Music History in Two Dimensions

With thanks to long-time friend and commentor RG for the original suggestion, I would like to talk about two ways you can look at music history: horizontally and vertically. Of course, this comes from the world of wine-tasting where you can have horizontal or vertical tastings. In a horizontal tasting, you assemble a bunch of wines from the same vintage and compare them. For example, you might get together all the premier cru wines from Bordeaux from 1978 (and if you do, please invite me). There would be Château Latour, Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Margaux, Château Haut-Brion and Château Mouton Rothschild. What you would be noticing is the variation between the terroir and the wine-making techniques even given the same weather. Château Lafite, for example, is famous for making great wine even in poor years. A vertical tasting, on the other hand, would take a single vineyard, say Clos Vougeot from the Burgundy region, and assemble wines from different years, which would be an interesting index of how that particular wine aged. Clos Vougeot dates from 1336, so that could take a while.

What does this have to do with music history? We could look at different forms or genres from both dimensions. For example, the rondo or rondeau form has existed for a very long time so we could look at it vertically through time. In the 13th century it was both a poetic and musical form with a repeated refrain in both the words and music. Here is an example by Adam de la Halle:

In the 15th century we have a different kind of rondeau, but still based on the refrain principle. Here is Craindre vous vueil, a rondeau cinquain form by Guillaume Dufay from around 1430:

The rondeau became purely instrumental in the 17th and 18th centuries and is often spelled "rondo". In this variant, a principal theme alternates with contrasting episodes. The first were often for harpsichord. Here is a famous one by Rameau, Les Tendres Plaintes:

The rondo was a favorite form in the classical period as the final movement in sonatas or concertos. Here is a very well known one, the Rondo alla turca by Mozart:

Another famous rondo is the last movement of the Pathétique sonata by Beethoven:

Of course the genius comes not only in how the principal theme is constructed, but how ingeniously it is led into each time it recurs. The rondo or rondeau is a rare form nowadays, but it has had an interesting history.

But what would a horizontal look at music history consist of? I had a theory teacher once that brought a number of pieces to class for us to analyze, all composed in 1951, which turned out to be the year he was born. In a less-capricious manner, we could pick a year, or decade, and look at what different kinds of things were going on at that time. Just for the heck of it, let's pick the year 1964 and see what was going on. It was a time of immense upheaval in the musical world and if we pick three particularly significant pieces of music, we might get a sense of that. For the first, I choose a string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich, composed in 1964. Though a uniquely and powerfully individual work, the inspiration is undoubtedly the quartets of Beethoven. Composers in Soviet Russia were, on pain of banishment or worse, encouraged not to be too avant-garde. Shostakovich seems to have not let this make him any less creative. I devoted a whole post to the String Quartet No. 9 here. Here is a performance, in three parts, by the St. Petersburg Quartet:

For my next example, a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen composed over a number of years, but with a substantial portion complete by 1964. Here is a performance of Momente from 1965:

Everything you hear is part of the performance. That clapping at the beginning is the choir. Here is a description from Wikipedia:

In addition to singing, the choir members clap their hands, snap their fingers, stamp and shuffle their feet, and slap their thighs. They also play small "auxiliary" instruments: choir I has cardboard tubes of various lengths with glued-on covers, played like drums using light mallets; choir II uses twelve pairs of claves—all with different pitches; choir III shakes plastic soap boxes and refrigerator drink canisters filled with buckshot, which sound like maracas with different pitches, according to the number of pellets and the size of the plastic canisters or boxes; choir IV uses twelve pairs of Volkswagen lug-nut spanners (which kept disappearing during rehearsals, because most of the choristers drove Volkswagens). The purpose of these instruments was to create mediating links between the percussion and vocal timbres. Having the choristers play simultaneously with each syllable they sing or speak automatically and easily solves the problem of rhythmic coordination (Stockhausen 2009, 129). However, Stockhausen reported that the WDR choir, which sang for the première, initially objected to these practices (Stockhausen 1964a) and, "because such means of sound and noise production can have a comic effect, . . . one newspaper report talked about a 'cabaret performance' and ridiculed the whole thing" (Stockhausen 1964b, 132).

Momente is written in "moment form" an invention of Stockhausen. It is worth reading the Wikipedia article.  The basic idea is that the composition is a mosaic of 'moments' set off from one another and with no overall narrative line.

Now, for my third example, I choose a musical event that completely overshadows both of the preceding ones: Beatlemania. You may be too young to have experienced this, but for a few years the Beatles were popular in a way that has never occurred before or since. If you look at the Wikipedia page for "1964 in Music" in Wikipedia, it seems as if half of the entries are about the Beatles. Sales of Beatles records made up 60% of the singles market. For a while the top five on Billboard's Hot 100 were all by the Beatles. When they visited Australia for the first time, 300,000 fans met them at the airport. In a matter of a mere year and a half the Beatles went from an obscure bar band playing in Hamburg, to the most famous people in the world. The biggest release for the Beatles in 1964 was A Hard Day's Night, the soundtrack to the movie, which was also a success. Here are some songs:

So, there were three different kinds of things going on in music in 1964: the continuation of the classical tradition by people like Shostakovich; the invention of entirely new kinds of musical forms by people like Stockhausen and the triumph of popular music, largely at the hands of the Beatles. Sociologically, the Beatles are obviously far more important than either Shostakovich or Stockhausen. But what about aesthetically? There is no denying that the Beatles were extraordinary song-writers, probably the best since Schubert or Schumann. They were also amazingly innovative in their arrangements and use of the studio environment. But what was crucial to their success was the baby boom generation: a host of young people looking for something new and with disposable cash. For them, the Beatles were by far the most interesting music around. One interesting consequence is that since the 1960s, the whole classical field has been dwarfed, economically, by the pop artists. In the case of the Beatles, it is hard to deny their appeal. But now, with Nicki Minaj, Psy, Lady Gaga and their ilk, it just seems like an aesthetic train wreck.

It is Stockhausen that is most difficult to put into perspective. He and many others of the European avant-garde received a great deal of support from the US State Department and CIA as part of their Cold War cultural battles. But it is hard to say that his music was the "music of the future". Instead, it seems, to me at least, to be the most dated of my examples. Shostakovich's quartet sounds better to audiences today than probably at any time since it was written. And the Beatles' music never seems to age. Every single one of their albums has been in issue constantly since they first came out--including the very first one, Please Please Me. But Stockhausen might not be listened to too avidly fifty years from now.

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How I Re-Discovered the Beatles

A lot of Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials like to scorn us Boomers for never getting past the music of our youth. "Why do you keep listening to all that old 'classic rock' crap, anyway," they say. So let me go back and explain how I got back into the Beatles--not just because I listened to them when I was young, though I did, but because I re-encountered them.

Back in 1990 or 1991 I was visiting a classical guitarist friend of mine in Toronto and was alone in the apartment one morning with nothing much to do. I noticed a copy of the White Album on the CD shelf. I quite literally had not listened to it for many, many years. At least a decade, probably more like two. So I put in on and listened to all four sides. Of course, there was nostalgia from hearing those familiar songs once again, but much more powerful than that was I discovered that I was listening closely and hearing much more than I had ever heard before. As time goes on and you acquire more and more experience in music, your listening becomes more focused, more capable. Now I was hearing aspects and relationships I had never noticed before. Let's hear just a couple of those songs. Here are the first (by Paul) and last (by John) songs on side one, which also has George's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that I just put up the other day. First, "Back in the USSR", Paul's demonstration of how to do surf music, but set in Soviet Russia. I love how the airplane flies through your head at the beginning, from the right to the left channel. Since we were just talking about Ringo the other day, let me point out that he is not drumming on this song. There were a lot of intra-group tensions during the taping of this album and Ringo just took the day off. So Paul is playing the skins:

Now John's "Happiness is a Warm Gun", which has, apart from the pun of the title, some of the twistiest music Lennon every wrote. Walter Everett in his two-volume analysis of the Beatles points out that "there are  six different meter changes in the first twenty-one bars." At one point Ringo maintains a 4/4 meter for four and a half bars while the rest of the band is doing three bars of 12/8 (the eighths are equal). The song is in discrete sections set off with significant changes of tempo. All this is unified by using a small set of melodic motifs. Let's hear it:

I doubt there are many other groups that could even perform that song, let along write it. Let's listen to one of George's songs that isn't "While My Guitar". The last song on side three is "Long, Long, Long":

It's a melancholy waltz about lost love, but there are lots of songs like that. What makes this unique? Listen to the arrangement, especially the drumming! There are two drum tracks here: one that very quietly just lays out the 3/4 time and that you hardly notice. Then, on top of that, there are big drum fills--solos--that comment on the song and come in between the sung lines. The first comes at the 27 second mark, but they occur throughout the song and every one is different! Another interesting thing is the way the song ends: it just stops, then there are some distorted organ sounds, followed by a conclusive ka-ching from the rhythm guitar and finally, a drum cadence. It is the details they add to songs, how they begin, how they end, that often distinguishes songs by The Beatles.

After I got to the end of the fourth side in that listening session in Toronto that morning I found tears in my eyes. I don't think that was nostalgia; I think it is because this is powerful music. Here is the Wikipedia article on the album and here is a post I put up on it a while back. This could be the most radical album design ever as well. The album doesn't really have a name. Officially it is "The Beatles", but that is just embossed, not printed, on the plain white cover. So, no cover art. Everyone calls it "The White Album".

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Masterpieces of Music: Robert Schumann, Part 4

A few days ago I put up a post introducing Schumann's Dichterliebe, the poet's love. This is a remarkable cycle of songs that is particularly remarkable for expressing the longing and desire for fulfillment, but the impossibility of it in the music itself. I want to have a closer look at the first song because it can show us some of the ways that Schumann uses harmony. Let's listen to it again:

Charles Rosen, in his fascinating book on The Romantic Generation likens this song to a fragment, beginning in the middle and ending incomplete... The first time you hear it, it just sounds like a nice song about spring, but the more you listen to it, the more unsettling it is. For one thing, the more you listen, the less sure you are of what key it is in. D major? A major? F# minor? Here is a link to the first edition of the score. This very brief song, less than two minutes long, is beautiful and unsettling all at the same time--I believe that is the traditional definition of 'sublime'? Here is the score to the song:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Rosen says the song starts in the middle because the first note, on piano, is a C sharp held over into the next bar and as soon as the bass enters, we realize it is an unprepared suspension. The first interval is therefore a very dissonant major seventh. But what is that harmony? It sounds a bit like D major, but as the bar unfolds, a lot more like B minor with an A# leading tone. Turns out it is B minor in first inversion, which in A major is a II6 chord. In F# minor, our other candidate for tonic, it is a IV6 chord. Neither possibility establishes the key very clearly. The next bar is more promising as it pretty clearly lays out a dominant 7th harmony. The only problem is that, instead of proceeding to the tonic, an F# minor chord, instead the piano moves back to the B minor, II6 chord. This progression II6, V7, repeats, then the voice enters with that same C# unprepared suspension. But now, instead of the phrase taking us to V7 in F# minor, it instead takes us to A major, via its V7! Here the listener heaves a small sigh of relief: "ah, now I sense what key we are in!" This is right at the 19 to 20 second mark in the recording above, on the words "Monat Mai". The third and fourth lines of the song take us to suspensions in the voice: 4-3 in B minor on "Herzen" and 4-3 in D major on the "gangen" of "gegangen". Then all of this repeats. Finally, the piano has a brief postlude that ends on the V7 of F# minor! Begins in the middle and ends in the middle. A piece that is probably in F# minor, but that contains not one single full cadence in that key! The only full cadence is a momentary one in A major, that happens twice.

Obviously you could write an entire book on Dichterliebe and devote a couple of chapters to this song. Schumann, coming out of centuries in which the basic principles of counterpoint (how suspensions work) and harmony (how the cadence locates the tonic key) were developed, can play with them to have our expectations suspended, extended and in so doing, to embody in music, the sensations of romantic longing.

I now want to make a comparison of the kind that my readers may have grown to expect: how is Dichterliebe like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? The former is a song cycle and the latter the first so-called "concept album" which seems to mean that the whole is unified in some way. Obviously the only real unifying feature in Sgt. Pepper's is the reprise of the first, title, song. But similarly, in Dichterliebe the only real repeat is the quotation of the postlude to the twelfth song in the postlude to the last song. Schumann's cycle has many aspects that are open rather than closed and so does the Beatles' album. "A Day in the Life", the final song in Sgt. Pepper's falls outside the cycle of the album. The harmonic scheme in both Schumann and the Beatles is somewhat ambiguous. "A Day in the Life" begins in G major but ends with an E major chord. Both the title songs are more or less in G major.

Both sets of songs come out of a cultural context that the composers use to expand or defeat expectations. The context for Schumann is the very long one of Western counterpoint and harmony; for the Beatles it is the much briefer one of popular music since the end of the Second World War. They use many of the conventions both lyrical and musical, but are constantly improving and extending them. I certainly don't want to go overboard here by comparing chalk and cheese, but it is intriguing to set these two sets of songs side by side.

Schumann, while using no obvious links between songs except for the two postludes, has an evolving harmonic scheme, not to mention a kind of 'family resemblance' among melodic motives. One song, such as "Im wunderschoenen Monat Mai", ends with a dominant chord that seems to be resolved in the first notes of the next song--not quite as the key turns out to be A major, not F# minor. But the relationship is intentional. Sgt. Pepper's on the other hand, just doesn't function in this way. As with other Beatles albums, the songs are well-crafted, but fall in different genres: rock, music hall, Indian and so on. Great songs, but not conceived as a musical whole. What the album did succeed in were its true aims of a great leap forward in packaging and the idea of the band members appearing in a new persona, both ideas that have been used ever since by others. Musically, the songs are not related, apart from the reprise, and there is no narrative flow as there is with Schumann.

UPDATE: Just one small detail to add: when Schumann was writing Dichterliebe he was thirty years old and when Sgt. Pepper's was being recorded, John Lennon was a slightly younger twenty-seven years old.

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Old Music, New Music

I just ran across something that made me smile. Jed Gottlieb writes for the Boston Herald and put up an essay titled "Why classic albums are selling more than new ones". Because they are cheaper is his answer. But it was this bit that made me pause:

And anyone who thinks old music is better than new music isn’t listening to new music. Neko Case, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and a hundred other young acts are delivering brilliant art.

The "old music" he is referring to isn't J. S. Bach, let me hasten to add, but the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Since this is the internet, there was the option to leave a comment, which a number of people did. Here's the link to the comments. With only a couple of exceptions, every single commentor said the same thing: "dude, the pop musicians today have a serious shortage of talent". Heh.

OK, well we are all about exploring the new here at The Music Salon, so let's have a listen to a little Neko Case. She is, by the way, an American singer/songwriter who has done a lot of performing with a Canadian group, the New Pornographers. Here is the first clip that comes up on YouTube:

That was ... exciting? Pretty dull harmonies alternating between I and bVII nearly all the time (the same semi-progression that Gotye uses in his hit "Somebody That I Used to Know"). Drumming? OK. Guitar-playing? Subfusc. Singing? OK. Now this is awkward. In the traditional method of music criticism here at The Music Salon, now I am going to put up some 'old music' to compare this to. But it's going to be embarrassing. OK, let me see if I can find a dull song by the Stones.

I'm not a big fan of the Stones, nor of this song, but don't you think there is something going on there, some of it fairly original? It would be cruel to put Neko Case up against some real singers and songwriters, but what the heck, let's do it:

Yeah, no way that is better than Neko Case. Uh-huh.

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Sgt. Pepper's is 45 Years Old

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1, 1967. I had just turned sixteen and bought it and took it home to play on our horrible mono record player. I had been a musician for a year or so and was just trying to figure out what that was all about. This album confused the heck out of me because I couldn't figure out how to play any of the songs! Canada's National Post has an article up saluting the album, which they call the greatest ever made. Then they have a lot of criticisms of it for weak songs, poor concept and how Revolver, Rubber Soul and the White Album have lots better songs. George Martin himself has commented that the biggest mistake of his career was not including "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" on the album (they were released as a single). The National Post concludes that Sgt. Pepper's is the best album ever for only one reason: the song "A Day in the Life". Here is the complete album. It's only forty minutes of music, so have a listen:

What the album also has is really original cover art--good imagery. In fact, you might argue that with this album the Beatles started that whole emphasis on image and 'branding' that every pop artist cultivates now. They were doing it more for aesthetic than marketing reasons, though. Every new album had to be a progression over the one before. I really don't think they were worried about things like sales figures or competing with other bands. They couldn't even keep track of the money they had already made and were so far out in front of the competition that other bands hearing this album, like the Beach Boys, just gave up. The Rolling Stones tried to do their own psychedelic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request (sic), released on December 8, 1967. After that hideous failure, they sobered up and returned to their rhythm and blues roots with Beggar's Banquet, which is a fine album. They had reached the limits of their creativity. The Beatles had not. Here are the first three songs from Their Satanic Majesties (sic). Listen to them, if you can, it demonstrates what is so good about Sgt. Pepper's:

This is what happens when you listen to Sgt. Pepper's, go see 2001: A Space Odyssey, get drunk, get stoned and then go to the recording studio. What you hear instead on Sgt. Pepper's is a fantastically competent group of musicians who can play anything. They had just done two albums of incredible songs (Rubber Soul and Revolver) and released some even more incredible singles. They were experimenting with some new ideas that didn't quite gel. Sgt. Pepper's is an album with brilliant and novel arrangements of some pretty good songs and a couple of very good ones and one incomparable song.

When you think of it, hardly anyone in pop music has even come close to this...

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Artificial Double-Tracking

Thursday I put up a post that talked a bit about the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows" from Revolver. This is the post. I also talked about the song briefly in this post which was about the variety of songs on the album Revolver. It's not called that because it is about handguns. Long-playing records used to sit on a turntable and revolve, hence, an LP is a 'revolver'.

In the second post I linked to above, I talk a little about what makes Beatles' records distinctive. They really don't sound like anyone else. The reasons are many. There is a quote from somewhere that says that genius is nothing but infinite attention to detail. There is certainly some truth to that. The Beatles were a creative group that encompassed not only John, Paul, George and Ringo, but also included George Martin, who contributed a lot to the beginnings and endings of songs, arranged string and other instrumental parts and even played keyboards on some tracks. There were some technical and engineering people that contributed as well. The title of this post, "artificial double-tracking" refers to a technique discovered by Ken Townshend. The Beatles had discovered that if you double-tracked the lead vocal, it had much more presence. So they developed the practice of recording every lead vocal twice. This was very time-consuming so they were delighted when a way of doing this automatically was discovered. It is called "artificial double tracking" or ADT and involves duplicating a track slightly out of phase so it sounds as if two singers (actually the same singer twice) are involved.

But this is just one of many techniques they developed. Others included recording the voice at a slightly slower tape speed and playing it back at the normal speed for an intensified effect. They did the opposite with the instruments: recording them at a slightly faster tape speed and slowing down on playback for a 'fatter' sound. They recorded guitar solos and played them back backwards, they stuffed sweaters in the bass drum for a muffled effect. You name it. The purpose of all this was to find the uniquely 'right' sound for every song. For an example, let's trace the evolution of a single song, "She Said She Said" from Revolver. This is a tune by Lennon that comes from a conversation with Peter Fonda around a pool in LA. Most remarkably, we actually have Lennon's early drafts of this song that he recorded at home with just him singing and a guitar. Have a listen to how the song, especially the melody, evolves in these brief clips:

It starts out as little more than the phrase "he said" (later changed to "she said") and an up-tempo rock and roll accompaniment. But with each attempt, the melody evolves (at the beginning there was almost no melody) and the chords get less generic. Also notice the very ordinary sound of Lennon's voice. It sounds a lot like anyone fooling around at home with a tape recorder. Luckily, we even have the guitar tracks of the final version isolated. Here they are so you can hear how the guitar part evolved:

Now listen to the finished song:

The first words, "she said" are sung by Lennon alone, but with double-tracking. This is answered with harmony vocals "I know what it's like to be dead" in thirds. One nice touch is that this harmony line is immediately echoed in the guitars. Other things that were added are a contrasting section ('bridge') in 3/4 time on the words "no, no, no, you're wrong" and continuing to "everything was right". Oh, and the whole arrangement, of course.

The transformation from the simple, not very interesting, song John was messing around with at home and the finished version is simply astounding. And it all took place, according to session records, in one nine-hour session on June 21, 1966, the day before the master tape for Revolver was due to be compiled. That alone leaves me rather amazed... Anyone can walk into the studio with some lyrics on a napkin, a vague idea of a melody and some chords. But how many can end up with a song like this nine hours later?

UPDATE: I didn't mention Ringo's drumming but here, as in every song, there is no generic back beat. Just listen to the amazing variety of what he is doing and how it changes to suit what is going on in the song. Now compare it to the rather stereotyped drum patterns of most current pop songs.

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Missing TV

About ten years ago I cancelled my cable and haven't regretted it since. Until now, perhaps. I'm not totally unfamiliar with what is on television: alert readers may have noticed that I'm a fan of the work of Joss Whedon. But I don't like having anything broadcast at me. Instead, I buy the dvds. But I may have missed an interesting moment recently. Last Sunday on Mad Men the episode ended with Don Draper listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows" from Revolver. I have season one of Mad Men on dvd, but haven't seen the more recent ones.

You almost never hear songs from the Beatles incorporated into television shows, even ones taking place in the mid-sixties when they were nearly ubiquitous. Why this odd distortion of history? The reason is copyright. In order to play even part of this remarkable song, the producers of Mad Men had to pay $250,000. It may in fact have been the only time a Beatles song, performed by the Beatles, was used in a television show--apart from their own live performances in the 1960s.

Well, let's join Don Draper and have a little listen:

It is hard now to imagine the impact of something like that in 1966. Pop music, driven by very intense commercial competition, tends to fall into ruts pretty easily. As soon as someone finds a new kind of lick, or rhythm or arrangement, everyone else tends to copy it. But the Beatles weren't like that. Early on, you find them speculating about what the next big thing would be. Country? Latin? And you can hear examples of these genres on the early albums. But at one point they realized that THEY were the next big thing. And that led to a lot of genuinely creative music. In this track, for example, they use a whole set of tape loops, which had never been done before (and scarcely done since) in popular music. The likely predecessor was probably Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. People have commented on the similarities. But the differences are even more important. Just listen to what Ringo came up with. He had to invent a new kind of drumming for this song. He had to do that a lot in the next few years.


Anyway, I kind of wish I had seen the Mad Men episode as it would have been nice to have been surprised by "Tomorrow Never Knows" on television. So little is surprising on tv these days...

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C Minor to C Major

The inflection from minor to major with the same tonic is an old topos in music. Before tonal harmony was fully established the so-called tierce de Picardie (probably a mistaken etymology from tierce piqart meaning 'sharp' third) was often found, ending a piece in minor mode with a major harmony. But in the late 18th century the contrast between minor and major was used in some spectacular ways. Mozart cast his 'Dissonant' quartet introduction in a strange mixture of modes that only is clarified when the movement proper begins, at the 1:05 mark:

Here is the opening of Haydn's The Creation where chaos is depicted with empty octaves and then minor mode:

When God says "let there be light", C major bursts forth gloriously--just after the 2 minute mark in the next clip:

Taking this idea to a more intense level Beethoven writes his 5th Symphony in C minor, but casts the finale, as if a triumph against great odds, in C major. The whole symphony is organized in this way, but the last two movements show the transition from C minor to C major which occurs at 8:36 in this clip. Alas, the last movement is cut short, so I will put up another clip just of the finale.

That was the first time trombones were used in a symphonic, as opposed to operatic, context. All these examples have made the same move, from minor to major, in the same key: C. But there is one final example where the idea is distilled down to an essential form:

After that, the idea was pretty much exhausted. At least in its C minor to C major form in an orchestral context. It had been used so powerfully and so definitively that composers no longer wanted to touch it. But in a different kind of context and in a much less dramatic way, the idea of fluctuating between major and minor continued to be used to express the fluctuating fortunes of a romantic relationship. But now in A minor and major, not C:

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Pop Music Numbers

I ran across this weird little item on Visboo. Titled "Sad Facts About Popular Music" it consists of a list of artists who have sold more recordings than supposed much better artists. No news to we of the classical persuasion, of course. But some items looked a bit odd, so I decided to check one out. No. 3 on the list states that Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" single sold more copies than any Beatles' --and the rest is obscured, but let's imagine the last word is "single". Is that actually true? According to Wikipedia (where there are articles on absolutely everything) "As of January 2012, "Tik Tok" had sold over 6,149,000 downloads in the country alone, making one of only six songs to sell more than six million copies in the US." All right, now let's see how that stacks up against the Beatles. The question does not have a clear answer because there is no independent body that collects worldwide sales. But looking around the web, I come up with these estimates in a few different places. The Beatles' biggest selling single seems to have been, not "Hey Jude" (with 8 million sales), but "I Want To Hold Your Hand" with 12 million sales (or almost double Ke$ha's). But that is dwarfed by the number of sales of the Sgt Pepper's album with 32 million sales. So, the moral of the story is either don't believe everything you see on the Web, or maybe don't believe anything you see on the Web. Heh.

Wow, she makes Lady Gaga sound like, uh Franz Schubert. It's a long, long way from "I want to hold your hand" to "Boys tryin' to touch my junk, junk".

Of course, "I want to hold your hand" is probably a metaphor, but "Boys tryin' to touch my junk" is not. Or is it? Perhaps the former means "I want to make love to you" while the latter means "please God, won't someone rescue me from the drunken mess that is my life?" Heh.

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"Now I have to buy The White Album again!"

There is a scene in the film Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones' character, confronted by a new kind of digital disc comments "now I have to buy The White Album again!" I like this for a couple of reasons: one is the assumption that this album is a kind of perennial musical icon; the other is that a new technology might create a new perspective on something. Suppose you get a new sound system or, as happened to me once, I realized that to hear properly what was going on in the bass range with Shostakovich symphonies I had to invest in some better speakers. I muttered to myself "now I have to listen to all the symphonies again..." Or suppose you suddenly have a new insight into a character in a drama: now you have to go through the whole drama again looking at things from this new perspective. This might involve reading Hamlet again or watching all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because you suddenly realized something about the moral development of the character of Spike. Hey, we all have our guilty pleasures!

I'm reading the new Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin for the first time and I'm experiencing all sorts of interesting things. One is I am becoming more familiar with some repertoire that I have in the past neglected: opera in particular. Another is that Taruskin manages to "de-familiarize" some repertoire in interesting ways, Bach in particular. Yet another is that he also brings a lot of recent scholarship to bear on some old disputes and theories: the role of women composers, for example, or the relationship between aesthetic theory, ideology and music.

In relationship to this last, it is amusing to read the blurbs on the back cover as they betray something about our current aesthetic ideology. For example, one blurb calls the book "a highly personal (and often delightfully prickly) take on musical history from an original and eccentric mind..." I'm over 1400 pages into the book (which comes in five volumes) and I have yet to detect anything really prickly or eccentric. True, he dissects quite a number of myths and outworn ideologies connected with music, but that just means he is doing his job--not grounds for calling him 'prickly' or 'eccentric'. This speaks either to a kind of institutional dullness having taken over musicology these days where, by comparison, Taruskin's book appears unusual, or to an unconscious ideology that art and talk about art must be challenging or eccentric in some way.

I chose a song from The White Album as envoi to this post, of course. My Friday post was on the "tyranny of the backbeat" and this is a great example of how creative The Beatles were when it came to rhythm and meter. The guys who transcribed all the songs notated this one in 4/4, 2/4, 5/4, 9/8, 12/8 and 10/8. That passage "Mother Superior jump the gun" is a bar of 9/8 followed by a bar of 10/8, both bars repeated. And some people say Ringo isn't a great drummer!

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Two 'Hits' Five Hundred Years Apart

One of the most popular pieces of music of the late 15th century was the chanson "J'ay pris amours". It was disseminated in a huge number of manuscripts and recycled in many other pieces, both vocal and instrumental, as was common practice at the time. Oddly, despite its popularity, we do not know who composed the chanson, but it was likely to be one of the leading chanson composers of the time such as Hayne van Ghizeghem or Busnoys. Here is the score for the first half:

Click to enlarge

It begins with a 'motto' phrase, five notes that present the mood and that are set off from the remainder of the song by a rest. Then the superius proceeds with the melody, echoed an octave below by the tenor in strict imitation a half-note later. In the next phrase, the imitation is much looser and it is a fourth below. These elements, a so-called 'point of imitation' for each phrase of text, were fairly new techniques. Also at this time harmonic structure was making a shift from modal harmony to tonal harmony. This is shown in this piece by things like the V - I cadence in measure 7 where the contratenor falls a fifth from the root of the dominant to the root of the tonic. The 'half-cadence' in measure 16 is a bit unusual from our point of view with the cross-relation between G natural in the contratenor the beat before against the G# in the superius. What probably made this chanson so popular was its simplicity and clarity, which, given the tendency to virtuosity of the time, led to its use by other composers such as Henricus Isaac. He keeps the superius exactly as it is and adds a very ornate tenor. Martini goes even further and, keeping the superius and tenor, adds two new contratenors, quite ornate, in strict canon a mere eighth note apart. Other examples abound. Here is a performance of the original song with voice and lute. Up to the 1'04 mark, they perform it very simply. After that, they begin adding ornamentation.

I don't know about you, but what this reminds me of is a popular song of our day--one so popular that more than 2500 'cover' versions exist by other artists. Again, it is possibly the simplicity and clarity of the original that led to so much use by other artists. Here is that song:

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Technique and Expression

We usually think that the typical situation is that we work to achieve a certain level of technical competence so that we can express something. This seems to be as true of composers as it is of performers. There is a good example in the Beatles  Anthology 2 in the first version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" recorded by John at home. He is trying to finger-pick the guitar part, but gets tangled up and stops, saying "I canna do it!" He didn't learn to finger-pick until a year or so later as we can hear in "Julia" from The White Album. Obviously the lack of finger-picking chops didn't hold back the recording of "Strawberry Fields".

Technique is what is known in philosophical circles as an "instrumental good", i.e. something good only as a means to a true good, an "intrinsic good". For example, money has no intrinsic worth, but only value as a means to an end. Some philosophers think that the only real intrinsic goods are states of consciousness like happiness, for example. So technique, in the sense of ability to play or compose, is an instrumental good. The intrinsic good it is the means to is the expression, or rather, the state of consciousness aimed at in the ideal listener.

But things are more complicated than this. Technique sometimes is mistaken for an intrinsic good. John Lennon didn't make that mistake, that is, he didn't spend the next six months working on his finger-picking technique. Instead he dumped that technique as being simply unavailable and kept searching for the true expression of "Strawberry Fields". The odd thing, of course, is that it didn't exist yet. Hunting for "Strawberry Fields" was not like hunting for mushrooms in the woods as "Strawberry Fields" was nothing more than a sketchy idea for a possible future song. But that's what composers and song-writers do...

Getting back to the point: things are complicated because you don't know exactly the end, the intrinsic good, you are aiming for. All you have is a bunch of techniques. Which may or may not be appropriate. Finger-picking wasn't an appropriate technique so Lennon dumped it. Sometimes you have this foggy idea of something and you just try out, instinctively, different techniques until something seems to click.

Sometimes you are afraid of losing the inchoate expressive idea if you get too 'technical' with it. I suppose there is another Beatles example I could choose: the Phil Spector production version of Let it Be which buries some songs in a "wall of sound".

Sometimes a limitation in technique actually helps the expression and I'm thinking of a very unusual prelude by Bach. The E flat major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1 is a justly-admired prelude, but very atypical. A lot of Bach preludes are a single-minded exploration of an idea. But this one is like an improvisation set down on paper. It begins with a toccata-like improvisation that stops and then starts again as a loose fugal improvisation that then becomes a double fugue as it weaves in material from the first improvisation. This is anything but a tightly-written fugue as the subjects are vague, unstable. As if to contrast with the looseness of the prelude, the following fugue is tightly-written. Together they are like an illustration of the idea that technique and expression are different things and a triumph of technique is not necessarily a triumph of expression. For the truth of the matter is that the prelude is more expressive, more deeply affecting than the jollier fugue that follows.

Bach was heir to the greatest dynasty in Western art. In this prelude and fugue he lets us hear the process of composition as it sketches out different possibilities and at the same time achieves a kind of expression that would not be possible in a more fulfilled form. Have a listen to see what I mean:

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George Harrison Reconsidered

There is a lot about George Harrison in the news these days as a documentary by Martin Scorsese hits the air commemorating the tenth anniversary of George's death. Here is an article on George in the Weekly Standard. I haven't seen the documentary, but I found the article flawed and missing the point. It is perfectly all right to point out warts and all--I have done it in this blog a few times--but if all you talk about is non-musical aspects of a musician's life, it is safe to say you have missed the point. Sure, George may have been a bit of a split personality, as the writer says, "a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other", but the whole reason we are interested in George is that he was a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other who was in one of the most important musical groups in history and who made a significant contribution both as a guitarist and song-writer. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be paying a lot of attention. Andrew Ferguson, the writer of the Weekly Standard article, does at least mention George's music in one brief paragraph:

One of George Harrison’s most appealing traits was self-awareness. He would have seen (and said) how absurd such talk was. “I was never a real guitarist,” he once told his friend Klaus Voormann. And he wasn’t; he couldn’t launch the fireworks like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, and the disciplined technique of Andrés Segovia or Julian Bream never interested him. About his songwriting, he told an interviewer: “There’s no comparison between me and someone who sits and writes music. What I do is really simple.” Right again. He compared himself to a pastry chef, able to combine musical ingredients nicked from others to make a pleasing presentation of songcraft. He made many marvelous records, but as a source of fresh musical ideas, he said, “I’m not really that good.”

You could say the same for pretty much anyone who ever wrote a rock song, which is an extremely forgiving art form, but you can’t imagine anyone else who ever wrote a rock song admitting it.

Like most journalists, even ones who write about music, Ferguson's musical understanding is, uh, limited. I have no idea what George meant if he said "I was never a real guitarist", but he most certainly was. He got into the Beatles in the first place because he could play stuff John and Paul couldn't. It took him a long time to develop as a songwriter; being in the same group as Lennon and McCartney caused his songwriting to be seen as insignificant in comparison. But he wrote better and better songs as time went on including "Taxman", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something"--to name three outstanding ones. As a guitarist he is also an outstanding musician. Comparisons with Eric Clapton or Julian Bream are simply inane. Most rock guitarists from Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page come from the blues traditions of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. George comes from another tradition, the rock and roll one of Carl Perkins:

As for Segovia and Bream, why would anyone want to compare a rock guitarist with a classical one? But have a listen to this clip from A Hard Day's Night where George does some nice solos on a classical guitar by Jose Ramirez--the builder of some of Segovia's guitars:

If you have a look at the movie, you can see George playing on the Ramirez. Now you might say, oh, big deal, he plays on a classical guitar, so what? But let's dig into it a little bit, shall we? This is Paul's song, but a lot of the unique sound of it comes from George. That opening lick is by George and it is a motif that starts and ends the song. In the second verse George contributes a nice classical-sounding arpeggio. Around 1'30 we have the guitar solo. You might say, yeah right, he just plays the melody. But here's the thing: the song is in C# minor, but it jumps, most radically, to D minor for the guitar solo and stays in D minor until the final chord: D major. The relationship of D minor to C# minor is called the Neapolitan or flat II and it is both extreme and very popular with composers since the 18th century. Who came up with it? Either Paul or George. But it gives the song a unique twist.

Ferguson's sneer at rock songs and their composers is really just ignorance. Sure, there are hundreds if not thousands of boring, repetitive rock songs based on the most rudimentary of chord progressions, but it is very hard to find a Beatles song that is not a truly unique composition. Lennon, McCartney, yes and Harrison, wrote some of the finest songs in the English language and are legitimate heirs to the long tradition from John Dowland, to Henry Purcell, to Benjamin Britten.

Back to George's guitar playing. One of the things that stands out about his solos is that they, almost unique in the rock world, are not prolix. Take my favorite Harrison guitar solo:

Where is it? Exactly at 2'58. It consists of nine notes. After a long pause, there is a little trill. That's it. But I think it is exactly the right solo in exactly the right spot. Most virtuoso rock guitarists cannot resist playing a lot of notes. That's ok, but pretty much every blues-based extended rock guitar solo sounds exactly the same. Each of George's solos was created specifically for the song and sounds different from other solos in other songs. Lots of them were on electric six string, but he did a lot with twelve string too:

And of course, he is well known for being the first rock musician to take up the Indian sitar:

But he didn't stop being a rock and roll guitarist:

There is a great solo at 1'15 that is only about ten seconds long and sounds like no other rock guitarist. Yes, and it is also George's song. The only rock song that is about tax policy that I can recall...

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Aesthetics of Rolling Stone Magazine, part I

A few days ago I was looking at the "greatest" lists compiled by Rolling Stone Magazine. These include the 500 greatest albums, 500 greatest songs and the 100 greatest Beatles songs. Let's have a look and see if we can 'reverse-engineer' what aesthetic criteria they might be using. It certainly isn't sales, which is refreshing. According to Wikipedia, the biggest selling album of all time is Thriller by Michael Jackson followed by AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Whitney Huston and others of the usual suspects. But Rolling Stone's 'greatest' list, which presumably means musically greatest, has the Beatles at numbers one, three, five and ten; the most spots, followed by Bob Dylan with two slots, four and nine. Here is the list:

1. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
2. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1966)
3. The Beatles: Revolver (1966)
4. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
5. The Beatles: Rubber Soul (1965)
6. Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (1971)
7. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street (1972)
8. The Clash: London Calling (1980)
9. Bob Dylan: Blond on Blond  (1966)
10. The Beatles: The Beatles, universally known as The White Album (1968)

One interesting thing about this list is that all the albums date from between 1965 and 1980 with seven out of ten from 1965 to 1969. That's a pretty significant period for popular music. Coincidentally that is also the moment in time when I became captured by music--first popular music as represented by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and by early 1969, classical music by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Debussy and Dvorak. I purchased Sgt. Pepper's, Revolver, Blond on Blond and The White Album when they first came out on vinyl. Alas, I lost those originals years ago!

Now let's look at what Rolling Stone says about their choices:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

 The concept of adopting a different persona was Paul's and the others just went along. It really doesn't tie together much of the album, only the two title tracks and maybe "With a Little Help from my Friends". Two tracks that should have been on the album, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" were instead issued as a single and later found their way on to Magical Mystery Tour. As for sound, the album was another step in the enormous technical advances that the Beatles were making in realizing their visions in sound. The cover art was very cool and the idea of the whole package being significant was also an advance. This was the first album to include all the lyrics to the songs. But none of this really captures what makes this the "most important" rock and roll album, does it? Or does it? I suspect that greatness is all in the details. Beethoven struggled with themes for months or even years before they reached their final form. The simplicity of the theme to the 4th movement of his 9th Symphony belies its long genesis. Similarly, the wonderful achievement of Sgt. Pepper's is the product of a thousand small details. Leaving aside the album art, there is the songwriting. Masterpieces like "A Day in the Life" or "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" or "She's Leaving Home" or unique originals like "Within You Without You" are utterly remarkable as songs. But equally important was the execution. All of the technical prowess accumulated over the course of their preceding albums and more was put to work here. Things like the huge piano chord that ends "A Day in the Life" were carefully crafted to the extent that when the first attempt was unsatisfactory they assembled three pianos, one harmonium and five players to hit the massive E major chord. Then the long sustain was extended by upping the recording sensitivity at the mixing board. Oh, and one interesting thing, the song begins in G major, not E major...

This is already long enough for one post so let's end this part with:

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Not Everyone Loves the Beatles

Heh. Just read a hilarious little piece in the Wall Street Journal of quotes from various people on the Beatles. Some were from early on, the first wave of Beatlemania in 1964, but some others are from just a few years ago. Here is a sample:

"Musically, they are a near disaster; guitars slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

—Newsweek reviewer, Feb. 24, 1964

And here is a comment on the article:

This article is a fine demonstration of why you should never listen to critics. The only trustworthy judge of music is your own ears.

 A number of years ago the music critic Nicolas Slonimsky published a fascinating book titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective that was a collection of nasty things said about composers. Sample: "The music of a demented eunuch," writes one 19th-century critic of Wagner. No-one is immune: you would scarcely believe the incredible things people said about Beethoven during his lifetime.


However, neither the current article, nor the earlier book prove quite what the commentor thinks they do: that critics should never be listened to. Of course, as I complain sometimes, most music criticism today is really nothing of the kind. Instead it is just puff pieces to promote the latest fresh young thing, whether performer or composer. Or it is just the cranky ramblings of a curmudgeon--though I suspect that fewer and fewer of them even exist. By all means, feel free to ignore music critics. Unless they have something worth hearing. Some of them do. I have mentioned before the people that I think are real music critics and oddly enough, none of them have that actual job description. You should pay a great deal of attention to anything written about music by Richard Taruskin, Joseph Kerman or Charles Rosen. Taruskin is a musicologist who occasionally writes for the mainstream press, Kerman is a professor emeritus of musicology and writer and Rosen is a pianist and writer on music. I rather doubt whether they would have written anything so intemperate or ignorant as the things written about the Beatles in the article. Why not? I think that one mark of a good critic, or any good professional, is that you recognize the limits of your knowledge and understanding. I don't opine on Japanese calligraphy or break-dancing (or is it "dub-step" now?) because I know nothing about them. I do wander into pop music pretty frequently, but I think the fact that I grew up with the Beatles, played bass guitar, electric six-string and sang in a band when I was young and the fact that I have studied or listened closely to pop music for forty years does qualify me.


But most stuff written under the rubric "music criticism" is, as the commentor says, not worth reading. Other stuff is essential reading. Similarly with your ears: they may be trained ears or ignorant ears, in which case they may or may not be a good guide. Let's go back to that first quote. The Newsweek reviewer mentions a number of elements: "merciless beat" and "secondary rhythms" (that the beat "does away with"). Since he mentions "yeah, yeah, yeah", let's have a listen to "She Loves You" and see what he is talking about:

Hmm. Nothing 'merciless' about that beat and the song is stuffed full of "secondary rhythms". The leading theorist on the music of the Beatles, Walter Everett, regards this song as "the foremost example of the Beatles' ardent early works." He notes:

The surface of "She Loves You" is tension-filled. This is partly due to a strong rhythmic drive created by such devices as the strongly-accented beat-dividing syncopations in the strumming throughout and in the syncopated snare flams that follow the "yeah-yeah-yeah" motto within the chorus, the stop-time fourth beat rests near the end of the chorus, the unexpected repetitions of the final phrase of the last chorus ... and the suspension of the tempo at the song's structural, dramatically embellished V7. [score references omitted]

Oh yes, nothing but 'merciless beat' and no secondary rhythms whatsoever! I won't bother with the critic's sneer that the song has no melody or harmony, just to mention that Everett regards the song so highly that he spends six pages on it, much of it devoted to melody and harmony, in his two-volume monograph on the Beatles. The Newsweek critic simply knows nothing, including how to listen.

The only trustworthy guide to music is a trustworthy guide to music! Heh. That might be your own ears, if they happen to be highly trained and knowledgeable ones. Or they might be someone else's ears, likewise. Some music critics are excellent guides.

Let me close with one other quote from the article:

"The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music."

—William F. Buckley, author and commentator, 1964

This one rather saddens me because Buckley was such a stimulating and brilliant commentor on so many things. You have to love a guy who ran for mayor of New York with the campaign slogan "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" But here he is all wet, committing the fatal flaw of so many brilliant people of venturing opinions in areas in which they have no professional expertise.

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