Notes from a composer’s journal
Last week I composed a new work for piano and viola. It’s called Three Yeats Poems and is in three sections, and lasts about 15-16 minutes. This is just a first draft. The three poems by W.B.Yeats are I – News for the Delphic Oracle, II – The Wild Swans at Coole, III All Souls Night. This is not a setting of the words, but purely instrumental music.
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.
The chord that dare not speak its name …
… which is … D#m. I’ve been playing a couple of songs recently which feature this chord and it suddenly struck me what an odd case it is on the guitar. I decided to have a think about why this should be. It’s a chord which guitarists don’t use that often, and nor do songwriters writing on the guitar. Musicians who play and write on the piano may wonder what the fuss is – it’s just another chord, right? Well, on the guitar not all chords are equal. This is for a number of reasons – including the ease of playing, the number of open strings, etc. I discuss this in the early chapters of my book Chord Master.
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).
Lost Bowie clip screened
Happy New Year everyone.
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.
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Making do on guitar
The other night I was talking to a guitar student about my experience of trying to get certain sounds on the guitar without the right technology, and how useful things came out of this lack. I thought this would make a useful post here.
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’.
Free audio track
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I have plans to make more of my songs and music available in the future, time permitting.
Beatle echoes, Simon and Garfunkel, and a festive English symphony
I recently saw some of the new documentary film about George Harrison, Living in the Material World, which was interesting and enjoyable. Coincidentally, I was reminded of the fact that all four Beatles had memorable solo records in 1970-71: George with singles such as ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life’, John and Yoko with ‘Power to the People’ and ‘Instant Karma’, Paul with ‘Another Day’, and Ringo with ‘It Don’t Come Easy’. I thought I would mention some songs by the group Badfinger who were signed to the Apple label. Few bands had such a tragic history, as a read of their Wikipedia page will make plain. If Badfinger are unknown to you, Beatles fans should try to listen to the songs ‘Come and Get It’ (their first hit, written by McCartney), ‘No Matter What’ and ‘Day After Day’, the latter two songs being superb variations on the late 60s Beatle sound. The vocal on ‘Day After Day’ (sung by Pete Ham?) is very McCartney and the slide guitar is very much in the Harrison mould (maybe it was Harrison?).
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.
Play Great Guitar
I have just heard that there is a Kindle edition of my book Play Great Guitar published by Infinite Ideas. There is a discount on it at the moment. It is suitable for beginners and people who have a couple of years’ experience on guitar. Their website is http://www.infideas.com.
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.
Argent
I’ve recently been playing a couple of songs by the early 70s prog-rock band Argent who were formed out of the remnants of 60s group The Zombies who are remembered for the hit single ‘She’s Not There’ and have garnered some critical acclaim recently for their concept album Odyssey and Oracle. Argent had two hit singles – ‘Hold Your Head Up’ and ‘Tragedy’ and both feature some tasty guitar playing by Russ Ballard. Ballard cut a striking figure on TV at the time with black specs and a silver Fender Strat with many holes cut out of the body (I haven’t looked but maybe there are pictures of this guitar on the web by now). ‘Hold Your Head Up’ has a distinctive guitar riff/verse made out of triad shapes on the top 3 strings. Nothing so unusual about that, but it is the tone and the way he plays it – with what in classical music would be called tenuto – a kind of leant-on weight – that makes it sound great. Perhaps the guitar was recorded with compression also. The bridge of the song has an interesting instrumental passage with quite daring harmony where the guitar repeatedly hits a D chord as the organ cycles through a number of chords some of which (like Bb and F) create quite dissonant sounds. The other hit ‘Tragedy’ has some very funky guitar playing on a fifth fret A minor riff, again very well recorded, and not what you would expect from a prog-rock band.
Guitar teaching
In addition to writing the guitar / songwriting books I work as a guitar teacher, helping people with basic technique in most styles, acoustic and electric, bass guitar, all aspects of songwriting, theory and musical appreciation. If you live in the UK and would like to arrange a lesson drop me a message via the website. If you don’t live near Oxford but would like to visit and have a few hours tuition in one go I can also arrange that.
Latest Zep magazine out
Part two of my long feature on ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is published in Dave Lewis’ long-running Zeppelin magazine Tight But Loose. You can order it from the tbl website. Dave has recently published a very detailed colour account of the band’s final tour in Europe in 1980 as the book Feather In The Wind. He is currently planning a revised second edition of his book Then As It Was on the band’s two gigs at Knebworth in August 1979. If you’re interested in Zeppelin’s music and career his books are essential.
Four chord songs
Several people have mentioned a youtube clip to me recently involving a comedy act who run through scores of songs which allegedly use the same four chords. As the author of How To Write Songs On Guitar I had to look this up.
The comedy act is the Axis of Awesome. The chords in question are the progression I-V-VI-IV, which in the clip they play in the key of E major: E B C#m A. The joke is the audience’s recognition of the songs being similar, as though they are laughing at discovering the resemblance and the evidence of the proposition at the outset that these are the four chords you need to have a hit. The performance does have a slight cheat element to it, firstly because it puts all the songs in the same key, whereas they would be in a number of different keys; secondly, because it doesn’t distinguish between songs that use those four chords without repeat in a progression, with repeats in a chorus (what I call a turnaround), or possibly for the entire song.
What does this performance demonstrate? Certainly, that this is a very commercial progression and many hits songs have used it (and no doubt more will). It also says something about the formulaic nature of harmony in popular music and its limited grammar (i.e. how the chords are used, not which chords). And underneath this is an interesting unfaced question for popular music’s audience: how many songs do you need or want that have the same harmony? Wouldn’t you rather hear something different? Why did you buy all these songs if you’re laughing at the fact that they sound the same?
Loss of Rapid Eye Movement
Two days ago it was announced that R.E.M. had split up. R.E.M. will go down in rock history as an important band for a number of reasons, not just because of their success.Although it is some years since I paid them much attention, I have fond memories of some of their earlier music. The first R.E.M. track I ever heard was probably in 1984-85 and it was the haunting ‘South Central Rain’, a single from their second album Reckoning. There was something about the plaintive wash of A minor on the chorus coupled with the slightly distant vocal saying ‘I’m sorry’ that sounded as though it had come from a different world. This led me to buy that album and I loved it. The bright Rickenbacker guitar tone and the idiosyncratic and melancholy lyrics reminded me a little of The Smiths who were also on the rise at that time. In many ways R.E.M. were a kind of U.S. version of The Smiths. Both bands showed that rock music could speak about the real and the everyday and the small triumphs and tragedies of life and somehow transform these things into the beauty of song – in marked contrast to the often absurd pumped-up testosterone-fuelled pantomime of many rock bands – fun, no doubt, but a pantomime nevertheless. Peter Buck and Johnny Marr both showed that the arpeggiated guitar style which had been central to mid-60s folk-rock could still speak.
In the summer of 1985 I saw R.E.M. pretty much unknown in the U.K. play a short set at the Milton Keynes Bowl supporting U2. It rained and after awhile they retired, somewhat dispirited. I enjoyed them.
A year or so later I was in a record shop and heard Life’s Rich Pageant over the speakers. I bought it and it became one of my favourite rock albums, a delightful balance between the rough eccentricities and introversions of their first three albums and the slicker communicativeness of the later. From that I bought the first album Murmur and the third album Fables of the Reconstruction, then Document, Green, Out of Time, Automatic For The People, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and Up, as they appeared. I also got Reveal and found that rather thin. The others I don’t know.
The decision to split didn’t surprise me because I think the band had taken their sound as far as they could and were now caught in the dilemma which so often afflicts rock bands who stay together long enough: either break your mould and do something very different (in which case you get criticized for not being you) or attempt to self-consciously recapture a sound you best executed unselfconsciously many years before (in which case it is said to be not really a return to form). For me, the quintessential R.E.M. is that of the albums they made with IRS (nos 1-5) and if you want an introduction to it try either Life’s Rich Pageant or the Collected Singles CD (20 tracks). Although they made some good, occasionally great music when they went to Warner for Green and gained a much bigger audience, it doesn’t quite have the same character. The departure of Bill Berry was obviously a critical blow also. None of the Warner albums engage me as albums, though I like some tracks on each. I think ‘I Remember California’ is an astonishing track – a doom-laden slice of Pacific apocalypse all the more striking because in it R.E.M. seemed to step beyond their own emotional range so powerfully. ‘Electrolyte’ is very touching – that line about ‘C20th go to sleep’ gets me every time.
I don’t agree with the frequently-expressed rock critic view that Automatic For The People is their best album; I think that’s over-rated, as are songs like ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’. Given the choice between those two and ‘Perfect Circle’ and ‘South Central Rain’, I’ll take the latter. In some ways Automatic occupies a similar position in their career as Born In The USA does in Springsteen’s (the R.E.M. album is better, mind).
A two-disc greatest hits is apparently on the way in November.
Sibelius in Finland
First, welcome to those of you who recently signed up to this blog; I hope you’ll find these notes on music interesting. Apologies to all for the absence from writing. This has been due to several weeks getting to grips with a new computer and new software (for music-making) plus a much-delayed summer holiday in Finland.
The holiday included attending all the concerts at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, about 100km north of Helsinki. This is an annual festival dedicated to the music of Finland’s most famous composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) who for awhile at the beginning of the C20th played an important symbolic role in the struggle for Finnish national identity. He composed quite a bit of music in most genres, but it is his tone-poems and seven symphonies on which his reputation probably most rests. The symphonies in particular are held in high regard – so much so that at his funeral seven white candles were used during the ceremony, each standing for one of the symphonies. That gives an idea of the reverence in which they were/are held. They are all quite different from each other, as became apparent at the festival this year, because over the course of three nights we heard them all in chronological sequence. The first lasts about 40 minutes, the last only about 22 and is essentially in one movement instead of the usual four.
If you haven’t sampled Sibelius before try some of the tone-poems such as ‘Night-ride and Sunrise’ or ‘The Bard’ or the spooky ‘Tapiola’, or a short piece such as ‘Spring Song’, or the ever-popular ‘Karelia Suite’. Among the symphonies no.2 and no.5 are probably the most accessible to begin with, the former being a late-C19th romantic work, the latter being more compact, optimistic and with the beautiful ‘swan hymn’ theme in the last movement (also featuring one of the greatest key-changes in all orchestral music as Sibelius swings from G flat to C major just as the swan hymn is launched).
The Sibelius Festival is held in the first week or so of September Thurs-Sun. It is good to fit in a visit to his home which is now a museum about 60 km from Lahti. The capital Helsinki is also good to visit and walk round. There is an excellent DVD by Christopher Nupen about Sibelius’ life and music if you can’t get to Finland and also a 2004 Finnish biopic called Sibelius which I haven’t seen yet.
More shortly.
Not drowning but teaching
Sorry not to have posted recently. Since June I’ve been preparing for my annual teaching stint on The Oxford Experience, a five-week programme run by the International Section of Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Last week was the first teaching week and I have five different courses to deliver. One has a musical theme: The Beatles and 1960s Britain. This week it’s Shakespeare’s Late Romances, and one of the extras I like to put in is some examples of musical settings of the songs which occur in those plays, as well as directing my students to larger works such as the two suites which Sibelius wrote for The Tempest.
On the composition front I managed in late May-mid June to write an 11-minute piece for string orchestra called ‘The High Oaks (Threnody)’.
I’ve been giving some thought to starting work on a new book at the end of the summer.
Otherwise, I’ve been revisiting some of the songs of Marc Bolan (1968-71). Some of the articles I’ve written about his songwriting and guitar-playing have been pasted up online by others. I may put revised versions on this site eventually. This was in part set off by the fact that a week or so ago it was 40 years since T.Rex’s ‘Get It On’ was a UK no.1 and Marc Bolan appeared on TOTP with a black Les Paul Custom. Earlier in the year Gibson finally produced a signature Marc Bolan Les Paul in what they termed a ‘Bolan Chablis’ (orange-amber wood) finish. I can remember suggesting such a guitar to the head of Gibson in London about ten years ago. At the time he was sceptical that there would be enough interest – but it has happened. Sadly, the guitar Gibson issued is a bit of a hybrid – based on the fact that in the spring of 1971 in the U.S. in a fit of frustration Bolan threw the Les Paul and snapped its neck off. For some reason a black Les Paul neck was then fitted to the guitar, so that looked at from the back you have a cherry-red body and a black neck. So the Gibson guitar doesn’t match the one with which Bolan is pictured on the cover of the 1970 T.Rex album.
More on Bolan anon …
The English Music Festival 2011
The last weekend of MAy saw the fifth English Music Festival held over four days at Dorchester on Thames. The purpose of the Festival is to celebrate English and British composers – mostly tonal and mostly from the first half of the C20th – whose music has been forgotten, was never performed or recorded, or is generally unknown. This year’s Festival featured music by Parry, Capel Bond, Lambert, Rawsthorne, Sullivan, Bainton, Stanford, Bowen, Howells, as well as more famous names such as Elgar, Holst, Delius and Vaughan Williams.
The closing concert was of particular interest to me because it featured a world premiere of a choral work by Vaughan Williams, a setting of Swinburne’s famous poem ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. I wrote an article on this piece for the Vaughan Williams Society Journal and an extract from it featured on the CD sleeve for its release on albion records. You can read the sleeve note if you go to www.albionrecords.org and look for the album sleeve. The English Music Festival also has a website.
Mouldy masters and the (lost) joy of SACD
In Richie Unterberger’s book Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia there is a terrible story relating to the loss of the original multi-track tapes of some of The Who’s finest music. For many decades there seems to have been an assumption in the recording industry that once a band had mixed an album from the 8-,12-,16, or 24-track to the stereo mix from which master pressings would be made there was no need to keep the multi-track. These seems to often have been left at the recording studios. With the passing of years those studios closed or were sold on and often entire tape libraries were simply chucked into a skip. This appears to have happened at Olympic in London in the early 1980s. According to Unterberger some of the multi-tracks for Who’s Next were lost in this way. As a consequence, Who’s Next cannot be released in hi-definition formats such as DVD-audio or SACD 5.1 because the source material is incomplete. What a tragedy.
A related story I stumbled across concerns tape restoration. If stored in humid conditions tape can deteriorate and go mouldy. This apparently happened to a tranche of Bob Marley recordings. You can read the horror story at fxgroup.net/tape+baking. The tapes were only 25 years old. They could only save 12 out of 27. If this happens with such a famous (and therefore money-generating) artist such as Bob Marley, what hope for the smaller groups and the one-hit wonders, etc?
Stairway To Heaven
The first part of my 10,000 article about Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is now available in the Zep magazine Tight But Loose. Editor and writer Dave Lewis continues to do sterling work in chronicling the band’s history and the careers of its individual members. Here’s a link: http://www.tightbutloose.co.uk
Songwriting technique (Isley Brothers)
Every now and then on this blog I’ll post some comments on a song which will be almost like a footnote to one of my songwriting books. Here’s something which came to me recently when I chanced to hear a track on the radio called ‘Put Yourself In My Place’ by Motown act the Isley Brothers (from the mid-60s). The song has an unusual intro and a striking first melodic phrase and it’s clear that something odd is going on in the harmony to create such an arresting start and a curiously unsettling first phrase. I identified the reason for this.
The song is in the key of C major. The intro chords are E-A-C-Bb-G. Momentarily we think we’re in E or A but the C cancels those out. It’s the presence of the E and A which are unexpected. The verse progression is C-D-E-Am-Dm-G7-C-Bb-G. The Bb-G-(C) progression (bVII-V-I) is a classic 1960s change which is not much heard these days (there’s an interesting essay to be written about why certain chord changes are more popular and more used at some times than at others). But it’s the first three chords of the verse which are important. It is unusual to have two ‘reverse polarity’ chords one after the other, especially moving up the sequence of chords I-II-III. C-D-E is I-II^-III^, to use the symbol I chose in How to Write Songs on Guitar. It’s these two chords next to each other, coupled with the melody and the lyric’s title phrase, that gives the opening of the verse such a different flavour.
Reverse polarity chords are ones which have changed from being minor to major, or minor to major, against what they shouild be in a major key. In C major D, E and A (II,III and VI) should be minor chords; II^, III^ and VI^ (D, E, A) have turned into majors.
Try turning the progression C-D-E as I-II-III in C major into C-D7-E7. This gives a common note c to the chords C and D, and then a common note of d to D and E, making the progression smoother. Follow the Am with a Dm7 and you have a common note of c to link those chords, and then Dm7-G7 shares the notes d and f.
Classic Motown of the 1960s is a good quarry for songwriters looking for new ideas in chord progressions. Away from the famous hits you can find some real gems in terms of songwriting technique.
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Recent listening
I’ve been enjoying the new Fleet Foxes album ‘Helplessness Blues’ and pleased they did not seek to overhaul their sound too much. This one sits well as a follow-up to the debut album of a few years ago, with more confidence in the arrangements and the recording. Quite apart from the musical trademarks of the songs, it is interesting how reverb plays an important role in their sound, lending ethereality to the signature vocal harmonies. This is noteworthy because for some years many popular recordings have gone for a very dry and airless production. I’ve always preferred something that suggested depth and distance.
I’ve also been listening to some early Elton John. Connecting with my previous post about SACD, I’ve now heard Elton’s Honky Chateau album on SACD and again the sound is a revelation. It’s available on amazon for very little at all. (There is also a Nick Drake SACD compilation that’s unexpectedly good considering that his mixes tend to have relatively few instruments in them, so you would think that they wouldn’t lend themselves to multi-channel.)
For songwriters the thing that strikes me most listening to Elton John again is the vital role that inversions play in his songs. He makes far more use of them than most guitarist songwriters (they’re easier to play on a piano). They occur more frequently in his songs and in a greater number of types. It is surprising how much emotional charge they carry in songs like ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’, ‘Your Song’, ‘Into The Old Man’s Shoes’, and ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight.’ There’s also a feeling with the songs that they have a lot of music in them – by which I mean they don’t have any of the aura of laziness which I hear in a lot of post-2000 songwriting, where one short idea is deemed enough to carry most of the song and if you’re lucky you might get an 8-bar bridge.
Also on SACD I can recommend the new Stravinsky SACD of the Rite of Spring and Petrouchka on BIS by the Bergen Philharmonic. Incredible sound that lets you experience the genius of Stravinsky’s orchestrations.
A bouquet for Kensington
… or to be precise, the Kensington Orchestra who, a couple of weeks ago, gave a terrific concert in London. What drew me was two of my favourite pieces of music unusually linked on the same bill: Stravinsky’s ‘Symphony in Three Movements’ and Vaughan Williams’ third symphony (‘Pastoral’), along with a short third piece I hadn’t heard before, Martinu’s ‘Memorial to Lidice’. The Martinu made an immediate impression – a colourful and humane work on a terrible historical subject (the Nazi eradication of the town of Lidice). Martinu’s star has been rising of recent years, and his sixth symphony is a firm favourite of mine. The Stravinsky piece may have a questionable grasp on what a purist would consider true symphonic form but what drive, colour, melody and invention! It is another example of how, despite his reputation as a dissonant and shocking modernist, Stravinsky’s music is full of intriguing melody. It was great to hear the Vaughan Williams live again – his pastoral symphony is one of the great works in any medium inspired by the First World War. Evidence again that his symphonic cycle is so remarkable – 9 symphonies that sound unmistakably his and yet each forges its own world. And you can pick them up in a box-set for about £20 these days. I should mention that a couple of Vaughan Williams previously unrecorded pieces are being released this year, including his choral setting of Swinburne’s poem ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ (published in 1866). I wrote something about it on the CD sleeve and also in the current issue of the RVW Society Journal.
I’ve noted also first reports of the new Fleet Foxes album. Their debut made a big impression and I’m looking forward to hearing the new music.
On the home front, I’ve completed a piano quartet of about 15 minutes, and unexpectedly sketched a violin sonata whilst working on something else entirely. Sometimes you just have to follow wherever the ideas lead.
It looks like the long article on ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is going to appear in two parts in the next two issues of the magazine Tight But Loose. See the tbl website for details of subscriptions, etc.
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The Joy of SACD
Recently I’ve been listening for the first time to 5.1 surround sound mixes as featured on SACD. As has been said, the effect is more immersive than stereo. On classical SACD recordings the two rear speakers are used to add subtle ambient sound, so if you’re sitting roughly in the central position it feels as though the sound from the front three speakers is being pulled behind you. It’s three-dimensional. On the couple of rock SACDs I’ve heard individual instruments are positioned in those rear speakers, allowing more access to the texture of the music.
It is a tragedy that SACD never became a mass-market success when it was launched about 12 years ago. It offers much better sound quality than standard CDs, let alone mp3 files (I’ve read one account which said that mp3 files contain only 10% (!) of the information contained on the equivalent CD track.) There are some blu-ray players that will also play SACDs, so that’s hopeful, and classical labels are still issuing them. Other high-resolution formats such as so-called ‘studio master’ downloads also promise better quality music reproduction.
The essay on ‘Stairway To Heaven’ I mentioned in the previous blog is now done. It turned into something of an epic. I had anticipated writing 3-4,000 words, and it is over 10,000. I’ll post details of where it will be published when I have them. For many years I thought I would write a book on Led Zeppelin but the time for that has gone now. So I’m pleased at least to share some thoughts on what makes this legendary song exert its particular magic. This year would be a fitting moment to see Led Zeppelin’s fourth album released as an SACD.
I shall end with a brief note for readers who play guitar, which is to recommend the solo guitar works of the Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos, which I’ve re-visited over the past six months. They can be found on a single Naxos label CD (among others). His Preludes and Etudes are recognized cornerstones of the classical guitar repertoire. They are a delightful mix of rhythm, lyricism and dissonance.
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