W e use a special bass harmonica microphone manufactured by Suzuki. This mic is attached directly to the body of bass harmonica, so it gets really close to the source of the sound. The mic module is as long the instrument, and there are several electric condenser mic capsules in it. The capsules are engineered to have different frequency responses depending on their location in the bass harmonica, according to register. The mic has an built-in preamp operating on battery power. Because the capsules are omni-directional condenser mics, the mic module is very prone to feedback on-stage. It feeds back really easily in the monitors and sometimes also on the main PA. To solve this problem, we use in-ear earbud monitoring and very careful equalization on the bass harp.” — Sväng.
F or diatonic and chromatic harmonicas, we use handheld Audio Technica ATM350s. The mic is held between player’s left-hand fingers, but there are seldom problems with any handling-related noises. Microvox has its own belt clip preamp with volume control knob.” — Sväng.
O nly recently I came across Sväng’s 2010 recording of their arrangements of Chopin piano etudes, mazurkas, and polonaises. Sväng—the award-winning harmonica quartet from Finland—was commissioned by the La Folle Journée de Nantes festival to create these arrangements. Eero Grundström and Jouko Kyhälä, two of the group’s members, responded to this challenge with dazzling facility, adapting and orchestrating Chopin in such a way that the ethnic texture and musical intent of the originals are honored and preserved and yet new and interesting possibilities are revealed.
I n much the same manner as Chopin wrote the bulk of his compositions while living on ‘foreign’ soil, so too this work by Sväng feels deeply ‘transnational’.
T he arrangements have the motorics of festival dancing and outlawry, and all the confessional intimacy of close friends. The tuba-like bass lines alternately convey polka-like or gypsy-like feel. We have klezmer/ladino clarinet figures in here, rendered by harmonica with awe-inspiring technique. Story-telling, pneumatic phrasing of free-reeds clasped to emphatic lips, the music hovers between conserving traditional values and surrendering to pressures for assimilation into an alien culture.
T here are sad songs of separation, improvised deployments of non-standard instrumentation in service of musical ideas that hail from another culture. The collection co-opts Chopin, infusing it with Baltic jazz sensibilities.
T he informality of the recordings makes you want to get up and dance and join in song. The arrangements of the mazurkas are all bright and uplifting.
M ore than anything, the effect is a ‘caravan’ soundscape—like a great kumpania—a nomadic band of families, traveling with horses and sleeping in the rough. The sonic ‘wagons’ in this caravan are elaborately carved and fantastically painted; the outlook of Sväng is heterogeneous, with a strong sense of the whimsical and the absurd.
T he music evokes nostalgia, but nostalgia for what? A return home? No. This is a musical pattern of chronic displacement; of families who have winter digs but are of uncertain origins; of clans who have no permanent place and few possessions. Or maybe you feel a resemblance to the saudades and fatalism of portuguese fado. Or you listen, as you might listen to a ribald uncle telling aphorisms. The fascination in which he holds you derives from his concision, which stuns... and also from his wit, which throws you down. The Disenfranchised and Appropriated become the Appropriators!
T he engineering and production values achieved at Studio Kyhättö do great credit to the arranging and performing on this disc. The sound has great warmth and intimacy, with just enough reverb/chorusing for liveliness. (For harp players who wish to learn about the miking equipment and techniques that Sväng utilizes to such advantage, have a look at their website.)
I t’s the furiously melodic likes of Gladiator, The Lion King, Inception, Batman Begins, Dark Knight Rises, Pirates of the Caribbean, Kung Fu Panda, and Sherlock Holmes that’s elevated film music to a thing of rocking beauty, as Zimmer and his team have employed every oddball instrument and influence from Gustav Holst, Lebo M. and the sound of bat wings into percussively thematic adrenalin.” — Daniel Schweiger, 2011.
I f you ask me, Zimmer’s score rescues Sherlock Holmes (and Guy Ritchie et al.) in the new ‘A Game of Shadows’ film.
Z immer and his composer-orchestrator colleagues at Remote Control Productions created a beautiful and varied score that augments the color and vista of the film, lending atmosphere, scope, and interest to what otherwise could seem predictable. Never gets in the way of what the script and imagery are doing, but never merely reinforces or sonically reiterates what’s been said or shown.
B ut more than this, I am really thrilled with the tempi and the rhythmic architecture of this score. I got the soundtrack and listened to it several times, measured the tempi bar-by-bar in each of the cues, and created a spreadsheet of the values (see jpeg above). I also put an EKG on myself and digitized my heartrate during each listening. Not only did my heartrate adapt to each of the tempo changes, but the heart rate variability (HRV, using the simple RMSSD metric) also synced with Zimmer’s music. Empirically, I suspect that that “N-of-1” experiment is indicative of why this music “works”—physiologic response “pulls” cognition, rather than the other way around.
S ee the book by Bacci and Melcher (link below) for more on phase-locking and rhythmic ‘entrainment’ of breathing, heartbeat, and other physiologic rhythms, syncing with music.
S ince I’d captured the tempo timeseries, I decided to do some other calculations on it, too. I used the open-source R system’s package ‘entropy’ (link below) to calculate the Miller-Madow, James-Stein, Tsallis, Chao-Shen, and Shannon/Jeffreys entropy values. The entropy of the timeseries of tempi for these 18 cues is H = 2.72... pretty high... indicating a substantial amount of variability/unpredictability/interestingness. If you do entropy calcs for “bad” or ineffective film scores (as I happened to do several times last summer), you get much lower values, H between about 1.10 and 1.90.
M ost film schools don't even mention music, much less compare examples of good and bad scoring.” — Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 8.
T he cues’ titles (track-names) collect words and phrases from the screenplay that are cadential—perfect rhythmic-harmonic demarcations of the narrative arc and plotting. It’s clear that Zimmer applied an admirable amount of objectivity in the spotting session, to inject material that adds considerable depth to the character or the story without the material asserting itself as a vehicle for his own ego.
T he score (Die Forelle; The Red Book; Moral Insanity) makes Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes more alert and angry when he is facing Jared Harris’ Moriarty. The score (He’s All ‘Me! Me! Me!’) makes Jude Law’s Dr. Watson all the more hapless as he gets unwillingly caught up in the plot.
T he producers and Guy [Ritchie, the director] and Jude [Law, co-star] and I got together and tried to have it feel like an extension of what we think brotherhood is—the bickering and miscommunications are part of something that aspires to something higher.” — Robert Downey Jr., Scotland BigIssues Magazine 05-DEC-2011.
A Game of Shadows’ stands as a valentine to the public-school buccaneer. It provides Ritchie with a licence to run wild with Gypsies, trade punches with cossacks, or just generally arse about in expensive hotels. It gives us anarchy as panto and global espionage in the guise of a homoerotic stag weekend.” — Xan Brooks, The Guardian.
I n other words, Zimmer’s score truly ‘services’ the film’s narrative, neither over-writing nor under-writing. Naturally, given the big-action subject matter in this film, there are lots of huge orchestral cues. But there are more than half of the cues that are intimate, chamber-like pieces.
M any think that what we do is ‘Art’. I disagree. Music is an art form. Film music is a craft with its roots in art. Art is a form of self-expression, and the last thing a director wants is some composer coming in and expressing him/herself all over the director’s film.” — Richard Bellis, 2006, p. 69.
F olk idioms in the Romani melodies (doina repeated-note gesture of lament), pentatonicism, Phrygian scale with the second and third scale degrees raised when ascending, and fraigish harmonic minor, flying-staccato, alla zingarese poco a poco accelerandos “hallgató/lassú-közép gyors-friss" (e.g., Kesergö or or verbunkos or csárdás style in ‘It’s So Overt, It’s Covert’; ‘Romanian Wind’) to breakneck speeds, acrobatic violin with pitches bending and glissing, and the tone growling and crying ... great colla parte tempo-leading.
T he Hungarian hallgató of the ‘Did You Kill My Wife?’ brass band is superb.
G ee, this soundtrack is an admirable thing! The tremolos begin slowly, and the accelerandi melt into the flourishes so that they sound like one gesture—far bigger ones than you imagined when they began. The playing and conducting are excellent throughout. Precisely nailing the tempo variations, yet sounding totally organic while remaining faithful to meter. Very, very nice!
M usic can—and often does—transport us to places that no other artform can.” — Anne LeBaron.
T his international project presents fresh ideas by opening new and often unexpected horizons of creativity. The serious nature and deep content and design of the cantata aroused genuine interest from the public. The Cantata is one of the most important international events of contemporary classical music in Central Asia.” — Aigul Beisenova, Business Kazakhstan.
T here are artistic projects that heal and redeem and enlighten. And then, to our even greater delight, there are those that achieve this across vast cultural and political chasms, auguring well for world peace.
T he Silent Steppe Cantata Project is an artistic consortium, consisting of composer Anne LeBaron with her co-producer, tenor Timur Bekbosunov, plus filmmaker, Sandra Powers. The multi-media cantata is a sonic and visual portrait of Kazakhstan. Together with Bekbosunov, the Sary-Arka Folk Instrument Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of the Astana Philharmonic Society will perform the official premiere.
T he libretto incorporates Kazakh stories and mythology, and draws upon poems of Russian and Kazakh writers, including the poet Olzhas Suleimenov. Suleimenov has authored more than 16 volumes of poetry and prose, and his 1975 novel Az-i-Ia received both wide recognition in Kazakhstan and abroad, plus censure by Soviet authorities.
T he Palace of Peace and Reconciliation is a 77m high pyramid-shaped facility designed by Foster+Partners Architects and built by Sembol Construction at a cost of 8.74B Kazakh tenge (about USD$58M). Among other things, it houses a 1,500-seat concert/opera hall. It opened in late 2006. What a fitting venue for today’s première!
L istening to excerpts online, I am intrigued by the exposition of Kazakh ethnogenesis that the cantata and film portray. Without being revisionistic or grinding any particular philosophical “axes,” the cantata (the music, and the historical and contemporary texts comprising the libretto) reveals the inherently slippery, shifting imagination of Kazakh ethnic origins. It is their shifting, not a Western shifting; it is an indigenous acceptance of transitoriness/ephemerality that may derive from the primordial “geography” of the Kazakh nation and tribes. Acceptance without relativism/fatalism/determinism.
T he cantata demonstrates evidence of local elders and a musicoliterary elite struggling through the millennia to come to terms with the evolving political demarcations of Central Asia. Through their struggle, they created a handful of discrete ‘nationalities’, sustained through the centuries. If anything, the impression (from the bits of the cantata and film that we can experience online) is one of the indomitability of the spirit and of authentic human diversity. Needless adversity and suffering destroy things; they are never ‘noble’ or ‘desirable.’ But there is this residue of survivors—people, and music, and stories, and culture—and this once-dogged, now-expansive persistence of the will to peace. This cantata inspires as well as teaches!
S hih-Hui Chen’s String Quartet No. 5 (‘Mei-Hua’, ‘plum blossom’) [commissioned by Formosa Quartet in 2007] was performed last night by Formosa Quartet at University of Missouri Kansas City’s White Recital Hall.
[Jasmine Lin (violin), Ayano Ninomiya (violin), Che-Yen Chen (viola), and Jacob Braun (cello) formed the quartet in 2003. Formosa Quartet members trained at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute, Curtis, Harvard, and Yale. They have held title positions in the San Diego and Cincinnati Symphonies and have been on the chamber music faculty at Interlochen, University of California San Diego, Taos School of Music, and Northwestern University and have appeared regularly at the Marlboro, Caramoor, and Ravinia festivals, and at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. They have taken first place in the Primrose, Paganini, and Naumburg competitions as well as first Prize and the Amadeus Prize at the Tenth London International String Quartet Competition in 2006. Besides the Shih-Hui Chen work on last night’s program, Formosa Quartet also performs other new music, including pieces by Bright Sheng and Richard Wilson.]
B orn in Taipei, Shih-Hui Chen emigrated to the U.S. in 1982 and received her doctoral degree from Boston University. Her works have been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. Also frequently appearing in programs abroad, her music has been featured in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Amsterdam. A recipient of several fellowships including the Guggenheim, Ms. Chen has received grants from the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, and the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation.
H ard to be unaddressed, Empty to reflection— Take the road east— Be where it is.” — Robert Creeley, ‘There’, from ‘Gnomic Verses’, 1991.
S hih-Hui Chen frequently collaborates on inter-disciplinary and multi-media projects. She composed a film score for the documentary ‘Once Removed’ by film maker Julie Mallozzi, premiered several years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She also composed ‘There’, a song cycle composed with poet Robert Creeley prior to his dying in 2005. Shih-Hui Chen is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and has served as Composer in Residence at the Tanglewood Institute and at the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). She is a music advisor for Formosa Chamber Music Society, an active member of Musiqa (a composers’ collective based in Houston), and the Asian Composers’ League.
Some Chamber Music Compositions by Shih-Hui Chen
Six Songs (‘Sweet Rice Pie’) for voice and mixed ensemble
Shui (‘Water’) for cello and piano
Fu I for solo pipa
Fu II for pipa and 5 western instruments
Four Little Pieces of Wood for piano
66 Times (‘Voice of Pines & Cedars’) for soprano and chamber ensemble
S hih-Hui Chen’s Quartet No. 5 is comprised of three movements: Fantasia; Scherzo; and the eponymous Mei-Hua (Plum Blossoms). It is edgy, energetic throughout—athletic, even, in the demands it makes of the artists. Part of its edginess derives from the extensive use of spiccato gestures in each of the instruments’ parts. The bows rarely stop dancing and bouncing.
T he bowing styles called spiccato (sautillé) and ricochét, in which the bow bounces off the string between notes, have a predominant mode between 13 and 15 bounces/sec for a bow tensioned at 50 to 60 Newtons force. The kinematics of the bouncing involves a ‘ripple’ that is dominated by bending moments in the distal part of the bow, out toward the tip.
T he percussive ricochet bouncing—with the dissipation of energy over the series of successive bow impacts with the string—can evoke a variety of suspenseful musical effects. It conveys an emphatic, forward-looking ‘consequentialism’, for example—like a reminder that gravity is inescapable, like death and taxes: a Creeley-esque ‘be where it is’ inevitability. The kinesthetics of the bouncing is trampolinesque, fascinating as our minds anticipate the diminishing intervals of milliseconds between the successive bounces.
I calculate that, with a constant bow force, the inter-bounce time intervals approximately follow a hyperbolic Fibonacci series. I do not see that Askenfelt or anybody else has published on this. But, to me, it is a beautiful little mathematical result—writing spiccato as a compositional gesture amounts to invoking Nature and Mathematics and situating human society and its concerns in the large context of the universe and history. Spiccato kinesthetically alludes to the intersection of music and cosmology.
B ut you need exceedingly skilled artists to pull the gesture off in performance! You need a light bow-hold, yet a bow-hold that stays under control despite the vigorous bouncing. The bow more or less pivots around an axis through the ‘U’ in the frog with the thumb and middle/index finger (depending on your bow-hold technic) daintily opposing each other. You want the force of the bow on the string to stay essentially constant during the successive bounces in order to avoid ‘multiple-slipping’.
A squarish, Gibraltar-shaped force curve with a sharp rise and sharp drop, slipping during contact, has been shown to be optimal for a crisp spiccato. This was the result of physics experiments performed about 15 years ago by Anders Askenfelt and his colleagues at KTH in Stockholm. They found that the ‘ripple’ bending mode in the bow serves to reduce the build-up time for the force between the bowhair and the string with each successive bounce, enabling the sharp, box-shaped force as a function of time—and the crisp attack and release. However, more is not necessarily better, with regard to the sharpness imparted by the ripple. The risk of multiple-slipping is increased if the ripple mode is too great. Askenfelt found that spiccato playing properties of different bows varied widely and that the reproducibility of spiccato effects within-player and between-players also varied widely.
O ne of the [many] remarkable qualities that characterized the Formosa Quartet performance last night was the astonishing cohesiveness and elegance of their spiccato bowing. A cohesiveness of style and technic—all four of them—not just Ayano’s violin ricochet cohering with Jasmine’s violin ricochet. In fact, the extensive spiccato in each of the parts in the Shih-Hui Chen quartet provided ample empirical opportunity to confirm Askenfelt’s experiments: the ‘ripple’ in the bow dominates the effects, and the predominant 13 to 15 Hz mode is the same in violin, viola, cello, double bass. The effects are quite insensitive to the size and register of the ‘anvil’ (instrument) and have mostly to do with the physics of the bouncing ‘hammer’ (bow). The fact that this is so lends itself toward a ‘sectional’ unity that the composer can take advantage of. That spiccato physics plays no ‘favorites’ imparts a sense of the pervasiveness of ‘cause-and-effect’ natural law, of (eventual) justice and karma catching up with each and every one, of our embeddedness—every last mortal one of us—in Time.
T here are so many wonderful things in the Formosa Quartet performance and in this Shih-Hui Chen composition that I really must apologize for my ‘over the top’ delight in this one bowing-style/technical feature | compositional device. But, after all, this is a blog, not a ‘review’.
T he Formosa Quartet was joined by guest violist Scott Lee, Assistant Professor of viola at UMKC for Dvorǎk’s Op. 97, String Quintet in E-flat Major (1893). Scott won First Prize in both violin and viola in the Taiwan National Instrumental Competition, and was a top prize winner in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition and the William Primrose Viola Competition. He has performed at the the Newport Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Music from Marlboro, and, in addition to collaboration with the Formosa Quartet, has been a guest artist with the Miro, Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, and Miami String Quartets, and with the Beaux Arts and Mannes Piano Trios. Scott Lee has been a featured soloist at the International Hindemith Viola Festival and at the 22nd and 24th International Viola Congresses. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, 29 year-old Scott trained beginning at age 14 in the U.S. with violist Donald McInnes and violinist Todor Pelev and later with Michael Tree at Curtis Institute of Music and Paul Neubauer at Juilliard.
B edřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor (1876) was also performed. Both the Dvorǎk and the Smetana were superb—highly narrative, dramatic expressions that cohered with the Shih-Hui Chen piece, in terms of their grounding in the composers’ respective (auto-)biographical, nationalistic and folk-music traditions. Without question, last night’s performance was an adventure and a high-point of my concert-going thus far in the 2008-2009 season. Bravo!
O ne of my reservations about trendy new music that is heavily based on folk music—some pieces by Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, everything by Mark O’Connor—is that it is too transparently a recycling of those sounds. With [Shih-Hui] Chen’s work, by contrast, the Taiwanese melody is heard only furtively, as if it were lurking around the corner or hovering spectrally above the music. Indeed, an imagined pentatonic melody rattled through my head at intermission, even though it was never really quoted fully in ‘Mei Hua’. The folk original was evoked in fragments, with microtonal bends and other effects, obscured by dissonance in the first movement and treated with viscerally exciting rhythms and a repeated-note pulse in the second movement. The instruments were called on to make sounds more specific to Chinese music in the third movement, reminiscent of the pipa and erhu mostly.” — Jens Laurson, IonArts, 17-DEC-2007.
T he strength of any piece of music is how well it can simultaneously invoke memory schemas but still surprise us with clever twists and turns that foil our expectations.” — Daniel Levitin, Chatauqua Institution interview, 16-AUG-2007.
I think that is a mistake. There are more ways in which we reflectively meta-surprise ourselves than the number of ways that music directly surprises us. In fact, many of the pieces that are most-loved are ones that intrigue us by causing us to (re-)experience and rehearse emotions that we treasure. Have a look at David Huron’s new book (link below) for detailed empirical data and discussion of surprise and meta-surprise in music. The key is the prosodic stimuli that we experience with the music, and how the particular prosody of a piece satisfies a listener’s hunger or unmet need. Our need—and consequently our interpretation of the music—differs from time to time, from place to place, from culture to culture. What the pieces in Well-Tempered Clavier mean to me evolves with each passing decade of my life, and with each performance. The same is true of how I perceive the song ‘I Love the Mountains’.” — DSM.
One World or None? The astonishment at Daniel Levitin’s simplistic, reductionistic “Six Songs” meme! So it was that I began reading Levitin’s new book with this chip on my shoulder: ‘How like an ex-rock-producer-turned-academic to reduce everything to neat marketing and packaging!’
S cience should make everything [out to be] as simple as possible but not simpler [than is possible or factual].” — Albert Einstein.
But the book stayed; it stayed in my hands until I had finished the last page. So I now put up this CMT blog post to enthusiastically recommend that you read it, too.
Daniel Levitin argues in ‘The World in Six Songs’ that all music can be classified into one of six thematic categories:
friendship,
joy,
comfort,
knowledge,
ritual, and
love.
The motives for composing and performing may be more diverse than these categories, but, according to Levitin, all music is socially ‘normative’ (prescriptive, or reinforcing of social norms) and the reception of each piece by individual listeners and by society as a whole is associated with one of these categories.
T he right question, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature?” — Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.
Q uoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, [Stanford professor James Ferguson] persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ... It is in the particulars—the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves—that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.” — Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.
Twenty years ago Alexander Ringer (Professor Emeritus, Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign) examined the question of whether there is one music ‘world’ or many. And Francois Fetis and Alexander Ellis had ‘classified the human races according to their musical systems’ 100 years before that. Levitin’s new book knowingly caters to current social ‘political correctness’ fixations, but, in my view, scholarship is not advanced by uncritical illustration.
I don’t like the idea of this at all. How can you tell the story of the world in six songs? Who does this guy think he is telling me what these six songs should be? [A few hours later: ] Hmmm... this is interesting. I think I could come up with six songs to tell the story of the world.” — Willie Nelson.
Levitin’s new book is not scholarly ethnomusicology—it is a humanistic tract written for a popular audience. What I mean to say is that, insofar as comparative musicology tends to reveal in musical terms relatively synoptic and superficial features of human evolution, Levitin’s reduction of music to “six songs” should be considered a kind of ‘historiography’ at best and as a kind of "Voyager spacecraft Golden Record" at worst. The record placed on-board Voyager, which was launched in 1977 and departed the solar system into deep space in 2004, contained material selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.
W hy is music so important to us as human beings? What is it about us that seeks music? For many people, music is a way of expressing, sharing, or experiencing emotions that we use as an alternative to language. Music does things that language can’t. As an art form, it allows us to express emotions and ideas over time, as opposed to painting, which does this over space. Why do songs evoke many emotions, that can make us laugh and cry? Because that is the job of music! It is made to do that. Music captures the dynamics of human emotion, their changing nature, the complexity of feeling happy and sad at the same time. When it’s composed well, it can do this better than language, and that’s probably the reason why we, as a species, still have both.” — Daniel Levitin, interview on Voice of America, 20-AUG-2008.
Prof. Sagan and colleagues assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this were added several dozen musical selections from different cultures and timeperiods, plus spoken greetings in fifty-five languages. The first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg concerto No. 2, the Prelude and Fugue in C No. 1 from WTC Book 2, and the gavotte from Partita No. 3 in E for violin were on the disc. Louis Armstrong’s ‘Melancholy Blues’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 were on it. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the Bulgarian ‘Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin’ were on it. In all, an eclectic 90-min housemix of the past 500 years of music.
The diversity of human feeling and musical expression was not about to be adequately captured on one Golden Record, any more than the tremendous diversity of round musical “pegs” will fit into Levitin’s six square “holes”.
A sign is something which stands for something to somebody. It addresses one or more somebodies. It carries an association with a particular meaning and generally with one or more other signs. It can even create other signs. The sign stands for something: its object. In Peirce’s notion of semiotics, the sign creates in the perceiver’s mind a more developed sign (called an ‘interpretant’). Each of these in turn generates its own chain of interpretants. ‘I Love the Mountains’ (ILTM) generates a litany of its own interpretants. So does Bach’s BWV 862.
In music, pitch, timbre, intensity, or chord progressions may act as signs. Popular music especially trades on these. But all music since time immemorial has also done so. In fact, after reading Levitin’s book (and its mention on p. 108 of how prevalent ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ progressions are) I went looking for examples in Baroque music. They’re not difficult to find. Open up Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, for example. Have a look in Book 1 at BWV 862. The chord progression ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ is nominally the second most common chord progression in music, ever.
Here we have the little-known duet by J.S. and son C.P.E. Bach, in 1722:
Pieces with I-vi-ii-V7 progression:
I Love the Mountains
Blue Moon
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
Savin’ All My Love
Try To Remember
Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat
Bach’s Fugue in A-flat
Millions more…
A hit song is actually somewhat formulaic—the repetitiveness, the rousing section that leads us to that ever-so-hooky thing that we call a chorus—those things seem to happen over and over in hit songs, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s not necessarily a good song from a musical standpoint, one that uses ‘The Chord That Stops The Planet From Rotating On Its Axis’. I think one of the most difficult things to give students a grasp of is an idea of the dire simplicity of most of the music in a song.” — Jon Aldrich, Berklee College of Music.
[Video was first aired on 15-APR-2008 during the Discovery Channel’s season premiere of “Deadliest Catch” program; went ‘viral’ after that. Arrangment by composer Brian Chapman (Beacon Street Studios, Los Angeles); Creative Director: Glenn Cole; CD/Designer: Bryan Rowles; CD/Copywriter: Jason Norcross; Agency: 72andSunny; Agency Executive Producer: Sam Baerwald; Agency Producer: Angelo Ferrugia; Production Company: Outsider; Director: James Rouse; Director of Photography: Max Goldman; Producer: Jeremy Barrett; Editorial Company: Mad River Post; Editor: Lucas Eskin; Producer (Editorial): Ann Kirk; VFX Artist: Alex Kolansinski; VFX Producer: Helena Lee; Producer (Music): Adrea Lavezzoli]
It never gets old, huh? Nope. Kinda makes you wanna... break into song? Yup.
I love the moun-tains, I love the clear blue skies; I love big bridg-es, I love when great whites fly-- I love the whole world, and all its sights and sounds. Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.
I love the o-cean, I love real dir-ty things; I love to go fast, I love e-gyp-tian kings-- I love the whole world, and all its cra-zi-ness. Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.
I love tor-na-does, I love a-rach-a-nids; I love hot mag-ma, I love the gi-ant squids-- I love the whole world, it’s such a brill-iant place. Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Aht-Tah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.
[50-sec clip, Brian Chapman et al., DiscoveryChannel ad, ILTWW, 0.8MB MP3]
Notice the circle of 5ths movement in this series of chords. The ‘Circle of 5ths’ describes chord movement downward by 5ths (or upward by 4ths). The strong resolution of the dominant V7 chord to the tonic I chord is known, oddly enough, as ‘dominant resolution’.
In chamber musc and other classical music genres, ‘dominant resolution’ is called an ‘authentic cadence’. Every time we change chords:
The root moves down a fifth, or one string.
The seventh always slides down one fret, to become the third of the next chord.
The third of the previous chord stays where it is, but becomes the seventh of the next chord.
[50-sec clip, CrewsNelson, ILTM, 0.9MB MP3]
In the right hand of a guitar, each note moves to the pitchwise-closest note in the next chord. That’s basic ‘voice-leading’, and the ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ progression voice-leads well—it is physiologically convenient to sing and play, reliably and with minimal risk of mistakes, and, consequently, is likely to sound good—which is why this pattern has been so prevalent in western music over the centuries. MIDI sequencers can execute horribly complex patterns that might sound good, and MIDI sequencers can execute them with no performance risk. But our ears and minds have evolved over the millennia to prefer singability/playability. We love dire simplicity, as Jon Aldrich calls it.
Somehow ‘major scale’ = ‘happy expressivity’ / ‘minor scale’ = ‘melancholic expressivity’ became a social norm—at least in western music. That led to a bias toward the ‘harmonic minor’ harmonizations. Listen to just about any piece of music in a minor key and you will hear progressions like I-iv-V7-I / I-vi-ii-V7 / I-vi-IV-V7. Success breeds success. But the sound of the harmonic minor scale played in a melodic context was unpopular. So the Dorian and Aeloian came together with the addition of a raised 7th (leading-tone), and this union begat the melodic minor scale. The raised 6th and 7th on the way up sounded ‘right’ in a melodic context and didn’t impair the harmonization.
As Frank Zappa put it in ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’, this progression is the ultimate in formulaic ‘bad caucasian music’. While it may have originally been interesting 500 years ago or more, it has by now been so overused by every composer and songwriter that it’s become a musical cliché. ‘I-vi-ii-V’ progressions—the only way these can be used effectively to create new music is to subvert the cliché. Which you can see that Bach did in BWV 862 if you carefully analyze it, measure by measure.
In the end, Levitin’s new book is highly enjoyable, well worth the read. If you’re looking for penetrating comparative musicological scholarship, this is not your book; but, if you’ve read other of Levitin’s writings, you would never have thought that it would be anything other than what it is: an expansive, highly-readable, inspirational book-length essay. Successful record-producer and marketer that he is, Levitin concludes abruptly with a surprising ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law’ passage that is patterned along the lines of Romans 13:8-10 or Galatians 5:14. What the!?
I t is the love of our existence that is the highest love of all—the love of humanity with all our flaws; all our destructiveness; all our petty fears, gossip, and rivalries. A love of the goodness that we sometimes show under the most difficult stresses—of the heroism of doing the right thing even when no one can see us doing it; of being honest when there is nothing to gain by it; of loving those whom others might find unlovable. It is all this, and our capacity to write about it—to celebrate it in music—that makes us [sentient creatures with moral standing].” — Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 289.
I won’t hazard to guess how comparative anthropologists will receive this book. But Levitin’s writing succeeds as brilliant, popularistic music commentary in much the same way as, say, Rob Kapilow or Bruce Adolphe succeeds. It’s fine. It’s fun. And it propels ordinary readers to think about why music works—about why they respond to it as they do.
Just the same, what about ILTM? Isn’t this song simultaneously a member of all six of Levitin’s categories? And why exactly is it that I like Brian Chapman’s Discovery Channel ad so, so much? The reason has nothing do with any of Levitin’s six categories. Boom-de-yada.
