The Fredösphere

André Michelle has made an addictive sequencer-like music toy and put it on the web. If you are, like me, someone who pines for evidence that auto-generators of non-sucky music need not rely on minimalist forms and the pentatonic scale, prepare to be disappointed once again. Still, the interface is so easy, it really is a tool that everyman can use to make music that is, as I said, non-sucky.

More ambitious, yet much higher on the suckiness scale, is CODEORGAN. I entered the URL of this blog and, by an algorithm which I didn't bother to research, my blog was turned into a pop song. C'mon, guys, the Fredösphere must sound better than that. You haven't come close to capturing its essence. It's soul.

(Both these toys come via the Daily Zeitgeist at Seed Magazine.)

Labels: Creativity, MusicTheory

I'm stunned by the continued clamor for louder electric cars, as most recently described at Bloomberg.com via The Atlantic. Adding more noise to the world is so wrong—so perverse—according to my intuition, I can't help but regard the opposite opinion with a kind of crazy awe; admiration, even: you guys have achieved unimaginable levels of wrongness. Congratulations!

(Oh, and the Bladerunner reference is a nice bonus.)

But I blog this topic not to criticize (mainly) but to point out this tidbit:

"We fought for so long to get rid of that noisy engine sound," said Tabata, Nissan's noise and vibration expert. With electric cars, "we took a completely different approach and listened to composers talk music theory."

Music theory? Wow. The possibilities are endless. My mind is now captivated by a beautiful dream of a futuristic Nissan electric hovercraft ameliorating the clangor of city streets with the sound of nested counterpoint.

Labels: MusicTheory

It's not easy to write convincing fiction when one of the characters is a great artist. The explanations of the art and its greatness usually fall flat. Two embarrassing examples from Ayn Rand's novels come to my mind instantly. In the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, the theme of a mysterious symphony keeps popping up, one that is brilliant and perfect precisely because it was never written (oooh, that's spooky!). The other example comes from the The Fountainhead: Howard Roark's architectural masterpieces are left mainly to the imagination in the novel (I presume—I never read it) but must be shown in the movie version because of the nature of the medium. This showing is not to Roark's advantage because the artists hired to create the architectural drawings and matte paintings inevitably relied on clichés, because if they were geniuses like Roark they wouldn't be working in Hollywood. (One friend's reaction upon seeing those "masterpieces" was to blurt out, "he invented the 1950's!").

Two works of fiction from the world of SF feature characters who are musicians, and to my delight get them mostly right. First is Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time. A supporting character, prominent in the first few chapters (the ones I've read so far) is a brilliant young pianist who dies a slow death, but not before transmitting his passion for music to his sister, the main character. I'm amazed to report that some of the lad's advice on the topic of practicing is actually useful. Amazing.

The other musician, a composer actually, is the first-person main character of the short story Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffery Ford, available from my good friends over at the Starship Sofa Podcast. I thought it regrettable that the story told of a magnum opus consisting of two-voice counterpoint (only two? To carry an extended work? I doubt it) but otherwise the depiction of the life and work of a composer felt right to me. As a bonus, the character is also a synaesthete, one of a group that, long-time readers know (hi Mom!), I have made the butt of good-natured jokes here at the Fredösphere (if jokes about concentration camps can ever be good-natured. . . and I say, when they're about synaesthetes, they are!).

Labels: AynRand, Composition, Creativity, MusicTheory, Starship Sofa, Synaesthetes

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Hat tip goes to my friend, the SF author, fellow Starship Sofa lounger, and super genius Matthew Sanborn Smith.

Labels: MusicTheory, VideoClip

Alert the animal rights police! Via The Standing Room we learn of cats cruelly forced to recreate Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, without their knowledge or consent. Cory Archangel used freeware and perl scripts to hack together a performance of the piece using Youtube clips of cats walking on pianos. Madness! Torture!



(Don't miss the audio file of a direct, simultaneous comparison of the cat version with Glenn Gould's, one in each ear, which is far more impressive than the video, which I didn't bother to finish. Of course, if you happen to love music that never resolves, by all means listen to all three videos.)

Labels: MusicTheory, VideoClip, Wrong Note

A week ago I asked what makes a strong bass line.  My friends Alan and Ian answered in the comments with definitions of good bass lines.  Ah, now that I have answers, I understand better what question I was asking.  I was interested in the quality of strength, which can be a component of goodness but is not exactly equal to it.

In other words, imagine a bass line optimized for this quality I've not yet defined called strength.  It may quite possibly (and would probably, I think) lack some of the virtues mentioned by Alan and Ian.  Specifically, it would likely not work as an interesting melody when sounded independently.

Again, I have my ideas, but I'd love to hear from others.  Also worthy of discussion is a comment made by a long-time chorister during a rehearsal of Jesu meine Freude, a comment which started this slowly gestating line of thought, to the effect that Bach was a master of strong bass lines.  Is that true?  Is that good?

Labels: MusicTheory

We had a blast singing that Menotti choral ballet I told you about and the performance went well.  Oh, yes, there was one botched bass entrance, but the audience clearly enjoyed themselves and laughed at all the jokes, proof that they were, one, paying attention, and two, understanding our diction.

I admire this work hugely.  The story telling and dancing ought to make it accessible to almost anyone (yet tragically it is rarely performed).  I do have a few quibbles with it; I think a few places are gratuitously difficult to sing because of changing meters; I find the story a bit too melodramatic, with its misunderstood artist on his deathbed surrounded by bourgeois blockheads.  and musically, I think it suffers in places from weak baselines.

But what is a strong bass line, really?  What characteristics make a bass line stronger or weaker?  I have ideas, but I want to hear what others think.  Please, please, leave a comment.

Labels: Choral, MusicTheory, Performance

Sorry Don, but this is my topic:  harmonic intervals in all their beautiful, mediaeval purity:



I'd like to see the monk's reaction to some of my yummy minor ninths.

Labels: Choral, fun, MusicTheory, VideoClip

Let's get all geeky!  Soho the Dog, slated to be added to my blog kennel the next time I update my Blogger template (tentatively scheduled for December, 2025) riffs at length on the influence of R&B, soul, and gospel on white pop music.  Soho's specific illustration of this influence is a single chord progression.

My mouth is watering.  Did someone just mention chord progressions?

Read the whole thing.  I'm interested in a somewhat tangential point made near the end.  He's talking about the plagal cadence, also called the "amen cadence" or IV-I or subdominant-tonic cadence, particularly when it acts as a foundation for an entire harmonic language.  In other words, when the plagal determines what chords and chord progressions get emphasized and form the defining harmonic boundaries that help give a piece of music its distinctive feel (as opposed to the plagal's main competitor, the authentic cadence, AKA V-I or dominant-tonic):

You know who else used to stack his harmonies heavily towards the plagal, the flat side of the circle of fifths? Edward Elgar. And for precisely the same reason that Brian Wilson does—to give the music a sense of melancholy grandeur, a sense that bright, sturdy perfect [sic; more precisely, he means "authentic"] cadences would flood with too much sonic light. Now I know that Brian Wilson wasn't consciously trying to imitate Sir Edward. But they both heard the bittersweet longing within the plagal cadence, and chose their vocabularies accordingly. Tracing influences is fascinating, but for me, just as fulfilling is the realization that even total musical strangers are sometimes, in the same way, chasing the same star.

This relates to an opinion I've been forming for a long time:  whole eras of western musical progress can be characterized by either plagal or authentic cadences.  In fact, I'll suggest this hypothesis:  the plagal is the default sensibility, since it was operative throughout music up to the end of the renaissance, and vied with the authentic cadence in the Baroque, and became truly operative only during the period of Viennese classicism.  It's inherent instability (artistically speaking; harmonically it's too stable) caused it to be abandoned gradually throughout the romantic period, after which the natural order of plagal supremacy was restored.

As you can infer, I'm biased toward the plagal.  Indeed, I blame Haydn for following the authentic cadence to its illogical conclusion, and it is this belief that makes me hate his music far beyond any other.  But here's the problem that lurks within the plagal:  the flat side of the circle of fifths may produce melancholy and warmth, but it is also a region of safety.  There, harmonies blend more easily.  It is the rightful place of cowards, among whom I would name Elgar (and Ives and many others).

The worst examples of this cowardice is found in the (very) mediocre choral music I sometimes receive in the mail for free from publishers.  They are composed for unsophisticated performers, and tend to be harmonically tame in the extreme.  The one flamboyance allowed is an occasional lowered seventh in the melody in phrases where it ascends to the tonic.  This eliminates the dominant chord as a possibility, and give the piece a faux-modal vibe.  I see this compositional tic in these pieces over and over and over and over.  Or more honestly, I don't see it anymore, because I stopped wasting my time on the junk publishers send me for free.

I hate the cloying candy of Haydn-influenced music, but I despise cowardly composing.  One of my compositional aims has been to find ways to bring the brightness of sharp accidentals to plagal-based music.  It's not easy; many combinations of these two traits are unnatural.  One very successful example comes from the late romantic period:  Wagner (who, in the context of this discussion, must be regarded as a hero) worked a IV chord with a suspended sharp 4th resolving downward to the 3rd over and over in Tristan.  This suspension deserves all the attention that has been wasted on the so-called Tristan chord down through the years.  When, as a teenager, I discovered this suspension, I used it like a lab monkey hitting the pellet release in a cocaine-addiction study.

Dang, this post is long.

What's sad is that this idea of mine is still only half-baked, and geeky ne plus ultraissimo.  Yet I spend a fair amount of my life thinking about it, and stuff like it.  The great steel cage match between the plagal and the authentic is important to me. Blogging is supposed to be the great enabler of esoteric discussion, but I'm not kidding myself:  at this point in this post, I have about one reader left.  Hi, mom.

Labels: MusicTheory