arcas

Yet another shout out for another great yet under- but getting-to-be-better known guitarist/composer: Julián Arcas (1832 - 1882). His music is, like Tárrega's (who heard Arcas play in 1862) a mix of 19th century European and nationalistic Spanish music. Here are examples of both styles (I'm whipping out extended passages here: fair use, after all), Spanish first:

Solea

Andante

The Andante is one of his most performed concert pieces, along with the Fantasy on Themes from La Traviata which was wrongly attributed to Tárrega (perhaps because he plagiarized it).

raga sindhi-bhairavi

I transcribed this from the great Ravi Shankar album The Sounds Of India. What's great about the cd, beyond the playing, is that before each piece Ravi plays the raga used and also goes over the rhythm. Here is raga Sindhi-Bhairavi, and like the classical melodic minor it has 2 forms, an ascending and descending. Clicking on the images will make them ever so slightly larger:




The x's indicate that some microtonal bending was taking place in Ravi's playing.

I have no real conception of Indian music beyond what I've heard on cds, etc (i.e. I've never engaged in any formal study). But it seems that the idea behind the different forms of this mode (if I may) has to do with what tones are being tonicized or made the the focal point. Half steps do that well (and in Western music from the Medieval period on a similar practice has been in place: in fact melodic formulas born of said practice eventually gave rise to the melodic minor scale). I'll put up some actual passages of Ravi's playing soon, but play around with this raga keeping that half step idea in mind. Play it over a C#mi7 chord: it sounds cool, and gives a lot more color than a regular dorian or minor will (w/o chromatic passing tones, that is).

BTW I arrived at a C# by pitch shifting the original track up 86 cents (could've shifted it down, of course, too). Why not simply retune the ol' guitar? One reason: Floyd Rose.

coste

I have to give a shout out for Napoleon Coste, the awesome French composer/guitarist who lived from 1805 to 1883. I personally don't go so much for the labels classical and romantic: though that taxonomy is not born out of irrationality it's a bit easier simply to talk about 19th century music. Having said that if any guitarists of that period assimilated the Schubertian style of "Strum und Drung" (i.e. of "Romanticism") it was Coste (along with Mertz, though Aguado, Arcas and many others circumambulated that style).

Of the many, many examples that could be mustered let me just lob this one passage out there from his Andante and Minuet op. 39.



Play through this (on any instrument). Hopefully it'll put you in a fervor to devour the rest of Coste's output, which spans the gamut from very easy to very virtuosic.

N.B. This example comes from a facsimile of the 19th century publication of the work. When reading through these editions one has to realize that less information is usually provided for the performer. A good example of this is at the E⁶₄ chord: the arpeggio is comprised of sextuplets, though no 6 appears anywhere above the appropriate groupings of notes. Also in that same measure the penultimate melodic note is D#, not D natural (the D an octave below was sharpened in the previous beat, and that holds for the entire pitch class).

naked women once again at goodbye blue monday

Well, this is an after the fact post: Naked Women returned to Goodbye Blue Monday last night. Very nice show, great playahs. The lineup:

Tom Blatt: bass
Charles Ramsey: guitar
Lex Samu: trumpet
Tom Swirly: midi winds + spoken word
Nick Thabit: drums

The thinned-out ensemble worked even though we actually hand't really rehearsed as such. It's slight easier to listen to each other when there's less density.



The upcoming shows are: June 2nd at the Tank, June 6th at ABC-No Rio, June 13th at Yippie Museum at June 21st at MMNY (Make Music New York) somewhere outside in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. Also I'll be playing with the New York City Pop Band on June 5th at New Century Artists for the opening of Yori Hatakeyama and Sawaka Norii.

can't you see

Classic Marshall Tucker tune, a great jam to play over. Here's a live clip via youtube:

Can't You See

(1973)

Check out the solo starting at 2:08, especially that long, drawn out f to f# at 2:20 repeated thrice...totally awesome. The licks in this tune are synonymous with southern rock.

Transcriptions to follow...

pentatonics again

So here's a way of using pentatonic scales which comes at the issue from the other way around from what we were doing before. Let's start with an F major triad, and let's use minor pentatonics.

Now, the first thing we should stipulate is that you can play whatever you want whenever you want. That's the first rule, and this is basically the opening sentence of Persichetti's Twentieth-Century Harmony. Your ear and musical soul will guide you. On the other hand often what we're doing when we improvise is restating the underlying harmony, and if this is the case then we have to be a little more analytical or "rule bound" in our approach.

Back to the F major triad. Let's see what happens when we start a pentatonic scale on all of its tones: f, a, c.

Right away we can see that the F minor pentatonic (f, ab, bb, c, eb) isn't the best choice if we're aiming at re-stating or -enforcing the harmony. The minor 3rd is what undoes this most. BUT in context the triad might be standing in for a dominant chord, so the minor 7th might work well. And if it is standing for a dominant-type chord it might be a 7#9 chord, in which case the minor 3rd really would sound as the #9 and it would reinforce the harmony. The tones relate to the chord as follows:
f = 1
ab = b3
bb = 4
c = 5
eb = b7

A minor penatonic (a, c, d, e, g) works well as the collection of tones is found in both F ionian and F lydian. It of course won't work if the major triad is actually a dominant chord. The tones relate to the chord as follows:
a = 3
c = 5
d = 6
e = 7
g = 2

C minor pentatonic (c, eb, f, g, bb) could well work, depending on context. If the triad is a dominant-type chord then you get the following:
c = 5
eb = b7
f = 1
g = 2
bb = 4

first sounds

Several years ago I heard about this on some NPR show -- "this" being the fact that sound had in fact been recorded about 2 decades before Edison. The feat was accomplished by a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His machine, the phonautograph, for making this happen looked like this:


In a way this did "record" sound: but it did so only for the purposes of examining how it looked (it recorded sound onto paper). That is Édouard never seemed interested in hearing the sound reproduced. But in modern times that information can be used to turn the visible marking of a wave back into sound. If you use any audio editing software you'll know that if you zoom in close enough you get to see the actual wave form of the sound.

So, anyway, if any of the above seems interesting to you please check out FirstSounds.org where there is audio of the first recording plus a lot of .pdf files of original documents. Also midway (or so) down the home page is a short very informative video.

naked women at yippie museum tonight

Tonight Naked Women return to the Yippie Museum/Cafe. Check it out! The Yippie is located at 9 Bleecker Street (between Elizabeth and Bowery).

personnel:
T-Bone Blatt: bass
M'tazz the Great: guitar
Andy O'Neil: drums
Lex Samu: trumpet
Tom Swirly: ewi
Raymond Todd: trombone

and featuring GOLDIVA singing + dancing!

blues, high-energy experimental jazz, funk,
psychedelic afro-pop...

carmen of the spheres

Very interesting take on the Harmony of the Spheres by Greg Fox here. A blurb from that page if you need any more enticement:

"This is (finally) the brand new early August 2006 work by Greg Fox, a first response to Edward O Wilson's "Consilience", Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving The Rainbow", Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee", Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works" and most importantly Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine". All of these books deal (among other things!) with the relationship between art and science, between art and human nature, art and the world. "




The piece derives pitches from the orbital periods of the planets (using the idea that halving or doubling a cycle produces an octave down or up respectively). Of course that alone will only give one a fundamental frequency: I think he settled on sine waves for the realization.

gagaku

I mentioned gagaku before in a post concerning Takemitsu's modern piece In An Autumn Garden for gagaku orchestra. For some interesting points concerning gagaku check out this site. Unfortunately only the home page is in English. But even so the information here is quite nice. Consider the following descriptions of some of the instruments:

Sho ... The light that penetrates from the Heavens
Ryuteki ... The dragon that ascends dancing in the Sky
Hichiriki ... The voices echoing on the Earth

When all sound together a Cosmos can be heard

The two Chinese characters (kanji) that make up the word literally mean "elegant music".

So there is a nice correlation between the instruments and the cosmos. Of course to get a more nuanced feel for gagaku one would have to plumb the depths of Heian culture more generally. Especially regarding the concept of wabisabi which is, as the WWWJDIC translates the term,the "aesthetic sense in Japanese art emphasising quiet simplicity and subdued refinement". Also the sadness that a cultivated soul feels upon experiencing beauty knowing its transient nature.

traditional chinese music

Yesterday while strolling through Chinatown I passed by Columbus Park and heard some music. I went in to investigate and the music turned out to be coming from a traditional Chinese ensemble. I couldn't really get their name (all information was in Chinese, except for that they played as part of Music Under New York). I'm pretty sure that they're called the Street Musical Club. I can't find anything online about them specifically, but here's a good site with traditional Chinese music: Internet Chinese Music Archive. The lyrical quality of the playing is remarkable.



By the way, China has the oldest written music: tablature for the qin. The piece is called Secluded Orchid and comes from the Tang Dynasty. You can get some info on that in the wikipedia article or on this page (if you scroll down to the section called music you'll be able to hear it, too) from John Thompson. It's definitely worth listening to: the amount of harmonics used is stunning, as well as the fact that it could easily be heard as a contemporary piece.

in need of orchestration

Back in the day it was customary for composers to orchestrate their works made for smaller ensembles and soloists. Or to orchestrate other composers' works -- especially piano works, Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition being the preeminent example.

So I'm not an orchestrator, but for any of you out there looking for some projects let me suggest some of the guitar repertoire from the early part of the 20th century:

Antonio Jose's Sonata para Guitarra
Ponce's Variations and Fugue on La Folia
Manen's Sonata-Fantasia
Migot's Pour un Hommage a Debussy (more on this one later)
...and though from the 1960s Mompou's Suite Compostelana
would be fabulous.

There are many more, but these are what I would pick first. And selecting from the list would probably yield a very nice album.

For practical "how to" examples one could consult De Falla's orchestration of his Debussy hommage and Martin's own Quatre Pieces Breves.

perfume for the month of may

What better way to begin the merry month of May than with some tunes from Perfume? Here are links to 2 different tunes from different points in their career...

sweet donuts
(2003)



one room disco
(2009)

Used daily your overall mood will be improved!