Freak accident!

Yesterday I suffered a freak accident that will hamper blogging for a while. I was walking down the hill into town and was just passing over one of those drains where an open series of steel slats covers it when a friend was driving by and offered me a ride. I went around to the passenger door and didn't notice the that drain cover angled steeply so I was still walking on it. My right foot slipped right between two slats and I started to fall. There was some danger of breaking my ankle. At the same time I was reaching to open the door. My right hand middle finger got trapped in the door handle as I began to fall. It popped out, but not before giving the last joint a serious mashing. So now it is badly swollen and I can't move it without a lot of pain. The fingers are just full of nerve endings! I don't think there is any permanent damage, but there is a lot of trauma and I can barely use my right hand.

Guitar playing will be postponed for a while, but this may just give me more time for composing!!

Here is a guitar piece that really gives the right hand a workout. This is my recording of the Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Tárrega:

American Composers ... Pianissimo?

Alan Fletcher, composer and president and CEO of the Aspen music festival and school, has a piece in the Guardian about the featuring of American symphonic composers at this year's Aspen Festival. The title is "Why are the reputations of US composers so pianissimo?" Now, of course, this is largely a puff piece aimed at promoting the festival. But it might be fun to try and answer the question posed by the title. Isn't it interesting that articles whose title poses a provocative title like this one, never, never, never actually answer the question because they just assume it is rhetorical?

You should go read the whole thing, but let's just browse through it a bit. The opening lays out the situation pretty well:

What does it say about a nation when it doesn’t do justice to its own composers? Americans are famous for their patriotism, but do we really walk the walk in terms of loving our own culture? You can hear Prokofiev in concert halls across the country, but just try programming Piston. (Walter Piston, 1894-1976, the brilliant American symphonist – see?)

At this summer’s Aspen music festival, we are presenting a group of mid-20th-century modernist American symphonies. There will be major symphonic works by Piston, George Antheil, Erich Korngold, Peter Mennin, Roger Sessions, Charles Ives, Roy Harris and William Schuman. I’m especially happy that audiences will hear Mennin’s brilliant and gutsy Fifth Symphony, and Sessions’s Violin Concerto. Planning our marketing, phrases such as “all but forgotten”, “unjustly neglected”, “unaccountably unknown” kept coming up. As a composer myself, who knew many of the composers whose work will be performed, I struggled against these descriptions. I have not forgotten these composers and their magnificent music. And yet.

Some quick research shows that Harris, Mennin, Piston, Schuman and Elliott Carter (who together wrote more than 100 concert symphonic works) had, in the past five years, a total of just 20 performances by US orchestras.

The rest of the article seems to be a concerted effort to avoid the question by haring down as many side-roads as possible. So let's see if we can think of some answers to the question.

Isn't the first sentence an interesting and revealing statement: "What does it say about a nation when it doesn’t do justice to its own composers?" Let's just unpack that a bit. First of all, the fundamental assumption is that America is being unjust to its symphonic composers, these ones at least, by ignoring them. Instead of considering the question of the title, he just jumps right past it to a foregone conclusion. But is America being unfair to its symphonic composers by ignoring them? What is the alternative? Is it possible that most concert audiences just don't particularly enjoy what they have written? Or could we be more specific and look at which symphonic works are more-performed and which are less-performed?

Obviously the focus of the festival is on the composers who were highly regarded, at least in some circles, in the time from the 1920s through the 1970s. Composers of the first major wave of modernism. The focus is not on the more successful composers of more recent times like John Adams and Philip Glass. It is kind of interesting that no attempt is made to argue that, yes, we need to perform Walter Piston and the others more because their music is well worth listening to.

Why don't we do our own little mini-festival and listen to a few symphonic pieces by the composers mentioned and see what we have been missing? I am not well-acquainted with this repertoire, so I just picked the first symphonic work (excluding concertos) that came up for each composer. First up is the Symphony No. 5 by Walter Piston. In the last two and a half years it has had 1,800 views on YouTube:

Next, George Antheil, this is his Symphony No. 1. In three and a third years it has had around 13,000 views:

This is Erich Korngold's Symphony in F-sharp major, Op.40 (1953). In three years it has seen 36,000 views:

Here is the Symphony No. 7 by Peter Mennin. In nearly four years it has seen 1,400 views on YouTube:

Finally, Roger Sessions. This is his Symphony No. 1. In the last five years it has seen 6,000 views on YouTube.

Erich Korngold aside, it is safe to say that listeners are not eagerly pursuing the opportunity to listen to this music. Why is that? Could it be that one reason is that nearly every piece starts with a slow, hazy, ambiguous section that is highly unlikely to grab an audience? Sure, they get to some more active stuff later on, but the feeling for the listener at the beginning is "yes, we have to sit here, twiddling our thumbs, while the composer decides on which, or if, he is going to have a tonality. Or a theme. Or a bloody rhythmic motif." When some rhythmic activity does begin, it seems inflexible--sterile neo-classic counterpoint with maybe just a touch of jazz as in the Sessions. Sure, there is a lot of individuality, but so much of this music has the same dreary existential angst to it. I'm just not sure there is much enjoyment in listening to the composer work it out.

These guys really should have listened to some Haydn. He knew how to grab the listener's attention right off the bat:

Or Philip Glass, for that matter:

Benefits of Making Music

We hear over and over again depressing stories about the sufferings of musicians: airlines that destroy your instrument or won't even let you on board, declining record sales, aging audiences, and worst of all, the pop musicians make all the money!

But there are lots of benefits to being a musician too. A recent story in the Pacific Standard talks about Another Brain Benefit of Music Lessons.

The term “cognitive inhibition” doesn’t sound particularly attractive, but it describes a vitally important mental process. It refers to our capability to tune out irrelevant information and focus our attention on the matter at hand.

Obviously, this ability to concentrate is more important than ever, in a world where we are constantly beckoned by a wide range of distractions. So how can you help your child develop it?

New research suggests one answer is music lessons.

Yes, absolutely. Learning to play music is quite a demanding discipline and one that seems almost immune to the worst recent trends in education that seem to priorize indoctrination over traditional skills like memorization. One of the things that music students have to learn to do is play from memory and this is something that demands a high level of focus and concentration. You have to really look very closely at the score and repeat it over and over again. And you have to keep doing this day after day until you have it perfectly from memory. Where else in our educational system do we do anything even vaguely similar?

So making music hones the ability to focus and ignore distractions, which can pay enormous dividends in educational settings, and throughout one’s life. School boards and administrators: Does cutting music programs still seem like such a great way to balance the budget?

I was chatting with a friend the other day and I mentioned that in my many years in the music business I had encountered very few really nasty people. Sociopaths, it seems, are rare among musicians. I proposed a theory as to why this might be the case. Every musician, I explained, at some point in their career, usually very early on and recurring regularly, finds themselves completely alone in a practice studio containing just four things.

1. A chair 
   
2. A music stand 
   
3. a musical instrument 
   
4. and a piece of music by J. S. Bach 

and you, of course. 

What you have to do is learn how to play the piece by Bach on your instrument. As every musician discovers, this is quite difficult. In order to do it you have to adopt a very strict discipline. If you do a sloppy job, as well you might at first, your teacher will quickly inform you of that at your next lesson. So, back to the practice studio, this time taking it a good deal more slowly and paying more attention to the tuning, the rhythm, the tone-color and so on. Once you get those down you can try and get a grasp of the phrasing and interpretation. At first you think, wow, this will take weeks! But as time goes on you realize that it will actually take years. Finally you realize that playing Bach is the challenge of a lifetime and you will never really master this piece. (Ok, yes, a few, a very few, do.) Learning to play Bach is one of the best antidotes to unentitled arrogance that I know of.

I think that anyone with sociopathic tendencies will not be able to handle this kind of challenge. Here is a page that lists the characteristics of a sociopathic mind.

• Glibness and charm? Alone in the studio, who you gonna charm?
• Manipulative and cunning? Again, alone in the studio. And music students trying to pass off poor preparation on their music teacher don't get very far
• Grandiose sense of self. This is the one that really gets hit. Bach trims us all down to size!
• Pathological lying. To whom? To Bach?
• Lack of remorse, shame or guilt. The only person you could possibly victimize is yourself, alone in the studio.
• Shallow emotions. I suspect that playing music is a great way to get past shallow emotions.

I could go on, but I think I have made the point. Bach (and other demanding composers) provides a kind of litmus test of your character. You are alone in the studio. There is no-one you can con, fool, deceive or trick. Bach is there as a kind of transcendent, impartial judge of your work. All you can do is keep trying. Or give up. I imagine that most sociopathic personalities will flee the practice studio as soon as they can.

Sure, musicians can have many faults. But these are not them. The only really nasty person I met in my whole career was, wait for it, a record company executive.

Now let's listen to that piece by Bach, the first movement of the Sonata No. II in A minor for solo violin. This is the Hungarian violinist Kristóf Baráti who has mastered the piece:

The Art of Listening: Long Pieces, Part 2

I don't know how many parts this section will have, we will just have to see how it unfolds. In the first part I talked about how two ways of writing longer pieces were discovered and used in the Baroque: variation form and ritornello form. Both these involve the use of repetition in effective ways. In a sense, all music structure involves either repetition or the avoidance of repetition and the former has usually been the more effective. But the counterbalance to repetition is contrast and that has also been essential to most musical structures.

This might seem a rather dry way of talking about music, but I am trying to avoid that whole dichotomy between sterile analysis and vague metaphorical purple prose by talking about how we hear the structure and how the musical moods are created through it.

I'm afraid that this whole series of posts has and is going to have a very noticeable bias towards instrumental forms rather than vocal forms. There are several reasons for this. First, as I myself am an instrumentalist, not a singer, that is what I am most familiar with (even though I have done a huge amount of accompanying of singers and written a lot of songs myself); second, music with text necessarily involves a whole other level of complexity, but at the same time provides the listener with an obvious entry into the heart of the music, third; it is the very fact that instrumental music has no text, but "speaks" to us solely through the notes that is perhaps the biggest challenge for the listeners, so this is where the greatest need of discussion is. But still, I make my apologies to lieder and opera lovers for not taking them more into account. That might make an excellent series of future posts!

This post, like the last one, is about "long pieces with clear structural sections and easily identifiable themes." Perhaps the most successful and hence important musical form of all is the sonata form, which developed during the later 18th century and reached its highest point in the early 19th century. There are two sets of books on the sonata form, the first, three volumes by William S. Newman:

The Sonata in the Baroque Era

The Sonata in the Classic Era

The Sonata Since Beethoven

Soon after these three books were published Charles Rosen completely overshadowed them with these two absolutely brilliant books:

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

Sonata Forms

Both these books cover how sonata form developed in the hands of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Yes, there were many, many sonatas written in the Baroque era, but they were an entirely different kind of form than in the Classical era. The reason I am not going to talk about them here is that they were most commonly short pieces in binary form such as the hundreds of examples by Domenico Scarlatti. What happened in the Classical era is that, searching for new ways of writing instrumental music, they (meaning mostly Haydn!) invented a new kind of form, inspired, let it be said, by the techniques of opera buffa. Now for the first time, "pure instrumental music alone could be the principal attraction without the seductions of spectacle." [Rosen, Sonata Forms, p. 9] He goes on to say that:

The sonata forms made this possible by providing an equivalent for dramatic action, and by conferring on the contour of this action a clear definition. The sonata has an identifiable climax, a point of maximum tension to which the first part of the work leads and which is symmetrically resolved ... it has a dynamic closure analogous to the denouement of eighteenth-century drama, in which everything is resolved, all loose ends are tied up, and the work rounded off.

Wow, so how the heck does instrumental music do this? The answer is, through harmony largely, though with contrasting themes to color the different harmonic areas and with a bubbling rhythmic structure to keep everything moving forward. The result is all those pieces that still make up the bulk of the classical repertoire: the string quartets and symphonies of Haydn, the piano sonatas and symphonies of Mozart and the piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies of Beethoven. The first movement of nearly every one of these hundreds and hundreds of pieces are written in sonata form (sometimes called "first movement form" or "sonata allegro form" because first movements are usually allegro, a tempo word from Italian meaning "quick and lively").

Sonata form, as Rosen discusses in great detail, came out of a number of older binary forms. Typically, as developed by Classical composers, it still looked a bit like a binary form because it was in two parts, the first of which was repeated (though usually not the second). The opening of the first part, called the exposition, establishes the tempo, the key, characteristic thematic material (i.e. melody) and a texture. It also sets up a dichotomy between the tonic and dominant. Here is an absolutely characteristic example:

With Mozart, instead of just one simple theme (typical of Haydn) we get a whole cluster of themes. The key here is G major. But the crucial thing, for the 18th century, was the cadences and where they are placed. The first important one comes at the 46 second mark and is easily heard because of the rhythmic gesture and pause after. This cadence is on A, the dominant of the dominant, D. Then a contrasting section continues in D major confirmed with a full cadence in D at the 1:13 mark. This opening section ends with a cadence on D which sets us up for the repeat. The lilting charm of Mozart is conveyed in a couple of ways: the most obvious is the never-ending succession of winning and expressive themes. But equally important is the framework these are hung on, the harmonic structure which is organized by those cadences.

After the repeat, the second section begins (at the 3:12 mark) and in sonata form this is called the development because what happens in this section is what in a narrative drama we would call "the plot thickens". Instead of a major character experiencing some crisis, what happens in music is the harmony suffers a crisis! Sometimes there is a destabilizing shift to a remote key, but here, keeping things fairly simple Mozart first just repeats that opening theme, but now in the dominant. But then he subtly hints at E minor. Instead of continuing in E minor, he immediately picks up that repeated-note theme from the D major part of the exposition and uses it in a sequence moving around different key areas without settling on one. He keeps this up, hinting at different keys and using different thematic material from the exposition until finally, at the 3:49 mark he slips back into the opening almost before we realize it. The effect is a bit like a basketball player faking out the other players on his way to scoring a basket. This last section, called the recapitulation, will recall much of the material from the exposition, but the ending will be rewritten so as to end in the tonic, G, instead of the dominant, D. That is how the loose ends Rosen mentioned are tied up.

So that is one very brief walk through one example of sonata form. Yes, I know, this is only six minutes long, but I wanted to pick a simple example. What this kind of structure enabled was much, much longer movements that, by the time we get to Beethoven, can be fifteen minutes or more in length.

Friday Miscellanea

Too many heavy posts? Too much abstract cogitation? The solution is the Friday Miscellanea and this week we kick off with a selection of Awkward Band Publicity Photos. Here is a sample, but you really need to see them all:

Click to enlarge

Oh, there are worse, much much worse:

I think that they looked at a copy of We're Only In It For The Money and failed to realize it was a satire:

* * *

After that I think we need some sad violin music. This is "Sad Romance (A.K.A. Sad Violin)" by Ji Pyeong Kwon:

* * *

Forbes has an article discussing a recent ruling by the Department of Justice that is apparently very unfavorable to songwriters: "U.S. Dept. Of Justice Deals Crushing Blow To Songwriters"

Also in the ruling, the DOJ denied requests from songwriters to be able to withdraw their catalog from digital licensing services, which would essentially allow them to negotiate fair market rate payments from digital services like Spotify, Soundcloud and Apple Music. Record labels and recording artists, who are not bound by the pre-WWII Consent Decrees, already have these rights.

This seems utterly contrary to a common-sense understanding of natural justice. But there have been a lot of those lately. Remember the raid on Gibson guitars? If you want to understand the complexities of the music publishing and licensing marketplace, this article will help.

* * *

The very fine music critic Allan Kozinn has a review of three new recordings of the music of Steve Reich, all by ensembles not directly associated with the composer. Well worth reading:

As it turns out, Mr. Reich’s work is as interpretable as the Beethoven string quartets or the Boulez piano sonatas. Alarm Will Sound made that point with its debut recording, a 2002 pairing of “Tehillim” with a revised version of “The Desert Music” that offered fresh views of works listeners thought they knew thoroughly. Since then, there has been a flood of Reich recordings made without the composer looking on. And with his 80th birthday approaching (on Oct. 3), three new discs join the queue: the London Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble’s “Sextet | Clapping Music | Music for Pieces of Wood” (LSO Live); Third Coast Percussion’s “Steve Reich” (Çedille) and Ensemble Signal’s “Double Sextet/Radio Rewrite” (Harmonia Mundi).

* * *

From the sublime to the ridiculous, here is a clip of a "humanoid robot choir" singing the tune from Beethoven's 9th Symphony very badly:

My informant comments if they are robots, why are they so sloppy? And my question is, exactly what means are they using to have the robots "sing"?

* * *

Here is a rather nice tribute to Ringo Starr from an unexpected source:

Fortunately for Starkey/Starr, the Beatles, and rock, he was successful at something—the drumming, and not just with biscuit tins and sticks. He not only acquired the skills (George Martin said, “He always helped us to hit the right tempo for a song, and gave it that support – that rock-solid back-beat – that made the recording of all the Beatles’ songs that much easier”), but he had the personality and the casually witty outlook shared by the rest of the Beatles and so apparent in their first film “A Hard Day’s Night.” The movie was a revelation to us fans who had liked their music but had no idea how funny they were. As Starr himself said, “Our appeal … is that we’re ordinary lads.” I’d say they come across as ordinary lads—even nice lads, which is not always true of rock stars—with extraordinary gifts and overwhelming charm.

* * *

The Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland turns out a remarkable number of the world's finest conductors. An article in The Economist talks a bit about how they do it:

In reality, the most important part of a conductor’s work happens not at the concert but during rehearsals. During the recent Friday afternoon lesson, the students took turns directing their colleagues in the Academy’s symphony orchestra. One of Mr Almila’s colleagues sat near the conductor podium, giving each student conductor detailed (and sometimes brutal) assessments after their sessions. “Don’t stop to tell them what you want them to do,” the professor told one student. “It interrupts the flow. Show them what you want them to do. They don’t want to hear you talk.” Mr Almila wandered around among the orchestra’s different sections, evaluating each conductor from the players’ perspective. At the back of the room, a video camera recorded the student conductors and the orchestra. Later each student would sit with a professor and evaluate his or her performance.

* * *

I think that gives us a good suggestion for our envoi today. One of the Sibelius Academy's most well known graduates is Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here he is conducting the third (and last) movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius:

I love that quite unexpected ending!

The Art of Listening: Long Pieces

It is with the longer pieces that classical music really departs from what a lot of listeners are used to. Popular music, especially in the form of songs, tends to come in two to six minute lengths and anything over four minutes is considered long. The Beatle's longest song, and I believe still the longest number one hit single ever, was Hey Jude and it only achieved its length due to a huge coda.

This is, I think, the best version on YouTube. The song itself is about six and half minutes long. In this clip, the song itself doesn't start until just before the one minute mark. It goes for about three minutes and all the rest, half the song, is that long coda. So, structurally, this poses no more challenge to a listener than any other pop song.

But longer classical pieces are usually more structurally complex than shorter ones. Basically a composer writes a longer piece because the material requires or justifies it. This is even true of some minimalist pieces. While In C by Terry Riley could go on forever with the most minimal of material, pieces by Steve Reich usually have their length dictated by the musical processes they involve.

What are we calling a "long piece" anyway? In my second post on medium length pieces the two examples I chose were six and seven minutes long. I would call anything from around six minutes to around ten or twelve minutes medium length, I suppose. With very few exceptions, there are no single movements longer than this until we get into the later eighteenth century.

That phrase "single movements" brings up another challenge to the listener: classical music very often comes in the form of multi-movement pieces. We will talk about that in some detail, but first I want to talk about one kind of piece that can be quite long, but is not like other multi-movement pieces: this is the theme and variations.

The theme and variations form is really the first way composers discovered how to write longer pieces. One of those exceptions I mentioned is the famous Chaconne by J. S. Bach, the longest single movement of the Baroque era. I wrote a whole post on this piece here that I encourage you to read. The piece is about thirteen or fourteen minutes long in most performances, so it definitely qualifies as "long". It is also the last movement of a suite for solo violin and is almost as long as all the other movements put together. How was it possible for Bach to create a structure able to support this length of music? The answer is through variation form. The theme is an eight measure phrase that he simply keeps repeating while varying the melody, rhythm and texture. The harmony itself remains the same until two-thirds of the way through where he moves from D minor to D major for several variations before returning to D minor for the final few variations. The piece is therefore a kind of hybrid of variation form and ternary form.

Most variation-form pieces are presented as a lot of short movements, each based on the theme, rather than one long single movement as in the Chaconne. The most famous stand-alone variation piece in the Baroque is also by Bach, his Goldberg Variations. I did a big post on this piece here that I encourage you to look at. This really is a long piece, about seventy minutes if you do all the repeats, but it comes in the form of a theme, thirty variations and then the theme again. Most of the variations are around two minutes long and they are presented as separate movements--that is, there is a brief pause in between.

Another way the Baroque found to extend the length of a movement was through ritornello form. This is a kind of expansion of ternary form. Where the structure there is a simple ABA, in a ritornello the A keeps returning but in between are contrasting sections so the result is ABACADA, for example. The ritornello section itself can come in the form of short, detachable phrases that can be used in the contrasting sections, which function a bit like a development. The ritornello also can reappear in partial form, so there is a lot of flexibility. However, most examples of the form, which was used to construct most first movements in the Baroque concerto, don't go much over seven minutes long. Here is an example by Bach, the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in D major, BWV 1054.

Well that didn't turn out quite as I had planned! I didn't quite get to covering many long pieces! Looks like there is lots left to talk about next time when I will get into what happened in the Classical era to increase the length of single movements.

A Musical Menu for Indigestion

One of the most pleasing things about my recent trip to Madrid was the discovery that sit-down restaurants there, where serious diners go, almost never have music in the background. People go to eat and talk. They don't need a mish-mash of music thumping away in the background to add burnish to their lives. But such is not the case in North America.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece up today titled:

How Restaurants Make Music Go with Food:
Rap builds up to peak speed at dinner hour or jazz standards; chefs and restaurateurs have options with digital streaming and DJs for hire

I wanted you to get the full picture as revealed in the sub-heading. Ah, exactly how I want to experience my Coquilles St-Jacques followed by a nice Dover Sole: with rap building up to peak speed, not so much in the background as pounding away loud enough to make the cutlery rattle. Now that's fine dining! Sadly, the cultural decay is even revealed in the botched grammar in the sub-head. But let's let the writer reveal the full horror:

At Charlie Bird in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, diners hear hip-hop from The Notorious B.I.G. while they twirl their tagliatelle. A few blocks away at Carbone, lobster ravioli comes with 1960s love songs such as “Just One Look.” 

Restaurant playlists have a critical role in shaping a diner’s experience and an establishment’s image. Music may make guests feel upbeat or calm. The right playlist can ward off a stuffy customer and attract a stylish one. It may also prevent the staff mutinies that come with hearing the same song 10,000 times.

One of the crucial restaurant management failures I have noticed recently is allowing your 20-something staff to pick the music while your 50-something guests grit their teeth in discomfort. But yes, the right playlist can certainly ward off this stuffy customer, never to return! Here is how one chef puts it:

“I think it’s possible to drink great Burgundy, eat great food, and listen to music that makes your head bob at the same time,” says Charlie Bird chef Ryan Hardy, describing himself and his business partner as “hip-hop heads” who wanted restaurant guests to feel like they were being invited into their homes. To Mr. Hardy, that meant music would play a prominent role, with few apologies for it being predominantly rap and containing explicit lyrics. “If you can’t handle it as an adult in downtown New York City, you can’t handle it,” Mr. Hardy says.

Oh, it is certainly possible to drink great Burgundy, eat great food and listen to head-banging music all at the same time--but the effect on your digestion is likely to be unfortunate. Every single place I have ever eaten where the music was aggressively bad in this way were, without exception, poor dining experiences. With all the kitchen staff bobbing away, who is actually paying attention to the food? That final sneering comment, “If you can’t handle it as an adult in downtown New York City, you can’t handle it,” is both condescending and tautological.

One of the songs mentioned as being particularly effective is this one, Wale’s “Lotus Flower Bomb.” I can't find a complete non-cover version on YouTube, but this brief excerpt might give you the idea:

Here is an interesting quote from the article:

“Light, color, sound, people, and food. If one of those is miscalibrated, you run amok,” says Sean Sullivan, a vice president at the parent company for Atlanta-based chef Ford Fry’s eclectic mix of 10 restaurants.

Notice the order: people and food come last. There is something deeply ironic going on here, I think. The culture has reached a point of considerable decline. People are more and more narcissistic and need a constant, glorifying soundtrack even when they are eating. The irony is that it seems that this narcissism is a kind of vacuum. Instead of sitting with friends talking about themselves, they need some kind of musical cues to tell them who they are and what sort of mood they should be in.

As a kind of finale, let's have a little Notorious B.I.G. to clear the palate: