Category: Music

Random 5: Pre-RSA edition

I’ll be traveling next week to the big security industry trade show, but hope still to manage some blogging. It should be … interesting. There’s some very cool stuff coming up from us, and always a few new things to see from competitors and hear about from the market. But in the meantime, there’s Random 5!

  1. Reckoner (Piano/Strings Stem) – Radiohead (Reckoner (Instrument Stems) – EP). Radiohead, experimenting with distribution and business models around the time of the In Rainbows album, released five separate instrument stem tracks for their song Reckoner. The tracks conserve whitespace and so are not for casual listening—this track opens with 1:22 of silence—but repay close inspection. With this stem you can hear how the piano provides a chord progression which is then picked up by the strings, for a net effect that wouldn’t be out of place in a soundtrack.
  2. Anecdotes – Joanna Newsom (Divers). I like this track just fine, but I preferred Joanna Newsom before her edges were sanded off.
  3. Toyland – Anita Ellis (Vintage Christmas). Man, remember when pop songs had serious orchestration with artistic interest and value? Yeah, me either.
  4. For What It’s Worth – Talk Talk (The Very Best Of). This anthology isn’t the “very best of” Talk Talk—that’s their album Laughing Stock—but has some otherwise interesting tracks, such as this non-album track. Built with the same instrumental essentials as any mid-80s track (the bass treatment could be heard on lots of 80s pop), the minimal slow burn of the two-chord vamp on which the song is built makes it stronger—and stranger—than many of its contemporaries. And then there’s…
  5. The Sea Incertain – Gastr Del Sol (Upgrade & Afterlife). David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke doing what they do best: a piano exploring a set of changes on a simple melody is gradually pushed to the background by electronic whistling sounds, a straining clarinet, and feedback. Essential listening.

The first Glee Club reunion

Virginia Glee Club presidents at the 140th anniversary alumni sing (2011) — photo courtesy Jeff Slutzky
Virginia Glee Club presidents at the 140th anniversary alumni sing (2011) — photo courtesy Jeff Slutzky

We’re in the run-up to the Virginia Glee Club 145th Anniversary Reunion, and that has me thinking about the history of Glee Club reunions.

The earliest record of Glee Club involvement in a reunion activity predates both the Glee Club as a well-established organization and formal reunions at the University of Virginia. In an article published in the Virginia University Magazine in October 1882 describing the final exercises of the previous June, this description occurs:

In the afternoon came the Alumni dinner whereat many of the young initiates forgot themselves and waxed uproarious–especially to be noticed was a sober minded one who insisted on drinking to the health of the “Glee Club” after every song in which performances his stentorian lungs did effective service.

So before there were Glee Club reunions, there were alumni at University functions who were involved with the Glee Club.

The next reunion was likely the 50th Anniversary concert in 1936. I say “likely” because we don’t have a record of an actual reunion event, but we do have evidence that there was going to be, thanks to the listing of the Glee Club’s Alumni Advisory Board in the 1935 Annual Concert program.

After that the record is murky. The next one for which we have a record is the 125th Anniversary in 1996 (in between these two we changed the founding date from 1886 to 1871 based on better evidence). This established the format for future reunions: a Glee Club performance, an alumni sing, a banquet.

Regular five year reunions began in 2006 with the establishment of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association and the 135th anniversary. Reunions have followed at five year intervals since then. If you haven’t done so, it’s fun to check out the photos, video, and audio from the 140th.

New music Tuesday: Marissa Nadler, Herbie Hancock compilation

I will forever be wired to seek out new music on Tuesdays, the recent shift to Friday releases be damned. Today I came across a few new goodies:

“In the evening, by the moonlight”

1938-virginiaspectator-1
Cover to the April 1938 issue of the Virginia Spectator

I had a lucky eBay find last week: a copy of the April 1938 issue of the Virginia Spectator, the successor to the University of Virginia Magazine and the original University of Virginia literary mag. These magazines aren’t especially valuable, though they only turn up infrequently. What made this one stand out was an article by a Virginia Glee Club member, Daniel Jenkins, about the state of song at the University.

Jenkins is an alum I’ve known about for some time. When I was an undergrad, he sent us a letter about his experience as a Glee Club member in the 1930s. I subsequently discovered that he had been a member of the Tin Can Quartet (which I wrote about a while ago) He is, I believe, still with us and still supporting the Glee Club’s endeavors, though I don’t know much about his whereabouts.

This article provides one of the earliest existing descriptions of Glee Club alumni singing:

On Saturday nights of Finals, however, a minor miracle took place. Gathered in and around a certain room on East Lawn were a goodly number of dark conspirators; six members of the class of 1912 had slipped away from their comrades, bearing with them a huge Mason jar containing a mint julep, and were on their way to join the group lurking in the shadows of East Lawn. Three members of the Tin Can Quartet, a dozen members of the Glee Club, past and present, and an odd assortment of dates waited expectantly as the six alumni approached. And then, a short five minutes later—ah, shades of the mighty Caruso!—it had been a long year—the soft, harmonious tones of “Sweet Adeline” once again rolled up and down the Lawn. The same moon shimmered through the trees and the same purple shadows mingled with the ghostly figures that stood grouped beneath a stately oak. A prominent and dignified New York attorney gazed up at the stars and hit notes of which he had never before believed himself capable. A notorious “big business man” drowned the sorrows of a troubled world in his Mason jar and gazed down at the green sod beneath his feet, rumbling a potent bass that seemed to mingle with the very roots of the mighty oak which towered above him.

For three hours the singing continued. They sang every song that ever graced a barbershop of old. Juleps were plentiful and so were first tenors—happy coincidence. But finally, at four o’clock in the morning, and when voices were so hoarse that anything above a whisper was an effort, the small crowd began to break up. The six alumni, their eyes tired but shining, stumbled wearily across the Lawn, speaking in reverent tones of the song-fests that used to be so common and now are so rare. The others, lingering for a brief moment over the dregs, said good-night and went their separate ways. The Lawn was once again cloaked in silence.

I was unsurprised, but a little disappointed, to find that even this memory carried the taint of the South’s original sin, though, with the inclusion of the minstrel show song “In the Evening, By the Moonlight.” Again, a reminder that the Glee Club was like every Southern cultural institution and carried the seeds of slavery’s past with it into the twentieth century.

But the article gives me hope, too, that the power of song can still bridge generations and tap deeper reserves of humanity in the singer and the listener. It’s a timely reminder, given the Glee Club’s upcoming 145th Reunion celebration in April. I hope the juleps are plentiful then too.

Random 5: family travel edition

Flying back today, so trying to put the Random 5 together using the WordPress app on my phone. The miracles of modern technology!

  1. “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her” – Paul Desmond (Bridge Over Troubled Water). A surprising album of all jazz covers of Simon and Garfunkel songs by Dave Brubeck’s longtime saxophonist. The results are a little uneven—no one needed that jazz cover of “El Condor Pasa”—but this track is lovely, with some fat Rhodes piano by Herbie Hancock (!) and a full orchestration. 
  2. “Weightless” – Brian Eno (Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks). One of my favorite tracks from this album, framing Eno’s atmospheric synths and textures with Daniel Lanois’s subtle slide guitar. 
  3. “El Niño: Pues Mi Dios Ha Nacido a Penar” – Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin, Kent Nagano (John Adams: El Niño). I will forever be sorry that I couldn’t sing this with the BSO a few years ago. This movement features a sublime solo from the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and some typically unsettled choral writing from Adams.
  4. “Two Sacred Songs Opus 30: I. Zlożę Na Pańskim Stole” – Ronan Collett, Stephen De Pledge & Chamber Domaine (Górecki: Life Journey). A baritone lied in Polish, in glacial time, accompanied by the barest outlines of a piano accompaniment. I considered using this for an audition piece once, and still might. I’d like a better translation before I do though, to better sell whatever takes the baritone into the higher register for two phrases near the end. 
  5. “My Secret Weapon” – Mark Mothersbaugh (The Lego Movie: Original Soundtrack). Great incidental music for a pivotal moment in the film, works surprisingly well against the Górecki and the Eno.

Friday Random 5: North of the Sunset

It’s that time again! Give your music player a shuffle and play along!

  1. A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission – Simon & Garfunkel (The Columbia Studio Recordings 1964–1970). Particularly timely given the exchange between Hillary and Bernie Sanders regarding Henry Kissinger in the Democratic primary debate last night. Remember back when we worried more about McNamara than Kissinger? Yeah, me neither. “The man ain’t got no culture.”
  2. North of the Sunset – Thelonious Monk (Solo Monk). Killer track featuring only Monk doing his thing and sounding for all the world like the left handed son of Jelly Roll Morton.
  3. Strange Fruit (live) – Jeff Buckley (Live at Sin-é (Legacy Edition)). It’s hazardous for a white male artist to cover this signature Billie Holiday song, with its resonances of Southern lynching and Jim Crow. That Jeff Buckley’s effort, to which he brings a Chicago-blues inflected guitar and an improvisational vocal, fails is unsurprising, but he gets points for doing something a little different with the song in trying to bring out the pain from its dark corners.
  4. Whatcha Gonna Do? – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964). A “Times They Are A-Changin'” era composition that’s a little tighter in scope and execution than that masterpiece. Reminiscent of certain hymns and uncertain blues.
  5. I Dig Love – George Harrison (All Things Must Pass). One of the more surprising and less spiritual songs on George’s debut, with an opening that sounds like it could have come from one of John’s albums from five years later. Killer rhythm section and what I suppose is Billy Preston (since there were three keyboard players on the track) laying down some fat grooves. Tasty.

The brain’s music center

Boston Globe: MIT researchers find new ways into brain’s “music room.” The research by MIT’s Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy Kanwisher, and Josh McDermott sounds straightforward: apply clustering to patterns of nerve activation to find the cells that respond to music. Turns out it’s a radical new approach that bridges magnetic resonance imaging and “machine learning,” or categories of math on sets that identify groups that are similar to each other.

For me the finding that’s most interesting is that the neural pathways for music are completely distinct from the ones for speech, though there’s a little activation overlap when listening to music with words. In fact, the research identified completely distinct neural pathways for music, speech, frequency, pitch, and “spectrotemporal modulation.”

I’d love to see the follow-on that evaluates these activation pathways in trained musicians vs. lay listeners.

Note: A more complete version of the article appeared in the New York Times.

Friday Random 5: Snowed in edition

One of those annoying winter storms today—not a real blizzard, just messy enough to cancel the kids’ school. So here I am working at home and watching the woods fill up with snow. Time for a Random 5!

  1. Cowboy Boots – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (The Heist). Let’s not judge, okay? I grew to appreciate Macklemore during his many live in-studios on KEXP, and there’s something homey about hearing him rap about the passage of time—though the chorus about urban cowboys on Capitol Hill is a little annoying.
  2. Sarah Anne – Daniel Bachman (Jesus I’m a Sinner). It’s not fair, the talent of this kid, who comes across as the second coming of John Fahey. This is a strong track from what’s ultimately a journeyman album compared to his epic River, but still mesmerizing.
  3. Last Time – Black Dub (Black Dub). A disappointing track that buries the old gospel song in layers of drums and reverb, along with the stylistically unsuited (if strong) voice of Chris Whitley’s daughter Trixie. I expected better from Daniel Lanois.
  4. Superhero – Jane’s Addiction (Strays). Okay, Shuffle, I guess the theme of today’s Random 5 is “regret.” As in, regret that I picked up this reunion disk 13 years ago. At least the playing is as tight as Perry’s lyrics are lame (“I’m not your average guy”? Really?).
  5. Like a Virgin – Madonna (Celebration). This is where I’m supposed to dump on Madonna like I did when I was 12 years old, right? Can’t do it. Incredible track, and her still-hiccuppy vocals sell the song in a way that her more mature voice couldn’t have done years later. I’m reminded of the joke in Sting’s “Nothing Like the Sun” tour program, where they did capsule bios of each band member—including Branford Marsalis, Minu Cinelu, and the late great Kenny Kirkland—and asked them about their musical guilty pleasure. “Madonna’s backing band” came up about four times.

“Well, God is in his heaven, and we all want what’s his…”

Somehow in the past fifteen years I’ve been blogging (!), I missed writing about “Blind Willie McTell.” Ever. This despite the fact that the song made the playlist of one of the first mixtapes I ever made back in 1991. And I don’t know that I ever connected the dots on the song’s meaning, in all that time, beyond the vague sense of prophetic dread conveyed by the slowly more intense vocal and piano performance.

It’s twenty-five years since I put that mix tape together, and I’ve spent the last few years feeling as though “this land is condemned.” If the response to the Obama presidency has taught me anything, it’s that slavery was the original sin of this land, and that its repercussions still play out today. So on the heels of writing about the Underground Railroad in my town, about misattribution of black collegiate spirituals by white a cappella performers, about the bureaucracy of slavery, of carefree use of the symbols of the Confederacy a hundred (or 150) years after the end of the Civil War, and of minstrelsy, listening closely to the song again bears dividends.

And I am left feeling that amid revival tents, amid the attempts to dress up the past betrayed by cheap hooch, and despite the otherwise redemptive charge of the blues, we are left with this: an arrow in the doorpost, the ghosts of slavery ships, and the promise of our life in these United States undercut by power, greed, and the inevitable corruption and decay of our descendants.

Friday Random 5: far afield edition

Returning for another edition of the newly resurrected Friday Random 5, here’s what’s on my personal music channel this morning:

  1. Disorder – Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures). Great start to an undercaffeinated Friday morning. There’s something about the starkness of this early Joy Division song: the extremely dry studio production, the guitar all fifths and fourths, the great Peter Hook bass line moving frenetically around the guitar in sixths, and the way the song completely comes apart with Ian Curtis’s frantic “I got the spirit.” I could listen to this song all day. And have.
  2. Grandma Brackbill Dec. 1978 w/Ralph Homsher (track 4). This is an odd one, but a cool one. It’s an interview with my great-grandmother Esta Leaman Brackbill when she was 91 years old, conducted by my great-uncle Ralph, that our family recently digitized. Not a lot of revelations, but a fun retelling of the story of the man who got drunk and tried to burn down Uncle Frank Leaman’s barn and was caught on the porch of my great-grandmother’s house while she and the other children were inside and their parents were off somewhere. Good stuff.
  3. I Will Be There – Van Morrison (Saint Dominic’s Preview). I went deep down the rabbit hole on Van Morrison a few years ago (ten? geez) on discovering Astral Weeks, and picked up this album and a few others. Of course, nothing else is like Astral Weeks, but Van doing traditional blues is fantastic, even with the tossed off line “Gonna grab my suitcase, and my toothbrush, and my overcoat, and my underwear”!
  4. Pieces of Sky – Beth Orton (Comfort of Strangers). Beth Orton’s Central Reservation was on constant repeat for me for about a year, and the followup Daybreaker accompanied more than a few road trips, but her subsequent albums haven’t worked as well for me. This song might be an example of why: the production (courtesy Jim O’Rourke) has just the right amount of emotional restraint but she disappears into it, and the song feels unfinished—it ends too soon.
  5. Messe basse (Fauré): Sanctus – Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, George Guest conductor (Fauré: Requiem, Cantique de Jean Racine; Duruflé: Requiem, Quatre Motets). A brief movement for choir and organ from a lesser known Fauré work. He jointly composed a full mass setting with his pupil André Messager providing the Kyrie and the O Salutaris; the Fauré movements (Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) were subsequently published stand-alone as the Messe basse. It’s a brief but effective setting of the Sanctus for treble and alto voices with organ; I want to go back and listen to the rest.

Winter Song

Speaking of eight years in, I missed a day of posting yesterday due to the Veracode sales kickoff, so I’m going to do a two-fer today to make up.

With the past weekend’s killer storm in DC and Charlottesville (as well as most of the rest of the mid-Atlantic), I couldn’t help but thinking about ice gnomes. One of the great fun songs of my Virginia Glee Club days was singing “The Winter Song,” an odd little tune that… well, look at the lyrics:

Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes, pass the bowl.
Ho, a song by the fire
With a skoal, with a skoal.
Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes with a skoal,

For the wolf-wind is wailing at the doorways,
And the snow drifts deep along the road,
And the ice gnomes are marching from their Norways,
And the great white cold walks abroad.

But, here by the fire, we defy frost and storm;
Ha, ha we are warm, and we have our heart’s desire.
For here, we’re good fellows, and the beechwood and the bellows;
And the cup is at the lip in the pledge of fellowship.

I had always wondered about the tune, so did a little research. Turns out “The Winter Song” is a collegiate song, but it originally comes from Dartmouth, not Virginia. The poetry collection Dartmouth Lyrics prints the poem “Hanover Winter Song” by Richard Hovey, who in 1898 convinced his college friend Frederic Field Bullard to write the music.

The tune lived on in Dartmouth fraternity singing, until that tradition died away, and in Dartmouth singing groups such as the Aires. But it took John Liepold to bring it to the University of Virginia, where it’s become a favorite of the Glee Club.

The return of the Friday Random 10 … er, 5

It’s been over five years since I did a Friday Random 10 post. When I was last blogging daily, these posts started out as a group blogging challenge, a fun way to talk music and other stuff. After a while they became mechanical and they stopped along with my other blogging. Now that I’m three full weeks into my resolution to blog every weekday, I thought it might be time to resurrect the format, but with some changes. Namely, I’m not just going to post a list of tunes, I’m also going to write a little bit about each one, and so I’m shortening it from a Random 10 to a Random 5.

Otherwise the rules are the same: turn on your music player, hit shuffle, and list the first 5 tunes that come up… no cheating. I hereby swear to blog about it even if it’s embarrassing.

So here we go:

  1. What Is Your Secret – Nada Surf (The Weight is a Gift). A favorite band ten years ago, I need to go back and revisit some of their later albums which didn’t stick as much with me. But The Weight is a Gift and its predecessor, Let Go, are in my top 100 albums list, and even a lesser song like this is still a great listen for the harmonization.
  2. Song That Made Us What We Are Today (Demo) – Red Hot Chili Peppers (Mother’s Milk). I’m not the biggest Chili Peppers fan in the world but I do love their earlier, edgier stuff, and this instrumental track is all bristly funk.
  3. Oh Carolina – Virginia Glee Club (Songs of Virginia). I’ve written about this track before and it’s still funny. What I didn’t write about is the musical form. A lot of these football songs were written for the spectators to sing at a football game and never had harmonizations, so when the Glee Club went to record this one they had to come up with a new arrangement for it. It’s a fun combination of traditional harmonization and multi-octave voicing that I hope we do as an alumni song someday.
  4. Like the 309 – Johnny Cash (American V – A Hundred Highways). In the aftermath of David Bowie’s death, it’s interesting to revisit Cash’s. Where Bowie’s was, in retrospect, a premeditated surprise managed for maximum artistic impact, Johnny Cash’s had all the inevitability of Revelations—the public awareness of his health problems, the death of June, the elegiac tone of the last few albums. In that context, his first posthumous release is both moving and comforting, with the bluesy shuffle of “Like the 309” a good representation of the tone.
  5. Above Chiangmai – Brian Eno (Ambient 2 – The Plateaux of Mirror). I went back to find the other albums in Eno’s Ambient series the other week, and was glad I did. This one is mostly composer Harold Budd on piano responding to “tones” introduced by Eno, who otherwise contributes mostly sound textures to the recording. The track “Above Chiangmai” is a soundscape in itself, sounding as though the piano is heard through the bones of the skull rather than the ears, and is hypnotic in its simple melodic improvisation. A little Satie, a little Cage, and all Eno.

Disillusionment™, the official emotion of the 40s

Peter Gabriel: Peter and Sting Tour 2016. I am not the most rabid fan, any more, of either Peter Gabriel or Sting, the first decade of the 21st century helping to temper my enthusiasm for their projects. (See my 2006 review of Sting’s “Songs from the Labyrinth” and my note in 2010 on the “Scratch” project for examples of tempered enthusiasm.) But the fifteen year old boy in me wants to see these shows, very badly.

Given where I am in my life almost thirty years after getting exposed to both artists, I think I owe it to myself, and them, to forgive them for aging, for losing the intensity and edge they had in their respective youths, and to see what they’ve found in its place. After all, God knows I’ve lost some intensity and edge too.

Ride the Chariot and Yale: a study in misattribution

I took my daughter to her first a cappella concert yesterday, to see the Yale Redhot and Blue, as well as the women’s group from our town’s high school, the Lexington High Euphoria. As expected from a group of Redhot and Blue’s reputation, their set was excellently performed and jazz heavy (“Fly Me to the Moon” and Cole Porter’s “Redhot and Blue” were solid, “Angel Eyes” was spectacular and a welcome surprise). But they closed with an “old Yale song.” Which turned out to be, essentially, the William Henry Smith arrangement of “Ride the Chariot,” which I sang in the Virginia Glee Club in the early 1990s. More precisely, the Smith arrangement was used unmodified by the group, while the soloist improvised his own line around Smith’s melody.

I asked a member of the group about the Yale attribution after the show, and he said, “It’s an arrangement that’s done a lot at Yale. Each group has their own version of it and that’s ours.” A quick Google confirms the performance practice; the Whiffenpoofs do the same thing to the arrangement, as does the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus. Even the Yale Alumni Chorus gets in on the act, though they sing the SATB arrangement as written.

The attribution is a lot more dubious. The Whiffenpoofs’ repertoire page does not credit William Henry Smith for the arrangement at all, listing it as “trad. Yale”; other groups simply say “traditional.” Given that the arrangement is not only clearly Smith’s but that it was likely in copyright at the time it was adopted by the Yale groups (it was copyrighted in 1939, and if renewed by the publisher does not pass into the public domain until 2034), the Yale groups owe Smith a credit at the very least.

There’s also a matter of appropriation. While little is known about William Henry Smith (1908–1944), we do know that he was a professor at historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, known for graduating civil rights leader James Farmer, and that he directed the Wiley College choir, touring with them in the years before his sudden death. To claim authorship of a work published and copyrighted by a prominent black musician is unfortunate if done through ignorance, unforgiveable if done deliberately.

It’s unbecoming for the Yale vocal groups, even in ignorance, to claim “trad. Yale” authorship for Smith’s arrangement of “Ride the Chariot.” The various groups should correct this historical error and give Smith the credit he’s due.

Missed opportunity

The New Yorker: David Bowie and the Return of the Music Video. Good article that stops short of what it could have done, which is to point to the role that YouTube videos for ★ and “Lazarus” played in building anticipation for Bowie’s final album.

Or, put another way, just watch these. After watching the video for the lead single, “Blackstar,” how could you not want more? And the video for “Lazarus” became, posthumously, the key piece in Bowie’s in-plain-sight revelation of his fatal illness.