Our students in the Music History, Culture and Creativity have a final project that involves providing music to a one minute clip of film, excerpted from the actual working print from which Paul Chihara worked. The excerpt is from a famous anime film and has SMPTE time-code streaming on top.

The class of 80 each has to score this one minute segment using only QuickTime Pro 7 ($29) and Audacity (available on both platforms and free). Quite a few students used GarageBand. The three professors have been discussing composing, and affect and effect and issues in film music around the world; we’ve had two guest lecturers speak about film music from different perspectives; and NOW they get to compose film music themselves! This is a real coup for me; the notion getting a class of 80 students composing film cues as naturally as if they were doing harmony exercises.

I am also quite satisfied that they taught themselves. I went over the process once in class, I put up a forum that so they could ask each other technical questions, and many used it.

In that adding music to video/film is becoming technologically easier and easier, why not add it to the list of musical exercises all music students should be required to do?

Yesterday Profs Bourland, Stulberg, Lindemann, Dean, Snow, Rice, Lysy(s), and Loza flew up to Emoryville, CA to meet with future UCLA applicants and their parents, give overviews of our program and answer questions. Kavin and Laura were there to answer all the nuts and bolts and deadline info.

This is, of course, recruiting. Even though it was a bit beyond the call of duty for all of us to give up our Saturday and fly up and back en masse, it was a good bonding experience as well as learning first-hand about our program. It gave the faculty a chance to get to know each other better and create better departmental bonds. It gave moms and dads and their child an opportunity to meet face to face with professors.

This kind of generosity in faculty members shows a genuine and touching devotion to their work.

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As Chair, I’ve been sitting in on lessons and classes to hear first-hand our teachers in action. What a joy! I wish all of our performance faculty would sit in on each others’ lessons: they couldn’t help but learn from each other. I certainly have.

Today I lectured about what I’m now calling “chord cycles”–a series of chords that repeat over and over. In the Baroque, these types of compositions were called “chaconnes.” Composers think of any repeated set of chords as a chaconne, but historians are sticklers about that progression being a set progression. There are more arguments about the difference between passacaglias and chaconnes. Professor McClary suggested I just refer to a chord cycle as an “ostinato” (Italian for stubborn). Despite the historical sense of it, that didn’t seem like a good phrase either.

So, starting today, I’m going to refer to them as chord cycles, a term that seems self-explanatory, you don’t have to speak Italian, or know Renaissance or Baroque dance forms.

In the lecture I covered “La Folia,” the chaconnes used by Handel, Bach, and Purcell, the “I Got Rhythm” ["rhythm changes"] and “Blue Moon” chord progressions (I vi IV [or ii] V), the “La Bamba” variants (including “Louie Louie,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Wild Thing,” Bob Marley’s chord cycle from “No Woman No Cry” and a couple of more. I also looked at the circle of fifths in songs and how they are used (think: Vivaldi Winter/Four Seasons, “The Autumn Leaves,” and “All the things you are”). I closed with the “Sensitive Female Chord Progression” (vi IV I V) made clear in Joan Osborne’s “What if God Were One of Us.”

If you’d like to hear the whole set, here is a YouTube playlist that I made for the lecture.

[Musical examples from the lecture handout. Pg.2 is missing.]

Mark Carlson and I attended a concert given by the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA). My high school days are a very long time ago (1967-71), and I don’t spend any time around high schools these days, so I was prepared for a culture shock.

From a school of 579 students in music, art, and dance, we heard a GALA concert (read: everyone plays) with 203 high school musicians. WOW!

We heard a jazz band, a gospel choir, an opera excerpt, three piano soloists interspersed, the concert choir, a very large orchestra (!!!), and saw inspired and gifted teachers and leaders. The performances, yes they are young, were on a very high level. I am thrilled that LA can have such a terrific institution, and I encourage all donors to consider making a donation.

Mark and I sat through the 3 and a half hour concert without ever getting bored. It was so fascinating to watch and focus on individual young musicians, seeing their energy and musicality, seeing who are the young Elvises or Madonnas, the Chet Bakers (yes! there was one) and the cool jazzers, already thick with attitude.

I felt I was witnessing the ur-Glee.

I was impressed that the audience listened in rapt attention to the three piano solos, all brilliantly played. I would have imagined that the parents would lean towards jazz and yawn at the classical: but no, these are parents who paid to have their kids go to an arts school. They LOVE the arts. Silly me.

This is a high school where ALL the students are in the arts. There is no Marching Band or football team. Sounds like a dream to those of us who didn’t have that luxury. They are all shapes and sizes and ethnicities. One of the most remarkable observations I made last night was that the students seemed really happy. Most just beamed a kind of happiness. After the curtain went down after the grand finale, we heard a huge WHOOOOOOO from behind the curtain of 203 deliriously happy students who just put on a great concert.

There was another level for me. Dr Dan Castro is the musical and organizational force behind this program. I was Dan’s Chair for his Masters and Doctoral degrees at UCLA. In front of a near sold out Luckman Theater on the Cal State LA campus, Dr Castro publicly thanked me for being a mentor and teacher. He also acknowledged Mark Carlson for whom he was a TA, and Jackie DjeDje, Chair of Ethnomusicology. UCLA got a warm applause from the appreciative audience, many obviously proud parents.

So, in a sense, I felt like a grandfather of the event, or better, a godfather. And to be thanked is always a nice thing.

Take a listen to what they do.

This is NOT indicative of what we heard last night, I found this reading of a student arrangement of “Turning Japanese” [do they KNOW what that means??] scored for full orchestra.

There is a melodic principle, or tendency in melodies from the Renaissance; we teach it in counterpoint exercises known as species counterpoint. The rule I’m thinking about right now is that of gravity. After the melody leaps up––say the interval of a fourth to an octave––the tones after said leap must recover in the opposite direction, usually a step, but occasionally a third. (Think the first three note of “Somewhere O-[ver the Rainbow] and you’ll hear the principle: leap up, and then recover. That’s the melodic principle of gravity.

I teach this principle by likening it to gravity. Think of a ball. Throw it as high as you can up into the air. Then it stops and falls back to the earth. The height from the ground to that turn-around point is like the range of an instrument. A ball can’t be thrown up and then hover. So melody defies this and CAN hover, but the voice must eventually come down, as the tones in our sentences fall down. The opposite would keep a high note for a climactic dramatic purpose.

Rarely do tunes just ramp up and down a scale. They sashay and tease, jump and recover, and hover for effect. We breathe in sympathy to that tune and breathe when it does. Stravinsky once complained about the organ: “The monster never breathes.”

P.S. Susan reminds me that good organist DO know how to breathe. Which reminds me of our mutual late teacher, Elliott Forbes who, at Harvard when he taught species counterpoint, referred to the whole leap-recover thing like this: “From time to time one takes a lusty jump into sin and leaps–never larger than an octave–and one atones for that sin by recovering by step in the opposite direction.” I never thought of him as a hard core Christian, but I love the notion of melodic leaping as a lusty leap–it makes composing that much more erotic.

Image: “Runner” by Roger Bourland. Ink and guauche on silk paper.

This morning I woke up in 7/8. [For non-musicians repeat over and over: 1212123 and accent the ones a little bit and you'll get the feel.] It was the Bulgarian Radio State Vocal Choir (from “Le mystere des voix bulgares”) on the Johnny Carson Show. Take a listen and focus on two things: the time signature — sing along “1212123″ and then listen to how much 2nds are a part of their music. The duet after the first big section is one clear spot filled with 2nds. I find it fascinating how little they move considering the microtimers going off in their brains. They sway a bit, look very happy and have beautiful beaming faces. I listen to this and I can’t sit still.

This quarter, in our Music History, Culture and Creativity class, one of our themes is the notion of aural simultaneities. We chose this word as a substitute for the more traditional appellation, “harmony.” The term “harmony” tends to call up the Western notion of functional tonality, where every (or most) chord has a function. The most important function is for the dominant (V) to resolve to the tonic (I), The harmonic and melodic drama occur on the way TO the dominant from the tonic, and once there, the celebration of the resolution of the dominant to the tonic fill millions of square miles in the annals of music repertoire.

Not all the world’s music fits into such expectations. For instance, here’s a montage video over a performance by the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. You’ll LOTS of 2nds, 4ths and 7ths — intervals treated as dissonances in the
West — in this largely 2-part song.

And my new favorite music comes from Sardinia. Susan McClary played some in class on Thursday and it blew my mind. Her point in this part of her talk was showing the evolution of melodies being shadowed a 5th above or a 4th below, and in the case of some Sardinian music, in parallel triads — a kind of Balkan Crosby, Stills and Nash! Here is a little documentary about Sardinian music that gives a nice overview.

How about some Sardinian sacred music?

Now where exactly does THIS one fit in? Caribbean throat singing Gospel?

And here’s one that shows how Sardinian music refuses to be functionally tonal. And was that Petruchka I heard flit by??

And one to blow your mind — the Tenores di Bitti sing “Mialinu Pira.”

Excerpts from final projects for M87. © UC Regents

Download audio file (M87miX.mp3)

Our experimental class, Music History, Culture and Creativity, is now over. I’ve graded all 91 final projects. Their assignment was to write a composition in any style, for any instrumentation, using elements we discussed in class this term and most importantly that it be in ABA’ form. (For readers who don’t know what that means, it means you write a chunk of music, like a verse [A], then write a contrasting section [B], like a chorus, and at the end, bring back the opening, but shorter, a little different, and make it sound like an end.)

I was amazed at the huge range in diversity, I can only give you a taste of it here, and I apologize to my class that I can’t put everyone’s project up, but I’ve put excerpts of some of them. I find this SOOO much more gratifying for all involved than having them all write bad Bach chorales. They can try that later in the year.

What a hoot to teach a class of 91 students from a wide range of backgrounds, composition lessons like this. See what you think!

[Note: although the photo isn't my class, it might as well be, as this is what it looks like to me from the stage. Our class has been using computers to "take notes" but as we learned that many were on Facebook the entire time and barely listening, we will be curtailing computer use next term.]

I have been grading my class’s assignments where they were to record original compositions that include a drone and a melody, for any instrumentation and in any style. I have been very happy with the results.

I know of no existing theory books where students are asked to compose such exercises. I think it’s an important ability, as much of the world’s music exists over drones. One can think of hanging out on a chord, even if for a short time, is a kind of micro-drone.

Speaking of hanging out on a chord, something that our current harmonic analysis fails in imparting to music students is how a mode is imprinted on a particular diatonic chord. For instance, in a major key, the IV chord (subdominant) is ALWAYS in the lydian mode; the ii chord is always Dorian; the V chord is always Mixolydian; the iii chord is Phrygian, and so on. The unspoken ability to know that a IV chord is a IV chord, is that the melodies that dance around its magnet are in the Lydian mode, not the Mixolydian or Ionian mode. Even though the root triad of all three modes is major, their modal content is completely different. Teachers might consider adding this to their bag of tricks to get students to hear chord changes.
]]> http://rogerbourland.com/2009/11/27/micro-drones-and-the-modal-iv-chord/feed/ 1 http://rogerbourland.com/2009/11/18/drones-and-pedals/ http://rogerbourland.com/2009/11/18/drones-and-pedals/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:20:34 +0000 Roger Bourland http://rogerbourland.com/blog/?p=4081

This week in Music History, Culture, and Creativity, our students must compose, record, convert to mp3 and upload their compositions to the class website. Their compositions are to feature a drone (a sustained bass note throughout a section or an entire piece of music), or pedal (as in when an organ holds down a PEDAL, a low note, while other music happens on top) with a melody. It may be for any instrumentation and in any style.

For inspiration I played several music videos from YouTube illustrating a wide variety of musics that use drones or pedals.

In Stevie Wonder’s “Too High” both the opening tonic vamp and the dominant pedal are short drones.

Influenced by Ravi Shankar and Indian ragas, the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” lays down a complicated drone thoughout.

The Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen has a bass line ostinato that changes chords throughout, but the bass line refuses go anywhere.

“Scotland the Brave” is a perfect example of a memorable melody over a drone. But, to paraphrase Stravinsky, the monster never breathes.

Some of you may remember Moondog. I saw him both performing in the streets of Manhattan, but he came to the UW Madison School of Music and had an all-day residency. He wrote a round called “N-O-S-I-D-A-M” which is Madison backwards. I still remember the tune if anyone needs it. I may have a copy somewhere as well. But this is an example of an invention with one note, played by several instruments.

Here, John Coltrane tells the bass player in “Giant Steps” to sustain an E flat pedal. I don’t get it but this video/transcription is maddeningly brilliant.

Here Seal whoops up the audience over his drone song “Crazy.”

These songs represent a wildly diverse range of music inspired by drones and pedals.