Fourteen Minutes of Music

The following is an essay on Seán Clancy's work, "Fourteen Minutes of Music on The Subject of Greeting Cards." As with all essays I write about a particular work, I encourage you to listen before reading. In this case, there is written text, as well, drawn from a short film by David Theobald, titled "With Deepest Sympathy."

Here is a link to a video of Clancy's work: Fourteen Minutes

And here is a link to Theobald's film: With Deepest Sympathy

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5.a.

"Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth on which he lives..." Marcus Aurelius

1.a.

Repetition is a core consideration for the music maker.

 

What gets repeated?

When is it repeated?

How is it repeated?

Why is it repeated?

 

What is changed?

1.b.

The ostinato - a musical idea which is repeated over and over again. Often, rhythm is the most pronounced part of an ostinato, but it doesn't have to be. Pitch can be an important part of an ostinato as well (see: the ground bass).

2.a.

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

...

...

...

3.a.

Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards repeats most obviously an alternation between two notes: one note repeated, a sharp alternation of a half-step, the new note repeated.

The rhythm is less clearly repeated. The ear senses similarity but the experience is uncertain.

Not quite an ostinato, the opening motive nevertheless has the character of one. Or perhaps it is an ostinato. Had I easy access to a score, I could confirm one way or the other.

I don't. I suspect, for the purposes of the listening experience, it doesn't much matter. Even if I knew it were an actual ostinato, could I hear it as one? How many repetitions would I need to hear before I did? If it isn't an actual ostinato, could I hear the subtle changes made over the course of fourteen minutes? How many repetitions would I need to hear before I could?

Again - would the ability to discern by ear one way or another aid the work's idea? Or is the work more concerned with the inability to perceive the true nature of the perhaps-quasi-ostinato pattern, caught indecisive between two equally plausible answers?

1.c.

The round, or canon (not to be confused with cannon, or Kannon) - a musical form in which multiple voices sing the same melody with staggered entrances (voices singing "in imitation" a theorist might say). Row, Row, Row Your Boat, basically.

Repetition overlapping like waves in a pool, creating difference.

Musical canon might not involve strict repetition. There might be a rule - play the imitation upside down; play the imitation at a higher/lower starting pitch; play the imitation backwards; play the imitation such that the work, like all of life, becomes a crab.

3.b.

Fourteen Minutes does have a melody. It is admittedly difficult to hear as a melody. The flute and violin echo first the piano. Then, always playing long, sustained tones, the two instruments slowly evolve outwards, often imitating each other, first one leading, then the other.

Often, but not always.

The long tones not only make it difficult to perceive the unfolding music as a melody, it makes it doubly difficult to tell if their parts are organized as a canon. Clearly, there is imitation between the two instruments. There is also difference. But is that imitation and difference the result of an underlying canonical logic? It is difficult to tell.

The question becomes more challenging when the piano's other hand enters. Is it playing the same tones as what the violin and flute played at the beginning? Do you remember the beginning well enough to tell?

Or, like 3.a., is the inability to perceive one way or another part of the point?

2.a.

...

...

...

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

...

...

...

4.a.

So you've decided to write a fifteen hour long opera tetrology. You have a problem - how do you maintain musical and dramatic sense over the course of the ordeal?

In another way - how do you maintain the listener's memory?

Leitmotiv is one answer - a musical idea associated with a character, or perhaps a place, or maybe something more abstract. You see the Rhine? You hear the Rhine. You see Siegfried? You hear Siegfried. You see &c., you &c. &c.

You spend the next twenty-six years of your life writing this opera cycle. It becomes, arguably, the most influential musical work of the next 150 years or so, if for no other reason than showing the powerful potential of leitmotif - especially in films and video games.

4.a.1.

No wrong answer: When you think of Darth Vader, do you think of the Imperial March or his breathing first?

4.b.

Of course, an opera is a drama. Characters undergo change. It makes sense that the music supporting those characters might change as well. A composer might decide to take a leitmotiv or melody or chord progression and make a variation of it somewhere down the line. When well accomplished, the listener has the pleasure both of recognizing something familiar and of hearing something new... at the same time!

Double your pleasure, double your fun!

3.c.

While Fourteen Minutes is not an opera, it does have a text. The music is presented with slides of phrases pulled from David Theobald's short film, "With Deepest Sympathy," in which the camera pans from one greeting card to another, creating from the sequence the narrative of a life running its course from birth to death.

4.c.

Some composers might be so taken by the idea of variation, they make a whole composition that is only a theme followed by a bunch of variations of that theme, a "theme and variations," if you will. "Some composers" might include a few names you might have heard of, like "J.S. Bach," or "Ludwig van Beethoven."

It became something of a way to show off your musical creativity, both compositionally and (since variations were often improvised by the composer as part of performances) instrumentally. And indeed, J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" and L.v. Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" have more than stood the test of time, they have earned the "towering composition" moniker from many a program note writer. A prestigious award, to be sure.

4.a.2.

In the video game, Chrono Trigger, one of the first tracks the player hears when the narrative proper begins is "Peaceful Days." Skipping ahead a bit, there's some festival shenanigans, a demonstration of a new teleportion invention, and then BAM! You get sent back in time 400 years. As you do.

Anyways. The characters (and the first-time player) doesn't know they've been sent to the same place 400 years prior. But if you listen to the music, you might catch a hint. The music you hear when arrive is "Wind Scene."

Take a listen.

Peaceful Days

Wind Scene

Did you hear it?

2.a.

...

...

...

do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

&c. &c. &c.

&c. &c. &c.

...

...

...

4.d.

Not every composer pursued variation as a sign of aesthetic excellence, but at least one composer prized variation so highly, he made a whole compositional philosophy around it. Enter Arnold Schoenberg.

Growing increasingly discontented with what he felt was clumsy padding in his own compositions, Schoenberg drew upon the compositional techniques of Brahms, Wagner, and Mahler to begin composing works using what he called developing variation. Describing his own music in New Music: My Music, he wrote "variation almost completely takes the place of repetition."

The avoidance of repetition, and the development of compositional techniques to successfully do so, was a preoccupation for such composers as Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage.

If this sounds like difficult listening, Schoenberg would agree. Repetition is an aid to recognition, and, as Schoenberg puts it, "the precondition to memory is recognition."

3.b.1.

Fourteen Minutes has a melody, but not one clearly stated. Certainly not one clearly perceived. New pitches are presented in near isolation from each other. They are distant both in time and register. They do not follow an obvious melodic arc. The old ebbs away as soon as the new flows in.

The moment matters more than the memory.

4.e.

Other composers rebelled, naturally. I am thinking specifically of the minimalist composers, composers whose compositions are, ironically, often quite long. Here is an aesthetic which revels not in variation but repetition.

Although... It's not quite so simple, is it?

Philip Glass is perhaps most obviously "classical" in his presentation of myriad scintillant arpeggios and other musical figurations. Much happens in the moment, but change changes slowly (if at all, say his detractors).

But then there's Terry Riley's In C, for which no two performances will ever be alike except they are all In C.

There's Steve Reich's Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, in which two loops of the same short phrase are played just out of phase so that, slowly, inevitably, the words lose meaning not merely from semantic satiation by from the dissolution of syllabic sense created by constructive and destructive interference.

And speaking of interference. La Monte Young, inspired by the hum of electrical grids he heard as a child, worked specifically with drones to create music from the overlap of similar but not the same waves.

1.c.2

A musical tone is a wave repeating so fast we hear the blur as a single entity.

The sound of an instrumental section playing "in unison" is an imperceptible round.

4.b.1.

"Oh Bwunhiwda, you're so wuvwey."

"Yes, I know, dear. I can't help it."

3.c.1.

David Theobald labels With Deepest Sympathy an "impoverished narrative."

The film is the narrative of a life. Whose life? Could be anybody's (although there's definitely critique to be had regarding the assumption of universal experience, that's an entirely different essay).

The life is twice compressed - life's unique moments compressed into pithy phrases used to label experience as genres; and the industrialized repetition of those phrases rendering them cliche.

4.e.1.

My first listen of Fourteen Minutes brought Brian Eno's Music for Airports to mind. There's a similar vacant feeling in these works, a music detached.

It was a spurious comparison, musically and philosophically. Fourteen Minutes has a poignant sharpness to its dissonance, where Music for Airports is more gentle, more mellow. Eno's album was written as an antidote to anxiety, not by "stripping away all doubt and uncertainty," but by creating calm and "a space to think." Which anxiety was Eno trying to assuage, in particular? Mostly the anxiety of the plane falling out of the sky with him in it. In his words, the music is meant to "Resign you to the possibility of death."

2.a.

...

&c &c &c

&c &c &c

&c &c &c

...

3.a.1.

The ostinato in Fourteen Minutes is a leitmotif - the only consistent throughline in the music for the only consistent throughline in the narrative - the life lived.

5.b.

Two views of ritual.

Ritual as repetition: "The key to forming good habits is to make them part of your rituals." Lewis Howes.

Ritual as change: "Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation." Abraham Verghese.

3.c.2.

An "impoverished narrative," notwithstanding, Sean Clancy underscores the narrative structurally.

From birth to early adulthood: the ostinato accompanied by increasing activity and layers in the melodies. The flute and violin play high in their registers.

Mid-adulthood: in the middle of the narrative, a single word - "sorry." The melody cuts out. A series of troubles is accompanied only by the piano ostinato.

From mid-adulthood to old age: the melody returns with "A New Job." The flute and violin play low in their registers.

From old age to end: "With Sympathy." The ostinato cuts out. The melody continues a while in the violin and flute, again high in their registers. Midway through "With Deepest Sympathy," the flute and violin cut out altogether, leaving just the piano.

5.c.

What is the difference between ritual and tedious repetition?

Belief, I suppose.

2.a.1.

"Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded..."

"I do."
"And do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded..."

"I do so la mi fa do fa so

do so la mi fa do fa so

...

4.a.2.1.

If you missed the variation in the Chrono Trigger examples earlier, I don't blame you. The "Wind Scene" theme begins with a variation on just a single bar in the middle of "Peaceful Days."

Sneaky, Yasunori Mitsuda. Very sneaky...

3.a.2.

If you watch Theobald's movie after watching Fourteen Minutes like I did, you might be struck by a sudden epiphany, a moment of recognition.

Theobald shot his film at a grocery store of some kind. In the background is the ambient noise of people going about their business, accompanied by the beeping of items being scanned at the cash registers.

That beeping is awfully familiar, is it not?

5.d.

Viktor Frankl, on meaning: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather recognize that it is he who is asked."

4.e.2.

The sharpness of Clancy's music prevents it from becoming ambient. Fourteen Minutes is insistent, poignant, perhaps a little unpleasant. Compared against Airports almost fatalistic calm, Fourteen Minutes a questioning, challenging the listener to make sense of the sequence the composer deliberately obscures.

Unlike Beethoven, say, Clancy does not demand the listener's attention. Instead, he invokes the insistent question that lurks in many a mind - "Why? What is it all for?" and, perhaps, "Is that all? Everything that happened, everything I did, compressed and flattened into generic events?"

5.e.

"What an odd thing a diary is. The things you omit are more important than those you put in." Simone de Beauvoir.

3.a.3.

Is it too dramatic to say Fourteen Minutes is a statement of rebellion?

Theobald's film is stark, almost nihilistic. A portrait of how lives are squashed and strained into seedless jellies, salted and sweetened, all bitterness eradicated, transformed into commodoties to be bought and sold. This card rack is an altar, Theobald seems to say, and the ritual is commerce.

And then...

Clancy turns the impersonal beeps of the store registers into music, underscores the hollow words with the meaning they had lost. It is stretched thin, almost too diffuse to be perceptible, but it is there, insistent.

Listen:

3.c.3.

I left one bit out of the structual analysis. "Happy Birthday, Grandad" is underscored by a strong, dramatic moment that cuts out suddenly at "On the Loss of Your Wife." The moment is a last moment of happiness before the final, slow dwindling.

A strange thing happens, though, in this final stage of the work. Stealthily, a melody begins to sync up with the ostinato. During "With Deepest Sympathy," the last moments of the life, the alternating ostinato and flute and violin drop out. We are left with a melody in the piano, the ostinato rhythm given new shape as it playfully skips around a larger constellation of pitches.

Do you recognize them? Are they the same pitches as established at the beginning of the work?

Could you, at the end of everything, be able to look back at the beginning and recognize yourself in what you became?

3.a.4.

There is a person in there. In spite of all this, the symbols yet signify.

2.a.

...

do

.

---

I hope you found this essay enjoyable. At the very least, if you made it this far, it might have made you think a bit. If you'd like to support future blogs, as well as my own composing, consider becoming a Patron at my Patreon.

Adam Eason | creating Music, Videos, Blog | Patreon

 

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Fantastical Musings

Watch a fantasy movie, what music do you hear? The background music is probably some kind of Wagnerian/Straussian late-romantic orchestral score, something epic and monumental.

What about the characters in the movie, though? What music do they play, listen to? Invariably, some kind of fiddle tune, something vaguely or actually British Isles-ish. Jigs, reels. Fifes and pennywhistles are probably involved. Bagpipes, if the director is feeling especially daring.

To be sure, this makes a certain amount of sense. The biggest fantasy film and TV shows have been either located in England (Harry Potter), or in some kind of pastiche grounded in medieval British history (Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones). The biggest fantasy game is Dungeons and Dragons, no contest, and its setting, too, is medieval pastiche largely drawing upon the British Isles. Listen to podcasts and streams of D&D games and you'll find them riddled with quasi-British-ish accents.

If you're satisfied with that, there's no reason to go asking further. I've often thought, though, there is zero reason why a "fantasy world" full of literally invented cultures should be full of this admittedly charming but narrow band of musical styles. In fact, given all the folk music I've listened to and how diverse it is even just in Europe, there is every reason to think that a truly fantastical culture would develop a music completely different from anything we're accustomed to.

The Tricky Bit

Escaping the gravitational pull of this stylistic paradigm (or any paradigm, really) is difficult. Hollywood sets audience expectations through a massive distribution of media and those very expectations then feed right back into Hollywood, rewarding the fulfillment of those expecations with hundreds of millions of dollars and punishing thwarted expectations with a flood of "it's not really fantasy" bomb reviews.

This dynamic and how it affects music choice is demonstrated clearly by the production of James Cameron's film, Avatar. Producer Jon Landau brought in ethnomusicologist Dr. Wanda Bryant to work with composer James Horner. The goal was to create a new musical culture for the Na'vi, and to that end, Mr. Horner apparently asked Dr. Bryant to bring him sounds "no one had ever heard before." Tricky work, that, but it was done.

In the end, a great deal of their work was dismissed out of hand by James Cameron. Dr. Bryant goes into more detail in her essay recalling the experience and elaborates more fully on how the commercial needs of making an obscenely expensive blockbuster film impose strict constraints on the creative drives of those involved. While she is gracious, Dr. Bryant's frustration with the process is palpable. Or maybe I'm projecting - you can read her work and decide for yourself here.

Luckily, most artists need not be beholden to such stringent standards. One work which explored the "What if..." of a fantastically imagined culture's music is Judith Weir's Airs from Another Planet.

Native Extrapolation

Judith Weir took a different tack than James Horner and Dr. Wanda Bryant. Rather than looking for something no one has ever heard, she took inspiration from personal heritage (for her, Scottish) and asked, "How might these genres be reimagined?" You can have a listen here: Judith Weir: Airs from Another Planet (1986) - YouTube

In the first movement, "Strathspey and Reel," Weir uses two different strategies to effect this "locally foreign" intent. The strathspey evokes the bagpipe version of the dance, in which florid ornaments decorate the main tones of the tune. While she keeps that genre element more or less intact, the harmony is wide ranging and feels familiar without being so. She also uses the ensemble's greater range and diverse timbres to explore unusual colors - the ensemble plays all together, if not always quite in unison, to create the illusion of a single, rather unusual instrument.

For the reel, Weir uses the group a bit more like an ensemble, although there is still a strong feeling of the group functioning as a single unit, an instrument made of instruments. The piano alternates between providing a scintillating accompanimental figuration and adding color to the melody played by the winds. Unlike the strathspey, the sense of the reel as a melodic genre is more deconstructed. Its characteristic driving rhythm is present, but broken up. It might feel like a reel if you squint your ears a bit. Again, there's a sense of familiarity to the harmonies and melodic contours which echo a memory of something you might have heard once, even if you can't quite place the source.

In Betweens

For composers looking to create a "familiarly foreign" feel, to evoke the Once Upon a Time place, there's plenty of room in between the two extremes presented above. Regardless, the main approaches are probably going to be the same - using something relatively familiar as a baseline, identifying the genre's characteristic harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic features and then asking "What if this, but not?"

The degree to which you can create a sense of distance from the source will depend on how many of the factors you tinker with at once. The difference between a jig in 5/8 as opposed to its typical 6/8 meter will probably only be picked up by careful listeners, though I suspect most people would simply sense something "off" about it. Keeping the usual melodic contours of a jig but using a different harmonic source can result in a striking contrast while your average listener will still, if pressed, probably say "It's like a jig, I guess?" Doing both at the same time might only maintain the barest whiff of its original source.

Interestingly, in one melody I composed which used a slightly different harmonic scheme than a usual Scottish air, one commenter said it sounded "like Scotland sometimes, but also Middle Eastern somehow?" This came from a person with no musical training whatsoever, showing just how difficult it is to match the "doesn't sound like anything anybody has heard before" prompt James Horner put forward for Avatar.

Instrumentation can be an especially strong marker of place. Play some bagpipes, and I'd put money down you think first of Scotland, even though the bagpipes are a commonly used instrument throughout Europe. It would similarly be very difficult to evoke a place other than Japan if a composer used the sho, its distinctive clarity being difficult to mistake for anything else. For Avatar, James Horner even ended up blending the sounds of several drums together in order to create a percussive sound that didn't share obvious characteristics with existing instruments. Nevertheless, finding new approaches to using an instrument can probably create a lot of oppotunities for creating a fantastical sound-place that isn't too far afield for broader audiences.

 

 

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Very Old Music: Hurrian Hymn #6

We know music has been around for a long, long time. The Divje Babe flute, named after the excavation site from which it was found, suggests musical instruments were being made as far back as 43,000 years ago. Ranging across pre-history, instruments of various kinds, ranging from rattles to drums to bells have all been found in the archaeological record. What did their music sound like? Would we even consider it “music?” Who knows? Time is not kind to the ephemeral.

But in the 1950’s, excavators of a site at Ugarit, Syria found a group of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform. Building upon Emmanuel Laroche’s compiling and cataloging, researchers Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin worked out the musical nature of the tablets. Of all the pieces that were found, only one song is complete, given the title “Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal.” It looks like this:

Hurrian Hymn Tablet

These tablets date to about 1400 BCE, and form the world’s oldest known song. Part of the tablet contains instructions for tuning the instrument, the other part notates the music itself alongside the lyrics of the hymn. Even if it is incomplete, it is a very exciting thing! It is so exciting, even non-musicians get excited about it! You can even perform it! Can you imagine, hearing and playing music written 3,400 years ago? That’s crazy pants!

You can hear a performance of Duchesne-Guillemin’s transcription at the bottom of this page: http://urkesh.org/urkeshpublic/music.htm

It’s right around this point that researchers and lay people diverge. The lay public continues to be chuffed about the whole business, and reasonably so!, while researchers break out their pipes and deerstalkers to go brood in a corner about all the things they still don’t know.

Things like: “We know it’s written for an instrument called a sammûm, but is it a harp or a lyre?” (Probably a lyre? Most likely. Or not?)

Or, “Duchesne-Guillemin’s transcription is really cool, but are there other, valid interpretations of the notation?” (Yes, five, in fact, and they’re all quite different)

And, “What other questions can I think of to ensure I keep getting research funding?”

The transcription issue is especially a downer. The specter of “notation vs. interpretation” floats nearby and dunks doubt over whether we really know what the song is at all. Dr. Richard Dumbrill wrote one of the several other interpretations that exists. You can give a listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c-hmFN610g&ab_channel=DamianMusicChannel4

Even a cursory comparison will show the two interpretations are considerably different. But, from a certain perspective, maybe it doesn’t matter all that much whether we’ve gotten the “right” melody. The work of all these researchers is a special achievement in archaeology and musicology regardless of any definitive conclusion. The Hymn to Nikkal’s discovery continues to inspire and impress, as can be heard in pianist Malek Jandali’s adaption for keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tn9x-IDYcY&ab_channel=AgaKhanMuseum

Until new evidence comes to light (and it very likely won’t), there is no knowing what the song “actually” is. Where does that leave us? Like remembering an old childhood memory, hazy in its recollection, the Hymn to Nikkal reminds us of a thing we know happened – even if we can’t quite place what it was.

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Theory for Strings

I've got a pretty big project in the works - a text aimed at teaching music theory for string players. Because it needs to be said, I'm specifically talking about theory grounded in Western ideas, because that's what I'm familiar with. And, because it also needs to be said, I'm not talking about Schenker, either. The text will cover the basics - pitch, intervals, chords/arpeggios, progressions; rhythmic subdivision; motives, phrases, and simple musical forms.

Why am I doing this? Because I'm a titanic nerd. Also, because, as a cellist, it would have been really helpful to learn a lot of this stuff a lot earlier than I did. Like, how anyone gets away with saying a student is playing "out of tune" without talking about intervals is kind of beyond me. Or expecting students to memorize music without talking about motives and form. There's a special brand of pedagogical sadism lurking in the shadows, sometimes.

Now, when I say I'm writing this "for strings," I mean that the way I'm introducing these concepts will be done in a way which is most immediately relevant to beginner-ish strings. It's admittedly a bit of a grey area, here - how soon should you talk about theory stuff? Elementary school strikes me as too young. Theory is pretty abstract. Depending on the player's introduction to music, they may be beginners in middle school... or very advanced, if they started learning as a toddler.

I guess it's a big to do about not much - the question kind of answers itself in that to begin teaching theory, you have to start basic, so the music will end up basic. The text, then, will could serve as an intro book for a beginner alongside something more musically palatable. Or, it could serve as a review book for someone more advanced. I'll leave it up to the teacher to decide on a case to case basis whichever suits their pedagogical approach and/or the individual student.

The Musical Crab Ladder

In structure, the text will have three different sections per chapter - a new pitch concept, a new rhythm concept, and some exercises. As things get more advanced, the exercises will include small compositions I write, or folk tunes which combine concepts already covered. Not that folk tunes are better than other types of music, just that they're in public domain and it makes my legal life a lot easier when it comes to publishing.

Ideally, the exercises will follow this pattern - new pitch concepts combined with old rhythms; new rhythmic concepts combined with old pitch ideas; and a cumulative etude/composition which uses a mixture of previously covered concepts in a more musical fashion. How far back this interweaving of new+old should go has yet to be determined. I think it will become more clear as I write more.

I'm using this approach because I'm somewhat dissatisfied with approaches which are purely progressive. That is, each new exercise is more difficult than the last, with no circling around for review. The problem I've found here is, as the pieces become more difficult, students end up grappling too much with actually learning what the new piece is and they lose sight of how the it is played. Physicality of performance and internal audiation (hearing the song in their head) is lost for the sake of visually decoding the notation.

To some extent, I've tackled this problem simply by returning the student to earlier etudes and songs. This works, it just feels like a backslide and can be a hard sell to students who want to feel like they are moving forward. Hopefully, by building the review into the exercises themselves, I can have my cake and eat it, too. The cost might be relatively slow progression. Considering how difficult the fundamentals are, though, I think that's an acceptable trade off.

Duets for Teaching

For a whole host of reasons, these will be written as duets of the same instrument - two celli, two violins, two violas, two basses. For the sake of intonation, musical intervals should be heard harmonically (at the same time); for the sake of rhythmic intuition, students should get used to playing against different subdivisions of the beat; for the sake of musical interest, a duet is generally far superior to an unaccompanied string player (until a certain degree of advancement).

This does introduce another layer of titration - compositional complexity. I have an idea in mind to write variations on earlier exercises and songs. Drawing on the familiar will help illuminate the musical effect of the theoretical idea the student is learning. Variations are also just a good practice technique to learn, anyways. Having different ways of unlocking the same material is very useful both for memorization and for tackling particular physical challenges.

One other approach which I am finding very useful are musical rounds. Row, Row, Row Your Boat and all that. They're great because you can practice them in unison and then try them as a duet. So far, rounds have proved very effective in my own teaching. I think I'll have to write a number of them, myself, just to make sure there are rounds for each concept being taught and also to pace the complexity of the round's overlap.

String Specific Technique

The last question I have for myself is, how much of the book will be given over to techniques specific to string playing? I surely have to introduce some. That said, I think the pedagogical work for string specific challenges has been pretty well trod at this point. Schroder's 170 Foundational Etudes, along with Feulliard and a number of other cello pedagogues besides, give plenty of options for teachers to choose from. To that end, this book of mine will keep the physical technicalities pretty simple. I don't want to end up with a text that's, like, 10,000 pages long.

Scope

Speaking of page numbers, I just want to include a little note about the scope of the book. From the little sketching I've done, it will probably end up with three small-ish volumes. I'm hoping each one will end up about 40-50 pages each? I hope? I've got a list of theory concepts I want to be sure I cover, and it's pretty long. Considering there's going to be a lot of folding familiar into new (and familiar into familiar), it's not going to be a small project.

Nevertheless, I do want it to be concise. Theory is useful, but ultimately secondary to performance (ducks to dodge a Schenkerian tomato). I see no reason for this to end up being a titan omnibus. In fact, I see a lot of reasons for it not to be. Like I said, the intent of this series is to cover the basics, of which there are more than enough. Maybe one day, I'll do a volume that covers less than basics, like modes of limited transposition and pitch sets and tone rows, etc. In fact, I think I should. But that's kind of a separate project, really, which has its own challenges and problems.

Conclusion

Alright, that's it for today! If you're interested in following along in more detail than this blog will provide, consider joining my Patreon! Each tier has access to my progress at different levels of depth. Even a $1 subscription means a great deal in terms of support!

If not, thanks for reading! I hope to see you next time when I cover my approach to pitch reading for strings!

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Disappearing Music for Face

The concept is simple enough: a black and white film records an open mouth slowly close. By "slowly," I mean "over about ten minutes."

Over the course of said ten minutes, there is no other change. The shot's angle remains the same. The framing remains the same.

Also, there is no sound.

Link: https://youtu.be/mXkCI6yZlGg

The Experience

Assmuming one hasn't left the room of boredom or shuffled away in anger, vaguely gesticulating while muttering something about "the death of art" -

There's something uncanny about the image. A loose paraphrase of Freud's 'uncanny' - something once thought familiar has become unfamiliar. Like most uncanny things, it's difficult to pinpoint the reason for the reaction. I suppose, if it were easy to digest, the uncanny wouldn't be uncanny.

Interpreting the expression is difficult, for one thing, and it's not for lack of time. The film gives ample opportunity to cogitate over the image and what emotion the performer might be trying to convey. I hesitate to call the expression a smile. A grimace, perhaps? Not that either. It is an expression just shy of "neutral."

We see only the mouth, the chin, and one cheek. The nose, eyes, and forehead (which, by the way, provide valuable information to interpret expressions) are all out of frame. No, not quite. They are obscured by black, the features not just cut out of frame, but absent entirely. Without seeing the face's eyes, we can't gauge the person's gaze to give context to the expression.

Compare and Contrast: a person smiling at a campfire versus a person smiling at a burning building.

Another reaction to the unmoving lack of eyes: we, the viewers, might, at one point, feel as though the mouth gazes at us.

One curious element of the image is its apparent flatness. On one side, the light blows out the image; on the other, the black is somehow too black for us to register as shadows. The eye lacks information to percieve depth which we know should be present. The title is lying in the sense that we do not see an entire face. In another sense, the title is true - we are seeing only a face, detached entirely from a head.

About two minutes pass before any movement occurs; or maybe it takes that amount of time to register the performer is, in fact, moving. The stillness is unsettling. A stranger in a store staring too long at the back of your head. Stillness and flatness gives the impression of a mask, or a doll. As an instructive exercise, count how many horror stories involve masks or dolls. Another perspective: the slow movement leads us to believe we are viewing a something (like a mask or a doll) which should be still, but isn't.

A face which appears to be a mask, a mask which turns out to be a face.

(As an interesting aside - Japan has both masked (Noh) and puppeted (bunraku) theater with long histories. I'd be curious to hear Shiomi's thoughts about the connection between those theaters and this face.)

The image does change, but it changes so slowly it is difficult to discern how or why. Gradually, the sense of "face" gives way to increasingly abstract shapes. These shapes come as much from the change in shadows cast by the changing shape of the lips as they do from a mind desensitized to the image. Semantic satiation - how many times can you say "face" before "face" doesn't sound like "face" anymore?

Eventually, pareidolia sets in. The shadows shift and settle into something our mind interprets as a face, though what kind of face will surely depend on the viewer. I personally saw something like a demented muppet. A kind of double vision sets in as the memory of the image we know to be a face is superimposed by a face we know not to be a face.

Pareidolia may also confirm the earlier suspicion of the mouth's "gaze." The front teeth, at a point, may appear to become eyes. Gaze for long into the mouth, and the mouth gazes back.

After a time, the shadows settle back into a place where we easily perceive recognizably human features. The darkness and ambiguities are dispelled. The mouth, now a mouth again, is closed. The question remains:

What music?

There is No Hear Here

The title promised music. The film is silent.

Technicality: there is a low, buzzing thrum throughout, a sound similar to a fluourescent lightbulb about to burn out. It is possible it is an artifact of the film's creation. It is possible that sound is the music. However, the sound does nothing to attract attention to itself, and my mind quickly categorized it as ambient rather than intentional. While the sound no doubt contributes somewhat to the uncanny effect, I personally doubt the sound is what Shiomi intends us to perceive as "music."

"Disappearing Music for Face" was created in 1965. By then, there was already precedent for "silent music." In 1915, Erwin Schulhoff wrote a piece composed entirely from rests titled "In Futurum." In 1952, John Cage composed 4'33, in which (a) musician(s) perform(s) three movements of silence. Shiomi, herself, wrote an action poem, "Boundary Music," instructing any number of performers to "Make the faintest possible sounds," whether it becomes audible or not.

Comparing Shiomi's "Boundary Music" to Cage's 4'33 gives clues to Shiomi's intent with "Disappearing Music for Face." With Cage's work, the musician's part is marked "Tacet," the instruction given performers to indicate their instrument does not perform during a movement of a larger composition. "Does not perform," but is not "absent," not, at least, unless the tacet players have time to sneak out for a drink or two (bottom of the 9th and the bassists are loaded, and all that).

Cage's intent is to draw the listener's attention away from the performer and towards the ambient sound in the room. The musician's presence is to act as an icon, to indicate to the audience that "performance listening" should be engaged. In 4'33, the listener is expected to give the space's natural, incidental, and accidental sounds the same contemplative, engaged listening as they would bring to a recital of [insert one of the classical B's here]. Important point for the comparison, the musician is not present as a performer (How to Start an Argument: musicology version).

The musicians in Shiomi's "Boundary Music" may or may not make any sound at all, but their presence is clearly performative - attention is directed to the performers rather than to the environment and its ambiance. Audiences listen less than watch as the musicians pantomime the actions of creating sound - bows are drawn, mallets are swung, fingers move. A listener may or may not derive any meaning from whatever sounds are made, but witnessing the act of sound-making without any sound made is laden with significance.

"Disappearing Music for Face" is only a step removed from "Boundary Music." A performative composition with almost no sound to a performative composition with literally no sound. "No sound," but not "no instrument." When I first saw the title, I had assumed there would be music accompanying a film of a face. Expectations successfully thwarted!

Then I came to think of the title in another way, the common naming convention of Western Classical music "genre for instrument."

Sonata for piano.

Concerto for violin and orchestra.

Disappearing Music for Face.

The Endless Ending

When does The End end?

Gustav Holst finishes "The Planets" (1916) with Neptune, our solar system's last* (RIP Pluto) planet. The work's final bar consists of two chords sung by the choir. It is marked "To be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance." Holst's intention is obvious - the suggestion is, the music continues on and on, endlessly, past audibility, a gesture to the boundary of human comprehension.

During the 1950's, the musical fade-out becomes commonplace to meet the time constraints of radio DJs and vinyl records. It did not take long for musicians to adopt the recording practice for their own aesthetic reasons.

Shiomi, between 1963 and '64, conceived and constructed the Endless Box. It is a wooden box which contains 34 paper boxes which spiral inwards and downwards, shrinking to a final point in the center. A physical suggestion of a process which continues to infinity.

What of "Disappearing Music for Face?" It records the final moment of musical expression. The sound has dwindled to inaudibility, but the performance is not yet over. The Planet's conductor's baton is yet held aloft. The audience strains to hear the disappearance and the music moves from moment to memory.

Endless Box suggests a process which begins but has no end. Disappearing Music might suggest an ending with no beginning. Or, perhaps, any beginning. The ambiguous expression appears to the eye how a sound appears to the ear which the attack has been removed - snip off the first milliseconds of a recorded sound and it becomes very difficult to identify the sound's instrumental source. Pull the last few stills of a filmed facial expression and ask someone to identify what preceded it - similarly difficult, maybe impossible.

Either way, point is, it ends.

The baton drops. The record player clicks off. The mouth at last closes.

"Disappearing Music" stops with an unceremonious cut.

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The Primer for People Who Want to Listen Good (and Maybe Do Other Stuff Good, Too)

Intro

This primer is a rundown of basic concepts that help us break down and understand the music we listen to. It does not aim to be exhaustive. It does not aim to be technical. It merely aims to introduce.

Important note: you do not need to know these concepts to enjoy music. Enjoying music is so reflexive it is almost instinctive. That’s a whole book, right there, so I’m not going to get into it. Just to say, if you’re happy with your understanding of music, keep on being happy about it!

I would say this article, as brief as it may be, would serve better as a reference until you get the idea. It will be linked back to in blog posts, in the event you need a refresher.

Sound

It seems obvious, no? Music consists of sound. But what is sound? Physics classes will teach that sound is a wave moving through some substance. Sure, but not quite. It’s missing two crucial elements: our ears and brains.

For my purposes, sound is the intersection of a physical wave, the substance it moves through, how it arrives in our ears, and how it is interpreted by our brains into the experience we call sound.

Altering any of these elements will alter the sound we perceive.

Tone vs. Note

A distinction I wish I had learned much earlier as a musician. Tone is the quality of the sound we hear. Quality not in the sense of “good” or “bad,” but quality in the sense of differentiating the sound of one instrument from another.

Notes are the way we write down music so that it can be remembered, passed on, and reproduced by somebody else. There are many ways music is translated into notation, so many that it is worth its own blog post.

Historically, most music was, and is, passed on and learned by ear. Even if something is written down, notation does not necessarily communicate how the idea is translated into sound. Many, sometimes most!, of the details are lost in translation.

Pitch vs. Noise

A real can of worms, this. In broad strokes: pitches are sounds whose waves have a regular form and pattern to them; noise are sounds which don’t. Both are used in music.

Pitch and noise exist on a spectrum. Most instruments produce complex sounds containing some combination of each.

Instruments like the voice, the violin, the flute – these generally make music using pitch mostly containing pitch.

Instruments like the cymbals, the snare drum, the clave – these generally make music using sounds mostly containing noise.

Important note: “noise” is often used to denigrate music. This is not the sense I will use the term. If you want a historical sampling of negative musical critiques, check out the fantastic “Lexicon of Musical Invective,” by Nicolas Slonimsky.

Rhythm

You can have music without pitch, but you can’t have music without rhythm. Rhythm is the pattern of note lengths over time. If you want to get really philosophical about it, because pitch is a wave with a regular pattern repeating within it, pitch is also rhythm.

Is that strange? That pitch is rhythm? Well, check out Adam Neely's talk, Pitch is Rhythm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tRAkWaeepg&ab_channel=AdamNeely

Rhythm can be more or less regular, more or less complex. The pattern can repeat often or not. Patterns can be layered on top of other patterns.

Tempo vs. Beat

Tempo is the speed at which we perceive musical change. When music changes slowly, we tend to hear a slow tempo. When music changes quickly, we tend to hear a fast tempo.

The beat is a more or less regular pulse which underlies the music. The beat might be audible, as is the case in almost every dance ever, or it might be hidden. Even when the beat can’t be heard in the music itself, musicians very often have a sense of beat going on within them.

Re: the beat – I say “more or less” regular because, since the invention of the metronome, many musicians have the sense that the beat is a strictly defined pulse. For electronic music, the pulse is strictly defined and unchanging because a computer is doing it. For most of the rest of music of all time, it’s a bit squishier.

Never underestimate drumming, though, especially in groups. Even without metronomes, humans have an uncanny ability to hone in on a regular pulse when drumming is involved.

Melody vs. Harmony

I feel like these terms are thrown around so often, we have an instinctive understanding of what they are. But just in case (because you can never be too sure), melody is a sequence of tones made by a single voice, while harmony is produced by two or more voices creating different tones simultaneously.

While English speakers would be comfortable think of melody as a “horizontal” element and harmony as a “vertical” element, that’s probably a bit too simple for our needs. You can think of melody as the pattern which unfolds in time and harmony as the sound stacked in the moment. Another way to think of it is, harmony results at the intersection of multiple melodies.

With my definitions, I made the deliberate choice to use tones instead of pitches. It is true that the majority of music we interact with in English speaking countries consists largely of pitched music, but melodies and harmonies can be created even with “unpitched” percussion. Drum circles depend as much on the tonal difference between percussive instruments as on the interlocking rhythms created by the players. Which brings us to our next term...

Timbre

There are loads of instruments. So many. Too many? Maybe. They all have unique sounds. Timbre is the qualities of the sounds which allow us to differentiate one instrument from another. The actual details involved get… involved. Probably too much so. But if you like physics, you can learn more by reading up on the harmonic series!

Texture

When all of the previously mentioned elements combine, they form Captain Planet! Ah, wait. Wrong. Wrong blog. They form texture, is what I meant.

There is still a bit missing – how many people* are playing, and how they relate to each other musically. Texture can be thin, like a single flautist playing a single melody, or it can be dense, with lots of people playing lots of different things. The spectrum in between is, I hope, implied.

Out of all the possible ways musical elements can be combined, four come up with such regularity they have been named. They are monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic, and heterophonic.

Vast diversity lies within these categories. They are bucket definitions, not surgical tools.

Monophonic – one instrument, one tone. A single singer singing a cappella. A shepherd playing a flute all by their lonesome.

Homophonic – A melody with some amount of harmony. A singer accompanied by a strumming guitarist. Almost all pop music.

Polyphonic – Multiple voices playing multiple melodies. Harmony results, but is not the main focus. An organist playing a fugue. Renaissance motets. Drum circles.

Heterophonic – Multiple voices playing slight variations of the same melody. An Irish session. Japanese gagaku. Indonesian gamelan.

Form

Last, but not least, form is the structure of patterns over the course of an entire musical work. It asks the question, “What repeats and when?” Over time, certain forms occur often enough we give them their own names. There are far too many forms to cover here. Individual forms will receive their own posts at a later time.  

From Here to Later

That's plenty to get us started. This primer will grow new sections over time, so if there isn't anything you thought should be covered but isn't, that's probably because I haven't written it yet. Or I forgot. That happens a lot, too. Until next time!

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