Classical Convert

Hot Pre-Retreat Thursday Type Linkage

Well, my presentations are sort of done and I am half packed. And we are leaving tomorrow morning. Clearly this is an excellent time to be blogging! I dunno how internetty it will be out in the Catskills, so there might not be anything new up here until Sunday. In the meanwhile, get your teeth into the following morsels:

• There’s a piece in the Guardian about what makes a good riff (From Beethoven to Deep Purple) which seems particularly relevant given the comments in one recent post.
• Also related to that post (the bit about classical music relying on scores whereas pop/rock relies on performances) is this story about a band called Deerhoof deciding to “leak” the sheet music in advance of the actual recording. The video is kind of annoying, but the idea is kind of interesting.
• Speaking of Deerhoof, NPR has a stream in which a performance of theirs was paired with “The Rite Of Spring Remixed” by the Metropolis Ensemble. The concept behind this Rite of Springing is that the sound from a live orchestra is altered in real-time via laptops. Although I think the idea is really neat, I have to admit that on the whole the sound seems a bit too spiky and unbalanced. There are some stand-out moments though (like around 8:40-9:30, and 18:00ish). You can listen to a stream of it on NPR here.
• The Chicago Sinfonietta are doing a concert-by-vote. What if everyone writes in 4′33″ and the helicopter quartet?

See write/you all again soon…!

Tags: chicago sinfonietta, deerhoof, metropolis ensemble, rite of spring remixed

An Example Of Why I Don’t Get Enough Done At Work

This week, I am mostly preparing for our lab “retreat”. This is deservedly inserted between quotation marks, as along the way the retreat concept has morphed from something fairly enjoyable into something fairly terrifying. We are all required to perform multiple presentations on topics which we are entirely unfamiliar with. Starting at 8:30am and finishing at 9:00pm. All weekend.

One of my assigned topics is “Cohesins” which are the proteins that stick your DNA together when your cells divide, so that the copied DNA can be properly distributed between the new cells. Being a good boy (temporarily) I pored over the aneuploidy page on wikipedia. Aneuploidy is what happens when the division gets screwed up and the DNA isn’t divided equally between the two new cells, leading to genetic disorders like Down’s syndrome in which cells have an extra chromosome.

I ended up clicking through the various genetic diseases, getting more and more depressed about how easy it is for the body to accidentally mess itself up. This lead to the discovery of the disorder entitled blue-diaper syndrome, in which a genetic malfunction causes the body to have problems metabolizing the amino acid called tryptophan. This ends up instead being degraded by bacteria in the intestine, which produces a chemical called indole, itself a precursor to indigo dye, staining diapers blue.

I didn’t realize that indigo was a very specific chemical, and so this lead to a very detailed reading of the page on indigo dye, and further to the following company which sells woad seeds. It is now my desire to grow woad in my garden plot next year, extract indigo dye, stain some cloth and sew a wall hanging with the chemical formula for indigo on it:

And then I realized that I’d spent half an hour researching and planning this instead of finishing my presentation.

Tags: cell division, cohesin, indigo

The Further Demise of Physical Media

Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.

I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:

Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.

Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.

Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.

In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?

Tags: cd, mp3, music, server

Hot Wednesday Linkage

Whoah there tiger, we haven’t had Wednesday before. Are you excited yet?

• Nintendo announced the impending arrival of Wii music. Well, impending in about 5 months. I know some of you are pretty familiar with the system, but for those living in caves and under rocks and stuff, the Wii lets you control stuff on screen via the motion of your hands and (recently) feet. This will allow you to virtually “play” various instruments, or more accurately, as one commenter put it: “you can just spaz around, and the game makes it into music”. If it’s anything like Wii sports it’ll be completely unrealistic, but hugely fun. Did I mention that there will be a conducting game in there as well?
• There’s a new (?) classical music video site in town. The styling looks very sexy and Web 2.0, but after discovering that everything costs a very un-Web 2.0 sum of money I promptly ran away. Those of you who aren’t stingy graduate students might be interested, though.
• We’re proud to be number 29

Tags: classical music, linkage, wii music

Timbre!

Timbre is a beautifully dyslexic word. It is also the subject of a recent post over at Black Dogs (one of the rare blogrolled blogs I really regularly read, and not just for the food and gratuitous cleavage) in which R.A.D. Stainforth discusses the topic of orchestras covering rock songs, and vice versa. His particular complaint is that whoever orchestrated Queen for the RPO decided to do it in a fairly mundane fashion. Instead of rearranging the songs in a musically interesting way, they decided to simply let the novelty of the re-instrumentation sell the performance.

The thing that really interested me was the issue of timbre. Stainforth reckons that whoever orchestrated the music failed to recognize that this is a defining feature of much rock/pop music. Or maybe that shouldn’t be rock/pop… perhaps a more appropriate description is music which is primarily heard in a pre-recorded fashion.

It’s probably exactly because the music is pre-recorded as opposed to being performed live that there are such possibilities for a varied sonic palette. Sounds can be layered, altered, edited, without needing to conform to the requirement that live performers with instruments must be able to reproduce the sounds.

As Mr. S points out, this overabundance of timbre in non-classical music means that listeners who come to classical from this direction (like me) can have a hard time adjusting to the relatively limited amount of sounds an orchestra can produce. After a year or so of listening your ears adjust and it’s easier to pick stuff out, but initially everything just sounds kind of “orchestra-ey”.

Is there any particular reason why “classical” music has to be able to be performed live? It seems in a sense that this is a defining feature of the genre, that it must be reproducible. The unit of classical musical creation is the score, not the recording. This reminds me of the process (a bit too close to my heart) of writing science papers, where an experiment (and thus a publication) is totally useless unless it contains enough information for someone else to reproduce it. Classical music is fundamentally open-source.

Can anyone think of examples of music considered “classical” which doesn’t conform to this conception? Or alternatively, examples of music which might be considered classical if only they did conform to it?

Tags: black dogs, classical music, music