All The Single Shostys
This is classical music:
This isn’t classical music:
But both of them were gamboling together over the weekend, like two little musical lambs. This symptom was brought on after reading a piece from a while ago: A compositional analysis of Single Ladies by Beyonce, as well as diverse comments blabbing on about the interesting touch of polytonality in the chorus. That was something I had not noticed in my previous exposure to this tune, which mostly consists of drunken post-midnight dancing. Not so much of musicology.
So I revved up the old youtube, the bassy bit in the chorus hits and bam, Shosty 10. Not word for word, or note for note, or anything exactly for anything — it’s more like when a sudden gust of smell reels you back to a different time and location. There’s something really similar about the feel of that section.
I was well pleased to discover that S10 is in E minor.
A pennywhistle for your thoughts
I semi-spurofthemomently bought one of the badboys on the left this last weekend. It is loud. What I failed to appreciate while daydreaming off in a land of little Irish lullabies, is that you have to blow like nuts to play to thing properly. The second octave is produced using the next highest up resonance frequency, which in non-science nerd terminology means you have to push air down the thing like you’re manually inflating an automobile tire.
I’d be totally fine with that — and actually, really enjoy tooting the hell out of the flute — except that we have upstairs and downstairs neighbors. I reckon there can only be a few more listens to me trying to hit a high D on the thing before we get angry footsteps clomping down the stairwell. If only we had a fully detached apartment. Or a really soundproof, and large, cardboard box.
But I’m just a fakey, below-10-buck “musician”. What do real musicians do when they live in an apartment? Annoy the neighbors? Use practice rooms instead? In an age of clicking on the windows taskbar to turn the sound off, it’s a bit unnerving to be interacting with a device that doesn’t have a mute button.
Maybe they’ll add it in the next software patch…
Getting The Beet Right
I’m so effing proud of myself. I can identify Beethoven in a crowd. That might not sound so impressive to you guys: one of the most famous composers in the history of history, yadda yadda. The trick isn’t recognizing pieces I already know — that happens without even trying, you don’t have a choice recognizing a piece you are familiar with, it snaps together like a coat fastener. What I mean is that I’m now getting pretty good at recognizing the composer of pieces I have never heard before. So, when this was playing on NPR the other night:
I was anticipating, with just a tidbit of baited breath, the name “Beethoven” to be brought up after it ended. And brought up it was.
And then, of course, it seems obvious. Naming the owner of a composition is easy in hindsight, when you can point out how the rolling bass notes bits sound really similar to the first movement of the Apassionata, and such. Committing in advance is much harder to do. It’s fun though. It’s a challenge. Often, while rolling back from Wegman’s, G and I spend the time guessing/arguing over the potential identity of our soundtrack. We sift through names, as the parts of the piece shift. And sometimes, more often now, we get it right.
Single File
PR emails usually end up in the mental spam-can. They usually aren’t interesting enough to be read properly, but there’s an angsty sort of guilt associated with scrunching their electrons up and shoving them into the electronic trash. It’s like getting a huge wad of linked pictures from a relative and not quite feeling like looking at them today, or tomorrow, or Thursday — but you know, you’ll get around to it eventually. And there they sit. Mewing plaintively from the inbox, groaning underneath the growing weight of all the more recent emails. And after a few weeks of aging/maturing/stagnating you’ve forgotten the point to the mail, and it’s really old anyway — and then they are much easier to consign to the filing cabinet, in the “vaguely read” section.
Well anyway, I wouldn’t be getting all artsy about emails unless I had a finishing move to perform. I hear you’re supposed to actually have some kind of plan in place when writing. The plan today was to now bring up a PR email which I received and then actually read. Cunning eh? That’s, like, irony (or at least coppery (sorry)).
The email was from the dudes over at WGBH, who are as we do not speak having a competition in which people describe which piece of music originally got them into music. This mostly caught my attention because I actually wanted to do exactly the same thing a while back, and never got organized enough to actually pull it off. Still, perhaps the classical blogging community could have our own online introduction-sharing, online get together.
Perhaps I’ll do mine tomorrow.