I’ve always loved the idea of the “music of the spheres.” As completely ridiculous and obviously not true as it may be… but then as I was doing my homework for “Quantum Physics and Beyond” (a fun class, though a topic I can’t claim to know anything about…) I came across this explanation of string theory…

In this theory,

an elementary particle does not resemble

a point; rather it is like a tiny

rubber band that can vibrate in many

modes. The fundamental mode has the

lowest frequency; then there are higher

harmonics, which can be superimposed

on top of one another. There are an infinite

number of such modes, each of

which corresponds to a different elementary

particle.

(by Susskind, See http://staff.science.uva.nl/~jdeboer/gr04/susskind.pdf )

Music of the spheres? Music of the strings!

Ted Hearne’s new album Katrina Ballads was just released last Friday through New Amsterdam Records:

https://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/#Album/Katrina_Ballads

The album is something of a cantata which uses for its text primary source materials from people’s reactions to hurricane Katrina. It is a powerful and moving work which takes advantage of the variety of compositional techniques available today, and always in a way that feels natural. Throughout Katrina Ballads the sounds of jazz, rock, gospel, and avant garde concert music flow freely and convincingly between each other as if stylistic boundaries did not exist. The piece is perhaps best illustrated by a moment in the second to last movement when tenor Isaiah Robinson, singing words of Kanye West, belts out in a melismatic R&B style, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” and to really bring the point home, this collapses into a Gospel chant on the text, clapping and all – a powerful message, and a powerful piece. The singers and chamber orchestra, (or band), provide a fantastic and virtuosic performance for the album, and the recording is mixed for a very effective, full, ‘produced’ sound. I highly recommend it.

            I’ve always been very fond of music that is lamenting, gritty, earthy, dark, dissonant, disturbing – in a way, music that is painful. This isn’t to say that I dislike pleasant, relaxing, pretty music. Not at all, I am quite a fan of all sorts of affects in music, but I was just thinking: why do things I try to avoid in life – like pain – make for addictive elements in music?

I have a friend with very different taste in music who in high school limited her listening to mainly Mozart’s major key music.[1] We used to talk about music and we occasionally had trouble relating our playlists to each other. To her it was shocking that someone could embrace music that is so dark. To me it seemed odd that someone could be content with just the ‘pleasant.’ So I wonder, why would I want music to be anything but soothing and relaxing?

            This question made me think back to some research I did last semester on the Japanese Noise Composer Merzbow. Merzbow is a very fascinating musician. His music is extraordinarily dissonant; in fact, it is essentially constructed from electronic noise. I find that it can be very moving – full of a vibrant, visceral, primal energy.  In concerts though, he plays his music at volumes easily exceeding 120db. 120db is the pain threshold. I think this turns me off mostly because of the hearing loss this causes (my tinnitus is bad enough just from the subway in New York!).  In any case, Merzbow’s music is painful – that’s the point. The idea of being stuck in a Merzbow concert is actually scary. This thought reminds me of the last Bang on a Can marathon when I feared Dan Deacon’s performance would make my ears bleed. I didn’t dislike the music, but that was definitely an experience I don’t want to repeat (I like my ears, I want to keep them,) but I digress. Back to Merzbow, I found it quite fascinating when I was researching Merzbow, that his music was often packaged with Pornography when he was first starting out. Not just any pornography, but especially Bondage pornography – pornography specifically related to forced restrictions, and even pain. While doing some reading, I even came across an article that posited that music in general is a sadomasochistic endeavor (I’m not on campus so I can’t access JSTOR right now, but if you’re interested, the article is called Some Sadomasochistic Aspects of Musical Pleasure and it is by Reinhold Friedl, published in Leonardo Music Journal by The MIT Press). Without getting into my thoughts specifically on this article, it is certainly an interesting point, and aside from the physical pain involved with potential hearing loss, I don’t see anything wrong with painful music; as I said, pain in music can actually be quite appealing.

            So what is it about pain that can make it so great? In a sense, feeling pain in music allows us to let it into our systems in a safe and controlled way, so we can stop denying its presence in our life and flush it out of our systems. In another sense though, I feel that the very essence of pain is something fundamental to our nature, something hidden in the earthy, the primal, and the visceral.  I think that in feeling pain we feel the gritty resistance that is the very fabric of life. I think this point is made particularly well in some of David Lang’s pieces like “The Passing Measures”  (1998) and “The So-Called Laws of Nature” (2002). In these piece and some others, Lang dispenses with most of the ‘stuff’ of music and gets straight down to that painful, gritty, gentle, but persistent tug that time has on the living. Phrasing it this way brings to mind Lukas Foss’s amazing composition “Time Cycle” (1960) which I definitely recommend for those who don’t know it. Perhaps then, pain is part of the fundamental thing we are all searching for – after all, isn’t the sweetest sweet a bitter sweet? It carries with it the same gentle gritty tug. Something of a nostalgia for transient beauty that temporality gives the living.

           

The other day on the bus I listened to Thomas Adés’s Piano Quintet, and afterwards to his performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet on the same album. I had heard both of these pieces before, but something struck me as I was listening this time. As I was listening to the Schubert I thought about the harmonic changes, the chord prolongations, the textures, and they all seemed so much more than what we are taught about in music theory. In Schubert’s music, (in a lot of music for that matter), they tell as a story. Harmonies are like places and gestures are like struts.

With this in mind I thought about Adés’s music, and I realized that the idea of music telling a story is a particularly fruitful metaphor with it. Adés’s music is exciting, often varied in texture, heterogeneous. Sounds, melodies, textures, harmonies, flow freely into and out of Adés’s music, and though the sounds and textures are all skillfully constructed, Adés’s skill is most apparent in how he fits them together. Far from the baroque where a single affect, and often a single texture would dominate and be ‘spun out’ for the length of a piece, in Adés’s music sounds, affects, often things that sounds like they were pulled straight from somewhere (but maybe stepped on along their journey), are pieced together to form a vibrant patch quilt.  Adés uses diverse sounds and textures to tell a story of sorts, piecing them together in the way that a story teller tells a story. I guess it’s not surprising then that Adés counts two operas among his relatively small oeuvre.

This whole idea of music telling a story also might shed some light on some of the overly cerebral homogenous music that is out there. Without naming names, because a lot of it is very amazing, in short I will just say that perhaps sometimes we get caught up in how we are telling a story – the skill and the craft – and forget to make sure the story is interesting in the first place.

http://www.wecansolveit.org/

Seriously, this is no joke, let's do this, lets end our dependence on oil once and for all. We have to do it for the environment, for global warming, for freer and fairer foreign policy (not to say we can't have better foreign policy now by simply leaving the world alone, but surely this is a step in the right direction that will free us and open our options). And speaking of foreign policy, yes this would be very expensive, but look at the ridiculous war we are waging instead! Instead of bolstering the military industrial complex's power grip on our country, we would be boosting our economy and ensuring that we maintain our status as the leaders of the technological world.