Category: Music

Tunes of the day #12

Giacomo Rossini is best known for a series of overtures and the operas that accompanied them. Late in his life he wrote several sets of small-scale pieces collectively known as “Péchés de vieillesse,” or “Sins of Old Age.” These included a variety of playful piano music. Years later Ottorino Respighi orchestrated a number of the latter as the score to the ballet La Boutique Fantasque. Instead of picking out individual sections, here’s the whole thing.

Tune of the day #11

Who is the best guitarist no one has heard of? One possibility is Kyoji Yamamoto of the Japanese band Bow Wow.1 The vocals are exceedingly average, but that doesn’t matter when Yamamoto shuts his mouth and plays. “Silver Lightning” is from their 1977 second album, released a year before Van Halen’s first. If you’re impatient for pyrotechnics, skip to 2:35.

Tune of the day #1

I don’t post all that much these days, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. Therefore, I thought I would start posting each day a piece of music that caught my ear, so that visitors will have something to listen to when there’s nothing new to read. Expect anything from Renaissance dances to Melt-Banana. No matter what your tastes are in music, there’ll be something to annoy you.

Can I keep this up indefinitely? Sure. Can you stand a year of it? We’ll see.

We’ll start with an orchestral arrangement of “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms” from a Super Mario game, composed by Yoko Shimomura. While I have little interest in video games, I recently discovered that some game music is highly listenable, and Shimomura is one of the best composers. This particular piece reminds me of central European composers such as Dvorák and Smetana.

Miscellany

Noise comes in colors. There are white noise, pink noise, red noise, brown noise, blue noise, grey noise, etc. The various shades are most easily perceived by acousticians and sound engineers.

While wandering around an airport earlier this summer, I realized that there music playing throughout the building. It was light, watery jazzish stuff, difficult to pay attention to. There was a trumpet in the mix, but the sound was bland, not bold. The melodies were trivial and the chords hackneyed. It may very well have been AI slop. What I was hearing could be called “beige noise”: music intended to be ignored.

*****

Joseph Epstein on a biography he never wrote:

In my early thirties I signed on to write a biography of John Dos Passos, who was still alive. I wrote to Dos Passos to ask if I might have his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied instantly, saying that he would help me in any way he could, on the condition that I “put my liberal ideology in mothballs” and pledge never again to use the word “explicate.”

*****

Atomic Fungus shows how to talk to machines:

Mrs. Fungus was trying to get a tech on the phone, and was stuck at the recalcitrant AI prompt. After hearing her say, “I want to talk to an agent!” fifty-odd times, I took the phone from her.

Machine: “Do you want to try to restart your cable box now?”

Me: “NO! BIB GOBBLE WAGLE BAG GAG HANGLE!”

Whenever the clanker would ask me a yes/no question, I’d answer it, but then add random gobbledygook. And I kept making the tone angrier and angrier.

It gave up and shunted us to a human.

Mrs. Fungus: “How did you do that?”

The algorithm that translates what the user is saying into something the computer can understand has a limited capacity for literal nonsense. In theory, after a sufficient number of errors, it should crap out and send the caller to a human.

That was my theory. I’m glad it worked!

*****

A thousand years ago I discovered three records in the University of Dallas library that would determine much of my musical activity over the years to come: Augustin Anievas’ Chopin waltzes, the first disc of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” and Songs by Tom Lehrer2. Lehrer died recently. A few years ago he released his music into the public domain. You can find all the songs here.

*****

One of the places I passed through in Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks. There is culture in the wilderness.

Musical miscellany

When I revisit my ancient posts I find that most of the links are dead. (Has anyone determined what the half-life is for internet links? I would guess that it’s around three years.) Some of them still do work, though, such as this one to free recordings of all of Bach’s organ works, performed by James Kibbie. I recommend that you don’t listen to them all in one sitting; one or two pieces at a time is probably enough. Turn it up; this is music that needs to be played so that the loud sections are thunderous.

*****

With equal temperament, each key sounds like every other key, only a bit higher or lower. However, equal temperament didn’t become the standard tuning for pianos until about a century ago. Before then each key had its own particular set of intervals and its own character. For instance, according to Christian Schubart’s 1806 Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst,

E♭ Major
The key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God.

D# Minor
Feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depresssion, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.

E Major
Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure and not yet complete, full delight lies in E Major.

E minor
Naïve, womanly innocent declaration of love, lament without grumbling; sighs accompanied by few tears; this key speaks of the imminent hope of resolving in the pure happiness of C major.

*****

I’m interested in the Japanese pianist Yui Morishita. He specializes in Alkan, and has recorded five albums of Alkan’s works so far. He has an alter-ego, the “Duke of Pianeet,” who plays virtuosic arrangements of anime and video game music. He is perhaps best-known for his “Gunbuster Fantasy.”3 I recently came across a playlist of Morishita performing music from Square Enix games, including many from Final Fantasy. You can listen here.

*****

Feeling kawaii? You might like a Hello Kitty Stratocaster, with its matching pink fuzz pedal.

Catching up: music

So, what have I been listening to?

Nikolai Kapustin was born in 1937 in the Ukraine and started playing the piano at 7. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory where he worked with Alexander Goldenweiser. While in Moscow, Kapustin discovered jazz. He later cited Oscar Peterson as the most influential figure on his own music. Kapustin composes in the traditional forms — sonata, theme and variations, etc. — but uses a jazz vocabulary. You can argue whether his music is truly “jazz” — while it may sound spontaneous, every single note is written out — but it is lively, colorful music. Recordings by Marc-André Hamelin, Stephen Osborne, John Salmon5, and Kapustin himself can all be recommended. And perhaps those of everyone’s current favorite, Yuja Wang.

*****

The late Peter Schickele, in addition discovering the works of P.D.Q. Bach and composing listenable music of his own, had a weekly radio show, “Schickele Mix,” in which he discussed musical topics clearly and understandably for all listeners, musicians and non-musicians alike, using examples of all kinds of music, from Palestrina to the Everly Brothers. The show has been off the air for many years, but it is available as podcasts here.

More years ago than I want to calculate I saw Schickele in concert, where the pièce de résistance was the “Concerto for Piano Versus Orchestra.” I finally found a good video of the concerto.

*****

Here’s a website devoted to analyzing the music of that brilliant jackass, Frank Zappa.

*****

I recently came across mention of an obscure band featuring a drummer named Warren Moore. This might be of interest to a certain other Warren Moore.

*****

Carl Stalling may be the best-known composer of cartoon music, but there were others of note, including Scott Bradley. Bradley wrote music for MGM cartoons, including Tom and Jerry and Droopy Dog. Unfortunately, there hasn’t yet been a “Scott Bradley Project” paralleling Stalling’s, and his music is hard to find. The one collection offered at the devil’s website is lousy and I can’t recommend it. Instead, hunt for the out-of-print Tom and Jerry & Tex Avery Too, a fuller and better-sounding compilation.

More cartoon music:

*****

Children Cry for Castoria — Nicolas Slonimsky, the compiler of the Lexicon of Musical Invective, many years ago used ad copy as the texts for songs:

Update: Slonimsky on Frank Zappa.

*****

Note on the videos: Four years ago I got absolutely disgusted with YouTube and refused to post any videos or even click on one. Since then, either the lizard people who run it stopped putting unskippable half-hour ads before every three-minute video, or the Brave browser has become better at blocking ads, so I can now watch videos without using very bad language. Therefore I am permitting myself to post a few YouTube videos. For now.

Hero vs. protagonist: the soundtrack

Ted Gioia:

I’ve seen intricate taxonomies of music genres, which divide and subdivide songs into every possible category from glitch hop to folktronica. I’m told that the Spotify streaming platform has identified 1,300 different genres of music. Yet these lists never include the genre hero music—the oldest and most enduring song of them all and the root of all narratives. Like other genres, it morphs and evolves, but it never disappears.

(If you’re not reading Gioia regularly, you should be.)