Category Archives: Music

We’re all the same . . .

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some will a strut and some will fret
see this an hour on this stage
others will not but they’ll sweat
in their hopelessness in their rage
we’re all the same
the men of anger
and the women of the page

they published your diary
and that’s how i got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here’s a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

so i know i’m alright
my life will come my life will go
still i feel it’s alright
i just got a letter to my soul
when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say
each life has its place

From Virginia Woolf, by the Indigo Girls (Rites of Passage album).

This version of the lyrics is from the rites of passage CD liner notes, only with line breaks.

the place where you hold me
is dark in a pocket of truth
the moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
and so it was for you
when the river eclipsed your life
but sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
and it was my rebirth

so we know we’re alright
life will come and life will go
still we know it’s alright
someone’ll get a message to your soul

The song stunned me when I first heard it because it so perfectly captured how I felt when I discovered Woolf’s diaries. (Her novels otoh — I should probably reread them now. I read them in college because one was supposed to, and didn’t really warm to them. Perhaps I was too young.)

I wonder if she came to realize, at the end, that her gifts could not substitute for a belief in deservedness . . . nor earn it.

Lyrical lines

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Talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago about pop music. It was after I’d cited a Little Feat song in this post and he’d looked at a YouTube clip of Fat Man in the Bathtub.

He remarked on Lowell George’s genius in lengthening the musical line.

And I got to thinking, lengthening the musical line had implications for the lyrical line, too.

I’d picked up a couple of Dave Matthews CDs some time ago, after my ex left (he was the one with the music collection) but hadn’t listened to them much — I was aware of the songs peripherally, enough to hum along, but hadn’t paid that close attention to them. Then idly, one day, I played Under the Table and Dreaming and found myself for the first time paying real attention to it.

Matthews has been criticized for writing songs that are too monotone, something I’d found a bit off-putting too. But suddenly I was what’s going on: these pieces are actually poetry — set to music — set to jam band music.

If you transcribe the lyrics to a song like The Best of What’s Around, you can see it, as long as you don’t artificially try to insert line breaks:

Hey my friend, it seems your eyes are troubled — care to share your time with me?
Would you say you’re feeling low? And so

A good idea would be to get it off your mind.

See you and me have a better time than most can dream — have it better than the best, so we can pull on through.
Whatever tears at us, whatever holds us down — and if nothing can be done we’ll make the best of what’s around.

Turns out not where but who you’re with that really matters — that really matters.
And hurts — not much when you’re around.

And if you hold on tight to what you think is your thing, you may find you’re missing all the rest.

Well she ran up into the light surprised; her arms are open, her mind’s eye is seeing things from a better side than most can dream, on a clearer road — I feel —
Oh — you could say “she’s safe.” Whatever tears at her. Whatever holds her down — and if nothing can be done she’ll make the best of what’s around.

Turns out not where but what you think that really matters.

See you and me have a better time than most can dream — have it better than the best, so we can pull on through.
Whatever tears at us, whatever holds us down — and if nothing can be done we’ll make the best of what’s around.

Turns out not where but who you’re with that really matters — that really matters.
It hurts — not much when you’re around.

What’s amazing is that lines like this can be made to come across as so pop.

At last

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Gingko leaves

It’s been such a peculiar fall. Cool, yet no bite, and so much rain that the turning of the leaves has been listless and tentative.

Then last night our first serious frost.

And this morning, even without a breath of wind to nudge them leaves were falling everwhere, as if the trees were themselves now raining. The leaves rustling as they hit the ground like hundreds of rustling footsteps.

I took the photo beneath a ginkgo finally gone to sleep.

Yodeling the Classics

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I heard a cut from this 1997 CD, featuring Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodeling, on PBS the other morning and realized that my admittedly puny CD collection had a GAPING hole that had to be filled pronto.

I mean, yodeling the William Tell Overture? Rossini’s Large al factotum? The only question is why it took someone this long to figure out it HAD to be done.

Music is good for the brain

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A kid’s brain, anyway.

Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.

The findings, published today (20 September 2006) in the online edition of the journal Brain [1], show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.

Very small study. But interesting.

Talkin’ bout my-yyy piano

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One of the most fabulous gifts my parents ever gave me was piano lessons. I started them in second grade. Once a week, after school, I’d walk across town from the Oxford elementary school, where my mom was a fourth grade teacher — across the bridge that spans the Chenango River — and make my way to my piano teacher’s house. Her last name was Scarlet and she was a Miss. Miss Scarlet. I didn’t know about the other Miss Scarlet yet. My Miss Scarlet lived with her sister, also elderly, also unmarried, in a house that was very still and full of lace and furniture that I didn’t dare touch, barely dared to look at, and her piano was weighted down by the white ceramic busts of composers that, to me, all looked alike, unconnected with anything except their own glossy anonymous whiteness.

Miss Scarlet was the organist of my church and had advocated that our school district teach Latin, so she would tell me what pieces she was going to play at next week’s service and was very pleased when I began taking Latin in high school.

I took piano lessons from her until probably about my junior year, and then I took lessons again in college when I found out I could take them as part of my courseload and actually earn credits for it.

Then, for many years I lived without a piano. Pianos are not suited for an itinerate lifestyle — for living quarters split among students, for moves that seem to come along every six months or so, moves you manage with your own car or maybe the help of a friend with a truck.

Now I have a home in the suburbs — a spot where I’ll be staying for awhile.

It wasn’t easy to pick out a piano, from among the used pianos at the store. I had no idea how to choose. I knew I needed something small, and inexpensive. But it had been so long, at that point, since I’d played (15 years?) that I felt funny even trying them.

But a black Wurlitzer console caught my eye. It was reasonably priced, and the right size.

I played a few keys. I liked its sound. It sounded, to me, like a bigger piano.

Nobody else likes it. The man who tunes it volunteered that he likes a piano with a softer tone. My mother’s console sounds downright muffled in comparison — she doesn’t much care for my piano’s sound, either.

But I love it.

I didn’t play much even after I got the piano, maybe six years ago — I was busy with a preschooler, it was hard to make the time. Then last year I started again a bit more seriously. It was a bit disheartening. I felt I’d lost whatever ease I once had. Then I contracted a frozen shoulder, left side, and between the pain and the loss of mobility I had to give it up.

At long last, now, I am back at it again. And for some reason I’m at a loss to explain, all the old stuff has suddenly come back. I’ll sit down to try a piece I haven’t touched since my early 20s and my hands remember it. They get ahead of me sometimes, I’ll realize I’m playing and with the realization I’ll suddenly lose my place and sit there laughing at myself.

And the piano’s sound: yes, it’s loud. It’s a ringing tone, it’s loud, it’s brash, brassy. But I love it. I love what I can do with the dynamic range. I love that I can ham it up. I was playing Gonoud’s Funeral March of a Marionette tonight, and it’s like I never connected with the piece before — I can remember that it used to bore me, I’d play it part way, then get bored. But not with this piano. This piano is somehow letting me find what this piece is about, the peculiar, precise hard drama of it.

I’m not a performer — I’ve never liked playing for people. But what I do love is to work up my own emotional response, and my little piano lets me do it.

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

I love my piano.

(Btw, this is interesting: an abstract of a study that compares the auditory response to “pure tones” vs. piano tones. Piano tones elicit the stronger response . . .)

Muzak. Not just for elevators any more.

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A lot of interesting stuff in this New Yorker article by David Owen.

Muzak, if you haven’t heard already, no longer sells “elevator music.” It’s now in the business of packaging real music for replaying in retail stores. When you’re in Gap or Old Navy, for example, the songs you hear played are Muzak tracks.

The article gives the history of that transition.

The piece features an interview with Dana McKelvey, “audio architect.” She picks tracks and assembles them so they’ll convey the mood corporations want evoked by music played in their stores. The audio architecture concept was conceived by one Alvin Collis, who was doing an engineering job for Muzak.

He told me, “I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ‘Let’s put on a show.’  It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’y really about selling music. It was about selling emotion — about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.” 

Since I live in Rochester, New York, it was also interesting to come across a tidbit about how the company got its name: it was originally called Wired Radio, but in 1934 changed its name to Muzak. Its inspiration: George Eastman’s “Kodak.”

Speaking of hits . . .

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Blogs are hitting their stride in the media game. Pop music has been around longer. So we should have a pretty good handle on what would make a song a winner, right?

Nope. This short New Scientist piece describes the difficulty of predicting what songs will become hits.

To some degree, the popularity of a song is influenced by the, um, popularity of the song. Participants of one study, for example,

tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

But what researchers can’t figure out is what gets a trend going in the first place. Sociologist Matthew Salganik, Columbia University, is given the last word in the piece:

“Even if you haven’t made it yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s low quality music; you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it’s high quality music, you might not become successful.”

So that’s it. It’s luck. lol