Radiohead is one of those bands that has a huge following of people who analyzeeverythingthey do and try to make a huge sweeping idea out of it all. And, from my experience, Radiohead is also one of those bands that is seen as “legit” in the concert music community. That’s interesting in itself, but it’s true that the music they produce is really quite great. I’m always impressed at how much I can discover when listening back through OK Computer or Kid A. And their latest record, The King of Limbs, has been a recent favorite of mine. Dear listener, if you aren’t a hip college student like I am, check out them Radioheads. It’s great stuff, from OddslotCreep, to House of Cards.
But this is all beating around the bush to what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about Jonny Greenwood.
Jonny Greenwood, everybody!
Greenwood is the lead guitarist/keyboardist/everything player for Radiohead. He is one of the big creative forces in the band, and as wikipedia informs me, was named #48 in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” That’s pretty high praise, there. He also does a variety of work alone. Notably, he was the composer for the soundtrack of There Will Be Blood.
So this guy is mad talented. But his latest solo record makes my heart explode with pride, as a “classical” composer, myself. He just released a solo record in collaboration with (wait for it…) Krzysztof Penderecki.
This is a big deal guys. Penderecki is a Polish composer, widely known for his piece, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The piece pushes the limit of what music is, what sounds a string orchestra can make, and also haunts my nightmares to this very day. But don’t take it from me, listen to it below, and be afraid.
(Composer nerd note: This piece is a great instance of what goes into a title. This piece was originally titled after the length of the piece itself-8’37”. Later, Penderecki changed the title to the very programmatic and evocative, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Is the piece less valid because Penderecki changed the name later? Is it still a lament for the victims of that horrible attack? How much does a title mean?!)
So that is a scary piece of music. An absolutely incredible piece of music, but by no means tame. And Jonny Greenwood released an album with this piece on it! The rest of the CD is another piece by Penderecki (called Polymorphia) and two original compositions (in a similar vein to the Penderecki!) by Greenwood, called Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia. And Greenwood’s pieces actually stand pretty well up to the Penderecki! That’s a pretty big deal, considering that Threnody is considered a staple of 20th Century Avant Garde Repertoire (too many qualifiers, there).
Take a listen to Popcorn Superhet Receiver….
(Also of note: Greenwood borrowed a bit from this piece in his score to There Will Be Blood. Interesting. Also might have cost him an Academy Award. )
I love this, though. The rock music industry and polish avant garde are not as far apart as one would think. In fact, the raw unpolished sound that Greenwood can get from his guitar in Radiohead isn’t too far away from the glissandos and rawness of this collection of strings. Music is music, regardless of what makes it up. And Greenwood is a shining example of that.
I encourage you all to buy the album. Because it’s really quite incredible and I doubt you have anything like it in your iTunes right now.
Let’s talk a little about the death of classical music. Because nothing pushes my buttons more than to suggest that classical music is dead. It’s my humble opinion that “classical†music has just adapted a new name, place, and time. It’s just as relevant as Adele, and just as emotionally potent.
Now I use air quotes around the word “classical†because it’s such a misnomer. True Classical Music, with a capital C, refers to the music produced exclusively in the time period from about 1750-1820. It’s when people like Mozart and Haydn were active. Now, I love me a little Mozart as much as the next guy, but that music is old. It’s great, but it’s very, very old. We live in a modern day society, right? And there are still some orchestras around playing this “classical†music? So where are our Mozarts and Haydns? Where are the people producing music that speaks to us as a modern generation? And the answer…well it requires a little history lesson.
"I'm old and I'm morose about it"
Near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, composers started to get a little ambitious. They were fed up with the old style and how music followed exact patterns, so they started to push the boundaries of music more and more. This meant a lot of things (levels of complexity in the music started to pick up, composers started doing some weird things) but suffice to say, listeners’ reactions were all across the charts. Some people cheered on this new music, others rioted at the premieres (See: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring). Music really started to push some buttons, go farther and father out, and the audience started to deplete a bit.
All the while, this crazy thing called “jazz†started popping up.
Pictured: "this crazy thing called jazz"
And by the 1950s, we’ve got jazz and folk music and r&b and full on rock and roll. All of these genres outside of classical music. We have the creation of what is now referred to as “â€pop music.†Because of a lot of factors, audiences grew to like this music in much greater numbers than the “classical†composers of the time. This created a bit of tension between these two groups. And you can still feel that tension now. Fans of “classical†music are quick to point out that their music is much more intelligent and high-class. Fans of pop music criticize classical music as being lofty, boring, and much too stuck up.
Anyway, this is a huge oversimplification that sets the scene for where classical music went to. A bunch of young kids were raised on pop music AND classical music. They grew up loving the Beatles just as much as Beethoven. And they eventually went to school for music, but wanted to breech this barrier that separated the music they loved. A whole group of composers wanted to create music that wasn’t just “classical,†but was rather true to all the music that they enjoyed.
The answer to this in the 60s and 70s was a movement called minimalism. This music favored repetitive structures, a unifying process to create a piece, and mixed instrumentation (that is, whoever the composers could find to play their music). The sound owed a lot to rock music, african music, and eastern thought. The idea was that you could experience music in a very different time structure―something that hinted at a much more primal and basic human level. Repetition was a natural human sensation that could be exploited through music. A great example of this aesthetic is Steve Reich:
Or Phillip Glass:
Personally, I find a lot of beauty in this music. It’s incredibly simple, but really quite striking.
But how about people that are even younger than that? Members of the new generation? Well, let’s start with one of the most well-known groups, the Bang-on-a-Can All Stars. This is a New-York based group that pioneered the idea of a classical “band.†They have a set instrumentation and tour with new music being produced by composers and artists that want to collaborate. Here is a piece by a Bang-on-a-Can composer and professor of composition at The Yale School of Music, David Lang-
Notice the beat-based structure that sounds a lot closer to prog rock than it does Beethoven. And yet, David Lang is a classically trained composer, one that has studied all the greats. He is trying to write music that he wants to hear, regardless of what kind of genre it falls under.
Todd Reynolds is another name I’ll throw out as well. Reynolds is a composer and a violinist also out of New York. He writes in a way very similar to David Lang, which is to say he ignores boundaries of genre and just writes what he wants to hear.
It’s also worth noting the artists that aren’t considered to be composers in the classical tradition. This means people and groups like Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bjork, and the Dirty Projectors. These folks all owe a lot to this weird classical tradition, and, I would argue, are some of the great composers of our time. Songs like The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens are just great demonstrators of this.
Besides the obvious instrumentation that owes itself to the classical realm, Stevens’ whole aesthetic is informed by the shifting timbres, experimentation, and the violent energy that modern classical music has.
To mention these artists and not mention their backup groups would quite a travesty. These artists, like Sufjan, often enlist help from musicians who are also active in the classical community. See Colin Stetson or yMusic as great examples. Stetson has toured and recorded with Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Yeasayer, and a whole host of other “non-classical†groups. But he also operates his own solo efforts, which are incredibly well thought out and simply amazing to listen to. They are certainly within an experimental classical tradition:
He uses his instrument (bass saxophone) to its full potential, exploiting it to generate all sorts of sounds that you wouldn’t think could come from a bass sax. This is a huge scores aspect of the modern classical aesthetic―experimentation with generating new and interesting sounds from instruments that simply weren’t made to do such things.
Along the same lines, yMusic is a group of musicians who have toured and recorded with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, The National, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, Bjork, and lots of other awesome acts as well. Here they are performing with Shara Worden (yet another one of these genre bending artists who are just CRAZY GOOD)
yMusic was founded with the idea of overlapping the pop and classical worlds, an endeavor sometimes referred to as “indie-classical†or “post-classical.†I just see it as great music played by great musicians.
So. Classical music. Dead? Not at all. The musicians and composers trained to be “classical†have just created a new world in music where genre doesn’t exist. You can find these academically trained composers writing just about anything these days, from indie rock to orchestral concert music. Good music is good music, regardless of what people call it. Classical music never died. It just became more relevant.
I remember coming late to a party in second grade. It felt really awkward. I was an outsider in this fantastical amazing best birthday party ever. Everyone was already off playing with the new toys, and I arrived late with my small gift of what was perhaps the GREATEST COMPUTER GAME EVER to my second-grade self, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? But this is just to say that I think I might just be late to the party on most things. With the exception of Rebecca Black’s masterpiece, Friday, I’m pretty sure I’m one of the last people to find things out on the internet. But not Friday, that was my JAM before it was everyone else’s.
So I was exploring the internet this week and somehow stumbled upon a treasure trove of magic and wonder, a twitter feed called @Horse_ebooks. It’s been around for about a year now, apparently everyone was into it a year ago. And now it’s old news. But it’s new news to me, so you are going to get a blog post about it!
Look at that majesty.
Horse_ebooks is a spam account. It is meant to try and get you to buy things (digitized books, helpfully named “ebooksâ€). But spam account are flagged by twitter, and hopefully deleted, so as a way of getting around this, Horse_ebooks posts random excerpts from the ebooks which it is trying to sell (or at least it did, for a while. Now it seems to post things from all over. For a more detailed look at that, see here). With these random text tweets, it looks like a user who just HAPPENS to post a link encouraging you to buy this ebook, but also look at all these purely text posts that CLEARLY mean this is a real person. The result: utmost delight.
Artist's recreation of my utmost delight.
These random snippets of text are the ultimate non sequitur joke. There is something so wonderful in the truth and panic in “Do you get stressed out because there is NOT ENOUGH TIME,†the humor of “Have you ever made a phone call to a man and later regretted it? Have you ever hesitated before,†and the Gertrude Stein-ness of “Hesitate. Did not hesitate (to) Do not hesitate (to) Do not hesitate to accept Do not hesitate to refuse Do not hesitate to reply If you do.†And all of these were found in the same daylong period. Horse_ebooks is a goldmine of wisdom (How can I know if rabbits are playing or fighting?), of philosophical discourse (There is not a single vacant room throughout the entire infinite hotel.), of the mundane (The dimly lit cocktail hour oozes class and sophistication. I recognize some of my accounting professors), and of the absurd (Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mortgage Mort gage Mortgage Mortgage Mortggge Mortgage Mortgage).
To me, the whole thing bears a remarkable similarity to dada and surrealist art and poetry. Meant to find some kind of subconscious meaning within the absurd, the these artists would often play games, like exquisite corpse, to generate artistic material that was free from the ego and from personal choice. The thought was that the subconscious would form it’s own conclusions and find beauty in these random strings of phrases. I certainly can feel that pull in Horse_ebooks, a desire to form meaning, even though it all is meaningless. The mind makes connections that are wholly individual and meaningful. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s quite a beautiful and human sentiment. Finding sense in the senseless. Aww. I’m all inspired now.
But what else is it that draws me so much to the unrestrained and anarchist beauty of Horse_ebooks? I feel a part of it is the unrelenting non sequitur humor. The hilarity in finding something that has nothing to do with anything else. The inevitable question of “where in the WORLD could that quote come from.†But there is also a sense of discovery. Horse_ebooks feels to me like a worldwide bathroom stall, upon which the randomly generated graffiti of an anonymous horse has been written. There is something strangely personal about it all—these words had to come from some person. But now all that remains are the few words tweeted by a spambot, left to be mulled over and drawn in comic-form. But still, there is something really magical in finding the profound amid the absurd.
And so, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with a dada poem generated by randomly selecting words from the above post. I hope you enjoy. (and also that make your own!)
by For And I my things get a in form the the Friday, But Mortgage). kind me a real of sequitur has quote “left†pretty you can artistic that Black’s is hesitate pull I from.â in
Happy March everyone! And happy end of spring break! My spring break was wonderfully productive and was in no way filled with dormancy.
As we all make the sad, sad transition back into school, I want to talk a bit about my favorite topic, the world of classical music. But! Before you stop reading and write me off as an old fashioned boring old guy in a suit that goes to opera and comments on the divinity and “high class†of the music that I’m listening to! I want to talk about where classical music intersects with popular music, where classical music is TODAY and why YOU should care. Because you should. It’s cool stuff.
So I want to start with how I got into this world of contemporary music by highlighting one of my favorite groups, a new music ensemble called Alarm Will Sound.
Alarm Will Sound could be called something like a “chamber orchestra,†if you wanted to give it a name. It has string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments, and they are all arranged around one conductor. It’s a “chamber†group because it has so few numbers: only one or two musicians per part (compared to a full symphony orchestra, which has quite a few musicians playing the same part…). All the musicians in Alarm Will Sound are classically trained—all have graduated with at least one degree in music. In fact, they started as a group of students at the Eastman School of Music. But what makes Alarm Will Sound different, in my mind, in their willingness to explore and be open to all kinds of music. As it says in the intro video above, AWS’s members have experience in all kinds of music, from world music to jazz. And this shows in their output: in 2005 they released an album of Aphex Twin covers, called Acoustica. Go back and read that again. Cover album. Aphex Twin. Y’know! The electronic artist, who made tracks like this…
and Alarm Will Sound’s cover?
This is a “classical†ensemble that sees electronic music as just as valid as anything that has Beethoven’s name on it. It’s such a wonderfully forward thinking strategy! And the things they produce are just really cool.
They also came out with another album in 2009, called A/Rhythmia, a project highlighting rhythmically challenging works. And this is where I first discovered AWS and fell in love with their music. In particular, I really dug this piece, called Yo Shakespeare by Michael Gordon….
But before I start to melt into uncompromising praise for a group of musicians I’ve never seen live, I’ll just take note of what an ensemble like AWS says as to the current state of music. To me, it says that there are no longer any boundaries. Genre is a meaningless term. All music is good music, and all music deserves a listen. So check out this “classical†music and see why I love it so much.
And I’ll leave you with one last video, Alarm Will Sound’s performance of Paul Dooley’s Point Blank. Paul is a doctoral student at the School of Music ,Theatre and Dance. Go Blue.
I’m Corey, the newest member of the arts,ink team! I’ll be posting every Sunday, and I’m super excited to be here! Exclamation points! But. I’m terribly afraid this blogging will turn into an egotistical rampage where all I do is talk about myself. And no one wants to read that. So let’s take this first blog post and do just that. Let’s talk about who I am, where I come from, and why you should trust any word that comes out of my mouth…
I’m from a small town in south-east Michigan, near Toledo, Ohio. I’m a sophomore here at UM, studying Music Composition. I’m really into contemporary art, and fancy myself an amateur visual artist. I am a DJ at the local radio station, WCBN (listen to me live from 1-3am on Monday night/Tuesday mornings!). I dig most music, from hip-hop to avant garde jazz. Some of my favorite bands/musicians include tUnE-yArDs, Sufjan Stevens, Jack’s Mannequin, Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Alarm Will Sound, and much much more….Most of my posts will probably be about music, but I’m exploring everything around, so expect some theatre, performance art and whatever else is floating around my mind.
But let’s talk a little about studying music composition, because this tends to raise the most questions with people I meet. This means I take classes in music, but I take lessons in composition. And writing music is what I focus on. I do play a few instruments (trumpet, piano, accordion), but I’m not that good (still pretty good though!). As a composer, I do write “classical†music. But I have a real issue with that term. That’s worth another blog post entirely, but I don’t feel that just because my music is played in a concert hall, that it should be any less fun/interesting/relevant than anything else you might listen to. So, as a result, I like to explore ideas of genre in my music. Perhaps the best example of that is my string trio with accordion, blacklight…
In blacklight, I tried to incorporate a club music aesthetic into an otherwise very modern and dissonant soundscape. It’s somewhere between a love song to Lady Gaga and a critique of the culture that exists around clubs.
Some of my other work you can find at my soundcloud, but I’ll also link to this interesting piece, called the radio keeps saying the end is near, or something like that. This is a piece I wrote last Friday, in a TWENTY FOUR HOUR PERIOD. It was a super stressful “Composer Marathon†event that the school of music put on. Essentially, I was given the ensemble of Cello and Viola at 8pm on Friday night, and was expected to perform a piece on Saturday at 8pm. This is what happened…
It’s not a great piece, but I’m proud of it, for sure. It still needs some work still, but it was fun to do! Particularly to add myself to the ensemble and start screaming at the audience, THAT’s pretty fun.
Anyway, that’s me and my music! I’m really excited to be posting here and look forward to next week, where the subject won’t even be me!
