October 6, 2017 On Music What Once Was Lost: Unfinding and Refinding Music History By Bradford Morrow Félix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904. Courtesy the Hermitage Museum. Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained. Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history. Read More
September 19, 2017 On Music 4′ 33″: On Listening to the Silence By John Haskell About a month ago, at the Museum of Modern Art, I attended a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. I’d read about its famous silence, but because I’d never sat in a theater and experienced that silence, all I had were expectations. I expected the pianist to be a man, which is what expectations do, they give you a picture of what will happen before it happens, and it turned out the performer was a violinist. He took, as they say, the stage, concentrating his thoughts, lifting his instrument, and with his bow not quite touching the strings of his violin, the music began. Almost immediately a subway train, beneath the streets of midtown, rumbled in the theater, the volume increasing and then decreasing, and the indeterminacy Cage had talked about, because the ears can’t shut themselves, was continuous, one thing after another, and I could hear voices behind what seemed like a curtain but was probably a wall, a woman’s voice, almost plaintive, and indeterminacy, which means “not exactly known or expected,” was what I’d come to hear. I was craning my ears, or pricking up my ears, or opening the metaphorical doors of hearing, and we don’t have a word for what the mind does, the way it turns from object to object, turning from the moment in front of it to another moment, to a past or a future, and having heard the subway sounds and the voices behind the wall, I expected to hear a candy wrapper being opened, the crinkling cellophane echoing through the audience like music, or “music,” but there was no cellophane wrapper. But in thinking about the cellophane wrapper I was hearing the music, which was part of the let’s-make-art-out-of-anything spirit that was in the air in 1952, when Cage composed 4’33”. Read More
August 7, 2017 On Music Suzanne Ciani and the Subliminal Property of Being Human By Dave Tompkins Suzanne Ciani. I’m being sold the memory of a weed-eater dream at the speed of August. The motor’s vortical hiss, slowed into an alligator groan. A commercial for the Black and Decker Cutter appears on a split screen, now a quadrant, continuously subdividing, each cell occupied with its own product activity, vying for attention and competing with human physiology, the maxed bladders and empty guts that threaten to spirit us away from our sponsor. A GE dishwasher offers to pamper the china. The Merrill Lynch bull walks into a popular idiom, a commercial space that is shiny but not as clean as ITT’s “Clean Room,” which, as claimed, is quantified a thousand times cleaner than an ER: “hyperclean.” It all seems to be happening at once. (I am suddenly compelled to trim the patio near the statue of a headless saint by the garden where I once interred my pajama bottoms beneath a geode.) To the ear, the weed-eater spot could be selling the Buchla 200 synthesizer, if not the work of Suzanne Ciani herself, an electronic-music composer who mastered Don Buchla’s switchboard of patch bays and oscillators. She’s a classically trained pianist who abandoned the keyboard interface (and its muscle memory) to revolutionize music, sometimes anonymously, right under your TV tray. The grid of old TV ads flashed on the screen in A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and career directed by Brett Whitcomb. Now available, it screened at Moogfest at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, last May. An original plug tuner, Ciani created identities for logos and products in the seventies and eighties as a way to support her own music projects and studio. Brands and their sonic referents may have been owned by the client, but the sounds themselves belonged to a woman whose work was singular in a field that was then undefined: routing signals and ideas into tiny spaces and “microcosmic time slots,” all while creating her own signature in the male-dominated world of advertising. Electronic music was largely mysterious then, a time when a modular synth for “Planetary Peace” would cause a bomb scare at the San Francisco airport. The media was no less baffled, but especially so with a woman behind the controls. “This is an album,” said one awkward TV interviewer, doing his best Perd Hapley. That’s about as far as he got. Cut to a commercial. Read More
August 1, 2017 On Music Skiffle Craze: An Interview with Billy Bragg By Alex Abramovich Billy Bragg. Billy Bragg’s new book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, is a history of skiffle—an art form that was looked down upon when Bragg himself began to play music, in the 1970s. But as Bragg explained a few days ago, in a fascinating talk at the Library of Congress, skiffle was England’s first teenage subculture—a working-class, DIY youth cult that set the stage not only for the British Invasion but for punk. It’s ironic, if not especially odd, that Bragg, a member of the first generation of British rockers who owed little or nothing to the skiffle craze, should end up writing about its influence. “As pop became profound in the 60s, artists who had learned their chops playing skiffle tended to leave it out of their biographies,” Bragg writes in the book’s introduction. “If you wanted to be taken seriously, better to claim you were initially inspired by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly rather than Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey. Thus skiffle became a bit of an embarrassment for Britain’s sixties rock royalty, like an awkward photo from a school yearbook, a reminder of shabby realities of postwar, pre-rock Britain. Even when credit was given, skiffle often found itself edited out in the search for a snappier sound bite. Take George Harrison’s famous quote about how his band was influenced by the blues: ‘No Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ What Harrison actually said was: ‘If there were no Lead Belly there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ ” Among musicians who grew up with the music, Van Morrison has been one of the very few to give it its due. I watched Bragg’s talk the other night, then hopped over to Bragg’s website and saw that he was playing in New York City on Tuesday. Naturally, the show was sold out. But just before sound check, I walked over to Bragg’s hotel for a pot of tea (Earl Grey for me, mint for the author) and a chat about the book. This was a treat: I’ve been listening to Bragg’s music since I was a teenager, and spent much of the money I had then seeing him live. (I’m not the only one. The Paris Review’s editor, Lorin Stein, saw Bragg play the 9:30 Club, in Washington, D.C., on the Back to Basics tour. It was Lorin’s first rock show.) Bragg touched on a few of the stories he’d told at the Library of Congress. (The remarkable story of Ken Colyer, an English trumpeter who joined the Merchant Marine just to make it to New Orleans, only to find himself sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, on his way to Australia, was new to me.) But the conversation itself weaved in and out, going—as the best conversations tend to go—in any number of other directions. Read More
June 29, 2017 On Music In Stargoon’s Car By Paul Grimstad AI is changing the way we write songs—but music has always embraced machine language. Soon after I’d arrived in New York in the late nineties, I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I’d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I’d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I’d sit and write in a spiral notebook. The entry for October 16, 1998, has the title “Franchise a rock band.” Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were—Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore—and perform the material as the band, just as someone with overhead and staff could open a Taco Bell or a Dunkin’ Donuts. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance—surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band—and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. This wasn’t about trying to get rich; I had no interest in making a profit. It stemmed rather from my desultory toilet reading in Andy Warhol’s POPism and also with my sense of the dreary uniformity of “indie rock”: always the same lanky guys (and the occasional girl) with carefully mussed hair looking identically “authentic,” dispensing more or less indistinguishable chords and melodies. Since my days not working in the Moog shop were spent making nine-minute songs with titles like “The Continuing Adventures of Cardinal Caterpillar” on a cassette multitrack recorder in a tiny room in Brooklyn, subsisting entirely on street-vendor coffee, bagels, SweeTarts, tap water, and Parliament Lights, the Franchised Band idea was a desperately contrived fantasy meant to achieve a conceptual sophistication along the lines of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but within the constrained format of the rock band. This all strikes me now as completely preposterous—and to some degree it’s been superseded by the hyperefficient Swedish studio wizards that crank out perfect megahits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, et al. But at the time I thought it was revolutionary. I pitched it to a bunch of label people in New York. As I explained it, every last one of them started to giggle. Read More
June 19, 2017 On Music A World of Shared Ecstasy By Adam Shatz A new suite for string quartet weds Western and Arabic music with intelligence, integrity, and feeling. Photo: captain.orange, via Flickr. Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, has been hailed for its elegiac, meandering portrait of Western scholars of the Islamic world. Few critics have noticed that it’s also a novel about European musicians and composers enchanted by the sounds of the Middle East and North Africa. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is an Austrian musicologist, or, in his words, “a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about.” His thesis, which Énard obviously cares about, is that modern European concert music “owed everything to the Orient”: All over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Orient to modify the self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony. Ritter’s compass invariably points east, and delirious exaggeration is his rhetorical signature, but the novel offers a suggestive account of Western music’s encounter with its Eastern other. Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt all wrote Turkish-style marches; Debussy, Bartók, and Hindemith were fascinated by Arabic and Asian scales. The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was so besotted by North Africa that he wrote “Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin,” whose lyrics at one point cry out “Allah Akbar!” Some Western musicians reinvented themselves as Arabic musicians, notably the late Swiss qanun master (and Muslim convert) Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. Music, Énard suggests, has proven a uniquely fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, “a world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity.” It has rejected the “violence of imposed identities” in favor of “the dual, the ambiguous.” Read More