Is Ringo a Good Drummer?

I offer this for your amusement:

Definitions of "Classical"

My post on Substance and Accident got a lot of passionate commentary so I would like to try and approach the issue from a different angle. I suppose the basic question or problem is how to define "classical" music. Let me put down some possibilities:

• One commentator argued for an essentialist definition that associates classical music with the characteristic features of its traditions: music for certain ensembles like orchestras and string quartets and the formality of the classical concert
• Another commentator argued for the characteristic sound of classical music saying that even when used in the context of a video game, that sound made it, for all intents and purposes, classical
• I was arguing that I would like to define as "classical" all that music that had a certain approach to creativity. It comes out of the Western European traditions of music, but extends to other forms and genres. As an example of this, I cited the Kronos performance of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix. By reinterpreting the piece, the quartet have transformed it, in my view, into a piece of classical music.
• Other typical definitions of "classical" include music that has stood the test of time or music by primarily Viennese-based composers written between, roughly, 1760 and 1827, i.e. music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (the subject of the book by Charles Rosen, The Classical Style)

The comments were very illuminating because they, so to speak, struck sparks off the original post and shed more light on the question. Now I am starting to think that what I am coming to believe is that the most fundamental fact about classical music is that it has a certain kind of attitude towards music. One commentator referred to it as "cold indifference", but this was not intended to be negative. I would rather express this as an objectivity about the materials. A classical musician, by training and inclination, sits down to work with a kind of aesthetic disinterestedness. Note that this does not mean "uninterested", but rather neutral. What I mean is that I am trying to create a piece of music (or an interpretation). I am willing to use whatever is going to do the job. If using a Bulgarian folksong (or imitation of one) is what is needed, then that's what I will use (think Bartók). If I am looking for a killer encore to end a program of new music, then I might go all wild and make an arrangement of a tune by Jimi Hendrix! If I am writing my culminating work as a composer for symphony orchestra and for the last movement I just need something more, maybe I will, as Beethoven did in his 9th Symphony, add a chorus and vocal soloists. I could go on and on and on citing more examples.

My point is that there is a certain attitude that is not shared by genre musicians (I am making up a term to describe musicians who really stick to a particular genre like blues, ragtime, be-bop, hip-hop or pop) that is not always present in classical musicians, but that I think is fundamental to good classical music. I'm afraid that what I am doing here is creating a definition of classical music that is rather post-modernist as it seems to both include and encourage the diversity that seems characteristic of post-modernism.

But I think that the way I am looking at classical music is actually age-old. When Léonin and Perotin invented organum at Notre Dame in Paris back in the 12th century, what they were displaying was exactly this same kind of attitude to the materials that I am calling fundamental. In simple terms, it is saying to yourself, "hmmm, now what are the possibilities here?" It is a kind of objective weighing of possibilities that leads you to slow down one voice so that each syllable of the text might take up a page of music while the other voice dances around that with many, many notes. Or it might lead you to say, ok, in my piece for two guitars tuned in quarter-tones I am going to add a part for cowbell, because, well, it works. I am thinking of a piece by Jō Kondo here.

The contrasting attitude, one that I associate more with genre musicians, is the need to be true to the limits and essential characteristics of the genre. It is what leads people to say things like, "that's not blues!" or "if you really knew what flamenco is, you would play that differently".

I want to put up two musical examples. Two songs, one of which would certainly be called classical and the other of which would not be called classical:

But both of these songs display a similar aesthetic method: they distill the music down to a fundamental essence in order to achieve an aesthetic goal.

Retro Record Review #2

For the second of my innovative Retro Record Reviews I am going to do Revolver by The Beatles that is, in the view of George Harrison at least, a kind of sequel to Rubber Soul.

Like Rubber Soul and all subsequent albums, the name "The Beatles" does not appear on the front cover. Well, there is one exception, the cover of the White Album does have "The Beatles" on it, but just lightly embossed and you have to hold it up the light at the right angle to even see it. Unfortunately, all subsequent reissues have highlighted the name in light grey, which defeats the whole purpose of an album with no cover art! Sigh...

The Beatles went from being an obscure small-time band playing in a Hamburg strip club to being, not just the most famous musicians in the world, but the most famous people in the world, in just a couple of years. I'm not sure anything like that has ever happened before or since. But let's get right to the music.

In case anyone had any doubts about the creative power of The Beatles after Rubber Soul, Revolver laid that to rest. The album starts with a clever reference to the beginning of their first album, Please Please Me that had Paul counting in the band. This count is tentative rather than the shout of the previous album:

Lots of interesting things about this song: it is the only time a song by George Harrison was used to kick off an album. And a good song it is. Straight ahead, four on the floor, rock and roll. And the theme? Tax policy. Yes, the only song I know that is about punitive tax rates and it even mentions the then prime minister, Edward Heath. The passion of the song is explained by George having just noticed that they were paying 95% of their income in tax. Yes, that's correct, 95%. "One for you, nineteen for me." Solely as a result of this song, taxes were lowered world-wide. Just kidding! Had you going there, didn't I? The acerbic lines about pennies and dead people were, of course, the contribution of John Lennon:

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes

Revolver was released on August 5th, 1966 after thirty-seven days of recording, mixing and editing between April and June. Each song took between ten and thirty-three hours of studio time and a lot of the real "composition" took place in the studio. The basic structure of the songs, the lyrics, chords and melody was usually conceived outside the studio but what the Beatles were inventing in the studio was what you might call the "orchestration" of the song: the texture of instruments, quality of timbre and various things that we previously didn't have names for and that are still exotic practices. For example, they would sometimes slightly alter the current to the tape recorder when recording the instrumental tracks to make them sound "fatter" (by recording them slightly too fast and playing back at the normal speed) and then do the opposite for the voices. The result pushes the tone-quality of the voices forward. They would also double-track the voices for yet more intensity. Recordings by the Beatles always sound different from just about everyone else because a big part of the composition is actually the way they recorded the song.

The second song on Revolver, an utter contrast to the first, is very classical sounding as the only accompaniment is a string octet. The song is Paul's "Eleanor Rigby":

The musical ideas are all Paul's, but he relied on the invaluable George Martin to write out the parts for the players. Now each of these first two songs is a brilliantly creative example of pop music, but it is a whole other order of brilliance that they would appear side by side as they are so radically different. This astonishing range of creative thinking appears in the next song as well, "I'm Only Sleeping" by John Lennon:

This song uses the varispeed technique I mentioned above as well as another one invented for this song. The guitar solo was recorded in the usual way, but inserted backwards into the final mix. In other words, you are hearing all the notes backwards. It's a nice eerie effect for a song that evokes dreamlike states.

OK, so three songs, rock and roll, chamber music and electronic wizardry. Surely that is enough stylistic variety even for the Beatles? Not at all, because the next song is another one by Harrison that is the first in which his interest in Indian music really takes over. "Love You To" was inspired by George's lessons on the sitar with Ravi Shankar and also uses a group of Indian musicians resident in London, so the sound is much more authentically Indian than you might expect:

The metric variety in that music was soon to have an influence on the writing of Lennon.

There are even more varieties of music on this astonishing album including the next song, "Here, There and Everywhere" which is one of Paul's beautiful ballads (and one that sends theorists into conniptions--good ones, I hasten to say):

This was composed and added to the album almost at the last minute. I won't keep putting up clips, but "Yellow Submarine", one of the most popular children's songs ever, written for Ringo to sing, is also on the album as is another of Paul's soul-influenced numbers, "Got To Get You Into My Life":

Big, brassy and bold, that one took more time in the studio than any other song as they kept redoing it to get exactly the right sound. They used three trumpets and two tenor saxes, put the mikes right in the bells and severely limited the signal for the most compact sound. I like the way Paul saves the big, belted out line "Got to get you into my life" for just the right place in the song.

And after all that, we haven't mentioned the most remarkable song on the album, and strangely enough, the first to be recorded, the one that ends the album, "Tomorrow Never Knows" with lyrics based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. What makes this song unusual are a number of ideas, both technical and musical. First of all, Ringo, again, invents a new kind of drum pattern, then the whole song is just one chord, C major, John's voice is put through a speaker system called a Leslie that was originally made for electronic organs. The speakers are on a rotating base that, as it whirls, makes the sound airy and fluttery. But most importantly, this is the introduction into pop music of an avant-garde compositional technique called "musique concrète" as it was developed by French composers. In this, five small loops of pre-recorded sounds are played and layered over top of one another. Some are forwards and some back. The result is a song that sounds like and is like no other:

If they had never recorded another note, I think that this album would pretty much make the Beatles immortal. JMHO.

Substance and Accident

Some interesting issues came up in the comment thread to this post. The question was posed, is there video game music that is influenced by classical music and are there popular music genres like heavy metal that are particularly influenced by classical music?

The easy answer is yes, of course. Here is a particularly strong example from Final Fantasy:

I think that the implicit assumption behind pointing out that this music or other music has something of a classical sound or feel is that the music is better because of it. Sounding vaguely classical is better than sounding vaguely pop or world music or whatever. But I think I want to question that on aesthetic grounds.

Aesthetic questions are always a bit awkward for the reason that they necessarily involve value judgments. Music theorists avoid all that by sticking to stuff like "the composer makes particularly adroit use of the secondary dominant to prepare the return of the main theme". One is never quite sure if this makes the music sound "good" or not. Value judgments tend to be subjective--in fact, capitalism depends on that! If you spend some money to buy something it is because you value the thing more than the money it cost to buy it. The transaction occurs because the seller prefers to have your money rather than what he is selling. So every free transaction depends on a different judgment of subjective value.

Similarly, every aesthetic judgment is subjective as well. But I think that there is also an objective value. Just as in the world of financial transactions it is objectively recognized that a Lamborghini will always cost more than a Volkswagen, and therefore be objectively more valuable than a Volkswagen, a particularly artwork can be recognized to be more valuable than another. After all, at auctions of famous paintings, no-one expects the Van Gogh to sell for less than something by a relatively unknown painter. I think we can make the argument that some pieces of music have greater aesthetic value than others, but due to the immaterial nature of music, this might be more difficult and we should probably allow a fair amount of wiggle room.

Still, I have had no hesitation in the past about talking about objective aesthetic value when it comes to music. This is a recurring theme or motif in this blog. The passage of time seems to sort out the good and the great from the dull and ordinary. Everyone knows the name of J. S. Bach, but the names of dozens or hundreds of his contemporaries are forgotten because their music is, compared to that of Bach, quite insignificant.

Now, back to our video game music. I want to make the argument that sounding vaguely classical is not an aesthetic virtue. The piano music in the clip above is nice-enough sounding, but of only modest aesthetic quality. This is probably because it imitates the accidents of classical music while ignoring the substance.

These categories of substance and accident go back to the philosophical theories of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher. I make no claim of using this distinction in the same way or for the same purpose Aristotle did, but I am going to use the basic idea to create an aesthetic distinction in music. The article I linked above uses the example of a chair. The substance of the chair is the basic design and function, the accident is whatever materials are used. A chair can be made of wood or metal and it is still essentially a chair.

Now let's move over to music. When we usually think of "classical" music we tend to think of the accidents that are associated with it: a concert hall with musicians in formal dress, a conductor waving a baton, the sound of bowed string instruments or tympani, perhaps a soprano belting out an aria. These are not the substance of classical music, but rather the accidents. The Kronos Quartet playing their arrangement of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix while dressed in ordinary street clothes and playing in a non-typical environment are doing "classical" music in essence. But a symphony orchestra in formal attire with a conductor waving a baton playing  pop songs in a traditional concert hall, I would argue, is NOT "classical" music but merely displays the accidents.

What makes something "classical" in my mind, and I want to stress that this definition may not be widely accepted, is the way the musical materials are handled. It has to do with the creativity involved more than the particular instrument or even style. Yes, a piano concerto by Mozart is classical music, but not because it is using an orchestra or the players are dressed a certain way. It is rather because of the creative way the music is put together.

In the piano clip from Final Fantasy above, we have the presentation of various sorts of musical elements that are common in classical music, but the piece as a whole is not very creatively structured and tends to wander aimlessly from one idea to another. In order to call it classical, I would prefer to hear a more creative approach. In fact, even though this piece sounds the way we think classical music should sound, with nice chords and scales, a piece by the Beatles, even though it sounds like pop music, is more what I would call "classical". Isn't that a funny way to look at it?

What I am always listening for in music is creative expression and one finds it in a lot of different places. A lot of what we call "classical" music really isn't, under my definition. But music in other styles and genres might be. How I am conceiving of classical music has a crucial component of aesthetic quality. Sure, there is something subjective about it as all judgments have a subjective component. But there is an objective component as well and arguing about that is what makes talk about music interesting.

Now let's hear Kronos play "Purple Haze" and make it classical:

Well, that was certainly deliberato, wasn't it?

Retro Record Review #1, Part 2

Well, first of all, I'm changing the name of the series to "Retro Record Review" instead of Retro Album Review.

This is part two because in my last post I took over 1400 words and only managed to talk about two songs and the cover of one of the most important albums ever made, Rubber Soul, released in December 1965 by The Beatles. Let me see if I can do two more songs from the album. One song that everyone seems to know is one by Paul that has a French touch to it--even some of the words are French. You might have noticed Lady Gaga also did this in "Bad Romance". Here's the song, "Michelle" from Rubber Soul, the last song on side one:

The thing that has alway stuck in my mind the most about that song is the guitar solo. But this is one of those seemingly innocuous little tunes that Paul just seemed to toss off--like "Yesterday". But they do seem to stick in your head and finally you realize they aren't innocuous, they are great, though unpretentious, songs. Back in 1967 this song won the Grammy for song of the year. Incidentally, this year that same award went to this song:

Now that's not a bad song, certainly better than the other nominees, but I don't think you could call it unpretentious. When did pop music get so over-produced and bloated? Oh, right, the 80s...

But the one song on Rubber Soul that really stands out and was perhaps the most innovative instrumentally is "Norwegian Wood", a song with rather coy lyrics about an affair John (yes, this song is one of John's) supposedly had. The instrumental innovation was the use of the Indian instrument the sitar for the first time in a popular music recording. The song has an interesting echo in a song by Bob Dylan that appears on Blonde on Blonde, "4th Time Around":

The resemblances are pretty strong. I'm not sure if it is important to say which song came first. The truth is that John Lennon and Bob Dylan had a big influence on one another around this time. Ok, now let's listen to "Norwegian Wood".

There's just a tiny bit of bass drum in there, but that's it for percussion. This song shows what a really great rhythm guitarist John was--the whole texture is based on that driving, chunky rhythm guitar. Nice melodic interjections by the sitar. But the thing about this song is its extreme simplicity, both harmonically and melodically. Simple, but, in its way, perfect and no harmonic clichés, in fact some very interesting harmonies.

I don't think I will talk about the other songs on the album so I will just send you to listen to the whole thing. The whole album is only a bit over 35 minutes in length, and all of it is good:

Do What You Love?

This is a slight departure from what we usually do on this blog, but it is certainly something that most musicians have to deal with. The issue is the deeply-rooted principle that in life you should do what you love and therefore love what you do. Sounds nice and unexceptionable and it is smuggled into our consciousness in a thousand ways in innumerable films, books, tv shows and self-help sessions. It is one of those unquestioned "truths" of our time.

I got thinking about this because of an essay by Miya Tokumitsu in Slate. Go read the whole thing, which is quite good. Here is a sample quote:

If DWYL denigrates or makes dangerously invisible vast swaths of labor that allow many of us to live in comfort and to do what we love, it has also caused great damage to the professions it portends to celebrate. Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average Ph.D. student of the mid-2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue his passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.

The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which about 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors—contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.

The article does quite a good job of exposing the flaws in the so-called principle, so I would like to contribute more of a personal angle. Yes, lots of us have been fooled into pursuing something that we love at the cost of our long-term financial stability. But sometimes we have good reason for doing so. A while ago I put up a post titled "The Aesthetic Vision" in which I described the experience of being captivated/captured by, in my case, music. One difference between the way the article talks about pursuing one's vision and the reality, for me at least, is that my sense was that there would always be a certain amount of suffering involved, such as poverty or long hours of hard work or the misunderstanding of one's peers. I expected that! It seemed to me to be simply part of the deal one strikes if one is captivated by the vocation, not job, vocation, of being an artist. It can turn out to be a lot like being a Franciscan monk, but without the dental plan. It is more of a privilege to be an artist than a reward.

The problem with the article is that, while it describes the problems with simply pursuing some interest to the exclusion of economic reality, it does not describe well the situation of someone who really is captured by some kind of aesthetic vision. In other words, if you are truly some kind of artist, you may not have an entirely free choice and you may have to accept the downside as well as the upside.

Now let me describe a less extreme situation: if you do have some sort of aesthetic vision, yes, you should probably pursue it because, frankly, our extremely shallow and materialistic age probably needs more of that. But you should be prepared to discover that you don't have sufficient talent or genius. Just something to keep in mind. However, the bonus is probably that you have some talent or genius. In that case, it is entirely likely that you can have a very successful career in all sorts of different areas. As is often pointed out, real training in the arts develops all sorts of skills and abilities that are in short supply in the real world.

It's not an all or nothing world: lots of people work out interesting compromises and combinations that enable them to have useful and prosperous careers and also lives that incorporate real aesthetic goals as well.

A life is a life, it is always a lot more than just a job!

Let's end with some music by one of those people who spent a great deal of his life in a real world job, a successful executive in an insurance company, but who was also an important composer. I give you Charles Ives, "The Unanswered Question" written in 1906:

Retro Album Review #1

Partly inspired by a suggestion of frequent commentator Rickard, I am going to start a new series called "Retro Album Reviews" based on the notion that it should be just as interesting, if not more so, to write a review of an old album as a new one. In reviewing new albums, there is always the possibility of an agenda in the mass market reviews: is the positive review being paid for in some way?

Rickard was suggesting that I talk about some good pop music, which got me thinking. So I am going to start by reviewing a pop album, but I won't restrict myself to those. There are some great retro classical albums out there too. By "retro" I just mean an album has been around for a while, years or decades.

So to start, I am going to review a pair of albums that are quite historically significant. I call them a pair of albums because according to one of the participants, they are really one big album that came in two parts. The two albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. Rubber Soul was released on Dec. 3, 1965 which makes it just over 49 years old! Good grief, has it been that long! Actually, this album just precedes my musical consciousness which only came along a couple of years later.

This was the sixth studio album by the Beatles and the first one that they actually had uninterrupted time in the studio to work on. It took a couple of weeks to record and a couple more to mix and you can compare that to their first album that was recorded in one day, over ten hours. These sessions were not broken up by other commitments to touring or film so in a sense it was the first big opportunity to see what they could do, creatively, in the studio.

But first, let's look at that cover. Notice anything? The name of the group does not appear. In a very interesting reaction to "Beatlemania", the phenomenon where people just seemed to go nuts around them, the Beatles more and more distanced themselves, well, from themselves. The name The Beatles doesn't appear on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's or Magical Mystery Tour either. In fact, on that last album, neither do their faces as they are all wearing masks. This reached its maximum with The White Album that has no cover art at all, except for "The Beatles", embossed on the paper. On the original release, you could see the name if you held it at an angle to the light. Subsequent reissues have put the name in light grey, which is too bad.

One of the many, many remarkable things about this album is that it is not only a tremendous creative success, it was also a huge popular success: it pushed the Sound of Music soundtrack off the top of the charts! In today's pop world we just assume that the more creative and original the music is, the fewer copies it will sell. I'm not sure this is entirely true as artists like Gotye and Lady Gaga manage to be creative and original and still sell pretty well, but the general trend is clear: if you want to sell a lot of albums, do what everyone else is doing, but shake your booty a bit more.

But the Beatles were and are a major contradiction to this narrative. They were the most creative pop group of their time, enormously more creative than their peers, but they were also the biggest selling pop group and not only of their time, but of all time. Their only close rival is Elvis Presley.

Ok, let's look at the music. The first song, side one (yes, vinyl records have two sides which affected the way the Beatles organized the songs) is McCartney's "Drive My Car". You will notice me referring to songs as being by McCartney or Lennon when they are both credited with all the songs except for those by Harrison. Yes, John and Paul wrote a lot of songs together, especially in the early years, but by this time each song tended very much to be the product of one or the other of them. John would never have written "Michelle" and Paul would never have written "Nowhere Man".

Oh, just a note: I'm talking about the UK release, the original release in the US had somewhat different songs in a different order. This first one doesn't even appear on the US release. Since the re-release of all these albums in the late 1980s, the UK version has prevailed. "Drive My Car" is one of Paul's rocking soul numbers obviously influenced by American soul music. But I want to just point out what is interesting and original here. First of all, Paul is playing a new Rickenbacker bass and the agility and prominence of the bass lines is a big part of the sound. People forget what an incredible bassist Paul is because of all his other talents. Oh, and the bass line is doubled in the guitar an octave above, which you might not notice at first. The vocal parts are rich: the verse is harmonized in bare fifths and occasional tritones while the chorus is in thirds and the occasional tritone. This sounds a bit acerbic to us because we don't hear this kind of vocal harmony much these days. Listen to the percussion: as always, Ringo (and the boys) seem to reinvent drumming with every song. In this one, notice how the sound of cow bell and tambourine dominates. There is something interesting in every bar. Notice the triplet chords in piano that answer the line "Baby, you can drive my car".

Some interesting things about the lyrics. While the Beatles started out with the usual romantic lyrics, with every song they tried to find a new angle on them. In this song, the character speaking most of the time is a woman who is going to be a famous movie star. Lennon's contribution to the song was mostly in improving the lyrics. "Drive my car" was an old blues euphemism for sex. Paul has described this song as Zsa Zsa Gabor talking to her boy toy.

I see that I have already written a whole post and I'm still on the first song of side one!

Let me just pick one other contrasting song (what am I saying, all the songs are contrasting!) before I close. Paul was the one who talked about different characters in his songs while John's songs tended to be more self-exploratory. "Nowhere Man", the fourth song on side one, ironically came out of the frustration of trying to write a song. In an interview John related that "I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good and I finally gave up and lay down. Then "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down."

So, it's a really good song about not being able to write a good song. This might be the first pop song about existential angst; it is certainly the first Beatles song that has nothing to do with romantic love. There are some interesting cross-currents going on. You might expect the song to be dreary, but it's not. The bass is rather jaunty with a lot of syncopation and passing tones. The melody, while buried in the other two vocal lines (Paul above, George below) is pretty directional. Incidentally, you hear some "la, la las" in the background of the chorus. They might have used this same musical device in a love song (and did), but here it is just a texture. From the 48' mark to just after the one minute mark is a doubled guitar solo with George and John playing twin Stratocasters with maxed-out treble. And I do mean maxed out, when the engineer said that the treble pot was at max they said "well, put it through the faders again". Plus, if you pick the strings right at the bridge, you get more treble. The double solo ends with a high E harmonic. In this song Ringo is actually playing a backbeat, but not rigidly and not all the time.

Now go back and listen to "Drive My Car" again. See how the texture and palette is completely different? Starting with this album the Beatles in effect orchestrated each song in the studio. Every resource available was used and when they ran out they invented new ones. Every song took a unique approach.