I don’t think chronological really works. Bach and Mozart mean far more if you have a bit more of a formal understanding of older musical forms. So better start with the Romantic era, or 20th Century. There needs to be a familiarity with melodies, faint enough to catch one’s ear. Also, the pieces should be a tad shorter than Beethoven’s Ninth. After all, we’re most familiar in the mp3 era with 3- to 4-minute radio tunes. Lastly, perhaps some of the avant-garde or supremely dissonant could be left until a foothold has been put in place. As I’ve said many times, you can’t think outside the box if you haven’t seen the box. So no John Cage just yet.

It also leads me to the question: what if I could only pick one orchestral work to open the door to this music?

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to bridge the gap for those used to American pop and jazz?

Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” to touch the heart of anyone who isn’t deaf?

Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to reach those of us who grew up on Bugs Bunny?

Beethoven’s, well, anything? I’m too big a fan to be picky, though the Sixth Symphony comes to mind.

What if you got to pick the very first piece of music a person would hear? I always go back to the sounds from my father’s old LP collection. There was album in particular, Ormandy by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mea Culpa: “Finlandia” by Sibelius, I thought of it as “Dragnet” music. “Danse Macabre” by Saint-Saëns, I thought it was Christmas-y (it had ringing triangles and soft flutes and I was six. Shut up.)

For my mind, I keep coming back to one piece. I don’t know why. Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (his 9th).

I’m still building my playlist, but for sure all these will be on it.

I’m a sucker for waltzes. That lilting triple-meter does something to me. I feel it inside and out. That lingering 2-3 after the strong 1 that gets the beat conveys time and motion so well.

Also, I think that as a native to English our language has a natural lilt. We have small prepositions and articles fed in between our heavy nouns and verbs to give our voices the sway of the triplet. I hear lots of phrases in either 3/4 or 6/8 time.

So I’m tossing this question out to my few loyal readers: what music are you a sucker for? It doesn’t have to be your favorite, or particularly good, but what draws your ear?

Like I said, I’m a sucker for a waltz.

And 80s pop music. (For some reason; Heaven knows why.)

I hear a memory. Of course, being of the age that I live in, it plays back in my mind as a movie soundtrack. It is not a movie I’ve seen before, though. And in it, I’m the one remembering.

There is more to it than that. It feels like a future memory. I first heard it on the radio, and it was a different musician playing. That performer drew out time a little more slowly and softly, as if there was a haze around it. I barely heard half of it while driving kids to school and I was hooked.

There is love in that piece of music. Part of it is sentimental. Most of it is simple fondness. A life lived together, remembered at the end? Something that happened over a Spring as a young man that disappeared as quickly as it came? Childhood friends goofing around the neighborhood?

To anyone else, they may hear more of a circus in their mind. Or just a piano. Or nothing and change the station. Art strikes us all in different ways. That is what is amazing, and what I try to teach my kids. I ask my son what he sees when he hears things. Sometimes he sees something, sometimes he doesn’t.

With any art, you are not obliged to feel anything at all. It should mean something to at least a few, otherwise it is meaningless and therefore not art. I don’t get much out of paintings or sculptures. Music and movies, though, can hit me hard.

To each his own, as long as something is conveyed to your soul somehow.

I have always been bad at concealing my feelings. The look on my face or my posture instantly gives away my opinion on a current subject. It makes my wife’s job of reading my mind most of the time much faster and easier. You’re welcome, honey.

M asked me why I was angry. I told her that I was sick of this false, forced patriotism. The middle of the seventh should be devoted to singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and standing in line for the bathroom.

But no. After the choir of grade schoolers finished “Take Me Out” (apropos), another woman came out to sing “God Bless America”. That was when I started getting annoyed.

Aside from the lyrics being trite, why are we bothering to do this? Because we started it after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Fine. It’s been over eight years. We don’t need another reminder that we were attacked and to reaffirm our allegiance to the United States.

I have spent two hours sitting and watching a game of baseball being played in the middle of the North America continent. Is there any doubt where I could be? I have eaten food born from four cultures in two days. Where else does that happen?

Let baseball be baseball, let everything else that surrounds us be great and plentiful, and let the fact of our location be implied. Even when I sat in the freezing wind of a rugby pitch in England, I didn’t go, “Oh no! Where am I? I better check my passport and make sure I didn’t go Brit.” I loved enjoying that game as a part of their culture, just as I love our game as a part of ours.

I don’t need reminders that a) I’m in America, b) people died so we’re singing this stupid song, c) I’m not a believer in half of the lyrics, and d) we’re in the midst of poorly guided wars. Let me watch my baseball, even if the Twins are playing like fools, and forget the fact that bad things are going on.

Then “God Bless the U.S.A.” came over the loudspeakers.

I’ll bet I looked like a kid who just got told he couldn’t have a second helping of ice cream. If “God Bless America” is trite, this song is all-out asinine. Before the game began, there was a high school marching band roaming around the warning track playing Sousa marches, for crying out loud. Is this garbage really necessary?

I pity anyone who has to sit through that nonsense for every game.

Oh, and as any writer or drug addict can tell you: excessive use diminishes effect.

The prime example of what I’m talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, “one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret.” At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven’s time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended. Here’s Alfred Brendel playing the beginning of the “Moonlight” about as well as anyone on the ubiquitous modern Steinway.

Compare that to Gayle Martin Henry playing a piano from around 1805 by the Viennese maker Caspar Katholnig.

The sound is startlingly different from a modern piano and takes a while to get used to. These instruments were mostly played in small to medium-size rooms. The sound is intimate; you hear wood and felt and leather. The voicing is varied through the registers rather than the homogenous sound of modern pianos. On the Katholnig, the effect of holding the pedal down in the “Moonlight” has a ghostly effect, most obvious in the longer-sustaining bass notes that can sound like a distant gong. All these elements of the pianos Beethoven knew shaped the music in the first place, including the way he picked out high and low notes around the murmuring figure in the middle of the keyboard.

You’ll have to click over to the article to hear the music clips to hear what he’s talking about. It’s very cool, and something I’ve often wondered. It is a bit of a musical history musing as to what Mozart would have come up with if he had access to more modern pianos with far greater dynamic ranges.

(Found via Megan McArdle :: The Atlantic.)

Epic Box

[HA!]

It had been quite some time since I last listened to the full suite. Sitting and listening to them ten years later has given me far more perspective on just how massive this work of Holst’s is.

I remember being bored by Venus and Saturn. But especially with the introduction to Saturn as the dignity in aging and death, the way that movement ended was simple and spectacular. And Neptune works as the great anti-finale. It leaves you adrift, wondering what could be beyond it, knowing full well that there has to be something.

It is something significant about who we are that changes what we hear in and get out of music throughout our lives. The speaker mentioned that Saturn was Holst’s favorite of the suite, and now I can understand why.

There was also something else to the music. It has been a long time since I attended a concert that I was not actively either playing in or working on. So I sat and got to just absorb this art laid out over time.

Music is the only art that requires time in order to actually exist. It is the closest thing we have to a tangible fourth dimension. Anything else can be looked at again, gone back over, re-read, etc. Even plays can be read without being acted and the impact of the art is nearly there.

With music, as any of us who know how to actually read its nomenclature can attest, until it happens, it sits as a potential. No art or impact is conveyed without hearing it, and it can only be heard as part of its own sequence.

So I sat in the audience and just listened. There was nothing else going on. I wasn’t working on something else, I was there just for the music and I got to hear so much more of it. It wasn’t a background to the movie of life. So much great art is thrown to the dogs of daily life without being appreciated.

Truth be told, I take full responsibility for The Pointer Sisters on that list (since that was what I was looking for; the toddler kept shouting out the word and hopping up and down). Oh and Sugar Hill Gang. Those are definitely mine. I deny any association with The Jacksons or Taylor Swift.

Davis.

Fellow Minnesota automobile drivers, I implore you to look toward your summer selves for guidance while operating your vehicles. I know that the first snow is always a little rough, what with the plows playing a little catch-up in clearing and salting, and the rest of us drivers remembering our winter sea legs as it were. That being said, by the third, fourth, or even seventh wintery precipitation, can we all keep in mind that the lines on the road are to be driven between and not straddled like a lady of the night advertising in a red light district?

II.

Here is how my mind rattles while shopping:

We’re almost out of vodka.

I don’t want to get Smirnoff again.

Hey look, Finlandia is on sale.

You know, I’m a fan of Jean Sibelius.

I purchase the “vodka born from the purity of Finland.”

III.

I just went shopping at Wal-Mart on the night before Christmas Eve. EYE YAM SOFA KING WE TAR DID.

Thanks, George Carlin. I’ll always be grateful.

As a historical carryover, this is also the title bestowed on all adolescent lead Bari Sax players.

Wonderful artists I have discovered or rediscovered in the past few months have been Björk, Brother Ali, R.E.M., Tracy Bonham, Radiohead, Billy Joel, and Barenaked Ladies.  I’ve really liked Björk’s Post and Brother Ali’s The Undisputed Truth albums.

And then I also downloaded Atreyu.  I heard their song “Falling Down” on the radio and liked its sound.  The guitars had an 80s/Nintendo quality that sounds good to my ears, and the vocalist wasn’t half bad.  So I figured, hey, why not check out their other stuff?

The guitars and drums, for the most part, stay cool.  Nothing particularly ground-breaking or original (but with metal, nothing really is).  But the vocals are worthless.  I do my level best to give any genre or style the benefit of the doubt, but with thier metal sound, and (sometimes) clear vocals, I figured they’d be some ear candy.  I was sadly disappointed.  Oh well.

There’s plenty more out there, that’s for sure.

This was what came out of an assignment to creatively create an artifact to represent my education.  What things I learned, how I changed, what affected me inside and outside of school.  For some reason unknown to me, my artifact became a poem.  I can’t really remember the last time I wrote a poem.  It was probably back in high school that I last wrote anything.

Here’s an excerpt:

Then…
Then when I was 17,
It was a very good year.
I read Orwell’s 1984 while near
The fallen Iron Curtain.
I saw the crumbled Wall, the ruins of evil
That compressed humanity.
And there I lived, the foreigner in
A foreign land.
A role I fell into completely.

[Note, I cannot help but put in any small reference/tribute to Frank Sinatra.  Don't ask why.  Full text after the jump.]

In the beginning, there was nothing.
All was a silent blur.
Then there came Dr Seuss.
From The Cat in the Hat
I met some 236 words.

Through the grades, I made my way,
Bruce Coville and Judy Blume, I read.
RL Stein’s Goosebumps, too.
My punishment was ‘Go to your room.’
But could never be told, ‘Stop reading.’
I definitely found my loophole.

Once in junior high, I said nuts to work,
And became academically nefarious.
I read novels of fantasy and science fiction,
Along with books on science fact
My father placed in my hands.
An engineer I slated myself to be.

In high school I remember
The required reading never justified
Or questioned.
Great novels: Of Mice and Men,
To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451.
But to what end?

Then…
Then when I was 17,
It was a very good year.
I read Orwell’s 1984 while near
The fallen Iron Curtain.
I saw the crumbled Wall, the ruins of evil
That compressed humanity.
And there I lived, the foreigner in
A foreign land.
A role I fell into completely.

From this book gifted by my Granddad,
I found myself seeking on my own.
We and A Brave New World entered
My conscious vocabulary.

On to Uni where my talents shifted
Away from the calculating to the pondering,
Combining history and philosophy.
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
Marx & Engles changing the tides.
John Stuart Mill and Sigmund Freud,
Hannah Arendt, even Malcolm X.
Each their view entered my eye,
Newly altered lenses through which to peer.

All my life
Rivers of music flowed as currents
Beneath my ever-expanding raft of books.

While reading Star Wars,
I played my Clarinet,
Looking for Dixieland.
While reading Orwell’s fears,
I played my Sax,
Seeking the funk of Jazz.
While devouring the Science of Politics,
The sounds of my thinking expanded,
As I noodled the ideas
Of Davis, Mobley, Brubeck, Adderly…

And while finding my voice and my sound,
I found myself before
Those learning to make a noise at all.

I made them laugh and play.
I had them wanting to learn more.
I found a knack.  A knack to push them
Past the lowered bar.
Now I am seeking to turn
This knack into an art.

Still, through every moment,
Every tune played,
Every word read,
There was and ever shall be,
Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

Evan Fryer
Schools and Society

So I killed it. I have nowhere near the energy or time for this, so I’m done. No money has changed parties, so really I’m just out a few hours of my life. I will make it up in lesson money. More and more kids are asking about private lessons, and I will coordinate with the band director to do before school lessons, and now with my free time, I can do after school a couple days a week too. And lessons pay way the heck better than this gig.

I just love jazz. I love it. There’s a brilliance to improv, and within confines, it grew and shaped and changed so much over time. And, damnit, it is more our American heritage than anything else, and I love it for that too. I’m listening to the Dave Brubeck Quintet’s album Take Five and my mind is clearing and focusing at the same time.

I need to play again. I miss the old combo so much. If even once a week, my butt needs to be in a band or playing. For my own health, I need to play again.

Only problem with this great program is… there’s no podcast of it. I want to hear it every day. But alas, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to. I will, however, begin emailing them regularly. My will be done!