Posted by Unknown
Posted on 5:34 AM
with No comments
The one thing I don't do on this blog is newsworthy items. I figure others, like Norman Lebrecht, do that better. But on Thursday, Mother's Day, Paul McCartney gave a concert in Mexico City's Zocalo square that is worth mentioning. Reports vary that between 90,000 and 200,000 people attended. The concert was free.
The crowd in the Zocalo
The show was two hours long and Paul seemed in great form.
Sometimes, just like when the Beatles used to tour, the screams of the audience tended to overwhelm the music. And sometimes they joined in:
Sometimes things are just simple: a great musician who loves performing gives a concert and everyone shows up.
UPDATE: Here is how the concert started with Paul speaking pretty good Spanish. These songs just don't die, do they? "All My Loving" is from the album With the Beatles, their second album released in the summer of 1963.
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 4:50 AM
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I'm always talking about harmony, but never melody, which is probably what is foremost in most people's minds when they think about or recall music. Melody is a particularly difficult thing to talk about though, because it seems hard to generalize about it. What makes great melodies great? They are memorable and expressive. OK, what makes melodies memorable and expressive? Uh. Hmm.
Take "Yesterday" for example. Possibly the most famous tune of all time and Paul just fell out of bed with it running in his head one morning.
We can talk about it all we want: how it begins with an expressive 2-1 appoggiatura, how the phrase length is irregular, how the harmony falls from I to a minor, not diminished, VII for a Lydian modal effect, how the final cadence is plagal, how the relative minor is tonicized in the second bar and so on. But trust me, a hundred other composers could do the same things (and have) and come up with tunes that are banal, inexpressive and unmemorable. This is where theory fails.
I once got into an argument with a theory professor who was trying to claim some sort of scientific validity for theory. If we study and analyze enough sonatas, then we can come up with a general or typical structure for sonatas and test that model by using it to create new sonatas. If they sound like the old ones, we have a good theory of sonata form. Sounds good in theory... But the truth is that all the really good sonatas are each unique and that is perhaps the crucial element in a great sonata: that it is unique. Take this one for example:
There is no other piano sonata that sounds like that even though Beethoven used a variation on a very old harmonic progression and probably stole the texture from a Mozart opera.
Just so you don't feel completely cheated with this post, where so far I have simply said I have no idea, let me say two things about melody. From the beginnings of notated music in the West, melodies tended to move by step with leaps being far less common. As tonal harmony developed in the 17th and 18th centuries this started to change and by the Classical Period, melodies were typically constructed using the notes of a chord or triad, that is to say, instead of moving by step, they moved by thirds. For example:
As opposed to the stepwise movement of this:
Now here's an interesting thing: the melody of "Yesterday" moves almost exclusively by step, one scale note to the next. Hmm...
Posted by Unknown
Posted on 8:31 AM
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The Wall Street Journal had this story this morning. You should go read the story and listen to the four excerpts from the ballet. Paul McCartney is probably the wealthiest musician in the history of music, one of the great song-writers, bass-players (well, he can play pretty much any instrument), singers and for the last few decades taking a stab at writing classical music. More power to him! This music is not bad. It tends to sound a bit like Sibelius or Bax at times. At others it seems afraid to modulate. Certainly no match for the great ballets by Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky. He tends to develop merely by repetition and by changing the orchestral color, but this is pleasant, listenable music nonetheless.
