Check this out: a Japanese acoustic locator (2 of them). That’s Hirohito on the right, and some AA guns to be used with the locators. Wow, what we won’t dream up in the name of defense!
My second favorite band of the 60s behind the Beatles is the Byrds. Nearly everything they did from 1965 to 1970 in their various incarnations was interesting, although after Crosby, Clark, Clarke and Hillman left my enthusiasm wained. Gram Parsons and Clarence White were two post-Byrds mega-stars that put in time. I’m pretty sure I own all of the LPs they put out at this time, together and apart. So despite their already having put out far too many greatest hits and reissues, a new set called “There is a Season” is slated for release by Coumbia/Legacy on August 29, 2006. It will include a 4 CD set of the standard Byrds fare, but also all the early stuff like the early bands called The Jet Set and Beefeaters, as well as later reincarnations of the group in 1973 and 1990. A DVD of live performances promises to make this set unique.
After a little hunting around I see that Roger McGuinn owns byrds.com where he posts with his wife Camilla from time to time. David Crosby has his own website where finally he has free reign to talk politics as well as his music. He used to irritate his bandmates by chatting politics with the audience when all they wanted to hear was “Turn Turn Turn.” Like the other two living Byrds, Chris Hillman is alive and well. His website will bring you up to date on his career, and be sure to check out the various photos of his musical career. Not great pics but marvelous documents. Although Gene Clark has been dead since 1991, his music is more popular than ever. geneclark.com will show you the extent to which this is true. The most invisible member, Michael Clarke, a heavy drinker, succumbed to liver failure in 1993. Clarke will be remembered for providing cool drum parts to early Byrds records as well as the Flying Burrito Brothers. At the end of his life he pursued appearing on TV to warn children of the dangers of alcohol. The foundation Campaign for Alcohol-free Kids carries his dream on. Read “Death of a Rock’n'Roll Legend” for the sad end of his life.
I look forward to revisiting these old friends. No, it won’t be the same as it was when they were together, and that’s just fine.
[For more information, see the Billboard article and the Chartattack article.]
Addendum: today, May 24, 2006, is the 15th anniversary of Gene Clark’s death. Gene died of a heart attack at age 46.
There are some marvelous harmonic details in Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” It was Mark Carlson who pointed out to me that there is no dominant chord in the song. I was incredulous. He was right.
Look at the chart of the chord progression for the song. I laid out the harmonic analysis so that the line starts over every time the tonic (I) recurs. And was I surprised to find a perfect palindrome in the layout of the chords!
Young composers often attempt to write their first songs travelling up the scale: I ii iii IV and back, and it almost always sounds terrible. Cohen’s handling of the harmonic apex is brilliant, and only goes to the subdominant (IV), never the dominant (V). In this song, the harmonic syntax is this: I may go to ii or iii; ii goes to iii or I; iii only goes to IV; IV only goes to I.
Many of you know Judy Collins version of the song. That version is by Joshua Rifkin and is a thrilling and touching variation of the original. Here is the first verse of the Cohen original:
MP3: Play audio file (suzvs1.mp3)
Verse 1 of “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen”
From the creator of Sequenza 21, Jerry Bowles, has created blognoggle, a compendium of RSS feeds about music, mostly contemporary and classical music. It has two cousins, that focus on Politics and Business as well. Several of my posts have appear there, along with a bevy of other thoughtfully curated posts. Red Black Window is in blognoggle’s 100 Top New Music Blogs
Here are Jerry’s thoughts on his new site:
I started blognoggle pages on new music, business and politics because
I realized that only a small fraction of internet users now bother
with RSS readers and those that do become quickly overwhelmed by too
much information. My hunch is that web readers (particularly music
lovers as opposed to techies) would much rather go to a web page where
the most important and freshest posts from the best sources have
already been automatically selected for them to quickly review.
Gram Parsons and Nudie Cohen
I’m amazed: who’d a thunk it? CMT, or Country Music Television, has a website, and featured in it is a tribute to one of my old heroes, Gram Parsons.
I think the argument can easily be made that Gram Parsons was to country-rock what Hank Williams was to mainstream country. Each simultaneously catapulted a musical genre light years ahead of what it had been, and each left a romantic image of a brilliant but doomed wastrel country poet who died young. Hank was 29 when he succumbed to too much dope and liquor in the back seat of his Cadillac, and Gram was 26 when an overdose of dope and liquor claimed his young life in a motel room in the California desert. [Editorial Director Chet Flippo.]
With the exception of Emmy Lou Harris, Gram has hardly received the respect he deserves from the country music world. Perhaps this article is the turning point. It doesn’t tell any of us Parsons experts anything new, but it DOES tell us that there is a new GP documentary and 3 CD box set due on the shelves June 20, 2006. The 3 CDs are his Reprise recordings.
Who knows? Perhaps now they will come to their senses about k d lang as one of the greatest country artists ever. (She didn’t have the patience or artistic sloth to stay and wait for approval and moved on.) I heard k d with the LA Philharmonic two summers ago. She is at a new level. She has always been a great performer, but she has matured into a great artist. I can’t help but think that her passion for Buddhism has centered her into a new level. I anxiously await her next project.
I hold onto old software, especially when I used it to create music. I have on old IBM PC-AT with tons of Sequence Plus files on it that I am holding onto until I can figure out how to get them off that old hard drive. As a publisher, I have many files that composers send me that use dead software. I learned a new term today: “abandonware” meaning the company that made the software went out of business or the product is no longer sold or supported. I found the following explanation helpful:
“Abandonware” is still protected by copyright — there is a series of hearings and testimony is being taken by the copyright office concerning such things as how to handle the copyright issues, how much of a search is sufficient to protect an individual should he/she use copyrighted materials without permission. The copyright office is aware of the problem and is trying to sort it out, but under the law, the full copyright still is in effect even for what is apparently abandonware. Of course, it may not be abandonware at all, it may just be dormantware, which is something that may rise out of the ashes of its former existence.
The Composers in Red Sneakers was and is composers consortium founded in Boston in 1980 by Robert Aldridge and Thomas Oboe Lee followed by Christopher Stowens. I was invited in, as was Amy Reich and Gary Philo. That was the original group, and it has gone on and morphed into an entirely new group where it would seem none of the current members seem to know the original gang. Alas, so it goes. It was a great experience being in the group. The gimmick was that if you wore red sneakers, you could get in for free.
Richard Dyer gave us a great spread in the Sunday Calendar section of the Boston Globe with a picture of Stowens and Bourland and their red sneakers. In our next concert we had to turn people away. It was amazing. A group of young modern composers who had an audience that couldn’t wait to hear the next concert. Composer groups sprung up for years. New music became relevant in Boston, not alienating, but cool. (Check out Tom Lee’s museum for our concerts.)
Above is a photo of the original pair of red sneakers, originally owned and used by Christopher Stowens, now living in Hollywood with Roger Bourland. They are decaying; the rubber is turgid and browning. The cloth has been smushed and has separated from the rubber siding. Can’t you smell them? Old sneakers, unworn for 20 years?
[Rufus hands in a CD of "Lux aeterna" a part of his larger work "Bloom."]
Berlioz: What is this?
Rufus: My “Lux aeterna”
Bz: Is this a notation file?
RW: No, it’s a sound file of my performance.
Bz: Where is the score?
RW: There is no score. I recorded it all in real time.
Bz: My dear Rufus, I must encourage you to practice your notational skills.
RW: I don’t need them.
Bz: I beg to differ. Notating music takes your music out of time, and allows the composer to carefully consider every tiny detail and nuance on paper, or on computer, before anyone ever tries to perform it. This is especially true with counterpoint.
RW: So you don’t wanna hear my piece?
Bz: I’d be happy to hear it.
[Rufus plugs the disc into his laptop. They listen. Berlioz smiles, applauds. Rufus combs his hair back with his right hand and reaches for a cigarette.]
Bz: Excellent m’boy. No smoking in lessons. Kill yourself on your own time, not mine. The piece has many characteristics of a good contapuntal work. The music is really overloaded with more parts than are really necessary, that is unless you were after a Thomas Tallis type mega-contrapuntal piece.
RW: Yeah, I kinda was.
Bz: You’re not ready for it. Take one step at a time. Be patient. I’d like to start you at the very beginning or contrapuntal study: modal counterpoint. In this study, we’ll do note against note exercises, half against whole exercises, quarters against whole, then a study in syncopated voices and suspensions, and then I’ll let flap your wings and try your hand at free counterpoint. The difference is that I will give you rules as to what you may and what you may not do.
RW: Sheesh, just what I need; more rules. Do I hafta?
Bz: Yes you have to. Trust the process. I’m not insisting that you follow these rule for your whole life, nor for your own music, just for this series of lessons. Think of these exercises as contrapuntal training wheels.
RW: Yeah, there’s an attractive image.
Bz: But first I want you to practice your music notation. While you’re talking on the phone, I want you to doodle drawing clefs: treble, bass and alto. Practing making notes. Notes are ovals, not circles or little specks of fly poop. They are ovals. Draw an oval and fill it in for the black note. Now notice the difference between the two hollow notes: the half note and the whole note. See how the half note slants to the right, and the whole note slants to the left. Practice drawing these differences. You may wonder why music notation looks the way it does. Composers used crow quills, or pens made from crow’s feathers. Used like this [draws] you can make a thin line, and like this [demonstrates] a fat line. Do this and the lines can go from thin to fat. For next time, I’d like you to fill this page with music notation, not music, just notation practice. Find a treble clef you like and imitate it. Try it yourself first, then I’ll show you my technique later.
RW: Cool, ok thanks dude.
Bz: I am not “dude” you may call me Professor Berlioz, or Professor, but not dude.
RW: Ok Prof, er, Professor.
Bz: Later dude.
“Puerto Vallarta Alley” by Roger Bourland
When I applied for my sabbatical from the UCLA Department of Music, my employer, I had originally planned on starting an opera about a famous Mexican opera star who had an amazingly tragic life. A book on Rufus Wainwright shoved its way to the front burner and sits half-done on my computer. I have been releasing chunks of it on this blog. As both of these were my own projects and not commissions, they were displaced once several commissions came in.
Shoved to the back burner are the following projects:
There are several other big seeds germinating that I won’t mention until they become real. Until then, I have more than enough to keep me busy.
Photo by George DeSota
I was surprised to read that Paul and his 2nd wife, Heather Mills, have split after four years of marriage. They blamed “intrusion from the media” for the split. Uh, yeah. Is that kinda like “the devil made me do it?” Here’s the kicker: Paul is worth around 1 billion dollars, and they didn’t have a pre-nuptial agreement. I’m amazed Paul.
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