format and the results won't be nearly as good.

Duckworth's structures are (to a degree) indifferent to the musical material. They can be seen as processes, but they operate more on durations and phrase lengths than harmony and melody (the latter two being strong indicators of style). For a moment, let's say we're not talking about music, we're talking about a special kind of poetry written using a process. Our "pre-compositional material" will be a sentence, which we'll write down on a piece of scratch paper (so we mangle it readily along the way). We then follow these steps:

1. Copy out what's on the scratch paper
   
2. Cross off the first word on the scratch paper
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 until all the words on the scratch paper are crossed off

So if our germinal sentence is "My dog has fleas," our "poem" is "My dog has fleas dog has fleas has fleas fleas." Replace words with measures of music, and you've got the basic backbone for some of the Time Curve Preludes. The "sentence" for Prelude II looks like this:



The barlines break it down cleanly into four parts, with two of the parts being slight variations of the other two. The process for the prelude cuts down the material one beat at a time, allowing it to stretch out over a couple minutes. The poem we wrote doesn't obscure the process that created it, but the repetitions embedded in this musical material do. While one bar is getting chopped up, you hear it seemingly intact just a few seconds later. Only at the very end, when the last bar is getting taken apart, does the process become more apparent.

While the right hand works on this modal figure, the left hand plays a tala-ish accompaniment: a 20-beat pattern on Cs (similarly divided into two equal halves that are only slightly different from each other). This pattern is constant throughout the piece, lending interesting rhythmic counterpoint to the right hand's gradually diminishing phrases. The two hands finish together at only two points: after the first statement of both 20-beat figures and at the end of the prelude.

I've made it

Courtesy of Site Meter, I have a limited ability to see who passes through these pages and what might've led them here. For the most part, people wander in from other blogs. Searches also draw in a number of people. Because search terms are embedded in the referring URL, I can see what they were. Earlier today, a search for "blondie cartoon incest" led someone to this (what I thought) family-friendly blog. I'm assuming my earlier post on R. Crumb was responsible for this. Ignoring this visitor's sexual predilections for the moment, does it really only take one mention of R. Crumb to bring out the deviants?

Piano tuning fun has continued, albeit with a slight break for Midterm Mayhem!! Curiosity led me to getting out the library's copy of the greatest book ever (OCD sufferers are advised to stay away). Further curiosity led to some experimentation with the Thomas Young (well-) temperament of 1799. It didn't take long to realize how superior non-equal temperaments really are for playing tonal music. Keys really have distinct characters, intervals in general sound better, etc., etc., etc.

I'm wondering now about an issue in listening to tonal music: modulation. In all of my music history classes that covered tonal music, discussions of significant modulations always prompted someone to ask, "I can't hear this. Could people back in [whatever period] really pick up on it?" Each time, regardless of prof., the same answer: "Well, listeners then were much more attuned to these harmonic procedures."

Something about this answer always seemed...fishy. My current theory: it's hard to notice modulations within equal temperament because every key sounds the same. A temperament with distinct key characters makes it easy for listeners to notice modulations. When the quality of the tonic suddenly changes, you know you're in a different key. Do you even need relative pitch to figure that out? Consider the beginning of the Debussy prelude, "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir":

When the piece modulates to Ab major, this melody, with identical harmonization, comes back. While the modulation is handled with the utmost smoothness, modulating by semitone definitely falls outside the bounds of common practice tonality. In the context of equal temperament, though, any modulation made with enough common tones sounds acceptable. Is it significant that Debussy chose a new key that neighbored the tonic on the chromatic scale instead of the circle of fifths? If you think of modulations as large-scale dissonances, then you get keys that clash by semitones instead of fifths.

I'm guessing someone could pull out more links between equal temperament and Debussy's harmonic practices. Thinking more generally, what are other ways of "dealing" with working in equal temperament? You can...

• ...reshape functional harmony to work more effectively within the constraints of equal temperament (à la Debussy).
• ...build a harmonic system around the understanding that all 12 tones are equal (à la Schoenberg).
• ...downplay functional harmony, instead constructing music around rhythm/timbre/texture/etc. (take your pick).
  

Did I miss anything?

Feldman and Cassavetes

When drawing comparisons to other media, Morton Feldman's music often shows up next to the plays of Samuel Beckett. Not only do their minimal landscapes resonate with each other, but Feldman was quick to compare their work, even citing the ease with which the two got along. However, for the purpose of investigating his musical innovations, it would make sense to compare his achievements with the films of John Cassavetes (this link is maintained by Ray Carney, who does for independent film what Kyle Gann does for Downtown music).

Cassavetes's movies are marked by inarticulate characters, long takes, and rough technique. Feldman's music reveals its maker in at least one way, its myopic interest in each sound. Its striking sensuality often wins fans, even if they admittedly can't make any sense of the music. The visceral rawness of Cassavetes's work usually isn't as endearing.

Audiences often find a “rambling” quality in their work. Cassavetes let scenes run as long as he felt necessary. The suicide scene in A Woman Under the Influence is unrelenting. Similarly, Piano and String Quartet plays on each fragment for calmly extended periods. The proportions of both works are nothing like a Hollywood drama or a Classical sonata. Cassavetes's insistence on honest emotions led him to eschew simplified narratives. Feldman similarly refused to “push the sounds around.” These unusual aesthetics obscure the presence of form, but they don't deny it. Though detractors may insist their work is formless, both derive forms from the characteristics of their content.

Opening Night, at its surface, is the story of a new play moving from New Haven to its Broadway premiere. The production faces problems as its lead must reconcile her own problems with aging with those of her character. Tracing this idea more closely, one finds women's reactions to getting older to be central to the film. Viewed through this lens, just about every scene provides a different perspective on this issue. No age group is left unexamined, from the 18-year-old fan who gets killed to the 65-year-old playwright. While the film's pacing has a certain “lumpiness” that can turn off a lot of viewers, its attention to this central problem is basically unwavering.

Palais de Mari focuses on spare pitches, slowly drawn out of the instrument. The near-constant pedal draws attention to their decay, making the sounds feel both frozen in time and slipping away from it (an elegant depiction of the palace ruins of the title). In m. 18, an unusually large spacing interrupts the initial sense of stasis. The search for a balance between the initial stasis and this startling gesture creates a tension which lasts until the very end of the piece. Later fragments are heard in terms of how they relate to this problem, not in harmonic terms, but sonic ones: density, duration, and decay.



Jonathan Kramer, in The Time of Music, characterizes Feldman's music as extremely “vertical.” That is, his music is one long moment divorced from our usual perception of time. However, his dramas of sonorities reach somewhere between “moment form” and “vertical time.” The sections of similar sonorities in Feldman's late music beg to heard as unadulterated pieces of beauty (vertically), but the way they're joined together is not without causation. He wants his audiences to take away a keener appreciation of sound, but not through a Cagean all-inclusiveness. Instead, listeners should sharpen their ears to the ways that one sound connects to another.

Cassavetes approached emotion in a similar way. His unconventionally long scenes have a child-like fascination with the interplay of emotions. They refuse to measure time into neat parcels, instead letting everything take as long as it needs to. This intense focus at times negates the existence of all other moments (just as Feldman's sounds want to be “left alone”). Here too, the individual pieces are intriguing in their own way, but the greater experience comes from tying them all together.

Form, in the work of Feldman and Cassavetes, evolves out of the individual qualities of their materials. How one perceives them as emotions, or as sounds, takes precedence over higher-level divisions (character arcs and harmonic progressions). This “phenomenological form” can usually be spotted by a series of irregularly-sized episodes, linked through a single organizing principle. This form is highly elastic, always letting proportions be defined by the demands of the content. Though the priorities of these artists differ from most of their contemporaries, close examination reveals a highly rigorous technique. Though their work is often labeled as “amateurish,” it is only because Feldman and Cassavetes have the utmost sensitivity for the materials of their craft.

Pop Harmony vs. Classical Harmony

Harmony in popular music is often looked at by classical connoisseurs like a simple country cousin. Occasionally it surprises with a bit of deftness, but generally it is seen as a watered-down version of common-practice tonality. These two songs at first glance seem to be coming from rather different places:

Their conceptions, though, are quite similar. Both texts clash inner anxieties with the exuberance and celebration of a new season. The tension between these two emotional territories is paralleled with a tension between major and minor modes. Where they diverge in this scheme reveals fundamental differences between the harmonic languages of the classical art song and the modern popular song.

Schumann moves from f# minor to A major with great elegance. Because the modulation doesn't alter the key signature, the transitions aren't noticed until a cadence point is reached. After the four bar introduction implies a resolution to f# minor, the next bar brings in the singer and a swift modulation to A major. The harmonic rhythm is fast throughout, with no harmony sustaining for more than a single measure.

“River,” in comparison, feels a little clunky. Rather than modulate between relative keys, it presents the two harmonies side by side. The harmonic rhythm here is significantly longer. The first half of each verse is harmonized with a C major chord that lasts for about ten seconds. It only takes a few seconds to sing the first line of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.”

This protracted duration gives a different kind of meaning to each harmony. Since they're given time to breathe, they're able to establish a more significant presence in musical space. They feel less subservient to a larger harmonic scheme and more like contemplative objects worthy of individual appreciation. The effect is not altogether different from a piece like Music for 18 Musicians. The drawing out of a short progression over time allows the listener to “inhabit” each harmony for a while.

The relationship between singer and accompaniment is very different in these songs. The vocal line in “River” floats on top of the accompaniment. The ideal of the art song is to entangle the two, giving them similar structural and expressive importance. Much of the expression in “River” comes from Mitchell's singing. The accompaniment in the Schumann does almost as much to shape the vocal line as the singer does. The brief harmonies color individual words, while Mitchell's harmonies color vast spaces.

This key difference evolved out of another major distinction between “art music” and popular music. While one is composer-oriented, the other is driven by performers. Though it's common for performers of popular music to play someone else's songs, they usually learn them from another's performance. Since the score is the primary document for classical music, the notes must speak for themselves more. Joni Mitchell can use simple backing for expressive vocals because her performance is the final product. Robert Schumann, tied to a less forgiving tradition, couldn't take such chances.

The resulting styles use the same triadic tonality, though in slightly different ways. Longer pop harmonies dramatize change, even as slight as I moving to vi. Classical harmony is about the ultimate destination (the similarities here between popular songs and minimalism/other “ergodic” music are striking to say the least). These two “dialects” should not be belittled either way with generalizations and value judgements, but recognized as equally valid means for tackling the same problems.

Dynamics in Pop Music

While the study is several years old by now, a friend pointed me to this study of the dynamic characteristics of top-selling pop songs (full listing of songs here). The author convincingly connects sonogram readings with how people hear the songs. Great example of analysis done right.