Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread

 This should brighten up your day:

Then have a listen to this, composed in 1932:

Now contemplate a piece titled "Anton Bruckner Buys a Loaf of Bread"!

Today is "Rabid Serial Composers' Day"

Sadly, because I was really looking forward to it, they unexpectedly cancelled the "Trans Day of Vengeance". The only suitable replacement we could come up with on short notice was "Rabid Serial Composers' Day." In commemoration, Boulez' Structures for two pianos:

What I really love about this piece is that the use of total serialism and the constant shifting of parameters means it is impossible to identify a misprint!

The other thing I love is that the Kontarsky brothers actually play it from memory, something one would have thought was also impossible.

The Wit and Wisdom of Adam Neely

I put up a clip of Adam Neely the other day talking about tuning. But he has a whole bunch of clips out and some of them are very funny. Here is a favorite, about musical trainwrecks:

This reminds me of a couple of my trainwrecks, though mine were rather minor in comparison. I was accompanying a choir in a performance at church once. The choir had a fairly long section where they sang unaccompanied and then we ended together. Or sort of! Turns out this choir had an unfortunate tendency to sink in pitch if they were singing a capella. So when I came back in for the coda, it sounded as if I were about a semitone sharp! Agh! That horrible feeling of being appallingly out of tune even though you are not. But at least I didn't have to play uptown funk afterwards...

Here are a couple of other clips from Adam Neely:

(Caveat: there are some secrets to busking, as I discovered touring through Europe one summer, but none are revealed in this video.)

Hey, dude, that's nothing. When I was nineteen I played bass at a gig at an air force base with a soft rock/calypso group. On acid.

Victor Borge

I suddenly had the terrifying realization that I may have never put a Victor Borge clip up on the blog! Since I just ran across one I have never seen before, I can rectify this immediately:

I have never heard him do singing impressions before. Just think, you could be watching Victor Borge clips instead of, well, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings.

Sometimes he even plays the piano...

Emerging Musical Genres

I tagged this as "musical humor" because I am 73% positive that this is meant to be humorous or satirical or something. The Guardian article is headlined: What's the hot emerging musical genre of 2017? Welcome to serialism. They link to a BBC piece on Spotify that has various lists of statistics from the past year like:

Top five artists worldwide

1. Ed Sheeran
2. Drake
3. The Weeknd
4. Kendrick Lamar
5. The Chainsmokers

But they also have the very promising list of:

Biggest emerging genres

1. Melodic power metal
2. Chaotic black metal
3. Chillhop
4. Trap Latino
5. Future funk
6. Jumpstyle
7. Serialism
8. Cinematic dubstep
9. Vintage swoon
10. Gamecore

Now I'm sure you can pick out the odd-man-out in that list? Which of these is not like the others? I'm guessing serialism is the one. It is also the only one that I actually know anything about. "Chillhop," "Trap Latino" and the others are a complete mystery, though I have to confess a curiosity about "Vintage swoon." Would that be, like, Puccini? In any case, the folks over at the Guardian do a little question and answer schtick on serialism:

Name: Serialism.

Age: Has its origins in the early 20th century.

Appearance: The next big thing.

I know about this – all melted watches, people with apples in their faces and whatnot. That’s surrealism. This is serialism, a form of modern musical composition that began with Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique.

And what’s that when it’s at home? Essentially, it’s a system that uses repeated patterns to ensure that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are given equal importance, thus avoiding the constraints of keys and traditional harmonies.

I’m no expert, but it sounds like a hard listen. It may be difficult for the uninitiated, but serialism of one kind or another was the dominant classical music form of the first half of the 20th century.

I’m still confused. Can you give me an example? Of course. Are you familiar with, say, Le Temps Restitué by Jean Barraqué?

I’m not sure. Can you hum a few bars? I’ll try: hmmmnyiunnnnnhhhmmmmioooohnnnymyhmmmmmmmmm…

Are you OK? You sound like a dog that has been hit by a car. It’s difficult to reproduce.

Let's have a listen to Mr. Barraqué's piece:

It is really amazing how similar all those pieces from the post-war serialist phase sound. I suppose a real expert could distinguish Boulez from Stockhausen, Pousseur, Barraqué and others, but the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic style, from this perspective, forces them all into a very similar musical space. Of course I may have just revealed myself to be a complete dolt! But what I am listening to is not so much the technical devices, as the aesthetic result. Sameness.

If you dig around on Wikipedia you can find a lot of lists of musical genres, all of them very ill-defined, with a lot of hilarious names. At least we know what serialism is, even if we doubt that it is a "hot emerging genre."

Memoirs of a Song-Writer

I never thought it would end like this: slumped over a case of Cristal as a bunch of Dominican hookers steal my cash and bling... I guess it was the drugs that did me in the most, that and my job. What's that you ask? Auxiliary utility drum programmer for Beyoncé. Yeah, that was me. I did some of the backbeats, just the ones on "2". Bob did the ones on "4".

See what I mean? Oh and I did the finger-snap programming in the intro too--just on the second beat, mind you. I was happy, sure. I wasn't at the top of the drum-programmer hierarchy, that was Joe "Sticks" Bonnini from Queens. But I had hopes! I was gonna move up, do ALL the back beats and then, maybe, I might get to program some fills. You know, those flippy little drum things that you put in between the backbeats, just for the rush.

But no, it all went wrong. Jay-Z had this idea for some really f**ked up backbeats in the new tune, "Single Ladies" and trying to get my head around those just caused me to lose it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1EFMoRFvY

You hear what's going on with the second beat there? Me neither. Man, that's really messed up. It's so turned around that all the good stuff is now on the "1" and the "3"!

Anyway, I just couldn't deal, so I got myself to Vegas and just, well, drowned for, oh, six months. There's no coming back from that.

It's kind of like the story by Hemingway? The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber? Yeah, as soon as I got the courage to admit I just hated my job, that gave me the freedom to do anything. Unfortunately, my choice was Vegas, but whaddayagonnado?

[This, I emphasize, satirical item was inspired by the story from the BBC about how many people it takes to "write" a hit song these days (and so often, "writing" means, "programming the drum machine.")]

A Couple of Humorous Pop Songs

Yes, despite my post the other day, there are always exceptions. The first one comes from a commentator. Here is the Vancouver group Bare Naked Ladies with some delightfully self-deprecatory humour titled "If I Had a Million Dollars":

Dijon catsup!

And my second example is "Step Right Up" by Tom Waits:

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away!

Micro-biographies of Great Composers

I hope everyone will take this in good humor. Occasionally I do "catty micro-reviews" of pop music videos on YouTube. But I haven't done anything similar with classical music. You can't really. But what you can do is poke gentle fun at the biographies of composers. So here goes:

Anton Bruckner

Very long-winded late 19th century Austrian symphonic composer with a tendency to fall in love with 17-year-old peasant girls.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Late 18th century Austrian composer who was a bit of a slacker. He didn't start composing until he was five, didn't compose his first symphony until he was eight and got a really late start on opera. He didn't compose his first opera until he was eleven!

J. S. Bach

Very devout Lutheran composer who got so carried away writing music for the church that, in a fit of absent-mindedness, he wrote an entire Catholic mass even though he wasn't Catholic. In another accidental moment, he invented the keyboard concerto.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Used to call himself "Stalin's monkey" and kept a packed suitcase by the door to his apartment in Moscow in case Stalin needed him to go on a spontaneous get-away to Siberia. Also wrote symphonies and string quartets.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Was a tirelessly devoted composer who worked and worked on his music until it was perfect, or he ran out of manuscript paper. Kept a chamber-pot underneath his piano and sometimes forgot to empty it.

Joseph Haydn

Known as the "Father of the Symphony" but since this was in the days before paternity suits, it didn't affect his career. Could also be called the Father of the String Quartet, but never is for some odd reason.

Leoš Janáček

Was a rather dull organ teacher and choral composer until, at age 63, he met the young (38 years younger) Kamila Stösslová who became his muse. After that he wrote all the music, such as a song cycle, several operas, a big mass and his Sinfonietta, that he is famous for. Go, Kamila!

Richard Wagner

Was the proud owner of twelve, pink, silk, dressing gowns. He is also known for having written a few operas.

John Cage

( ... ... ... )

Philip Glass

Wrote the same phrase, the same, the same phrase, of music, music, music. Over and over and over and over and over. Again. Again. Again.

Arnold Schoenberg

Is particularly famous for being George Gershwin's tennis partner. They lived in the same neighborhood in Hollywood as Igor Stravinsky, but never invited him over to play. Both George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg were amateur painters. Here is George with his portrait of Arnold. Sadly, there is no photo of them playing tennis together.

Let's end with a couple of tunes. First Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue in one of the only two (abbreviated) recordings made by Gershwin himself:

And here is the first part of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida:

New Catty Micro-Reviews

Something I find particularly fun to write is the one-sentence review. Must be my Canadian sense of humor...

Here are some previous posts, starting in the second month of this blog:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/07/catty-micro-reviews.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/07/more-catty-micro-reviews.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/10/catty-micro-reviews-new-edition.html

Now don't tell me those aren't funny!

I'm shocked to see that I haven't done an edition of the micro-reviews in over a year. So here goes. A little different this time. I'm just going to pick some composers/musicians and deliver a one-sentence comment. To start off, I'll plagiarize from myself in a recent post where I described Rihanna's oeuvre as:

every music video by Rihanna I have seen has seemed like a brassiere commercial with an annoying soundtrack

Let's try some others:

• Handel: Bach with 73% of the counterpoint removed
• Shakira: Hips don't lie, but they do tend to be the most interesting part of the music video

That's ok, but we really need some clips, don't we? Let's go to YouTube and see what we can find.

The last time I listened to Jason Mraz I said he sounded like the love-child of Bob Marley (for the reggae-style music) and Donovan (for the sweet singing and lyrics). Yep, he still does.

This is Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, better known as Kid Cudi. This song did very well on the charts and this video has over 83 million views, but I can't help thinking that they spent five minutes on the music, a couple of hours on the lyrics and weeks and weeks developing the fantasy women.

This is Rebecca Stella. It's as if Lady Gaga decided to hire the special effects guy from Alien and a fashion consultant from Brides Magazine.

The next several clips I went to randomly, by typing in a single letter in the search field, were all so, uh, explicit that I couldn't find anything humorous to say about them. Some of them made the Kid Cudi clip seem refined!