Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
For music nerds only.
After watching yet another version of Pride and Prejudice, I'm convinced that private concerts were the early 19th century equivalent of home videos. The same mask of false delight at the dubious accomplishments of someone else's progeny has not changed for centuries...
Coming this July...
I really want to see 100-year-old Elliott Carter. $75 for a full-ride pass to the festival seems too good to be true. I may never have done Woodstock, but camping out in Western Mass in July with hoards of people who love early 20th-century music sounds heavenly.
Note: The Suite101 website is experiencing some problems, so please ignore the formatting issues that seem to be plaguing the article I linked. For example, the lead paragraph is showing up in the same font as the rest of the article. I am not trying to stutter.
After reading an NPR article on classical music in cartoons, and watching some of the clips on YouTube, I was inspired to write a short Suite 101 blog on the topic of Bugs Bunny in opera. Please follow the link (and click on lots of Google ads while you are there), but I also just wanted to share what I love the best about music criticism. You can really excited enough to make claims that you will have to follow the link to read. :)
I haven't had time to mention this yet but electronic avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died about 10 days ago. Another face disappears from the Sgt. Pepper entourage. But the glitz lives on. Stockhausen himself wasn't very glitzy, unless you are the type who thinks all old Germans are pretty hip. But we wouldn't have Miles or Bjork without him.
Since Sarah had a few errands to run and somehow I had neglected to patronize Canadian Tire for my entire sojourn in Canada, we went shopping. Canadian Tire is like Home Depot/Target. I thought about buying an iron, but they were kind of expensive. So we moved on to Value Village, the Canadian thrift store.
I noticed a bunch of 45s hung on a wall over a stack of LPs. Now often I will rummage through thrift albums and find that most are Barry Manilow or someone-else-with-very-bad-hair, but tonight was different. I found one with the RCA Victor label. I want to hang it on my wall somehow. I found a few Frank Sinatras, Beach Boys, David Bowie, and the Mamas and the Papas. I even picked up the single "Ben" from back in the day when Michael Jackson was actually cute. But the most interesting find was a Decca Extended Play 45 with "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place"/"Mammy o' Mine" on the A side and "The Darktown Strutters' Ball"/"Rag Mop" on the B side. You really don't find those any more (and for good reason). I must admit that I feel rather like someone who buys an old pair of lederhosen simply because there was a swastika stitched on the pocket...
The LPs were not bad, either. I picked up the soundtrack to the Graduate.
Yes, I may listen to indie hipster music. But I also find this stuff fascinating. Or this. Hm. Yes. This makes me a dork no matter what camp you put me in. Not only is it popular music...it's anciently out-of-date popular music, from an era when ethnic stereotypes of Irish, German, Italian, and African-Americans were considered great comedy.
I think, though, my love of history is driven by my desire to understand people, my wonder of what it's like to be inside someone else's head. Sometimes I lie awake at night and imagine what it would have been like to live in another era: How would I have thought? What would fascinate me? What issues would I care about?
EDIT: If the first two links aren't working, go to the third link and listen to the samples for 1) Hang the Mulligan Banner Up and 2) John Riley's Always Dry.
I personally want one of these, if only to achieve the satisfaction of the Ultimate Career Move: "In the career mode, you can rise from playing in park gazebos for church picnics to performing in the halftime show of the Harvard-Yale game," Hendleman said. "If you score enough points, you can unlock the ultimate level: playing in the John Philip Sousa–led Marine Band at Grover Cleveland's inauguration."
Personally, I am disappointed that the projected Steam Calliope Hero had to be shelved because of Sousaphone Hero's sluggish sales...
And....Happy White Rabbit!
O Mio Babbino Caro is my favorite opera aria (yes, yes, doesn't everyone love it). That octave leap has got to be one of the most beautiful moments in opera lyricism. Actually, any of Puccini's arias is worth a listen.
I don't think I have heard anyone top Dame Kiri te Kanawa's rendition.
Anna Netrebko is certainly more sophisticated, but her voice seems too heavy to me. I tend to be picky when it comes to opera voices that I actually enjoy. And anyway, it was Kiri who backdropped Room with a View.
***********
Also of note: Thomson on Fred Astaire is a poetical yet interesting analysis.
...is that David Byrne apparently spent his toddlerhood there.
For anyone who wants to learn the legendary Duck Walk, take notes on this special performance from the 1970s...
I'm not sure that I actually like this guy, but I found it interesting that he chose Baroque music for rapping. Vivaldi, unlike, say Chopin, has a very steady, predictable rhythm...a groove, if you will...
I want to put excerpts of sheet music on my blog.
And you haven't seen West Side Story till you've seen Cher do West Side Story. Which part does she play? All of them, of course.
I have to agree with some of Robin Wallace's theories that the growing inaccessibility of chamber music is largely due to the context, but I disagree somewhat with his reasons. I don't think that chamber music fails to inspire an audience seated in a large and impersonal hall because chamber music isn't meant for an audience. I think the reason that chamber music fails in a large concert hall these days is that we associate small ensembles with images of intimacy. Really, who can meet a stranger across a crowded room, unless of course, he/she is performing a number from an insanely popular musical. And of course, there is the name: "chamber" is another term for a room in a private house. Privacy and intimacy were assumed through the genre's development.
In early film music (which relied on many techniques from opera), the small ensemble was used to back scenes highlighting the individual or the particular, whereas large orchestras represented the transcendent, the state (oo...sounds Hegelian), or the universal.
A small ensemble sounds like it is speaking just to me (I know it isn't, but I can persuade myself that it is). Why throw the group across the alienating gulf of a stage? I will fail to connect. So much more rewarding to throw the CD in my player while I do dishes in the privacy of my own kitchen.
Musicologists are such geeks.
You might want to read the previous entry for context, however.
The fact that I find this hilarious just means...well...let's not go there.
In an age where the elderly are losing respect, somehow this video seems more appropriate than the original...
I enjoyed this, though I felt the creator had a rather broad definition of "rock and roll." And I also realized (though not for the first time) that Mick Jagger really looks like Luke's younger brother...
Feel free to add to the list. :)
1. Bill Haley and the Comets
2. Elvis Presley
3. Jerry Lee Lewis
4. Chubby Checker
5. The Supremes
6. The Beatles (Why this song? Why??? I hate this song. I also hate the way Paul looks...)
7. Rolling Stones
8. I really want to say the Who because how else are we going to get them into the history, but I'll just put a question mark here. The Kinks
9. the Monkees
10. Simon and Garfunkel
11. The Doors
12. Lynyrd Skynyrd
13. Deep Purple
14. Pink Floyd
15. No clue Queen
16. AC/DC
17. Some London punk band? The Sex Pistols??
18. The Clash
19. Again, not sure The Police
20. Village People
21. Boy George
22. Europe (and the GOB Bluth theme song....)
23. Guns N Roses
24. U2 (still looking....)
25. R. E. M.
26. Nirvana
27. Not sure.... Lenny Kravitz
28. Green Day
29. Oasis
30. Not sure...sounds sooooo familiar.... Verve Pipe
31. Supergrass
32. Presidents of the United States of America (covering for the Buggles)
33. Weezer (hmm, love that song....)
34. Jet
And why oh why can't I live in the UK??
Part of me just busts out laughing at the sheer preposterousness of this psuedo-Austro-German: he is quite "sincerely" trying to "fix" Thelonius Monk's music. Adorno rises again!! But upon further reflection, I realize that jazz musicians do the same all the time: take a tune, play around with it, spice it up, move it around, and generally just spit it back out in a semi-recognizable guise. And I realize that the bottom line, the acceptability factor, the crux of the matter is simply an issue of race. (PS See comment thread for further explanations of this entry....)
The handicap ramp.
Speaking of funny videos, this cover of Iron Maiden's song "The Trooper" is totally rockin' my world. I told Luke I fully expect any/all of his future children to be doing that someday. Train up a child in head-banging and when she is old she will become rich and famous. But besides just being too cute, these guys are actually pretty good. Thanks, Josiah.
I have a calendar of Beatles' album covers on my wall. I feel as if the titles accurately describe the passing months, at least for the past few months.
March: A Hard Day's Night
April: Beatles for Sale
May: Help!
I love how obsessed I am with this band...
I don't understand people who don't love Stravinksy. In any shape or form. *Cough* my metalhead friend. *cough, cough*
Here are two versions of the Infernal Dance of King Kashchei. The first is performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The second is performed by the Kirov Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev. You can tell Bernstein is a great Romantic at heart. And it works for the Firebird, a work from Stravinsky's earlier post-Romantic/pre-neo-classic period. Although Gergiev's version is a bit crisper.
Infernal Dance of King Kashchei_Bernstein
Infernal dance of all Kashchei's subjects_Gergiev
But I was also thinking that carving all the musical periods into philosophical eras does a disservice to the music sometimes. Think of poor Mozart. Figured as the epitome of Classical composers, of an age that valued rationality and order, the fellow is sometimes written off as...well...boring. And yet I remember in one Covenant music history course, Dr. Steele caught us all off guard with a question: what is Mozart's defining feature? None of us found the answer he was looking for: drama. Pure drama.
There is a reason why we all had to read Bellman in first year music studies...
Granted, being in a program that is getting the ax to Music and Cognition, I am prone to be a bit biased towards Bellman's opinion, but I think that there are others who can agree he really is an engaging writer who can diss the claims of Science quite persuasively. An apologetics for the liberal arts approach. I like it.
I found this kind of fun, but maybe you can help me fill in the gaps. Most of it sounds familiar but evades the memory. So be my virtual memory. Thanks, friends. (I put Evan's contribution in bold.)
Greensleeves (Anon.)
Messiah, "Hallelujah Chorus" (Handel)
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Mozart)
"Ode to Joy," Symphony No. 9, 4th movement (Beethoven)
William Tell Overture (Rossini)
"Nessun Dorma," Turandot (Puccini)
Ave Maria (Bach)
5th Symphony, 1st movement (Beethoven)
Thus Spake Zaruthustra (Richard Strauss)
"Can-Can," Orpheus in the Underworld (Offenbach)
"El Toreador," Carmen (Bizet)
Hungarian Dance. No. 5 (Brahms)
"Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy," Nutcracker Ballet (Tchaikovsky)
"Hall of the Mountain King," Peer Gynt (Grieg)
James Bond theme
The Entertainer (Joplin)
Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly)
"Doe, a Deer," Sound of Music (Oscar and Hammerstein)
"There's No Business Like Show Business," Annie Get Your Gun (Irving Berlin)
"Summertime," Porgy and Bess (Gershwin)
In the Mood (Glenn Miller)
Nothing But a Houn Dog (Elvis Presley)
Pretty Woman (Roy Orbison)
Yesterday (Beatles)
?
Staying Alive
????? Oh please help me with this one! I am going to stay up all night b/c it sounds like a tv show theme and it's bugging me!!!
Another One Bites the Dust (Queen)
Thriller (Michael Jackson)
Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)
Pyscho theme (Bernard Hermann)
?
In the course of thesis research I came across this intriguing quote: "As the image of CBGB [local New York club] aesthetics sharpened, the Talking Heads and the Ramones became perfect foils for each other, each defined by the public in opposition to the other, the highbrows from art school versus the lowbrow dropouts from Queens, the quintessential new wavers versus the paradigmatic punks. Many who supported one of the groups tended to show contempt for the other."
~Bernard Gendron, Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde, p. 256.
So here's your chance to vote!
The Ramones?
Or Talking Heads?
Given the regular audience here, however, I fear I may have skewed the poll...
I found this top ten list of the novelty song, a topical or parody number that sky-rockets to an all-too-brief fame. Quite a few Tin Pan Alley songs fell into this category (songs about telephones were extremely popular in the early 1900s; songs about new music styles such as jazz and swing were equally popular in subsequent decades). The songs on this list all date post-WWII, but the themes haven't really changed: quite a few are still about new advances in technology, pop culture references, or new dance crazes. All of them seem a bit bizarre after-the-fact. Scarily enough I was able to find ALL of the songs on the list (arranged alphabetically by artist's last name, rather than in order of merit)...
1. Buckner and Garcia: Pac-Man Fever
2. Rick Dees: Disco Duck
3. Steve Martin: King Tut
4. C. W. McCall: Convoy
5. Adam Sandler: The Hannukah Song
6. David Seville: The Chipmunk Song
7. Allen Sherman: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah. (This is a classic with my family.)
8. Ray Stevens: The Streak
9. Weird Al Yankovic: Eat It
10. Zappa: Valley Girl (Is this an example of East coast snobbery against West Coast Nouveau Riche? Regional stereotypes are fascinating...)
Because who else would produce radio programmes describing how Gilbert and Sullivan were 19th-century punks?
I mean, G & S lambasted every authority structure of their day: politicians, lawyers, the police, upper crust society.
Plus excerpts from The Beggar's Opera. As well as all the adaptations, some bizarre and some rather brilliant. This is making my afternoon!
On a related note, the programme describes how G & S managed to transcend their time period, despite their very contextualized topics, by producing witty lyrics. Other lyricists have only ever come close, says the radio host: Tom Lehrer is perhaps the best that the English-speaking world has produced since Gilbert's brilliant day. And so I include Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. I dedicate this song to Tuggy, who introduced me to Tom Lehrer.
A video of Steve Reich's Clapping Music. A lot of contemporary music is much better performed live, or at least, is easier for the audience to follow when performed live. Contemporary music is more about process and interaction, which can be somewhat lost in the audio file format. So, for example, with Clapping Music, the audience benefits from watching the body language of the performers, which signal the small changes in rhythmic patterns.
This entry dedicated to someone who informed me they needed remedial clapping lessons. Just follow the video and you, too, can clap in 12 easy steps! (Or should I say phases?)
I have listened to the first half of the White Album countless times and yet hardly ever to the second half. I think this is a mistake. The problem is that by the time I finish the first half I am not really in the mood to continue on. But today I just skipped the first disc. I wanted to make an argument comparing the Beatles to the Velvet Underground* and needed a refresher listen to Lennon's collaboration with Yoko Ono, Revolution 9. And then I just kept going with the rest of the disc. I feel as if I just got myself a free bonus album.
After all, everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey...
*I am looking at the introduction of distortion within "art rock" and looking at its origins....could it be an infusion of avant-garde timbral experimentation? Or from the blues background (which values timbral complexity over "smoothness") of rock itself? Quite possibly a combination.
It is interesting to me to listen to Sgt. Pepper back-to-back with the second half of the White Album....one is so crisp and clean and "pretty" (even the psychedelia is "logical") and the other so disruptive and distorted (comparatively speaking).
...if only Schenker were alive today and analyzing Vitamin C, Aerosmith, Green Day, Matchbox 20, Avril, Twisted Sister, the Beatles and pretty much the whole Western pop world. They all sound like Canon in D...
You were expecting a definitive list? As if one could ever come to such preposterous conclusions. But Evan and I came up with a pretty durn good one, if I do say so myself...
1. Thomas Tallis, Spem in Alium
2. J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations
3. A Ludwig Beethoven piano sonata (We didn't decide, but I am going to take the liberty of choosing No. 17 in dm, op. 31, No. 2 "The Tempest." I had to ask Anna's advice on this one, since it was pretty much a toss-up between that and the Appassionata.)
4. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
5. The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper
6. George Handel, Messiah
7. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
8. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisted
9. Bela Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra
10. Igor Stravinksy, The Firebird, George Gerswhin, Rhapsody in Blue, and The Clash, London Calling all tied for 10th place...
And then what about musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, who didn't write the songs they sang but are so distinctive for their voices?
Last night, I presented (for class) on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, challenging critiques of its so-called "whiteness" by illustrating how African American participation in its performance could (and did) drastically affect the music and thus the representation conveyed. The overarching issue was the impact of performance on musical representation, beyond and sometimes against, composer "voice." I played two clips of "Summertime," one by Anne Brown (Bess in the original performance) and the other by Billie Holiday and her orchestra. Anne Brown was classically trained, and the symphony accompanying her was a standard symphony orchestra. The wide vocal range, vibrato technique, and instrumentation (weighted towards the string section) of the accompaniment all strongly indicated the concert hall and "Western Art." Billie Holiday, on the other hand, had a jazz/blues band (muted trumpets, clarinets, strong rhythm section) behind her. Her range was narrower and delivery more characteristic of "popular" singing. In between verses, there was a break for a horn solo (also more characteristic of jazz style). To me, the versions are like night and day. How cool to find that, yes, even African Americans don't speak for all members of the group: each one has a different experience to tell. I liked the particularity, how just a performer could so completely change a song's meaning and sound. In the first, the Western Art sound was being used by an African American to deliver a message of competance: blacks were just as capable of the "refinement" that whites claim to possess. Stripped away is the "primitive" emphasis on rhythm and complex timbre (growling/muted instruments, roughness of voice, etc.) usually associated with the jungle and by (erroneous) extension, African Americans. Though Gershwin has been criticized for his "inauthentic" scoring of African American spirituals (since Anne Brown was the "original"), I think the performance of Western Art by an African American at the time was extremely positive. Thus, Billie Holiday's version, which actually fits a whole lot better with our notions of "black music," seems much less subversive to me. However, her version could be taken as a "Here, Gershwin, this is how it's really done" rebuttal.
Things to do before the semester ends:
Turn 8-pg presentation into 15-pg paper (not hard, since I was stripping it down in order to make room for the sound clips and still keep it all within 20 minutes, anyway).
15-pg paper integrating Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Goffman in theories of meaning in music.
Thesis proposal.
Apply for scholarships.
I'm tired. I didn't get to bed till 4 this morning, because after the presentations the grad students went to a night club in Toronto where one of the students' old band was playing. They finished up around 12am, at which point reminisces began. We didn't get out of there till 2am, and with the hour drive back to Hamilton, plus the dropping off of students at respective houses, my head didn't hit the pillow till nearly 4. I had wake up again to finish a paper, but now that I have turned that in, I am putting Kind of Blue in the CD player and zonking out.
Since Evan got me started on the subject of Beatles, I'll just add a few more things about the group: The mythology surrounding the Abbey Road album cover.
At the time of the album's release in 1969, rumours had been circulating that Paul McCartney was dead, but that his absence was being covered up by the band. The album cover plays into the mythology by portraying the Beatles in a stylized funeral procession. John, in white with an exbordinant amount of facial hair, represents Jesus. Ringo, in his black suit, represents the officiating minister. George, in jeans, boots, and a workshirt, represents the undertaker. Paul, with bare feet and a suit, represents the body. The cigarrette in his hand brings to mind firing squad rituals, and their associations with death. The four Beatles are all marching in step, left foot forward, right foot back, except for Paul, who has right foot forward and left foot back. The band is traversing a typical English crosswalk (a feature that suggests "crossing over to the other side," an image also associated with death). There is also speculation that the license plate pictured on the car parked beyond the crosswalk says "28IF" since Paul would have been "28 if" he had survived to the date of the album's release.
Obviously rumours of Paul's death were greatly exaggerated. Now fans are placing bets as to whether he or Ringo will be the last Beatle to fall. I speculate it will be Paul. The first to "go" will be in fact the last to remain. Or something like that.
I'm listening to some Chuck Berry, the early rock-n-roller whose music has been covered by just about everyone, but particularly by the Rolling Stones. And if you pay attention to "You Can't Catch Me," you'll catch the musical and poetic influence for Lennon's "here come ol' flat top, he come groovin' up slowly" from the Beatles' song "Come Together." (In fact, Lennon was sued by Berry's manager for the resemblance, though the two musicians formed a friendship afterwards). I'd listened to a few rock-n-roll songs by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis (who also covered Berry) before, but I'd forgotten the heavy southern/midwestern influences on rock: gospel, boogie, and blues (I amuse myself sometimes by counting out the 12 bars as I tap along to the music). "Downbound Train" illustrates the pervasive imagery of trains that characterizes both blues and gospel. The account of a trip to hell and back reminds me of common literary themes beginning with Virgil and later Celtic mythology (in which case, the fantastical lair of the faerie folk is substituted for hell), and continuing up till 20th century existentialist novels (in which case, the prospect of death is substituted for hell). And I love how "Rock n Roll Music" and "Roll Over Beethoven" are not only just durn fun for dancing, but also contain blatant criticisms of the low/high art dichotomy.
I'll close with Berry's most well-known tune "Johnny B. Goode," whose text recounts the classic rags to stardom scenario that the music industry promised to poor Southern folk (see bios of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, who boasts a particularly fascinating history, since he ended up becoming a pentacostal minister later in life). The music industry had offered employment to people unable to work other jobs (for example, Blind Lemon Jefferson, an African American country blues guitar player) since at least the 20s/30s, and in the 50s, most rock-n-rollers came from Southern, low-income backgrounds.
On a trivia sidenote, "Johnny B. Goode" is also the song that finally prompts Marty McFly's parents to kiss in Back to the Future.
From Music for Film and Television:
(Paraphrased from the professor's lecture, although extremely true to his style of delivery)
During the transition from silence to sound, there was a great emphasis on keeping sound realistic. So we see an abundance of musicals about musicals, since the plot provided opportunity for song and dance to occur within the structure of the film world. However, after the novelty of sound wore off by the early 30s, filmmakers were returning to dramatic narratives that kept music to a minimum. If music was included, it arose from diegetic sources, even if it meant having a couple on a hillside enjoy a romantic moment to the strain of a violin that, as the camera pans back, we see in the hands of a Gypsy who just so happens to be wandering around the countryside at that moment.
The concern was for realism. We just don't hear ominous, "something's-going-to-happen" music just before someone rear-ends us on the highway. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? We're driving along and hear Dragnet's "dum-de-de-dum-da" and think, "Oh, no. I'd better change lanes." Whoosh! "Thank goodness for the music!" Or think of a woman who meets this nice guy in a bar, and he's smiling with his nice teeth, and charming in his manner, and she hears "screech, screech, screech," on the violins in the background. "Don't leave your drink alone. Don't leave your drink alone," she thinks for the rest of the evening.
So, while having music accompany our lives would be nice, it just doesn't happen. And so music was dying in the film industry.
.....And then, in rode Max Steiner on his white horse...Raised and trained in Vienna, a conductor and composer of operettas, he brought some of the techniques of story accompaniment to the screen. He persuaded a studio to let him try composing an original score for two films that ended up being a huge success, despite the fact that no one could tell from whence the music came.
Then a group of filmmakers conceive of a film in which a 12-inch gorilla trundles via stop-action through forests and cities. And yet, somehow the idea seems ludicrous without something behind it to make it more believable. They approach Max Steiner and ask him to throw together some pre-composed music, because the budget was pretty much shot by that time. No Wagner for this film, Steiner vowed. And he composed the original score himself.
Enter King Kong (1933).
Vaudeville is getting to me: I've had "Bass's ale, by the pail" running through my head all weekend. The stuff's catchy, and I've always liked the Irish and their pub songs. Must be on account o' me great-grandfather being a Sullivan.
Chorus:
Bass's ale by the pail
He would order Rosanna to go out and buy;
Dublin Stout he would shout,
Keep drinking and never say die;
Whiskey prime, gin and wine,
He would hand down a bottle and merrily cry:
"My Rose Ann, fill the can,
For honest John Riley's dry."
"John Riley's Always Dry" by Harrigan and Braham.
The verses are set in duple meter while the chorus is set to a triple meter (probably 6/8), making me feel like twirling about the room with a pint in hand when we finally get back to the refrain. Triple meter can be used to simulate the sensations of floating or bouyancy, so I suppose it's a good fit with a song about drinking.
One of the graduate students in the course (Popular Music PreWWII) makes a point to bring in a contemporary tune every class in order to compare the old with the new. So far he has drawn primarily on country music, a genre also tied heavily to folk tradition (of a very white sort). The topics (nostalgia, rigid and clear-cut gender roles, and the ever popular love, love, love) are even very similar. Vaudeville appealed primarily to the working class and middle class. Country (at least in my mind) is the music of the blue collars or blue collar wanna-bes (at least the white ones). Here's Brad Paisley's "Alcohol," a celebratory drinking song, brought in by the grad student mentioned above to compare to Irish pub songs.** Both have a light-hearted, ennobling approach to drink, as well as employing lists with which every good drinker ought to be familar.
Chorus
And since the day I left Milwaukee,
Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France
Been makin the bars
Lots of big money
and helpin white people dance
I got you in trouble in high school
but college now that was a ball
you had some of the best times
you'll never remember with me
Alcohol, Alcohol
"Alcohol" by Brad Paisley.
**Irish pub songs as they are represented in turn-of-the-century American entertainment, not as they actually occurred in Ireland.
*This quote is for Rachel H., my old roommate, since she shares the aesthetic opinions voiced by this music critic of a century past.
"'Brass band music,' the young Henry Finck wrote, 'always reminds me of a threshing machine through which live cats are being chased."
(Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence Levine, pg. 165.)
I also wish these days were still around...
"At a performance of Richard III with Junius Brutus Booth at New York's Bowery Theatre in December 1832, the holiday audience was so large that some three hundred people overflowed onto the stage and entered into the spirit of things, the New York Mirror reported. They examined Richard's royal regalia with interest, hefted his sword, and tried on his crown; they moved up to get a close look at the ghosts of King Henry, Lady Anne, and the children when these characters appeared on stage; they mingled with the soldiers during the battle of Bosworth Field and responded to the roll of drums and blast of trumpets by racing across the stage. When Richard and Richmond began their fight, the audience 'made a ring round the combatants to see 'fair play,' and kept them at it for nearly a quarter of an hour by 'Shrewsbury's clock.''" (pg. 28 of same book)
I was fated to love the guitar, especially the acoustical guitar. It's my mother's fault, really. She played the guitar in high school and college. After I was born, I slept in the open guitar case (not on a regular basis, but we do have photographic evidence that once, at least, the case formed my crib). My mom didn't have much leisure while we were growing up, but her chorus book and acoustic guitar provided much of my childhood background music.
I was briefly interested in taking up guitar at one point, but F Major and my small hands quarreled, and I left the guitar to take up with the ukelele instead. My grandfather had given me an instrument he no longer played. I figured out my own chords (good piano background). I never became excellent on the instrument, but I get by, once composing a birthday song for a friend's 18th day of reckoning.
I can handle cheesy, sentimental guitar music much better than I appreciate the same on piano. Most of the music I like has guitar of some sort in it, but more often than not, the acoustic guitar that harmonized my youth is the dominant sound.
If the 19th century was the century of the piano, then the 20th century can perhaps be called the century of the guitar, the new instrument of the everyman. More portable than a piano, but with its capability to produce chords and multiple lines, the guitar accompanies the social music of our day (although the piano still forms an important staple).
I own three of the top five on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time , thanks to the Beatles.
The Beatles mythology intrigues me. Some of the grad students in my program live and breathe JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo. In fact, the running joke is that the Beatles invented music (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and the Beatles.....except the first three were just a warm-up).
John and Paul are considered the creative minds in the band, though John was the artsy one, the one out to change the world. Paul was the meglomaniac administrator. Their break-up was worse than a messy divorce. "How Can You Sleep At Night" appears on Imagine. Some very emphatic sentiments concerning the last days of Beatle members: "I hope that Paul goes before Ringo....otherwise he'll have the last say regarding the history of the Beatles; we'll be stuck with the Gospel According to Paul...."
Ringo is dismissed as a necessary but uninspiring member of the band: some quotes of fellow students commenting upon particular songs (since Beatles generally form the backdrop to our social gatherings)....
Yellow Submarine: "This is why you don't let drummers write songs."
What Goes On: "So Paul and John were such masterminds of songwriting.....and then, of course, they let Ringo write songs like this."
So maybe "Octopus Garden" is a bit clunky and corny. Maybe the predilection for overused vocal backups makes Ringo appear cheesy. But we need some fun songs. And everyone has heard "Yellow Submarine."
George, interestingly enough, is never mentioned. So I name my post after a Harrison tune from the album (Rubber Soul) currently materializing in the sound waves surrounding my desk space.
And I don't know how anyone could make the call between Revolver and Rubber Soul. The former may have "Eleanor Rigby" and "Tomorrow Never Knows," but the latter has "Norwegian Wood," "Nowhere Man," "Think for Yourself," and "In My Life." Rather close in my book.
On a sad note, Kid A only made the list as 428 out of 500. But I suppose Radiohead is influential in a much smaller stream of music-making than the Beatles are.
Quote from Edward Said's The Empire at Work: Verdi's "Aida": "Aida is about a tenor and a soprano who want to make love but are prevented by a baritone and a mezzo." To which I might add, that such is the plot outline of ANY opera.
Is there any venue for group singing these days besides the church?
I was struck by a curiosity to know this when I played a few parlour songs for class, and people really didn't know how to sing with each other. To me, having grown up in church, and spent years as a music major, this concept of singing together is nearly as fundamental as that of breathing.
Strange when we realize that our experience is not the same as the world's...
I suppose pop and rock concerts might count...
"In addition, this music [instrumental music of the 18th-century] appears to be nonrepresentational, at least as representation is usually construed. Unlike literature or the visual arts or even texted music, instrumental music seems to be generated from its own self-contained, abstract pricinples. Clearly, it is much easier to demonstrate the content (both liberal and ideological) of stories, pictures, and libretti than of patterns of tones, for which most people have no verbal vocabulary. Since most listeners do not know how intellectually to account for their response to music, they tend to understand it as communicating in an entirely unmediated fashion. Many guard jealously that mystified notion of music, precisely because it permits that experiencing of what is taken to be a higher order of being than the corrupt socio/political world in which they live. To drag music back inside that world, then, is to destroy that last illusion of metaphysical certainty."
--Susan McClary, "A Musical Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2," Cultural Critique 4 (Fall, 1986), pg. 163.
Also:
"While most music of the twentieth-century avant-garde has departed deliberately from the constraints of tonality, this same harmonic language [tonality] continues to underlie our popular musics and the music of movies and advertisement. Thus, even those members of Western societies who do not think they know what tonality is understand intuitively (like the Bourgeois Gentleman who had been speaking prose unknowingly all his life) how it operates, how to follow its logic, how to perceive deviations from its norms."
--Ibid., pg. 134.
Thus, it seems that music, like language, is a learned form of communication. But, like one's first language, it is usually not learned formally. Rather, through constant exposure, one absorbs the rules of one's own code of communication.
