This time it’s Symphony no.3 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg written around 1950, which I’ve listened to about half a dozen times in the past week or so (and I mean listened to, not  ‘had it on in the background’). Weinberg (1919-1996) was born in Poland but lived much of his life in the USSR and was a friend of Shostakovich. His music is generally tonal from what I’ve heard, and this 32-minute symphony makes a very good starting point. Part of its accessibility is its use of some folk themes. I particularly recommend the first and third movements. The third movement has a very beautiful example of changing from a major chord to its tonic minor (i.e. G to Gm), this idea being used as an important musical idea in the movement. It’s very expressive.

The recording is on the Chandos label and is a hybrid SACD – so you can play it in standard stereo, SACD stereo or SACD 5.0. Chandos have recorded several other discs of Weinberg.

In the realm of popular music a recent project has set me thinking again about the importance of various different aspects of songwriting and recording. I’ve been struck recently by the way that the musical language of popular music does change over the decades. It might be assumed to be always the same, but there are trends for using certain chord changes or progressions or certain scales for melodies. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written about these per se.

My current research has made me feel more strongly the importance of arrangement in songwriting and recording. In many cases you can line up scores of songs with the same basic progression and structure and what distinguishes them (apart from lyrics and the character of the performer) is the arrangement. Sometimes the instruments you choose make all the difference. I dealt with this subject in my boook Arranging Songs and I may have to return to it.

I hope to have news of the next book project to share with you in awhile.

A couple of interesting points came up during the process. When I started it my intention was to sketch some music for a viola plus string orchestra piece. I chose viola plus piano staves to sketch on so I could focus on the musical ideas without worrying about what to do with five staves of string orchestra (violins I, violins II, violas, cellos, basses). The piano has often been used as a sketch-pad by composers trying out ideas, and I guess this continues to be so even if the piano is a virtual one (on a computer notation system) rather than a physical one. (The computer piano never needs a piano tuner …).

First thing that happened was that about 5 minutes of material in, a melody turned up which simply elbowed my previous structural aims out of the picture. As a consequence I saw that my sketch was going to break into three separate pieces and not be a single span.

The second result came after 6 days, when I had some material for all three parts. I wanted to try arranging the middle section for a small orchestra. The viola melody didn’t sound right on the new instrument I’d planned, and the accompaniment had become sufficiently pianistic that I realised it would take a long time to sort out a way of doing it with a string section. Not having the time to pursue these problems I decided to leave the piece as it started: viola and piano. Maybe I’ll try turning it into a piano quartet or quintet instead. Moral of the story: when sketching on piano beware of many arpeggio figures with the sustain pedal down!

As for the viola plus strings piece, the next step will be to have those six staves open and compose onto them from the start so as to keep the idiom in keeping with strings.

D#m has the highest-pitched root note of any minor chord on the guitar. The root note is on the fifth string at the sixth fret – this is the lowest available D# – but this is also the 11th fret on the sixth string! Almost an octave higher than the guitar’s lowest note, E. When it comes to resonance, D#m stands at the opposite range of the spectrum to Em (022000) or Am (x02210).

[By the way, if you're not familiar with this chord shorthand, x = a string not played, 0 = an open string played, and the numbers are then frets. It goes from the lowest pitched string to the highest 654321, EADGBE]

The usual way to play D#m is with an Am shape (x02210) turned into a barre chord and moved to the sixth fret (x68876). There’s nothing difficult about this, but it is unusual in placing you a fair distance from the comfort zone of the first position and all the easy open string chords. To get to an open string chord involves a significant change of position. The chords that D#m belongs with are likewise mostly barre chords in the middle of the neck.

D#m first appears in the key of B major as chord III, then in F# major as VI and then in C#major as II. Thinking about its enharmonic equivalent of Ebm (the other way of writing it) it first appears in the key of Db major as chord II, Gb major as chord VI and Cb major as chord III. You might also use it as a IVm in Bbm major and a Vm in Ab major. Most of these keys are extreme sharp or flat keys – and the guitar doesn’t like them because it isn’t at its most resonant in them – loss of usuable open strings, lots of barre chords. When guitarists write songs in these keys it is often by the default of either using a capo to get rid of the barres or by detuning a semitone. Detuning the guitar by a semitone gives you D#m with an Em shape. If you capo at the first fret you can treat D#m as a Dm chord and proceed from there; with the capo at the sixth fret it will be Am.

Its the very awkwardness of D#m which offers some interesting possibilities for songwriters on the guitar. Think of it as a jumping-off point that might lead to an exotic chord sequence, or a sequence in a difficult key that could be released into an easy key in going from a verse to a chorus. If you find ways of connecting it to freindlier open string chords you may stumble on an exciting progression.

Some songs that use D#m: George Harrison ‘Awaiting On You All’ (in B), David Bowie ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ (first chord of the chorus), The Jam ‘Going Underground’ (chorus), The Beatles ‘If I Fell’ (first chord).

I was excited in December by the news that a copy of David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars performing ‘Jean Genie’ live on British chart music TV show Top of the Pops had been found. ‘Jean Genie’ had been released as a single and featured on Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane. It was thought that this clip – first broadcast on January 4 1973 – had been erased by the BBC many years ago. Many classic TV programmes met the same fate. It turned out that cameraman John Henshall had asked for a copy and kept it.

What was special about this performance was that it was genuinely live. Almost all Top of the Pops performances during its long history were either completely mimed to the original backing track, or part-mimed (i.e. lead vocal was live) to a backing track re-recorded by BBC TV musicians and the band. It has always irritated me the way the BBC have constantly devalued the meaning of the word ‘performance’ when describing old TOTP clips by applying it to entirely mimed or mostly mimed appearances – which of course were cheaper and safer for both the TV people and the singers / bands – but are not music-making.

In the case of Bowie’s January 3rd 1973 performance of ‘Jean Genie’ everything was live. If you look closely at the two half Marshall stacks the band are plugged into you can see their lights are on and there are tell-tale mikes in fromt of the speaker cabinets. The result is a glam-rock classic delivered deliciously raw and punchy, and conveys a thrill no mimed version could match. It departs from the studio version in various ways and has the odd mistake (Trevor Bolder on bass switches to the chorus too early toward the end), as well as a wilder Mick Ronson solo and more harmonica from Bowie – including what sounds like two blasts of the Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ harmonica riff toward the end.

You can see the clip on youtube.

Several examples came to mind. One was trying to play both parts of a twin lead guitar line. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, ‘twin lead guitar’ is where two guitarists take a note each and play parallel melodic phrases, usually based on thirds and sixths. With each holding only one note these are generally easy to play and the notes can be subject to typical techniques of bending and vibrato. This arrangement style was characteristic of British bands such as Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash, and there are elements of it in Queen’s studio records (where Brian May would overdub such lines himself) and The Darkness. Providing the lines are not too quick, it can be possible to play both at once. This effort taught me some things about how thirds and sixths work on the guitar. To make the lines sound a little different from each other I discovered that playing the lower note with a pick and the higher note with a finger helped. And trying to do a double-trill was certainly a challenge.

Another example occurred when I tried to emulate Mark Knopfler’s playing on some of the early Dire Straits tracks. The crucial technology for his sound was a Fender Strat, often with the single-coil pick-ups in positions 2 and 4, and played with thumb and fingers. I only had a guitar with double-coil pickups, which wasn’t ideal. I found that by winding the tone down a bit, using thumb and fingers and being careful with the touch,  and also playing nearer the fingerboard helped get a little closer to the sound.

A third example arouse when I wanted to emulate the sound of a 12-string on a 6-string. In some accompaniment figures which are based on simple chords it is possible to look for octaves above the notes which are in reach. That goes a little way to imitating the sound of a picked 12-string.

None of these things could replace the original thing. But they all helped my technique in terms of extending what I could get out of the guitar I had and learning more about the fingerboard and how much guitar technique is in the sense of touch.

I recently mentioned Vaughan Williams’ Symphony 8 as great music for this time of year. I could add to it Ravel’s Mother Goose suite (Ma Mere l’Oye), Prokoviev’s Lieutenant Kije (with the famous Troika that featured in Woody Allen’s Love and Death film), Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, Arnold Bax’s Christmas Eve, Peter Warlock’s ‘Bethlehem Down’, Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’, and Kate Bush’s ‘December Will Be Magic Again’.

I have plans to make more of my songs and music available in the future, time permitting.

Badfinger’s other claim to songwriting fame is that they wrote ‘Without You’ which Harry Nilsson had a huge hit with. I know of few more revealing comparisons between an original and a cover version, in terms of changed harmony and arrangement and feel. The Badfinger version seems a bit ramshackle and would never have been as bit a hit, but has its charm and may appeal to those who think Harry’s version is over-dramatic and slick.

I also watched an interesting documentary on Simon and Garfunkel. Readers of my book Inside Classic Rock Tracks will know that I hold the heretical view that ‘Bridge Over Trouble Water’ is not as great a song as ‘America’. But the song that stood out in the film was ‘Only Living Boy In New York’. This is one of those songs which has a strange power which seems unaccountable given the relative simplicity and undramatic nature of its materials. Partly it is a classic example of the poetry of reverb – something which has been undervalued for a long while in popular music because there has been a fashion for in-your-face dry productions (a trend Fleet Foxes bucked to great success with their debut album). The other aspect is that it is a touching song about friendship rather than romantic love. Unlike ‘You Got A Friend’ (or ‘Bridge OTW’), there is no sense that the speaker is congratulating themselves for being A Friend You Can Depend On, which lends those songs a slight whiff of egoistic self-approval. Instead, it is almost as if the singer of ‘Only Living Boy’ seems touched and startled to discover how much this friendship meant and its value.

Meanwhile, in the world of orchestral sample libraries, the chaps over at Vienna Symphonic Library continue to perform wonders in the world of computer sample music for composers such as myself, having just released an upgraded version of their software Vienna Instruments Pro with its nifty ‘auto-humanize feature’ whereby you can deliberately add a hint of mis-tuning and mis-timing to make your sampled string quartet or orchestra sound more realistic. Fantastic stuff. If you visit their website they have music examples you can listen to, including an astonishing rendition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring using only orchestral samples.

Christmas is fast approaching. One of the pieces of music I save for December is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no.8. written when he was in his early 80s in about 1956. He added a number of bells, etc to his orchestra for this piece, making it great for winter, though it has no actual winter programme. It has many of the beauties of his music with a slightly unworldly twist here and there which is typical of his last two symphonies. I’m delighted to learn that a DVD of a performance of it from 1972 has just been released. Sir Adrian Boult was the conductor. I don’t know what the sound quality will be like but it should be worth a watch.

Since I last blogged I’ve had tentative discussions about another book in my Backbeat songwriting series, which would appear in 2013. I’ve been working on another writing project not to do with songwriting and making good progress with that.

I have a short article in the Music You Might Like series in the new edition of the journal of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

Talking of books I can recommend record producer Tony Visconti’s biography Bolan, Bowie and the Brooklyn Boy.

On the creative front I’ve revised two scores for string orchestra – ‘From Cornish Springs’ and ‘The High Oaks’ – and have worked on generating new audio for them. I’m now ready to write the strings for Kate Bush’s next album … should she need me.

I was also writing some acoustic guitar instrumentals, but that project has got pushed out for lack of time.

Since I last wrote the acoustic player Bert Jansch has died. I interviewed him back in the 1990s around the time of the release of Crimson Moon. I always found his music a little on the dour side; much preferring the brighter, more mercurial John Renbourn for folk-baroque British guitar.

I was intrigued to discover recently that the unfinished second symphony of E. J. Moeran has been completed and recorded on the Dutton Epoch label. First listens suggest it was a worthwhile thing to do. Unfinished symphonies are an interesting topic. Moeran’s first symphony (Symphony in G) from the late 1930s (I think) is a very enjoyable piece. There’s a good recording on Naxos. It owes something to Sibelius, who was dominating the world of the symphony in the 1930s and 1940s, but not to the point of it spoiling Moeran’s music.