Category: Music

American music

Charles Ives is often celebrated for having anticipated many of the innovations of twentieth-century music. Less often noted is that he also anticipated, if that’s the right word, P.D.Q. Bach. Some years back, an acquaintance for whom I played a recording of Three Places in New England was scandalized by the second movement — real music isn’t supposed to be funny, he said. (Tell that to Mozart.) Here it is, the ideal music for the Fourth of July:

It’s become trendy in recent years to complain that the music of P.D.Q. Bach overshadows that of the composer Peter Schickele. I’ll grant that the humor is hit-and-miss, with misses predominating on the later recordings. Sometimes, though, the jokes work. Here’s the fourth movement of the “Unbegun Symphony.” ((Strictly speaking, this isn’t P.D.Q. Bach, since Schickele claimed it as his own, so to speak.))

If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill while waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks tonight, why don’t you invite 35 of your closest friends over with their instruments and run through some American music of a different sort. Here’s the score to Terry Riley’s In C.

Music appreciation

One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.

Identify the speaker:

1. “I have actually outlived myself.”

2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”

3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”

4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”

5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”

6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”

7. “Beethoven was wrong!”

8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.

9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?

10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?

11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism'”?

12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies'”?

13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?

14. What is 8’37” better-known as?

15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?

Continue reading “Music appreciation”

To the Moon

Alex Ross, in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, states that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of musical composition “… finally reached the silver screen by way of Scott Bradley’s inventive scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the forties, notably Puttin’ on the Dog and The Cat That Hated People.” Which gives me an excuse to post some High Culture, courtesy of Tex Avery.

Best soundtrack poll, round two

The problem with the poll widget had to do with the update to the plugin, not WordPress 2.8. I was able to get the poll working again by dumping the new version of the plugin and reinstalling the previous one.

This is the second, and last, preliminary round. The top ten from this poll will advance to the final round. You can vote for up to three candidates.

Music appreciation

Just for the heck of it, here are some excerpts from noteworthy soundtracks that weren’t nominated for the current poll.

Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihohito:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Shanhai Kurabu.mp3]

Binchou-tan:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Yume.mp3]

Spice and Wolf:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Mada Minu Machi he.mp3]

Metropolis:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Zone Rhapsody.mp3]

Arjuna:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/The Clone.mp3]

… and a little music depreciation. Here’s a tune you might recognize, sung by Haruna Ikezawa.

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/God Save The Queen.mp3]

The winner

After four rounds and over a thousand votes, we have a babe:

I’ll post the complete results sometime this weekend.

*****

There were 62 nominations altogether for the best anime soundtrack. I’m going to run two preliminary rounds of 31 each, in which you can vote for up to three candidates. The top ten in each round will go on to the finals.

Ideally, I should post excerpts from all the nominated soundtracks, but I’m lazy. If you want to campaign for your favorite, feel free to post a link to an illustrative video or .mp3 in the comments. (There are a number of such links in the comments here.)

Here’s a list

Soundtracks nominated so far for the next poll:

Aria the Animation/Natural/Origination
Azumanga Daioh
Bartender
Bleach
Bubblegum Crisis OVA
Bubblegum Crisis 2040
Code Geass/R2
Cowboy Bebop
Death Note
ef: a tale of memories
Elfen Lied
Eureka 7
FLCL
Full Metal Alchemist
Haibane Renmei
Kaiji
Kamichu!
Macross Frontier
Madlax
Manabi Straight
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Noir
Oh! Edo Rocket
Princess Tutu
Record of Lodoss War
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Shigofumi
Shigurui
Simoun
Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann
True Tears
Vision of Escaflowne
Welcome the the NHK

A few others were mentioned, but I’m not sure that they were meant as nominations:

.hack// et cetera
Vampire Princess Miyu OVA
Vampire Princess Miyu TV
Witch Hunter Robin

Some other soundtracks worth considering:

Ah! My Goddess: The Movie
Angelic Layer
Binchou-tan
Denno Coil
Interstella 5555
Kaiba
Macross Plus
Metropolis
Mushishi
Paprika
Saiunkoku Monogatari
Shingu
Someday’s Dreamers
Sugar, a Tiny Snow Fairy

What else? I’m sure I’m forgetting something obvious.

Also, would someone care to nominate a specific Miyazaki movie OST?

Unified Defense Force

Mao-chan goes on too long. It’s based on a clever notion and is executed with considerable charm, but the writers weren’t inventive enough to keep it consistently interesting through 26 half-length episodes. The story meanders through many standard anime situations: the sports festival, the beach episode, the hot springs episode, the bunny suit, the maid uniform. They’re not complete wastes of time — the beach episode is one of the better ones, in fact, though not because of the beach — but they mainly serve to let us spend time with the girls rather than advance the story, and Mao and Misora aren’t particularly interesting characters. The series would have been better overall had it been shorter and more focused.

Continue reading “Unified Defense Force”

Four balls?

Pete says that baseball is

A game without discernable rules or purpose; I deduced that teams compete to collect points, but those are awarded arbitrarily, so the formal objective does nothing to add any sense to the proceedings.

I just happened to digitize The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart last week. Here’s Newhart’s take on baseball from about 50 years ago:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball.mp3]

While I’m uploading audio, here’s a selection from another curiosity I came across: string quartet arrangements of music from Rozen Maiden. Here’s a sample:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Otome wa Tenshin Ranman.mp3]

*****

I have jury duty this week, so I’ll probably be spending the days at the courthouse and the evenings at the office. See you all next week.

Update: I was spared jury duty. (Actually, The plaintiff in the case I was in the pool for had suffered a broken ankle and knee injuries. It was no surprise that I wasn’t empaneled, given my own broken ankle and knee problems.)

Mao-chan, Miku, etc.

When the Fnools invaded Earth, they disguised themselves as two-foot-tall real estate salemen, figuring that no one would take them seriously until too late. ((See Philip K. Dick’s “The War with the Fnools.”)) The aliens in Mao-chan adopt a similar strategy: by assuming mercilessly kawaii forms, the invaders make the Japanese defense forces reluctant to engage them in combat, lest the human soldiers be seen as bullies. The Japanese fight cuteness with cuteness: the head of the land forces enlists his eight-year-old granddaughter, Mao, to battle the invaders, arming her with a baton, a full-size model of a tank, and a clover-shaped pin that transforms her into a not-terribly-competent but very cute mahou shoujo. Mao soon is joined by a couple of other eight-year-old girls: Misora, representing the air force, and Sylvie, representing the navy, both recruited by their doting grandfathers. Mao and Misora are ordinary grade-school girls, as kids in anime go, but Sylvie is distinctly Osaka-ish.

Continue reading “Mao-chan, Miku, etc.”

First sound of the future

Here’s a curiosity I recently came across: “Uta ni Katachi ha Nai Keredo,” by Doriko, featuring Hatsune Miku on vocals:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Uta ni Katachi.mp3]

Yes, it’s just another instantly-forgettable ballad featuring one of the many nasal sopranos that infest Japanese popular music, but there is something remarkable about this recording.

(Via Martin.)

Continue reading “First sound of the future”

Steve, Steve, Steve, Stephen, Steve, …

The Maximum Leader says he doesn’t know who all the Steves are in the current poll. Let’s see if we can do something about that. Here are several of the Steves in action.

Stephen Bennett: “C.E.O. (Comanche Executive Officer)”

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/CEO.mp3]

Steven King: “Medley: Puttin on the Ritz/42nd Street/It Don’t Mean a Thing” ((The bass you hear is actually the sound of the two lowest strings on King’s guitar run through a separate pickup and electronically transposed an octave down.))

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Medley_Ritz_42nd_Mean A Thing.mp3]

Steve Lukather: “Naima”

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Naima.mp3]

Steve Morse: “Cruise Missile” ((Jerry Peek, bass, and Rod Morgenstein, drums))

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Cruise Missile.mp3]

Steve Stevens:”Melt” ((Tony Levin, bass, and Terry Bozzio, drums))

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Melt.mp3]

Steve Vai: “The Attitude Song” ((Stuart Hamm, bass, and Chris Frazier, drums))

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/The Attitude Song.mp3]

For Steves Hackett and Howe, dig out your old Genesis and Yes albums.

I regret that I don’t have any Steve Kaufman handy (what I have is on cassette, but my tape deck died several years ago). He is the only person to place first three times in the National Flatpick Competition at Winfield (Mark O’Connor only did it twice). If flatpicking is what you like, he’s your guy.

If you don’t know who Stevie Ray Vaughn is, you have some remedial listening to do.

Update: In celebration of April 15, here’s Stevie Ray:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Taxman.mp3]