Category: Music

I just used the new Party Mix feature of iTunes 4.5 for the first time. The first song was “Son of Sam” by Elliott Smith, followed by…“Sister Ray.”

Man, that’s some kind of party.

iTunes 4.5 is out, with support for lossless imports (via Quicktime 6.5.1), WMA import on Windows, music videos…and shared playlists. You can click any playlist in iTunes and publish it to the iTunes Music Store. You can also click any song title, album title, or artist and jump to the appropriate content in the iTMS.

I don’t have any good playlists on my work computer (mostly random shuffle things) but I have a ton at home, and will publish them in the store tonight. I’m curious to see how the feature (which appears to be called iMix) will handle tracks that aren’t for sale; probably it will just omit them.

Update: Behold, my first iMix playlist, a version of this mix. The difference is all the songs I listed as “missing” (i.e. not available in the iTMS). Vote for it, won’t you? I also noted looking at some other mixes that user submitted mix names get passed through the same profanity filter that song titles do, but that it appears to be possible to elude the filter by choosing your slang appropriately.

Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) in the New York Times: “When the Edge Moved to the Middle.” A practitioner’s view of the importance of Nirvana in shaping the music industry of the 90s, and Kurt Cobain’s refusal to be swept up in that massive change.

I didn’t write a “ten years after” post about Kurt’s suicide for precisely that reason. Kurt’s suicide, even then, was no surprise to anyone who could see the pain that Kurt’s fame caused him. I had no reason to want to remember the pain I felt that Saturday morning in April when I woke up at a college friend’s parents’ house in northern Virginia and saw the headlines. (Besides, Tony Pierce has, as always, said a lot of things that I wanted to say and some I didn’t think to say, far more eloquently than I would have.)

But Thurston’s point is well worth thinking about. I don’t know how much of the coarsening and cheapening of alternative rock you can pin on Nirvana’s influence—however misunderstood and misheard—but surely it is no coincidence that the rush to find angry young men with guitars started at this time. I’ve been looking over the past few days for music from some late-80s alternative artists. It’s stuff that’s a little hard to find on the online sources because the bands are gone, largely unlistened.

But how could the gentler REM-influenced sounds of the Connells, the Brandos, or Dreams So Real, or the more experimental and nuanced sounds of Art of Noise, PiL, Love and Rockets, or even the Pixies survive against the one two punch of the incredible bass and guitar work and angry lyrics of “Come As You Are”? But the kids only listened to the surface. I’m pretty sure that only a few heard the lyrics of “In Bloom”—He’s the one/he likes all our pretty songs/and he likes to sing along/and he loves to shoot his gun/but he don’t know what it means—and recognized themselves in Kurt’s acid portrait of his fair-weather fans. And what the music industry did was worse yet.

When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group, an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste for bullyboy music – always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal. Most people who adapt punk as a lifestyle represent these ideals, but with one of the finest rock voices ever heard, Kurt got to represent them to an attentive world. Whatever contact he made was really his most valued success.

Darwin is sometimes ugly, and it isn’t Kurt’s fault that his band was leading that sea change. Just once, though, it would be nice if the sea change allowed all the rich and strange things to thrive, rather than the plain and ugly ones.

Tom Harpel at Tandoku points to the new Wilco album, A Ghost is Born, available via QuickTime 6 stream at WilcoWorld. Quoth Tom: “Jim O’Rourke is a genius, Jeff Tweedy, a god.”

Alas, a god in rehab. Rolling Stone says that he checked into a clinic to kick his addiction to prescription painkillers, which he was taking to treat migraines. The album release will be delayed two weeks but the group is still planning to tour. Good luck, Jeff.

And in final Tweedy note, I found a free promotional EP at a local store the other day in honor of the expanded reissues of all the Uncle Tupelo back catalog. And when I say “EP,” I mean 45. That’s right, vinyl. Now I just have to see if I can find that funny little ring adapter to fit the really big hole in the middle of the record…

Tonight at University Presbyterian Church my choir and I sing the Brahms Requiem. Should be a really good show.

The dress rehearsal last night went quite well, I thought, though our director clearly has a preference for minimizing vocal strain rather than polishing every last rough edge during dress rehearsal. Considering the directors I’ve had who have erred way too far in the other direction, I rather appreciated his restraint.

Language Log (my new favorite RSS feed) points to a Physics Today article that explains why you can never understand the words an operatic soprano sings—even if she is singing in your language. The story discusses a study conducted at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, which experimentally shows through acoustics that different vowel sounds are almost impossible to differentiate.

The issue appears to be resonance frequencies. The one that helps distinguish vowel sounds is the first resonance frequency, R₁. And for really high range singing, a soprano’s fundamental frequency (f₀) is actually above the first resonance frequency. Vocal practice (such as forward placement through opening the mouth wide and smiling) helps raise the resonance frequency, but not enough. Fabulous experimental data rounds out the picture.

This also confirms customary directorial practice which tells sopranos just to sing “aah” on particularly high passages, and compositional practice which avoids difficult rounded vowels on high notes (unless, of course, the composer was Beethoven).

By contrast, of course, a tenor’s high range is well below his first resonant frequency pretty much all the way. Yet another reason that tenors are in demand: you can actually understand us.

I felt a compulsion this morning to pull out the Shaw recording of Hindemith’s choral masterpiece, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d: A Requiem for Those We Love. It occurs to me that I’ve never told my story about the piece, and how I came to meet Robert Shaw.

First a word about Lilacs. The facts: Hindemith wrote it in 1946, on a commission from a young Robert Shaw, in memory of Franklin Roosevelt who had died the previous April. Roosevelt’s death had come 80 years—very nearly to the day—after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Perhaps for that reason, Hindemith chose Walt Whitman’s great poem of mourning for Lincoln as his text.

Hindemith’s work is simultaneously a monumental and an intimate piece, forbidding and vulnerable, as it alternates choral passages of (frankly) excruciating difficulty and dissonance with melodic arias from baritone and mezzo, and choral fugues of intense rhythmic power, all supported by an orchestra heavy on woodwinds. It’s a bitch to prepare. When I sang it in 1995, we sweated the choral parts—which comprise a relatively small portion of the work—for two months, knowing what was coming.

And he came. Robert Shaw, the greatest choral conductor of the 20th century, commissioner of this masterwork, instructor of choral conductors, dropper of pearls of wisdom both sacred and profane. I remember so little of what he said during those hot rehearsals, only that he looked exhausted and that I felt both his exhaustion and his invigoration as we sang the piece.

I return to the piece these days as a comfort that grief and sorrow are not only mine, and as a reminder of my first encounter with a great musician and leader.

Bonus links: there are a few online remembrances of Shaw that include sprinklings of his wisdom, such as the following:

• “I get a horrible picture, from the way you sing, of little bitty eighth notes running like hell all over the place to keep from being stepped on. Millions of ’em! Meek, squeaky little things. No self-respect. Standing in corners, hiding behind doors, ducking into subway stations, peering out from under rugs. Refugees. Dammit, you’re all a bunch of Whole-Note Nazis.” (to the Collegiate Chorale, 1946, as cited in the New York Times)
• “It is the nature of music, unlike painting and most of literature, that its final creation is not its original creation. Music needs to be sounded, to be sung. In this sense, the composer literally must leave his work to be finished by others… . Can you imagine Michelangelo asking us to come in and help him finish the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Us and our dirty little daubers?.” (quoted in Religion Online)
• “Our tenors are adolescent. Our altos have not passed puberty. Our sopranos trip their dainty ballet of coloratura decorum, and our basses woof their wittle gway woofs all the way home .. Get your backs and bellies into it! You can’t sing Beethoven from the neck up—you’ll bleed! Beethoven is not precious. He’s prodigal as hell. He tramples all over nicety. He’s ugly, heroic; he roars, he lusts after beauty, he rages after nobility. Be ye not temperate!” (on performing Beethoven’s Ninth, as quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Who says local radio is dead? KEXP is now in Arbitron’s Internet broadcast ratings list, ranking in a solid #7 in the list of the top internet broadcasters and sales networks (and the top ranked individual station on the list). Among Internet radio stations, the station ranks #12 (some of the top six properties in the other list operate multiple channels with more listeners than KEXP). Interesting too that the other local public station, the jazz channel KPLU, is close behind KEXP on the list.

Which makes one wonder. I am a firm believer that the content on both stations, particularly KEXP, is superior to just about anything else out there. That said, does the ascendancy of both stations have more to do with geography? Surely the demand from their local listenership, who would likely be early adopters with a strong interest in technology, would be a factor in getting both stations on line to begin with. So why aren’t there any radio stations from Silicon Valley on the list? Or is it just that this is the only ornery corner of the country left where the “local station” isn’t run by a drone at Clear Channel?

I got my score for Spem in Alium in the mail yesterday. Lisa called me at work and said, “You have a very large box.” She wasn’t kidding. I didn’t measure the cardboard flat the score came in, but the score itself is 14 inches by 20 inches. Open, it’s 38 inches by 20 inches.

And 40 staves tall. And 120 measures long.

And it hits me. Where the hell am I going to find the time to multitrack 40 vocal parts? At about 70 bpm, four beats to the measure for 120 measures is about 7 minutes per part. That’s 280 minutes, or more than four hours of recording. And how am I going to find that much quiet time in this house?

Man. This is going to be a harder project than I thought.

The score thing really bugs me, though. The only commercially available vocal part is the full score. There are part books available (one book has Choirs I – IV, the other Choirs V – VIII) but only for rent, not to buy.

As promised, a few more words about yesterday’s concert. But first a word about setlists. Elvis has such a deep back catalogue that anyone who claims to know every song he’s done is either lying or has very deep pockets. Or at least that’s my story. So I apologize when I will inevitably omit some songs from my retelling of the show.

Elvis opened the show with “45,” my favorite from his second to most recent album, When I Was Cruel. “Green Shirt” was next, then two other relatively uptempo songs. But most of the session was dominated by ballads, mostly drawn from North.

Mostly, but not all; Elvis’s performance of “This House is Empty Now” from his collaboration with Burt Bacharach brought the house down. Stripping away the layers of cheese-pop instrumentation that bloated the original recording, this version was just acoustic guitar, the magic touch of Steve Nieve on piano, and voice. And what a voice. Elvis stepped out from behind the mic after effortlessly nailing the high note in the bridge and sang the rest of the song unamplified. The performance brought the audience to their feet—remember, this was only about half a dozen songs into his set.

Incidentally, Elvis repeated the stepping away from the microphone trick a few more times during the set, which gave me a chance to notice that his unamplified voice was more in tune than his amplified voice. Maybe they screwed up something in the monitors. The acoustic in Benaroya was something to behold, by the way. Partway through the encore (which lasted 90 minutes!) he sang “You Left Me in the Dark,” and you could hear a pin drop. To be precise, you could hear the ventilation system of the hall, and the collective intake of breath as he sang the last phrase.

About 45 minutes into the first set, a latecomer took her front row seat, and Elvis, who had been vamping a bit on the guitar, leaned over and said, “The story so far…” After the laughter died down, he said, “…we’ve played a lot of sad songs.” But it wasn’t all cabaret. Elvis brought down the house with a broadly played version of “God’s Comic,” which he interrupted after the second verse with a moment of acidly political stand-up. (Sample: “God is everywhere, like CNN. And CNN was at our hotel in Florida because Dick Cheney was there. I saw him headed for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and thought, ‘Oh no. What if he eats too much, has a heart attack and dies? Then there’ll be nobody running the country!’ (a beat) And they’ll have to prise his cold, dead hand out of the arse of that Texan puppet of his.”) And his deconstructed version of “Watching the Detectives,” which veered from cabaret to reggae to feedback-drenched Hendrix, was brilliant, as was the rockabilly shuffle version of “Pump It Up.”

Again: for my money, one of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever attended. Get tickets and go. Now. You’ll thank me later.

Just got back from the Elvis Costello show. Two and a half hour concert—no intermission—that sounded at times like a mix tape; except all but a few covers were from Elvis’s own repertoire. One of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever seen.

No time to write down everything now, but hopefully I’ll be able to point to a set list and write some more tomorrow.

And by that I don’t mean Presley vs. Costello. What I’m specifically wondering is: which version of Elvis Costello will I see at Benaroya Hall tonight? Will it be the downbeat romantic balladeer of his most recent release, North; the angry young man of 1978’s “Radio, Radio”; or something in between? The review of the LA show suggests it will be a blend—EC performed there with a mic, an acoustic guitar, and Steve Nieve on piano, but heckled back unmercifully when an overzealous fan shouted a request from the balcony.

I’m guessing Benaroya tonight will be more of the same, which is mostly fine. Some of Elvis’s ballad performances are among his best songs on record, even some of his covers like the stunning version of Burt Bacharach’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” that he recorded on his last big outing with Steve Nieve. Which, I am amazed to note, is available for purchase from selected Amazon marketplace sellers starting at $150. I did’t realize this box set was so rare. I’ll have to be more careful with it.

What is it about vinyl? Really? (Yes, I’m talking about records, not clothing…) I found a good used music store in the U-District tonight and walked out with a handful of records—all stuff I had on CD, all early and mid 80s records: the Police’s Synchronicity and Ghost in the Machine, Sting’s first solo album, U2’s The Unforgettable Fire.

Common thread? The CDs, made early in the technology, sound … a bit thin to my ears now. I want to hear what the vinyl, made at the most mature stage of that technology, sounds like.

And Simon and Garfunkel’s The Graduate soundtrack? That’s just for kicks.

• I didn’t point to this year’s Pazz’n’Jop awards when they were published, but thought I should at least give a shout out to fellow ’Hoo Joe Gross, whose ballot is not disharmonious with my Best Of 2003 list.
• Wanna get a Cease and Desist letter from EMI? Publishing a link to the Grey Album is probably a good way to do it. (Ooops.) But so is participating in Grey Tuesday, apparently.
• Just in case you hadn’t figured it out on your own, buying Pepsi just to get a free song at the iTunes Music Store isn’t such a hot idea. I did just that this weekend, testing the tip about making sure you get a winning cap (it works) and my tolerance for drinking that sweet swill (non-existent). And at the end, what did I have? Two free songs (value: $1.98) and two bottles of Pepsi to pour down the drain (paid: $2.30). And just what does one do with only two songs from the iTMS? My conclusion: buy tracks from one of the many partial albums that are only available for purchase by song, since the album isn’t available for purchase as a package anyway.

Got my hair cut yesterday, and my ego flattened. My stylist and the clerk behind the counter got into a discussion about ideal working music. “I like the place next door,” said the clerk; “they have one of those satellite systems, you can tune in 80s music or whatever.”

My stylist said, “Nah, I hate 80s music. Too slow. I like something I can dance to.”

“But there was dance music in the 80s,” I argued. “New Order? Depeche Mode?”

“Never heard of them,“ she said. “I was born in 1982. I was what, six?”

“Thanks,” I said. “Just trim away that new gray hair you just gave me, would you?”