ivy -- nothing but the sky

I'm comfortable enough with myself to admit that I watched the film Shanghai Kiss. Not a fabulous movie. In fact not even a decent movie, though I liked all the actors and the places (it's great to see Shanghai on film -- see below).

But one excellent thing about the film is that the tune "Nothing But the Sky" by Ivy is in it. Here's a link:




But to see/hear how it was used in the film check this one out:



The nearly sci-fi landscape of Shanghai along with that ambient, ultra-airy sounding voice is really an excellent match...

Oh, and here are the entire lyrics for the song:

Meet me tonight
Fifteen miles high
Nothing but the sky
Shining in your eyes...

rhythmic training by robert starer

A book I used a million years ago at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (for a guitar sight reading class): Robert Starer's Rhythmic Training. I'm giving an amazon link here because you can look through some of the book there, but of course buy it at your favorite vendor of music scores...

Anyway it's an excellent book to go through from time to time, and especially if you're having particular difficulties (e.g. switching between triplets and sixteenths while keeping a steady pulse). The last few exercises are still brutal for me...

the fan man

I read this book last year and looooved it. The main character -- Horse Badorties -- is a hippie who's exclusively into medieval music. He lives in the Lower East Side and has a choir of young runaway girls and has them hold tiny battery-powered fans which emit to him a beautiful sound. A great, weird book. Horse's hatred of Puerto Rican music parallels my own detesting of Dominican music...



Click here to read what wikipedia has to say about the novel. If you read and enjoyed Confederacy of Dunces you'll dig this...highly recommended.

And if you do read it try to get the illustrated version (though it looks like the newer edition has a forward by Vonnegut which must be a great read).

music as patterns i

This is one of two series I want to start on this blog (look for the other "mystery" series to appear shortly!), viz. the investigation of music as patterns.

Let me just discursively throw out some ways in which patterns are a part of music:

VIBRATIONAL (from a simple vibrating sine wave to complex multi-timbrel occurrences, the vibrating ear drum, and so on)
RHYTHMIC (organization of sound even irrespective of pitch)
FORMAL (melodic shapes, harmonic structures, harmonic progressions, divisions of a piece of music into common forms -- sonata, song, aba -- scale structures, fingering patterns on particular instruments)

Also patterns may be grouped into those that are PERCEPTIBLE and those that are more CONCEPTUAL. A melodic phrase is an example of the former whereas the graphic representation of a square wave producing the pitch B4 is an example of the latter. Of course a melodic phrase notated is more conceptual but still perceptible, so perhaps another category of VISUAL needs to be added.

At any rate future posts in this series will start to examine some of these issues and others having to deal with emotion, entrainment and the like.

ai no tenshi

This is my favorite tune from Satoshi Kon's 1998 fabulous anime classic Perfect Blue, and it's called "Ai no tenshi" (The Angel of Love).



Also of potential interest is the following clip which shows the tune being recorded by the singers (which clip is on the dvd, btw):

highest f major chord?

Sor's Fantasy no. 2 (op. 7) is a spectacular piece. For those of you who have the Bream Baroque Guitar record and have heard the piece that way keep in mind: Bream only plays the Introduction. There's a whole theme and variations which follow, some of which are truly remarkable.

Remarkable in terms of just having to deal with a somewhat uncomfortable fingering examine the following passage from the B section of the 3rd variation:


Yes, that F chord is stratospheric! Yes on the electric guitar (or any guitar with a cutaway) this is not a real beast. But keep in mind: the lowest fret here is the 13th. I'd be tempted to introduce some rubato at this point just to accommodate this technical aspect.

By the way: you shredders should check out the 6th variation...

new ideas in a new year

If I were made dictator of the universe for a minute or two I'd like to change some aspects of conservatory training. These would be the additions/changes:

One semester (at least) of music writing and improvising. NOT taught by a "composer", especially not by an academic one. Here the goal is to reveal to musicians that if they can play an instrument they can improvise on that instrument. And also they can write music of very diverse styles for that instrument of any other.

One semester of "pop music" performance. Here we would, for example, play Let It Be. But the pianists would be given the chart on a cocktail napkin and NOT (I repeat NOT) permitted to write out any parts. The performance would have to be convincing, etc. Real world.

Basics of recording, multi-tracking, etc. Are there any musicians, anywhere, who at this point don't need recordings of their playing? Might as well be armed with some knowledge of how it's done...maybe even enough knowledge to do it one's self.

I would certainly toy with the idea of getting rid of music history. Maybe a course that contains the basic bullet points. Maybe in theory situate the concepts historically. There seem to be lots of musicians in the world who function just fine without knowing thing one about clausulae -- just as there are millions of musicians worldwide who know nothing of set theory and would much prefer to stab themselves repeatedly with rusty implements than learn anything about said subject.