This made me laugh: Merton, a guy with a piano improvises songs in realtime about the people who appear in his chatroom window on Chat Roulette. I could sit and watch this for hours except I have to go to work. Damn!
Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Chatroom improv man
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Hearing loss & children
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010Via Rebecca’s Pocket, still my favourite blog on the net, an article about hearing loss and young children from the NY Times.
It’s become fashionable to denigrate health & safety & ‘political correctness’, and to say ‘in my day, we jumped out of trees and played in the road and it never did me any harm’, but the prevalence of excessive noise in everyday life is new. My worst annoyance? Dance teachers who pump up the volume and then scream over it. Sorry if I offend anyone with that statement, but it’s true: we have to take the risk of over-exposure to noise seriously.
“Push a little button”
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010This is the nicest story I’ve come across for a long time. Ninette was a student on a course I taught on the BA (Hons) in Dance Education at the RAD a few years ago. All of a sudden, a song she recorded when she was 15 found its way onto the new licence fee adverts, and now the song’s been re-released after all these years. Unfortunately, I never recorded a song for PYE when I was a kid, so I’ll never know what it feels like to have this happen to you, but I can imagine!
There’s a facebook group “Push a little button and help get Ninette to Number 1!”
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Jan Moir and ‘orchestration’
Friday, February 19th, 2010
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised: how likely was it that Jan Moir would get her knuckles properly rapped for her nasty article on Stephen Gately? It oozed with latent homophobia, prejudice and disgust, but it was like the smell in the fridge that you can’t trace: it stinks, but you can’t find the source. And then you begin to doubt yourself: maybe it’s coming from outside, maybe you’re imagining it, maybe there’s something in your nose, not in the fridge.
That’s just what Moir seemed to imply when she suggested that all the complaints about her article were part of an ‘orchestrated campaign‘: it’s not me, it was them. It’s an odd argument to use against a few thousand people who have elected to complain about you at their own cost, when you are paid to write opinion pieces for a paper that has a circulation of over 2 million. ( I suppose there are people who actually buy the Daily Mail, but the only time I ever see it is when it is offered free to passengers at airports.)
There are strangely musical resonances in Moir’s argument. What, in fact, is so wrong with ‘orchestration’? If you rally like-minded people to act, surely that’s just democracy in practice. But then in the music world, orchestrators tend to be held in lower regard than composers, and composers who delegate orchestration to others, even lower. I suspect Moir views herself as a composer in the most vainglorious 19th century sense, not as an orchestrator. She is the Beethoven of the Daily Mail, her noble thoughts inspiring those who agree with her, transcending those who don’t: if you don’t agree with her, you simply don’t understand her.
In another (musical) sense, Moir’s dark insinuations about Gateley’s death echo ancient prejudices and homophobic narratives, the archetype of which is Tchaikovsky:
In novels, plays, films and other representations in dominant culture, the homosexual always dies, and it is significant that a fierce controversy has developed around the death of Tchaikovsky.[…] The myth of the tortured, morbid homosexual taking his own shameful life is one kind of essentialist stereotype, but the “gay-positive” image of a homosexual composer of this period experiencing no tensions is equally essentialist and unrealistic.”
Philip Brett & Elizabeth Wood ‘Lesbian & Gay Music’ in Queering the Pitch, p.377
I’m sorry that Moir wasn’t forced into a tighter corner when it came to apologising, but on the other hand, whatever quantity of disapproval and suspicion she thought she could bring to Gateley posthumously has been heaped on her many thousand times over while she is still alive, so it’s not all bad. But it’s shameful that she should have got away with apologising for the ‘ill-timed nature‘ of the article. There is no time ever, in my view, that what she said is acceptable. None of the details which she hypothesized about were of any concern to her or the public. If Gately had not just died, the Mail would not have bothered to publish it because it wouldn’t have been ‘news’.
It wasn’t ill-timed, it was plain ill. The PCC decision may have been the only one they could take, but it (and Moir’s ‘apology’) does not even scratch the surface of what was wrong. No matter, for top-down journalism like Moir’s, the writing is on the wall, I believe; or to put it another way, the tide is coming in, to borrow a nice metaphor from Anton at enemiesofreason, speaking of the twitter backlash on the Gateley article:
This was just a first skirmish. I’ve said before the tide was coming in – and got roundly slapped round the chops by a crusty old newspaper columnist, in a badly written and poorly researched piece that didn’t do him any favours, for doing so, which if anything confirmed my suspicions. I think that kind of recalcitrance indicates something beyond mere contempt for us, the great unwashed, daring to speak out for ourselves on the issues we want to talk about rather than leaving it to our beloved journalists to do it for us, important and vital though real quality journalism is. I think it indicates fear that the tide really is coming in.
From: PCC & Jan Moir: Business as usual?
The eff-word again
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Now dance it, darling.
So much for the ineffability of music: from Arthur Philips at The Believer, Dancing about architecture, a wonderful article about music and writing.
It pushes all my buttons at once, since I seem to be headed in the same direction with my dissertation: it’s all very well to say ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture’, but the more you consider it, the less attractive it seems: as Nicholas Cook says in Analysing musical multimedia “there’s nothing like the ineffable to provoke talk” (p.267). In a perversely backhanded way, the quip is itself a verbal musing on the ineffability of music: it’s all right to talk about music as long as you say it’s ineffable. It sounds hip, but it’s very 19th century.
Talking about music has its advantages, its necessities even, and Philips’ article is a very good advert for its delights.
‘Melanie has labor pains, I want twenty cellists!’
Friday, February 12th, 2010…is a priceless line from a conversation between the composer of the music for Gone with the Wind, Max Steiner and film producer David Selznick. Describing the scene where Melanie has the baby, Steiner recalls:
I had ninety men – the whole stage at United Artists was full of musicians – and Selznick comes in at 3.00 a.m. and called me over and said “What are trying to do? Ruin me?” I said, “Why?” He said, “A big scene like that and you have only twelve cellists? Melanie has labor pains, I want twenty cellists!”
They had to come back the next day with 20 cellists to re-record, because even Hollywood couldn’t muster 10 extra cellists at 3.00 am. Steiner’s point is actually that in many cases, his original idea won out, despite all the efforts and money thrown at ‘improvement’.
An interesting aside in this article is the extreme working practices: Steiner would work from 8pm til 6am the next morning at the studios, and then write during the day, after a few hours sleep. I was on the point of wondering how he kept this up, when he adds that a doctor came round every day at noon with an injection of Benzedrine to keep him going. I must talk to HR about this, I’m being short-changed.
From ‘On Gone with the Wind, Selznick and the art of “Mickey Mousing”: An interview with Max Steiner. Journal of Film and Video 56.1 / Spring 2004
Ten (not so random) books
Thursday, February 11th, 2010The idea comes from a post by Simon Savidge over at SavidgeReads Reading me like a book (or ten) - see his post for where he got it from: pick ten books at random from your shelf and tell the world what those ten books say about you. Ironically, since it was a post about reading, I misread it, and picked a clump of ten books from one of my shelves. This will hardly be random, because I treat my bookshelves like a kind of two-dimensional Rubik-cube: every now and again, I half-heartedly put books of a kind on the same shelf. When one project or another takes over, I shift them by the shelf-load and put the most relevant ones nearest to my desk. As a result, here’s ten not very random choices that nonetheless say something about me, I think (if nothing else, it says something about my cataloguing). I’ll do the proper version another day.
Ten not very random books
Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a new key: I dreaded having to read this book for my philosophy of music module, since in my experience, seeing the name ‘Langer’ in any article about dance was usually the kiss of death, both to the enjoyment of reading or dance. In fact, I ended up liking Langer a lot, and there’s much in her work that makes a lot of sense about music and dance, something that Mark Johnson picks up on in The Meaning of the Body.
Dermot Moran. Introduction to Phenomenology. If this is an introduction, God help me when it comes to the main bit. I didn’t understand a friggin’ word of this. Shame really, because I have a felt sense, as they say in phenomenology, that the ph word is something that appeals to me philosophically, but I can’t understand more than 1% of the books. A very bright man I met the other day who’s got an MA in philosophy told me the only way he’d understood it was by reading Sophie’s World.
The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. I think I bought this years ago when it looked like I’d have to write a module I knew nothing about. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. It’s been quite useful, but the thing about modern thought, or indeed any kind of thinking, is that you can’t get a book to think for you. There’s no such thing as microwave philosophy.
Alex Moore, Teaching & Learning: Pedagogy, Curriculum and culture. I bought this as a quick read to get my head round the issues in the title, thinking it would be dull. Apart from the fact that it’s easy to understand, a great introduction to huge themes and topics, it’s got an openness and freedom about it that makes you excited about teaching and learning. The last chapter is called ‘Working with and against official policy’ – how do you deal with conflicts between your personal standards and an official curriculum, and being ’subversive’ within the constraints. Fantastic stuff.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I bought this from the Tate Modern bookshop (which I love) after I saw it referred to in Wolfram Fleischhauer’s Der gestohlene Abend. It’s one of those books that you’ve seen referred to so many times that you think you’ve read it, whereas in fact, you’ve only read a two-sentence distillation of the ideas. Why couldn’t they have given us this to read at school instead of Future Shock and Twelfth Night? Benjamin seems to explain the 21st century from his 1930s viewpoint as well as any contemporary theorist, and is much more fun to read.
Milan Holas, Hudební Pedagogika. (Music pedagogy). I don’t speak Czech, but having once been fluent in Russian and Croatian, I can kind of guess my way through books in other Slavic languages, as long as they’re on a subject that I already know something about. From my time as a student in Zagreb, I’ve always had a penchant for no-nonsense Central European text-books that might not be cutting edge fashionable scholarship, but they sure as hell are choc-full-o’facts and get the job done. What constitutes musical knowledge, teaching and learning is a lifelong obsession (I’m beginning to discover) so I like flicking through books like this to see how other people and nations frame the topic. Having said that, I bought this years ago, and I’m only flicking through it now for the second time. That says a lot about me.
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Probably one of my favourite books of all time, because it explains in design terms why my parents’ gas hob was so darn stupid, and why I could never work out which knob operated which gas ring, and why it’s so easy to push a door that should be pulled. Donald Norman takes those everyday annoyances in life, and makes you realise it’s their fault for designing it so badly. God bless him.
Paul White, Basic Digital Recording. This came as a freebee introductory reference text on the music technology module of my MA. One of the great things about doing an MA is that it gives you an excuse to spend even more time taking your hobbies seriously, and then be given credit for it. What’s not to like?
Ellen Bouchard Ryan & Howard Giles, Attitudes towards Language Variation: Social and applied contexts. Once upon a time, I started a doctorate in sociolinguistics, with the working title Lexical variation in the cooking vocabulary of Serbo-Croat. No, that’s not a joke, I really did. Back in 1982 (for that’s how long ago it was) this was one of the key texts. Language variation and socio-political aspects of language still interest me, and I smile very wryly to myself when I see it at work in everyday contexts. I often wonder if one day I’ll swap directions and do a doctorate in linguistics after all.
Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education (2nd edn). I fully expected to hate this book (if you see some of the reviews on Amazon, you’ll hate it without reading it) but in fact, when I came to write my first MA essay (on the philosophy of music education) about the spat between Reimer & David Elliott over aesthetic education and praxial music education, I ended up defending Reimer totally against my own expectations. As much as Reimer is annoying at times, I find his enemies even more so. That’s quite something to have learned from a course in educational philosophy, I reckon.
