Bows

Community orchestras are a semi-wonderful thing. Over the past 15 years I’ve played in four or five of them at different times. Served as principal cellist in a couple.

After tonight’s concert, I think I may be done.

Not because it was a bad concert. It was a pretty darn good concert, actually. Elgar’s Enigma Variations, the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, and a solid piece by a local composer. The orchestra did a very respectable job. The audience obviously appreciated what they heard, and that’s one of the wonderful aspects: For a mere $20, people can hear a symphony concert close to their home.

Most of the musicians in community orchestras are unpaid amateurs. We do it because we enjoy it.

The biggest drawback of playing in an orchestra — any orchestra, no matter how good — is that it’s not a creative activity. You’re a foot soldier. Somebody else decides what you’ll play. You’re told how fast to play, and how loud. Somebody puts a page full of dots in front of you (more like 30 pages, actually), and your job is to execute the dots.

In a community orchestra, there are other issues. There’s never enough rehearsal time, and the quality of the players is somewhat variable. As a result, the orchestra never sounds as good as I wish it did.

On top of which, those darn composers take it for granted their work will be

Floogle

I keep thinking this tune is finished, and then I massage it some more. Okay, it’s smooth jazz, more or less — sorry about that. I didn’t mean it, honest, it just happened. And no odd tunings this time.

The working title is “Floogle.” The main instruments are u-he Zebra (main melody), AAS Lounge Lizard 4 (electric piano), Spectrasonics Trilian (fretless bass), and Spectrasonics Stylus RMX (beats). NI Reaktor does a cameo in the introduction, and there’s a bit of Camel Audio Alchemy later on.

I’m trying to learn more about mixing. I tried something new (for me, anyway) in this mix. After comparing my track to those on a few CDs, I decided that the up-close synthesizer sound (which I rather like) isn’t quite what the pros seem to prefer, so I added a touch of global reverb (u-he Uhbik-A).

I’m with Stupid

Today I’ve been poking around on the Web, looking for interesting new music. Hoping to be inspired, basically. No luck, so far. There’s a vast wasteland out there.

Granted, my points of reference are perhaps terra incognita to your average 20-something ambitious pop musician. I’m coming from the far side of eclectic. I play in a symphony orchestra. At home, for recreation, I play Bach and Haydn on the piano. On my iPhone I have albums by Weather Report, Jon Hassell, Paul Simon, Bill Nelson, Frank Zappa, National Health, and the Residents.

More than anything else, I respond to music that’s intelligent. If a piece simply wallows in an emotion for four minutes without any evidence that the composer expects listeners to engage in mental activity, I find the music not just boring but offensive.

But that’s what I’m finding online. I don’t think I could ever write music this stupid. It would drive me nuts. I keep wanting

Sympathetic Twang

I’d like to think the religions of Asia provide a level of awareness that seems rather conspicuously to be missing from the religions that originated in the Middle East. Hinduism and Buddhism are more appealing to me than Christianity (to say nothing of Judaism and Islam, of which the less said the better).

But possibly the grass is just greener on the other side of the fence. On using the Web to learn a bit about Tantra, I’m finding myself baffled. It’s not just that the authors of these texts use a bunch of unfamiliar terms. They seem not to be interested in defining the terms in a way that anybody could make sense of.

Before too long, I discovered that the practitioners of Tantra still (in the 21st century) sacrifice goats and other animals in their temples. Okay, never mind. I’ll look into some other tradition. I don’t care what kind of alleged ancient wisdom you’re hanging out with; if you’re killing animals to make your gods and goddesses happy, your ancient wisdom is a crock of shit, and that’s the truth.

Still, researching other cultures and their spiritual practices is probably worth doing. Somewhere along the path, being a musician, I noticed a link to a page on Indian music for meditation. Hmm — maybe knowing about that will give me a handle on the larger subject matter. Unfortunately, the nameless author of this page slathers it on pretty thick.

“Music has been used as meditation music since the very dawn of civilization,” we’re told, “because it balances the human organism through its rhythmic pattern of tones, which are generated in a harmonic relationship with each other.” Hey, I’m a musician. Can you tell me about the rhythmic patterns

Who Stole My Planet?

Not infrequently, I have the feeling that when I wasn’t looking, somebody took away the planet I was supposed to be living on and substituted a really sad satirical parody.

Tonight I thought I’d poke around and see what’s happening in electronic music in the SF Bay Area, which is where I happen to live. There’s plenty of dance music suitable for partying, which interests me not even a little tiny bit. There’s also a fair amount of avant-garde bullshit. I’ve given up trying to dial up a friendly euphemism; I’m going to stick with “bullshit.” This is the kind of music where nobody knows what’s going to happen next, least of all the performers; where painstaking rehearsal and proficiency on one’s instrument are anathema; where communicating a sense of beauty, symmetry, or emotional drama with an informed audience would be considered selling out.

I’m off in an odd corner of the music universe, you see: I happen to use synthesizers and software, along with drum sounds, bass lines, funky syncopations, tightly crafted melodies, unusual time signatures, and exotic microtonal tunings; yet my aesthetic is informed principally by Bach, Haydn, and Brahms. Plus maybe a little Scott Joplin. Whatever planet my people are hanging out on, it isn’t this one.

While looking around, I stumbled on this description of a recent concert at the Lab in San Francisco, which fortunately I missed. I quote:

“In a two-part concert, cellist Charles Curtis will present solo works created for and with him by Éliane Radigue, Alvin Lucier and Alison Knowles. Radigue’sNaldjorlak (2005) is a nearly hour-long, continuous exploration of the acoustical properties of the cello, centered around a tuning of the cello to its own intrinsic resonance. All of the strings are brought into alignment with the cello’s ‘wolf tone’; the entire corpus of the cello is engaged to elicit a complex, closely related spectrum of harmonics and resonances. Lucier’s Slices for Cello and Pre-recorded Orchestra (2011) sets the solo cello against a sustained chromatic tone cluster in 52 orchestral instruments, arrayed as a Supercollider patch. By outlining the cluster in various melodic orderings, the solo cello erases and re-inscribes the orchestral cluster in a slowly unfolding process. Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008) is a graphic score made of hand made rice paper, beans, lentils and bits of fabric and string. Curtis interprets this work of visual art in a performance analogous to the making of the score, working over the ‘score’ of the instrument in several passes, seeking out unsuspected resonances by tapping, rubbing and stroking the instrument with bare hands.”

Non-cellists may not know what the wolf tone is. It’s the natural vibratory resonance of the body of the instrument, and it’s an annoyance. It’s something you have to manage, something that you try to avoid. Since the wolf is usually near the F below Middle C, it’s a bit difficult to guess how all four strings could be “brought into alignment” with it. If you try to tune the low C string up a 4th, to the F an octave below the wolf, you’re going to break the string. Ditto for bringing the D string up a minor 3rd to the wolf — but if you tune the D string down a major 6th so it’s an octave below the wolf, it’s going to flop around like a loose piece of rope. Also, to be honest, if what you’re seeking is “a complex, closely related spectrum of harmonics and resonances,” the cello is not your best choice for a sound production device. Personally, I’d recommend a good computer. But what do I know? I only play both the cello and the computer.

What we have here, in short, is a concert in which listeners were treated to ugly resonances for an hour (bound to be boring), a sustained and slowly unfolding chromatic tone cluster (bound to be boring), and a graphic score made of lentils, which is performed not by bowing the cello but by hitting it (boring, unintentionally humorous, and insulting to the listener, all at the same time).

You may say, “But Jim, you didn’t hear the concert! It may have been grand!” Well, no, I take it back. I’m sure you’re not stupid enough to say that.

Apparently, Curtis teaches at UC San Diego. God help his students.

Public Rituals

Here’s a brand new piece of microtonal music — “The Triumphal Procession of Nebuchadnezzar“:

I may make a few dozen more tiny edits — I usually do — but basically it’s ready for public consumption. The tuning is 26-note equal temperament (26EDO for you tuning geeks). I didn’t know much about Nebuchadnezzar when I thought of the title, I just knew I wanted a reference to a Babylonian king. Various things happen during the course of the procession, none of them reassuringly familiar. If you imagine teams of slaves carrying an enormous golden idol past the cheering crowds, you won’t be far wrong.

Bent or Broken

Tonight, at a party, I found myself commenting to a friend that most of the people who are making microtonal music just aren’t very good. In many cases, they seem to have latched onto microtonal composing as a handy cover for the fact that they have only very marginal ideas about what musical expression and creativity are, or can be.

Am I being too brutal? Maybe. But again and again, as I listen to the hideous thrashing noises that have been uploaded by this or that microtonalist, I find myself imagining, with something akin to embarrassment, the scene in which the guy is hunched over his equipment recording this stuff while his girlfriend, standing behind him, rolls her eyes in pained and stricken disbelief, clearly wondering, “What am I doing hooked up with this loser?”

There are happy exceptions. One is Prent Rodgers. He’s doing provocative and spicy things with alternate tunings, and he’s using the tunings to enhance compositions that would stand up and be listenable (though in some cases quite different and less effective) if they were in standard tuning.

In what follows, perhaps it would be well to bear in mind that my taste in music is far more conservative than my taste in politics. I love Bach, Haydn, Beethoven (well, some of Beethoven), Schubert, and Brahms. I find Shostakovich and Prokofiev challenging but rewarding. I have no use whatever for Babbitt, Cage, or Stockhausen. The entire school of 20th century composition that attempted to demolish the ideas of melody, harmony, and regular rhythmic pulse I regard as a swarm of arrogant poseurs and con men, not as artists.

Having said that….

The website of the American Festival of Microtonal Music is a complete failure. Not because the site design is graphically awful — that would be easy to forgive if the music were good. Some of the videos of performances require a special plug-in, but I didn’t bother to download it, because after I went to the page of YouTube videos on their site, I could see no reason to burden my hard drive or browser with another plug-in. The audio in the YouTube video of a trio (flute, oboe, bassoon) was badly recorded, the piece was in a harsh and uninteresting modern idiom, and the use of microtonality was … well, it just sounded like occasional intonation problems. Other YouTube videos on the same page didn’t play at all.

The winners of the 2010 UnTwelve Competition are well worth listening to, though I can’t help feeling that somebody ought to have taken the time to explain to these composers

Is That a Piano?

I’m pretty sure you won’t know quite what to make of this. (I’m not sure I know what to make of it.) But I think a good way to approach it may be to listen first and then read about it after you’ve heard it. So here’s the track:

To answer your first question, no, that’s not a real piano. Building a real piano that would play those notes would cost, I’m sure, a quarter of a million bucks, if not more. Nor is it sampled. It’s ModArtt PianoTeq 4, a software-based physical modeling instrument. (And scary good, I might add.)

If it were a real piano with enough keys, you might be able to play the whole piece. I’m not sure. There are a couple of three-handed moments. But I did try to make it sound quasi-playable.

You want to know about the tuning, though, don’t you? It’s 19-tone equal temperament. You’d need a piano with a gray key between each pair of white keys, which would mean learning, oh, a few new fingerings. The fifths in 19 are not quite as good as those in our standard 12-note tuning, which is why the opening sounds faintly honky-tonk. But once you’ve listened to this tuning for a minute or two, you hardly notice.

I sort of know what some of the chords are — the obvious ones, anyhow. Other places I just trusted my ear. Chopin? Debussy? Or just a train wreck, you be the judge. If you want a title, I think I’ll call it “Koi Pond.”

Season’s Greetings

One of my Facebook friends posted a beautiful rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” for harp and oboe (probably sampled, but done with great care). My beady little brain said, “Heck, why not?” So here’s my take on the same tune. It’s … a little different, and certainly not as professionally produced as my friend’s, but I only spent three hours on it, so I don’t think I have anything to apologize for.

This happens to be in 31-note equal temperament, but nobody would be likely to notice the fact, as there are no outside notes at all. The only perceptible result of using that tuning — if it’s perceptible at all — is that the thirds and sixths sound a little more pure than we’re used to.

Music Theory Meets Geometry

The theory of harmony that serves to organize most of the music of Europe and America (and increasingly of the rest of the world) is built on a couple of basic assumptions — axioms, if you will. First, there are exactly 12 pitch classes (A, B-flat, B, C, C-sharp, and so on). Second, the pitches relate to one another within a one-dimensional space. That is, they’re laid out in a line, which conventionally runs from side to side with lower pitches to the left and higher pitches to the right.

The relations among pitch classes, which are what harmony theory is about, all take place within this one-dimensional matrix. Octave equivalence (transposition) and the Circle of Fifths introduce wrinkles, but the wrinkles can easily be mapped onto the one-dimensional layout.

To be sure, the frequency spectrum, in which pitches are defined by their number of vibrations per second, is one-dimensional. The fact that harmony theory defines relations in one dimension is not wrong. But it’s a limitation conceptually.

Guitarists play in two dimensions. Because of the layout of the fretboard, they sometimes discover scale and chord relationships that keyboard players fail to notice. They do it by moving geometrical patterns across from one string to another, as well as up or down the neck of the guitar.

Harmony theory in two dimensions turns out to be quite interesting. When we add the possibility that there may be more than 12 pitch classes within the octave, matters become very interesting indeed.

The ancestor of my new Z-Board is the Z-tar, a MIDI interface designed for guitarists by Harvey Starr. The Z-Board goes a bit further