The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

Music and Musicians Suck

Dr. David Thorpe of Something Awful has compiled a penetrating tractate on albums, bands, genres, etc, and why they suck.  Some excerpts from a view different articles:

Pet Sounds: "[A] syrupy and overblown testament to one man’s meticulous studio habits." (After all, Jan and Dean were the real innovators.)

Bob Dylan: "[R]ock and roll’s second-greatest poet-who-can’t-sing."

U2: "I wish I could write this review like The Edge plays the guitar. I’d just tap a few words into my delay pedal and let them echo and repeat for five minutes so I could leave and read Mad Magazine on the toilet." (This is unfair. The Edge does not read Mad Magazine.)

Television: "Tom Verlaine may sing like an amateur yodeler who got punched in the throat, but at least he had the balls to self-indulgently noodle away on a guitar like nobody was listening. Wait a minute, nobody was listening."

The Sex Pistols: "I wasn’t around in 1977, so I can’t pretend to know how magical it felt when a bunch of ugly, dirty guys got on a boat and made fun of The Queen."

Grunge: "[S]pecially engineered to sound good when listened to from big green bong water-stained couches with ripped upholstery."

Punk: "Punk, of course, is much more than a style of music. This is beneficial, considering how little punk has to offer as music."

Post-Punk: "[H]olds some sort of imaginary relevance to a certain type of guy in cuffed jeans." (And here I thought post-punk was music for anarchic mailmen.)

American Indie Rock: "[W]hite kids with guitars playing slapdash lo-fi pop songs about spatulas."

Hardcore fans: "They cut out the middleman [i.e., music] and headed straight for the part with ringing ears and drinking and getting laid."

Britpop: "[A]llowed English musicians to be as square and effeminate as they wanted while still doing enormous amounts of cocaine."

(Via Crooked Timber.)

"Classical Training" as Pop P.R.

Tony Green attacks "pop music's longest-running semantic fudge jobs: 'classical training,'" in Slate.

Green's take is basically right: the slogan is far too often used to lend a gloss of depth to otherwise depthless pop musicians. ("Oh--she studied classical music!")

But Green also says this:

Since technique is usually defined by musical idiom—there's a classical way and a rock way of playing the guitar, for example—you'd have to be a hard-core monoculturalist to assume that European classical pedagogy is the overarching standard for all types of musical skills.

Fair enough, but let's not get too relativistic--we're talking about basic craft skills here, which can be assessed a bit more objectively than artistic quality.

For instance, I enjoy bluegrass fiddle as much as the next guy, and some of it is technically fierce. But there are no tunes in the bluegrass repertoire that require anything approaching the sort of total mastery (of the entire bow and the entire fingerboard) demanded by, say, Paganini's Caprices. If you wanted the flexibility of playing both classical and bluegrass violin, classical training would get you far closer to that flexibility than bluegrass.

Also, Green's remarks about the guitar are wrong. It isn't the idiom that primarily defines the technique--it's the instrument construction. A classical guitar and a Strat are entirely different animals (classical guitars use nylon strings, have wide, flat necks, and are designed to be played sitting down; electric guitars are heavier, used steel strings, narrower necks with a more curved fingerboard, and are designed to be played standing up, hanging from a strap). Classical and rock guitarists also use different right hand "equipment" (classical players use their fingers and fingernails, whereas rock players usually use a pick). Much as in the case of the piano and accordion, despite the similarities in how some of the playing mechanism is organized, you're really talking about different instruments, each calling for a different technique.

More Lost Music Found

This time it's an opera by Vivaldi. (NY Times article.)

Interestingly, its existence had been known of because an extant copy of the libretto.

Was Atonality Beethoven's Fault?

Dylan Evans argues in the Guardian that Beethoven "did more harm than good to classical music." In particular:

From the speculations of Pythagoras about the "music of the spheres" in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven's fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven's original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.

Now, I'd agree if the claim here were merely that some of Beethoven's most lauded work (I'm thinking of the Fifth and the Ninth) is overrated. But there's no accounting for taste, so what makes Evans article worth reading (if anything does) is his historical argument--an argument that he gets pretty spectacularly wrong.

It's hard to tease out all the cultural causes that led to the atonal turn in the 20th Century. But Schoenberg's stuff was anything but "inward directed and narcissistic." In fact, a strong argument can be made that Schoenberg took the very Pythagorean impulse that Evans praises to its logical extreme. Schoenberg was interested in achieving a sort of ontologically independent formal ideal, in which music could be construed as an internally coherent system independent of the contingent structure of the world (or of other formal systems like mathematics or logic). So the mathematics-like formal coherence of a piece was of more artistic and intellectual interest to Schoenberg than the contingent dictates of the human ear or heart. (In this perhaps Schoenberg adopted Mark Twain's dictum about Wagner's music being "better than it sounds.")

Whatever the aesthetic merits of Schoenberg's program, then, it was anything but an extension of Beethoven's nascent romanticism.

(Via Butterflies and Wheels.)

Bach Aria Discovered

NPR has a story on the discovery of a previously  unknown Bach aria. There is an audio clip featuring part of a performance of the piece.

The manuscript was almost been lost in the fire late last year at the Anna Amalia Libary.

(Via Candi.)

Live or Memorex?

Sousa said that recording "would erode the finer instincts of the ear." Others today might counter that  live performances are but "messy reënactments of pristine studio creations." Alex Ross discusses the virtues and vices of recording--its effects on listeners, on performers and on music itself--here, in the New Yorker.

I'll add one observation. Since the 1930s or so, jazz musicians have cut their teeth in part by transcribing  recorded solos. Since you can't transcribe solos at a live concert, the language of modern jazz would never have developed if not for the phonograph.

No, They're Just Decomposing

Film Composer John Williams, in an interview yesterday for NBC's Today, on scoring Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List:

I said to Steven, and I meant it, I said, "Steven, you need a better composer than I am for this film."

And he said to me, "I know. But they're all dead."

Grand to be Alive

Eight Grammy awards went to the late, great Ray Charles last night.

But a Grammy doesn't do you a bit of good if you're dead. On the other hand, it can build and sustain a career for someone who is alive. Eight living artists were potentially denied that opportunity last night.

Call me biased (as of this writing, I am still alive), but only the living should be eligible for a Grammy.

Interpretation

"Once the composer has finished the piece, it's mine!'"
--Jaqueline Du Pré

The compose composes, the artist disposes.

The Pi Sonata

You can set pi to music here. Each integer is associated with a musical note and then the pi sequence is played.

I tried to memorize information back in university days using a related method, but I think when you hear the result as applied to pi you'll realize why I abandoned it. The tune is  more forgettable than anything by Andrew Lloyd Weber.

(Note: Of course, pi doesn't really exhibit a sonata form. On the other hand, that conjecture can't really be proved.)