‘John Kennedy at Coos Bay’ p.s.
It seems that the link I posted yesterday has not taken everyone to the right place on http://www.soundcloud.com. Apologies if you’ve had trouble finding ‘On The Edge’. The link works for me, some have had trouble – though they all report different things. If you go to http://www.soundcloud.com and search on my name and then scroll down the 19 results you’ll find it – once all 19 of my pieces / songs are listed on the screen. I hope this helps.
New music
Today I’ve posted a new piece of music on soundcloud. The link is
https://soundcloud.com/#rikky-1-2/on-the-edge
You may need to copy and paste it into your browser.
‘On The Edge’ is the first movement of a piano suite titled ‘John Kennedy at Coos Bay’ which I’ve been working on for about five weeks (when work has allowed). As I mentioned in the previous blog, it began with a single chord – Olivier Messiaen’s ‘chord of resonance’ – which I then composed out in various ways until inspiration took over. After working on it for a week the music took on an identity / title by connecting with my awareness of some famous photographs of JFK taken by Jacques Lowe in Oregon in 1959 (you can see them on Jacque Lowe’s website and they were reproduced in the book edited by his daughter which was published last year for the 50th anniversary. The music goes through many moods over the 7.40 minutes. I hope you’ll give it a listen and enjoy it. Composing it has been a memorable experience, if at times fraught as I’ve had to keep challenging myself not to settle when there were still improvements to make.
I hope to release this with the three other movements on a CD of piano music.
Getting the Led Out
Term-time in Oxford has left little opportunity for much else recently, though I have enjoyed sharing the music of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams with students. I’ve also been pleased to start to get a grip as a listener on Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra which is quite a tough work (an SACD on Chandos).
A listen to French composer Olivier Messiaen’s famous Quartet for the End of Time led me to his ‘chord of resonance’ (C E G Bb D F# G# B) which I used as the basis for a new piano piece. It has three parts and lasts about 14 minutes. I hope to add it to the Black Purple Blue piano pieces I sketched in January and release the music as a CD.
Led Zeppelin have been much in the news recently. A few weeks ago a story spread on the web that they were going to be subjected to a law-suit directed at ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on the grounds of plagiarism from Spirit’s 1968 instrumental ‘Taurus’. I wrote about this several years ago in an extended essay on ‘Stairway’ for Dave Lewis’ Tight But Loose magazine. Revisiting the story I incline even more strongly now in the negative – that the alleged borrowing has no real substance. But already I have encountered the idea which has spread that this law-suit has caused the delay of the release of the remastered Led Zeppelin IV. I’m pretty sure there is nothing in this at all and the release schedule was planned a long time ago.
As for the remastered albums (Led Zeppelin I-III) from the bits I’ve had a listen to I can say the CD versions certainly sound impressive, and anyone who has never owned these albums can certainly buy with confidence. The deluxe versions come with an additional disc of either live versions (in the case of the debut album) or studio alternate mixes, or one or two previously unreleased songs or covers. These make interesting listening, but are not compelling for the casual listener.
Listening to the band’s debut album the other morning, released in January 1969 and recorded in October 1968, it’s striking how much of a 1960s album it is, with clear reference points to a lot of 60s rock styles. This is not a criticism. I mention it because Zeppelin are generally thought of as a Seventies band. The arrangements on the first album have many fascinating and inventive details which are a joy to pick up. John Paul Jones’ organ intro for ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ always strikes me as the aural equivalent of summer sunlight bursting through opened curtains, a sharp contrast to the subterranean murk of ‘Dazed and Confused’ (which, if you’re familiar with their 27 minute live versions, seems to positively zip by here). ‘Your Time’ of course kicked off the second side of the vinyl.
The additional CDs demonstrate that Zeppelin were not the most prolific of creative teams in terms of quantity of material. This sounds a strange thing to say of a band that released five classic rock albums in as many years from 1969-1973, and it should also be remembered that they spent a huge amount of time on the road. Clearly there is almost nothing left over in the vaults. Also factor in the cover versions and various blues borrowings and this aspect increases. But it must also be said that whenever you play a Zeppelin borrowing next to its original the degree of transformation of that material is always staggering. For this, they can be forgiven much.
It will be very interesting to see what Jimmy Page has in store for the next three releases, and hopefully he will expand Coda to include the various odd things which do belong with I, II and III that have been omitted so far (like ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’)
Update on the next book
In recent weeks I have been busy checking the proofs of the next songwriting book, Songs and Solos. It has now gone to the printers and will be published in September. It runs to about 250 pages with an 84 track CD so it is a pretty hefty book – it never seems quite like that when I’m writing them, but it does at proofing stage. As I mentioned before, the next book to be revised into a new edition will be Chord Master. I’m looking to expand the amount of audio that comes with that book.
I spent two days at the London Book Fair at Earl’s Court in April, talking to various publishers about several book projects. I’ve also been doing a little research on Marc Bolan’s famous Les Paul. I hope at some point to do some writing about that and about his guitar-playing in general. Some articles I published have already been put up on line. You can read one of them here which was originally published in a fanzine Rumblings:
http://www.marcbolanmusic.com/guitars.aspx
I’ve completed work on an entry about film composer John Barry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
In Oxford the summer term has just started, so I have teaching to do that will curtail my musical activity. But it does include Vaughan Williams and Sibelius and Stravinsky – and I’m always happy to talk about those three great composers.
Mentioning Stravinsky reminds me that I blogged last year about Stephen Malinowski and Jay Bacal’s amazing animated version of The Rite of Spring. I recently discovered that there is now a high quality version which you can buy for only $1! So get this bargain and forget about the youtube version. The link is:
Last week I watched the Stone Roses film Made of Stone and was amused when at the 46 min mark a fan standing outside their comeback gig in Warrington held up a chord songbook for the band – which happened to be the work of yours truly. As Morrissey once sang, fame, fame, fatal fame …!
Four and six other strings
I’ve recently been listening to a Chandos CD by the Bekova Sisters of chamber music by the C20th Czech compoer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). It was a fortuitous discovery in a secondhand shop. I know Martinu mainly for his symphonies, of which the last – no.6 – is a firm favourite – wildly fantastical. Several movements open with what sounds like a murmuring of insects, and have passages of rising scales that remind me of gas bubbling from a molten landscape. There is also a syncopated theme that sounds as though it has escaped from some Western like The Magnificant Seven and a beautiful short chorale that closes the symphony. I don’t listen to much chamber music, but Martinu’s name tempted me, and I’m glad it did, because this CD has much to please the ear, especially with Martinu’s colourful harmony. It contains two piano trios, as well as music for cello and piano, or violin and piano.
Though I may not listen to much chamber music, I love writing it, and I found time these past six weeks to fit in some composing which produced a second string quartet of about 22 minutes and a string sextet of about 20 minutes. Writing the sextet was an insight into why this form has never been as popular with composers as the string quartet. To the quartet’s two violins, one viola and one cello you have to add two extra instruments.
A line-up of three violins, two violas and a cello runs the risk of sounding top-heavy; the combination of two violins, two violas and two cellos runs the risk of being bottom-heavy. In the former the third violin, viola and cello will each be pushed a little toward the lower parts of their ranges to anchor and spread the music out. In the latter combination you need to do the reverse and make sure the first viola doesn’t come too low. It was this 2+2+2 line-up that I chose. One immediate advantage of the string sextet is that it makes possible five or six-note chords without the players having to use double-stopping (where two notes are held down at once) – so one can work in extended harmony.
The composing reminded me of something important about creativity which relates to songwriting on the guitar. Very recently one of my guitar students complained that when he tried to put chords together it sounded like things he had already heard or wasn’t inspiring. I reassured him on the first point by saying (and this will be discussed in a future songwriting book) that there is an important sense in which you have to operate as though when you play a G chord on the guitar it is as if no-one has ever done it before. But what I have also understood is that when people writing on guitar listlessly strum round the chords they know, trying to write a song and feeling that nothing is happening, some of the reason is because until each chord has a defined voicing, duration, tempo, timbre, etc it lacks the energy that may inspire the music.
When I sat down to write the second string quartet I had no musical ideas at all. I chose a key, a time signature, a tempo, and wrote four bars of a generic introductory gesture to set up the arrival of the home key chord, E minor. I then laid out a highly rhythmic E minor chord idea. Within about six bars I had an idea with sufficient creative energy to set me off. Working with notation has the effect of forcing you to make choices about how the chords / melody is to be played that side-step the problem that arises strumming chords on guitar. For songwriting guitarists an equivalent technique would be to work with a drum machine or loop.
Detuning guitars
I had an interesting comment posted recently about George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ways of playing it. The song begins with an F#m-B barre chord change at fret II; later on the song changes key up a tone. Most people start with a capo at the II fret which removes some of the barres until the key-change and creates a more resonant sound. However, it has been suggested that another way to approximate the sound is to play on a 12-string detuned by three semitones. F#m-B would then be fingered with open string Am and D shapes. I haven’t tried it myself, but from what I know about detuning I’m sure this would produce a very effective result and might well approximate what is heard on the record. But it might not be what was done on the session.
The sound on the record was created by multiple acoustic guitars. Whether or not any of them were 12-strings at standard pitch I’m not sure but I wouldn’t be surprised – if you’re trying to get a big acoustic sound it makes sense to use a 12-string in addition to the 6-strings. Not only George Harrison, but Peter Frampton and members of Badfinger also played guitar on the track. I remember Peter Frampton describing this when I did a phone interview with him back in the late 90s. The result was a big acoustic sound.
The lesson of this is that imitating a guitar part from a recording as it was done may not be the way to get the sound if you’re trying to copy a multi-track recording. So in this case, it could be that there is no 12-string on ‘My Sweet Lord’ which has been detuned by three semitones – but if you happen to have a 12-string and can detune it it may give you a great resemblance if you’re singing the song on your own. Many years ago I worked out a way of playing ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on a six-string which added as many octaves as I could finger to the basic progressions in the middle in order to mimic the sound of a 12-string on the recording / live version.
More generally on the subject of detuning, tuning down by a semitone is a common hard rock / blues practice – Hendrix did it quite a bit, as did Thin Lizzy. Strings are easier to bend and vocalists can sing in the guitar’s E or Em chord shapes easier (the pitch is actually Eb). Riffs sound heavier. But it also works on acoustic, producing a deeper tone at one, two or three steps down. You may need to go to a heavier guage string if you go that far down. The critical point is what pitch the eight master-shapes will produce when you do this – this enables you to work out how to use it as a second guitar to a standard guitar that may have a capo on. Here are the master-shapes with their actual pitch at 1, 2 and 3 semitones down
Std A C D E G Am Dm Em
-1 G# B C# D# F# G#m C#m D#m or Ab Cb Db Eb Gb Abm Dbm Ebm
-2 G Bb C D F Gm Cm Dm
-3 F# A B C# E F#m Am Bm
I hope this is useful.
I remember trying to work out how to play All About Eve’s hit ‘Martha’s Harbour’. The chords that produced the right ringing arpeggios didn’t seem possible in standard tuning but I knew their pitch was right. A capo wouldn’t fix it either. I got to ask the band’s guitarist Tim Bricheno how it was done and it explained the acoustic was detuned by a tone. As soon as I did it all the chord shapes worked.
More on guitar tones later.
‘Silver Springs’ and gilded touches
I’ve recently been listening to ‘Silver Springs’, a Fleetwood Mac ballad from their mid-70s era. It contains a good example of how displacing chord I into the middle of a sequence can create a strong feeling of momentum. This happens in the song’s final sequence, the effect strengthened by a first inversion and a rising bass line (Am-G/B-C-F-G). The chord progression keeps sailing past the key chord of C and spending two bars on G at the end of each phrase.
Written by Stevie Nicks it was part of the sessions for the album Rumours but was left off, apparently because there wasn’t enough room on the vinyl. The 2004 double-CD reissue of Rumours places the song as track 7, coming after ‘Songbird’ (which ended side 1 of the vinyl LP) and before ‘The Chain’. The second disc of bonus material includes a demo version. There is a slower, weightier live version included on The Dance (1997).
This set me thinking about tracks that should have been included on an album but were left off, either kept back or released as stand-alone singles. Possibly the most famous is the Beatles’ double A-side ‘Penny Lane’ / ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ from early in 1967. These songs originated in a project to write a set of songs based on the Liverpool childhoods of John and Paul. This eventually changed into Sgt Pepper, but these two songs never made it to the album, instead being released months before (they were eventually collected on the Magical Mystery Tour album).
It shows that sometimes great songs get left off albums. Another one that’s come to my attention recently is David Bowie’s ‘John I’m Only Dancing’ which belongs with the Aladdin Sane songs (1973) but came out as a single. This is mentioned in a book by Clinton Heylin, All the Madmen, with the unwieldy but explanatory subtitle ‘Barrett, Bowie, Drake, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Who and a journey to the dark side of British rock’. It’s an interesting read if you’re into any of those acts or that period (1968-73) of British rock. It does exhibit some of the underlying tensions that I often find in rock criticism – mostly connected with an unarticulated conflict about the value and status of the subject (litany of failure or litany of success?).
Another track that was left off an album was T.Rex’s ‘Ride A White Swan’. This was recorded during sessions for what became the album T.Rex (December 1970), known to its devotees as the ‘brown’ album because of the sleeve, the last made as a duo before T Rex expanded into a quartet and launched glam rock in 1971. ‘Swan’ preceded the album by several months and became a hit single. Universal have just released a ‘Deluxe’ edition of this album, and the one that preceded it Beard of Stars, with additional CDs of bonus material. The T.Rex album’s first disc includes ‘Swan’ and its B-side. I’ve not had a chance to listen to these properly yet. My first impression of the original album is that this is the best remaster to date, despite what sound like some rapid fades (possibly encouraged by high levels of tape-hiss and guitar effects noise on the sessions). For those who heard these records at an impressionable age these songs have lost none of their enchantment. It is just clearer how rare a commodity it is.
I’d be interested to hear from readers of this blog of any tracks they know and love which were left off albums, perhaps reunited on more recent CD releases and expanded editions. I’ll report back on these in a future blog.
Wiggy for Ziggy
Several people have asked me when to expect the next songwriting book. Songs & Solos is due to be published early this September. Other news on my books: it looks like there could be a French edition of How To Write Songs On Guitar, and there are plans for a new expanded edition of Chord Master.
Anyone interested in guitar lessons or help with songwriting who lives near Oxford can contact me by registering on the site and then leaving a comment on the Guitar Lessons Oxford page. I am also considering offering long-distance advice and mentoring for aspiring songwriters. If anyone is interested let me know.
My own musical activity so far this year has been focused on opening some of my ‘classical’ scores and revising them – both in terms of the composition and playback. It takes time to get back in touch with the two software packages I use – Sibelius notation and the Vienna Symphonic Library, but after several weeks the familiarity is back. This is a prelude to doing some new composing. In late January I did sketch some piano music using octatonic scales.
The headline of this blog alludes to an unintentionally funny (and also depressing) press release I received concerning an exhibition shortly opening in Aylesbury looking at the history of a local rock venue which once hosted many leading live bands of the 1970s. It was there that David Bowie first unveiled his Ziggy Stardust character. This aspect is highlighted in the breathless prose of the press release which reaches new heights of absurd hyperbole. The key passage is this:
The birthplace of one of the UK’s most culturally significant icons, a section of Stardust’s satin sequined shirt, which was ripped-off by overzealous fans during the concert, will be on show at the exhibition. Vivian Symonds, one such fan who managed to come away with a piece of Bowie’s shirt, will be at the opening night of the exhibition. Ms Symonds is also available for interview.
You couldn’t make it up. Is there an ‘icon’ that isn’t ‘culturally significant’? A perfect case study in fetishism medieval in its symbolism. An actual piece of the Holy One’s shirt! This struck me all the more because I have noticed in recent years how Ziggy-era Bowie in particular has become the focus of some drastically exaggerated projections of significance. An earlier press release that came to me fetishized the phone box that appears on the rear sleeve of the Ziggy Stardust album. There is also the constant and tedious recounting of the moment Bowie put his arm around Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops miming to ‘Starman’. This has been placed on a level of social significance matching an outbreak of war or a coronation. Well, I was there in 1972 reading the NME and Melody Maker each week and can report that Ziggy was merely one of a number of ripples on the pond of British music at that time, and furthermore received a good deal of hostile coverage from rock critics who thought Bowie was being inauthentic and superficial.
The weakness of Ziggy worship is really the paper-thin content of Bowie’s creation. Ziggy was never a coherent or rounded character and was only an implied narrative over side 2 of a single LP. That’s very little to support such enormous claims. And yes I think it’s a good rock album and has stood the test of time – though the follow-up Aladdin Sane has a more muscular sound and an equally strong set of songs. If it means anything it is a demonstration that once upon a time if you wanted to be a rock’n’roll star the best thing you could do would be to sing about it (a trick Oasis replicated on their debut album with the song ‘Rock and Roll Star’).
Reading about music
I’ve just started reading Peter Doggett’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On (2007) which is subtitled ‘revolutionaries, rock stars and the rise and fall of ’60s counter-culture’ which gives a good idea of its focus. So far it is a compelling account of the tensions within the 60s counter-culture, and a useful corrective for anyone who tends to have a more rose-tinted view of the period. Not for the first time, it seems that some of the best aspects of the idealistic 1960s survive in the music itself – flowers growing out of mud, transcending the messy human realities of their origin. (Oh what a big topic the 60s are …) Scott Mackenzie’s ‘San Francisco’ survives as a place in the human imagination which always transcended the reality of Haight Ashbury in 1966-67.
This set me thinking about some favourite books on music. Staying with popular music, I would certainly recommend Revolution In The Head – Ian MacDonald’s famous study of The Beatles – and his collection of essays The People’s Music (2003) which contains a number of memorable essays, including a landmark one on Nick Drake. At the time of his death (a suicide) MacDonald was working on a book on Bowie. I suspect his premature death robbed rock criticism of several more classic books. Charles Shaar Murray’s Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and post-war pop (1989) is a fine, thoughtful study which raised the bar for rock criticism and has been reprinted several times. Both MacDonald and Murray bring a broader perspective to their subjects and write as if they mattered. Murray’s collection of essays Shots From The Hip which reprints many pieces from the New Musical Express is also hugely entertaining.
Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Chronicles (1992) is an enormously detailed coffee-table book which follows the career of the Fab Four on the road, on TV, on the radio, in the studio. Martin Millar’s novel Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me (2002) is a funny but accurate recreation of teenage rock fandom back in the early 1970s. If you want to know what it was like to be a young male obsessed with Led Zeppelin and anticipating them coming to your city, read this.
I’ll use another novel to link into a few classical music books. Chris Greenhalgh’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2002) is an entertaining and mostly well-written account of the affair between these two cultural figures of the early jazz age. It was made into an equally entertaining film, Coco & Igor. For endless hours of browsing try Third Ear’s massive Classical Music The Listener’s Companion guide edited by Alexander J Morin (2002), which reviews thousands of recordings by hundreds of composers, helping you choose between multiple recordings of a single work.
Julian Johnson’s Who Needs Classical Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value (2002) is an important discussion of a deeply unfashionable topic: the idea that some music might be ‘better’ than other types. It’s an inspiring book, because it ascribes a much greater value to music than the current dominant notion that music is mere entertainment. Its great limitation is that Johnson is at his least intelligent when dealing with popular music, and he makes some crass comparisons. But the book is redeemed by much.
My next recommendation is the Cambridhe Music Handbook series. These are detailed but compact studies of important single musical works, exclusively classical (with the notable exception of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). I have several, including those on Nielsen 5 and Sibelius 5, which are great. Some of the chapters are full of very technical analysis, but the more general chapters are usually worth the price for the general reader.
Finally, the book I jokingly think of as ‘the bible’ for a symphony obsessive: Robert Layton’s A Guide to the Symphony (pb 1995), a wonderful multi-suthor survey of the symphony. This book has led me to much superb music. I shall also mention Wilfrid Mellers’ Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1997) which is a profound and idiosyncratic response to the music of the great English composer, full of spirituality and connections from Vaughan Williams to a broader English culture. And you will certainly never think about keys in the same way after reading this.
Songs and Solos – the next book
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had an enjoyable holiday. As promised, here is the first detailed information about my next songwriting book, to be be published by Backbeat in the summer.
Many songs have a moment when the spotlight shifts away from vocals and lyrics to an instrumental solo. Often this solo is played on guitar. Songs and Solos examines this neglected facet of songwriting. It is a unique manual of creativity for guitar-playing songwriters who want to make the best use of solos in their songs. For the songwriter who composes with a guitar, solos are a significant way a song can be intensified. Though lead guitar technique for its own sake is widely discussed, this book takes a new approach, focusing instead on the relationship of the solo to the song.
Songs and Solos has 12 sections. Section One relates a brief history of the solo in since the mid-1950s when the electric guitar changed the course of popular music. It narrates how, from the 1960s, the guitar became the most likely soloing instrument, and how lead guitarists became a potent musical and symbolic figures. Some of the roles and politics of the guitar solo are traced through musical genres popular in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, including how attitudes to solos changed. Section Two is a practical look at basic concepts of soloing, and Section Three looks at how a solo is positioned and integrated. For the songwriter this section discusses what a solo can do for a song and where it might be placed for maximum effect.
Section Four surveys the use of other instruments than guitar to add solos to songs. This is important knowledge for a songwriter, because a guitar solo might not always be best for a given song. These other instruments include acoustic and electric piano, synths, saxophone, piano, trumpet, flute, recorder, and strings. All have been featured during solo breaks in songs.
Section Five looks at the implications for soloing of choosing one type of guitar over another, including nylon ‘classical’, steel-string acoustic, and electric, six- and 12-string. It also covers the way various guitar techniques and effects influence a solo, including harmonics, wah-wah, feedback, sustain, echo, vibrato, tremolo, phasing and playing with the fingers rather than a pick. Section Six deals with the way scales and harmony relate. This has information about which scales are the most useful for solos and the chords they fit. Section Seven rounds up guitar techniques for soloing which are not based primarily on scales.
The next four sections illustrate this practical knowledge with short solos, designed to show a range of techniques, scales and chord types, so by the end of the book you’ll know which scales fit over the likeliest chords encountered in a song. These solos are given in standard notation, TAB, and on the CD. Each of the 42 audio tracks is repeated just as a backing track so you can use them to practise the example or improvise your own. Section Eight deals with scales and major key chord progressions, and Section Nine with minor key soloing. Section 10 looks at how to solo when a progression includes the common out-of-key chords used by songwriters – the ones labelled ‘reverse polarity’ and ‘flat degree’ chords in my other songwriting books. Section 11 discusses how to solo over more complex harmony, including common altered chords and unrelated chords. Section 12 has quotes about soloing from famous guitarists.
Songs and Solos cites solos in over 800 songs by more than 600 artists. Features in these solos are mentioned and described for comparison, but there are no transcriptions of these solos in this book. Songs and Solos is about creating and playing your own solos.
I hope this book will prove useful to everyone who has already bought my songwriting titles.
Happy Christmas
Well 2013 is nearly finished, so it is time for a break. Thanks to everyone who visited the site this year and read the blog. I hope you’ll join me on more musical adventures next year. My first post in the New Year will give details of the next songwriting book due to be published in the summer. Until then, I hope you all have a good festive holiday and that 2014 brings lots of good things.
Music for JFK
I am a little late with this, owing to work (finishing the next songwriting book), but I thought it worth writing about regardless. On the evening of November 22, I attended a choral concert in Exeter College Chapel, here in Oxford, titled ‘Requiem ’63’. The music chosen was intended to mark the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, as well as mark the 50th anniversary of the deaths of C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and John F. Kennedy. The piece selected for JFK was Herbert Howells’ setting of ‘Take him, earth, for cherishing’ (1964). The BBC’s music magazine had published an article about music connected with the death of Kennedy which was rather disappointing. In previous blogs I’ve mentioned Roy Harris’ superb ‘Epilogue – Profiles in Courage’ as the best elegiac JFK piece I’ve heard (it’s available on the Naxos label).
Investigating the topic reveals a number of other pieces in the classical field. Robert Bernat wrote ‘In Memoriam: John F. Kennedy (Passacaglia for Orchestra)’ which is not well-known but was released on an Albany Records LP played by the Louisville Orchestra in 1980. Ronald Lo Presti wrote ‘Elegy for a Young American’ for brass band. Stravinsky produced a very short (90 seconds or so) setting of a W.H.Auden poem ‘Elegy for JFK’. The French composer Darius Milhaud wrote ‘Meurtre d’un grand chef d’etat’. Leonard Bernstein dedicated his third symphony (‘Kaddish’) to Kennedy, and Roger Sessions his third piano sonata which he was then at work on in Berlin (regarded as one of the hardest pieces in the piano repertoire). There are probably many more, not so famous either because the composer is not well-known, or the title disguises the subject – as is the case with John Barry’s ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ from his album The Beyondness of Things.
2013 saw newly-commissioned pieces added to the list. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra performed ‘The World Is Very Different Now’ by 19-year old Conrad Tao (about 17 mins long) and the Nasher Scuplture Center’s ‘Soundings’ concert series included Steven Mackey’s ‘One Red Rose’ for string quartet.
In popular music there have been many songs about the death of Kennedy, though very few have much of a profile. Probably the most notable are Dion’s ‘Abraham, Martin and John’, memorably covered by Marvin Gaye, from the late 1960s, ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ by The Byrds (1965), Phil Ochs’ ‘Crucifixion’, and The Kingston Trio’s ‘Song For A Friend’ (written by John Stewart). The edition of the famous British TV satire show That Was The Week That Was broadcast on November 23, 1963 featured Millicent Martin singing ‘In the Summer of His Years’ which was covered by Mahalia Jackson and Connie Francis, but is only remembered in the context of the impact of TW3. Two songs with a more oblique connection are Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’, which for many captures the desolation of the post-assassination period, and The Beach Boys’ ‘The Warmth of the Sun’, which was written after a concert on the night of the 22nd.
At the time there were a number of Kennedy-themed LPs released. Some of the songs have been collected on albums such as Can’t Keep From Crying: Topical blues on the death of President Kennedy (1994) and Tragic Songs from the Grassy Knoll. There are many songs which make passing mention of the assassination or draw on imagery associated with it – Tori Amos’ ‘Jackie’s Strength’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Less Than Zero’ which had its lyric re-written for the US market by changing the reference to Oswald Moseley, the 1930s British fascist, to Lee Harvey Oswald.
And finally I should mention my own 12 minute piece for orchestral strings ‘At Runnymede’ (2002), revised a couple of times, and which I hope to put online at some point.
Two music documentaries
The BBC have recently broadcast two interesting music documentaries. The series Imagine profiled Jimi Hendrix with quite a bit of footage I hadn’t seen before, and with a more thoughtful and less sensationalistic script than is usually the case when TV does Hendrix (note to TV execs: no – Jimi was not an era-defining guitarist because he twice set his Strat on fire or because he played it with his teeth). This prompted me to have another look at DVDs of Jimi at Monterey and at Berkeley in 1967 and 1970 respectively. 5.1 sound makes a huge difference to the immediacy of watching these films even on a small screen. In 1967 Hendrix looks happy and full of life; by May 1970 he looks world-weary – it is quite a contrast. When I return to Hendrix’s studio albums after watching the live stuff I’m always delighted to find his music richer, touching and more multi-dimensional than in concert where the limitations of working in a power trio are all too evident. He needed more colours to frame his music.
The other documentary was a profile of Elvis Costello. This was also interesting, though Costello is in a way quite a guarded person, and an hour wasn’t long enough to cover such a long and varied career. For me, his best work was done on his first five or six albums, and they remain hugely entertaining and full of memorable songs, with great wordplay and high calibre arrangements by the Attractions. Since then he has stretched himself as a songwriter and singer. Unfortunately, I do not think his voice is up to the demands of the more sophisticated material he does – as becomes evident when he pushes into his upper range. That said, I cannot think of many other contemporary songwriters who exhibit as much sensitivity and awareness toward melody.
Two quartets
Much of my time recently has been devoted to the new songwriting book which I hope to finish in the next month, at which point I’ll post some information about it. It is due for publication in 2014. Over the next couple of months I’m teaching some tutorials on Ralph Vaughan Williams and Igor Stravinsky. Last weekend I gave a lecture on the biographical tradition associated with John F. Kennedy for a Kennedy day school run by Oxford University Department of Continuing Education.
The title of this blog alludes to two things. First, the film A Late Quartet which I saw recently and can recommend. It’s a film about a string quartet that have been playing together for several decades and become famous. Suddenly, for reasons of age, one of the players develops a medical condition which means he can no longer play. This initiates a landslide of internal problems within the quartet. In the latter stages of the film the plot becomes almost Jacobean in its perversity and strained in its ingenuity. But nevertheless it is an engaging drama about adult themes such as long-term relationships, partnership, self-denial for the good of the group, redemption and of course music-making. One of the best things about this film is that it takes music very seriously and as a thing of great value – which these days is to be welcomed. The title is a playful allusion to the celebrated late quartets of Beethoven which are widely considered one of the greatest achievements of Western music and as possessing a particular profoundity sometimes manifested by artists in their last years.
My other quartet is an English rock band, the wonderfully named Wishbone Ash. I’ve been re-listening to some of their classic early 1970s music, including the album Argus which was voted Album of the Year 1972 by readers of the music paper Melody Maker (quite an accolade for the period given the competition). Argus has been remastered twice in the last decade. By all accounts the 2007 Deluxe version is the one to get. The band were famous for developing twin-lead guitar arrangements, where each guitarist takes a single melodic line in harmony with the other. Their sound was hard rock but with a curious lightness about it, helped by the mild distortion on the guitars, and strong melodies supported by harmony vocals. I like their very Englishness, which at one time might have been held against them, but now seems authentic and full of character, and the lyrical sweetness which sometime surfaces in the music – most notably in a track like ‘Persephone’ and the doubled lead guitar solos on ‘Throw Down The Sword’.
Not deaf to Hi-def
As someone once sang, it’s late September and I really should be … writing another post. Regular readers of my blog will know that I have been championing high-resolution formats such as SACD for some time now. The demise of SACD has not quite happened as predicted; it is certainly doing very well in the classical field with labels such as BIS, Pentatone and Chandos all issuing SACDs. But other changes in technology – such as universal disc players, increasing hard drive storage and increasing download speeds – mean it is now possible to find websites selling music at a higher resolution than standard CD. One that is worth investigating is HDtracks – their website is at https://www.hdtracks.com/ There is also an interesting blog on the Gramophone magazine website on this topic:
I notice from the current issue of Mojo that Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ album is about to be reissued in an extravagant multi-disc version which will include high-resolution versions. As record companies run out of out-takes / alternate mixes / live versions etc with which to garnish archive re-releases it may be that they will have to provide 5.1 mixes and high-resolution versions in order to have something new to sell.
Talking of archive releases, there is going to be a volume 2 of The Beatles at the BBC. The first volume, released about 20 years ago, is being remastered. I was surprised that there could be this many Beatles BBC versions uncollected to make a second volume.
I’m currently at work on the next songwriting book for Backbeat books. My guitar album Atlantic Canticles is selling well – check it out if you haven’t heard it.
Looking a long way ahead, I heard recently that the 2015 Lahti Sibelius Festival is going to be about six days long rather than the usual three and a bit, in honour of 2015 being the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sibelius, Finland’s greatest symphonist. This will make it a must-attend. I’ve been twice and loved it. The music is mostly performed in Sibelius Hall which is right on the shores of a huge lake in Lahti (Lahti is about 100km north of Helsinki). To wander along in the evening and hear the music in such fantastic surroundings is always a treat (and the last time I went all 7 symphonies were performed over three nights). Here’s a link for more information:
http://dustofhue.com/2013/08/worthy-150th-birthday-lahti-international-sibelius-festival-2015-2014/
Coming Up For Air
Hello to all – I hope you’ve been having a great summer. It must be about two months since I last posted. Alll my time was taken up on the Oxford Experience summer school at Christ Church College, Oxford. I delivered six week-long courses – three of which were on music – two evening lectures, and a musical performance with my good friend and singer-songwriter Roger Dalrymple. As of last Saturday life begins to return to normal and I try to pick up the threads …
There have been a couple of musical highlights worth mentioning. Albion Records have issued another CD of previously unrecorded Vaughan Williams titled ‘The Solent’. I heard this beautiful 11 minute piece for orchestra at its world premiere performance back in May at the English Music Festival and was captivated immediately. It is one of three Impressions for Orchestra which Vaughan Williams composed in the first decade of the C20th, along with ‘Burley Heath’ (which is also a delight) and ‘Harnham Down’. ‘The Solent’ has a special place in Vaughan Williams’ early music because one of its melodies was incorporated in his Ninth Symphony of 1957-68. You can find more information about this and other releases on the RVW Society website.
A constant companion of the past two months has been a CPO disc of Symphonies 2 and 3 by the Swedish composer Dag Wiren (1905-86). Both symphonies are written in a very accessible tonal style with very attractive progressions and themes. The repetition and development of the themes is unusually clear and so a good listen for people not familiar with the symphonic repertoire. There is also a CPO disc of his 4th and 5th symphonies but their idiom is more challenging.
I also found in a charity shop a Chandos CD of choral music by Sir Arthur Bliss (1891-1975). Bliss was quite a well-known figure on the British music scene during the interwar period. I am very fond of his ‘Colour Symphony’ and ‘Music For Strings’ which I think is one of the outstanding works for orchestral strings in the British C20th tradition. So far for me the stand-out track on this choral CD is a setting of part of the closing lines of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets. It also has settings of poems by G M Hopkins.
Naxos has released some interesting early recordings of the Sibelius symphonies from the 1930s in their historical series. There is also a recording from 1940 of Stravinsky conducting The Rite of Spring. I’d like to get to hear these.
In the rock field I was interested to read about the forthcoming 6-CD box set of Marc Bolan / T.Rex recordings for the BBC. This set supercedes the 3-CD Bolan at the Beeb of a few years ago. This new collection will only really be of interest to serious Bolan fans, though there will be a 2-CD version. The problem with the recordings he did for the BBC after 1970 (i.e. once T Rex started having hits) is that they are often not much more than recycled backing tracks from the original versions, sometimes with a few overdubs missing, sometimes with a new lead vocal. I would like at some point to write something about the plethora of T Rex alternate versions and so-called ‘out-takes’ which have come out in recent years.
Still no word on those promised Led Zeppelin remasters …
A recent guitar lesson experience reminded me of the existence of the partial capo. This is a capo that instead of holding down all the strings at a single fret permits the player to select a combination of strings. This enables the player to, say, put a capo at the second fret but only make it hold down strings 1-5, 6 remaining unaffected by the capo. This approximates drop-D tuning but without changing the pitch of the sixth string. This means a G chord has the bass note G exactly where you would expect it – third fret – not the fifth fret as happens with drop D tuning. My partial capo is a relatively crude elasticated device from a few years ago, but there must be more sophisticated models on the market by now.
My next work project will be the completion of a new songwriting book for Backbeat books. It will appear in 2014. I am also thinking about a Christmas single release and an album of songs to follow Atlantic Canticles.
I’ll sign off by sending good wishes to the young guy from the Orange County Youth Orchestra with whom I jammed two impromptu guitar / violin duets yesterday in Blackwells Music Shop in Oxford. That was fun, and reminded me how lucky we are as musicians to be able to share the wonderful world of music.
From Oxford to a Beatle
I was recently contacted by Charles and Sherry who took my first Beatles, Popular Music and 1960s Britain course on The Oxford Experience summer school a few years ago. They were delightful company on that week and helped make that first course a great success. It transpires that they recently attended the soundcheck at one of Paul McCartney’s recent U.S. concerts as VIP guests. During this soundcheck they attracted his attention with a sign that stated they had studied The Beatles at Oxford. Paul saw it and wanted to know more. The culmination of this was Charles and Sherry getting their certificates from the course signed by him – probably the only time my signature and Paul McCartney’s will be on the same piece of paper! Here is a link to the blog. You have to scroll down to the soundcheck and photos. It begins after he has tried out ‘Lady Madonna’.
http://themaccareport.com/news/latest.htm#anchor1935323
Two weeks today the 2013 Oxford Experience kicks off, and my first course will be the Beatles. So for the next two weeks I will be gathering together my final notes and material on the Fab Four, Stravinsky, French Impressionists, the English Country House in Fiction and Film, and a variety of poets and songwriters and bands.
I hope you’re all keeping well and having better weather than we are in the UK – very cool so far. If you haven’t already, have a listen to my guitar album Atlantic Canticles which is now online.
Non-REM adventures in hi-fi
It seems our most memorable encounters with recorded music happen without much consideration for the quality of the medium on which the music is transmitted. A whole generation of young people have apparently discovered their favourite artists, songs and albums through the pallid, eviscerated medium of mp3. Likewise, deacdes ago, I can recall falling in love with music heard on a tinny transistor radio or a mono tape cassette, or poor quality but exciting bootleg live recordings. It seems that if the emotional connection to the music is powerful enough, we listen through the medium’s imperfections that is bringing it to us. On the other hand, making acquaintance with new music through good hi-fi certainly doesn’t detract.
These thoughts followed a memorable hour listening to music courtesy of Oxford Audio Consultants, the city’s prime shop for audio equipment. I went to listen to a top-of-the-range CD/SACD player called La Source made by French company Aeroaudio. The retail price of the unit is about £20,000 (!) – between $30-40,000. Only a lottery win would give me a chance of owning one, but I was curious to hear what kind of sound that amount of money could deliver. At the demo La Source was hooked up to speakers and amplifier worth a further £35,000. I should add that for the cash-conscious among you there is a budget version of the player La Fontaine which is about £12,000.
In hi-fi the curve that links increasing sound quality with increasing cost means that you get the biggest improvement in sound over your first thousands of outlay, but thereafter it takes proportionately more money to get smaller improvements. I can’t say I heard £55,000 worth of sound or an improvement 55 times greater than my budget home system. But La Source was a remarkable listen – incredibly smooth sound and creating a sense of depth in the stereo field that was almost surround sound in itself. With my eyes shut I could hear voices and instruments not only positioned left, right and centre, but in differing positions near and far. I could hear different levels of ambience on different instruments within a single recording. All the instruments and voices sounding amazingly lifelike. Hearing The Casuals’ ‘Jesamine’ – one of my favourite 1960s songs – albeit a rough 1968 stereo mix on CD – on this system was certainly one of the best audio experiences I’ve ever had.
Now, where’s that confounded Lottery ticket? ….
http://www.audioaero.com/en/products/1-la-source
New album now available online
At last my album of guitar instrumentals Atlantic Canticles is now available to purchase online, either as a download or as a physical CD. I’ll post some links here later, but a google search on the title brings up a number of options, and it is on amazon.com (though not yet it seems on amazon.co.uk). For more details on the album click on the side-link. I hope you enjoy this music and I apologize for the long delay since I announced it back in January.
The colour of music
A couple of days ago I had a comment from Stephen Malinowski concerning his animated graphical score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The links are
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02tkp6eeh40
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2y90hH4H7Q
This uses a piece of software called the Music Animation Machine. His website stephenmalinowski.com has lots of information about it. I’m very attuned to the Rite just now because of preparatory work for the course I’m teaching in the summer, so I really appreciated what he has done with this presentation.
This is a fantastic labour and a terrific educative tool. As you watch the video you see the music moving from right to left as pulsations of colour, from low-pitch to high-pitch. It’s not only a pretty visual display, it makes visible many textural features of the music itself. It is quite easy to see that Stravinsky is repeating certain melodic motifs, lending evidence to my feeling that the Rite is a more ‘organic’ score than is often assumed to be the case. By this I mean that there is a greater recycling of certain musical ideas than often thought. The music becomes a live, pulsating organism. This is like looking into its breathing body. I get a similar feeling when I look at a score (scores are underestimated in their beauty) but you need a little familiarity with their conventions to do that. This visual presentation could be followed by anyone. I also feel the beauty of the visual display will make it easier for some people to cope with the dissonant quality of the music if they are usually put off by this. Whether or not you know the Rite you should take a look.
I should mention that the soundtrack to this video was created by Jay Bacall using the wonderful orchestral samples of the Vienna Symphonic Library.
My album of guitar music Atlantic Canticles has been held up by a really silly technological problem with the artwork. However, I think it is finally sorted, so I should be uploading the music within a day. There will then be a short delay for the album to be compiled and distributed to various websites where you’ll be able to buy it.
News recently of the death of 1960s singer-songwriter Richie Havens. Havens was a guitarist with a highly unorthodox technique involving his thumb playing half-barres in various open tunings. He also had a very soulful voice. If you have never heard it, listen to his performance of ‘Eyesight To The Blind’ on the Lou Reizner 1972 orchestral version of The Who’s Tommy (which is on youtube).
Houses of the Holy
As Dave Lewis (see the www.tbl.com website and Record Collector magazine feature) reminds us, this week saw the 40th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s fifth album. Having numbered their first three LPs and titled the fourth with four symbols, they more conventionally gave the fifth a title: Houses of the Holy (a reference to their audiences and concert halls). The Zeppelin mystique was assuaged by the fact that the title was not printed on the sleeve but came as a paper wrap-around. The sleeve itself was a strikingly tinted photo montage of the Giant’s Causeway. Nor did the album contain the song ‘Houses of the Holy’, which was eventually released in 1975 on Physical Grafitti.
Houses of the Holy was a hugely-anticipated album, following the band’s elevation to international fame during the preceding two years, and the fourth album which contained ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Many were hoping for another ‘Stairway’ on the new album, and Robert Plant revealed in one interview that the band did indeed have a song metaphorically fired from the same cannon. This was ‘The Rain Song’, a very attractive altered-tuning ballad with rising and falling dynamics. The remaining seven songs included the uptempo rollercoaster ‘The Song Remains The Same’, the delightful acoustic / electric mix of ‘Over The Hills and Far Away’, the heavy rock winter nocturne of ‘No Quarter’, the unbuttoned and joyful rifferama of ‘The Ocean’ (its opening riff combing a bar of 4/4 with one of 7/8), and the two controversial tracks ‘D’Yer Mak’er’ and ‘The Crunge’.
These were received by the more prog-rock ‘hairy’ part of Zep’s audience as ideological crimes: the first for being reggae and the other for being James Brown funk, and both for being apparently Not Serious. How dare Zep waste several inches of vinyl bandwidth on musical jokes! was the cry. What happened to the Viking-horde-clamouring-for-Valhalla head-banging which was what the World’s Official Heaviest Band were supposed to deliver?
The answer was that the World’s Official Heaviest Band fancied a bit of variety and to let their hair down a bit. They also wanted to not merely churn out ‘Black Dog’ Parts 2,3,4,5,6 … (They made a similar gesture in 1970 when III turned out to have quite a lot of acoustic music on it). I’ve always found both tracks perfectly entertaining in a light-hearted way, and contributing to the sparkle and variety of the album as a whole. ‘D’yer Mak’er”s title (an old joke: ‘My wife’s gone on holiday’, ‘Jamaica?’, ‘No, she went of her own accord’) is misleading because the song bears little relationship to reggae and owes much more to doo-wop – as is evident from the chord sequence, Plant’s lyric, and the album sleeve’s allusion to Rosie and the Originals. What I’ve always found hugely entertaining about this track is Bonham’s drumming, which is wildly too heavy for the song, but by that reason becomes a spectacle – as if a production of Swan Lake were gatecrashed by a squaddie in size 10 boots.
And talking about production, the drum sound on ‘D’yer Mak’er’ is amazingly vibrant, whereas the overall production lacks the monolithic crunch of the fourth album. But the arrangements show the band at the height of their powers. The amount of musical colour and detail in ‘No Quarter’ is astonishing, and, contrary to the indulgences of their live sets, nothing is present in excess.
The one track I haven’t mentioned is ‘Dancing Days’. This has to be one of the most harmonically inventive hard rock tracks ever recorded. It is built on a sinewy semi-tone riff moving between C# and D over a G chord, punctuated by a blues flat 3rd Bb and rude sixths that poke their tongue out every couple of bars. This has a definite Lydian mode flavour to me. It’s a good example of how a dissonant augmented fourth can have an erotic charge rather than the usual satanic / dark edge of the flat 5. In the verse the band settle into what initially seems like a Stones groove on C, but any comparison with ‘Honky Tonk Women’ goes out the window with the second chord which is based on C# with a tritonal colour. The progression of the verse also uses Bb and A with other odd notes added so the rock rhythm riff is given a Crowleyesque twist. Short and sweet, it is one of those tracks that has the quintessential Zep vibe.
Houses of the Holy remains an unconventional but good way into Led Zeppelin’s music.
The Rite of Spring
A piece of music which is on my mind very much at present is Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, or to give it its English title The Rite Of Spring. 2013 marks the centenary of its first performance on 29 May 1913 in Paris. This centenary is being celebrated all over the world, with live performances, books and CD releases. I’ve a small part in all this, as I’m teaching a course on the Rite for Oxford University Dept. of Continuing Education in the summer.
The first performance of the Rite is legendary because of the so-called ‘riot’ that broke out among the audience. A certain percentage of the audience reacted angrily to the Rite‘s flouting of their expectations of what ballet and music should be. The ballet was created by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, with choreography by Nijinsky and scenery by Nicholas Roerich. The dancers wore costumes, used postures and movements that were contrary to traditional ballet.
The ballet is set in an imaginary ancient Russia and centres on a ritual to bring the spring in which a girl is selected from the tribe and who dances herself to death. As such, it is a work which could be seen to synchronously anticipate the sacrifice of youth during the First World War.
Stravinsky’s music may only have been partially heard. It is recorded that even the large orchestra crammed into the pit at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was often drowned out by the noise from the auditorium, and the dancers often couldn’t hear it. Given the irregular rhythms and time-signatures, this made their task even harder. The legend of this first performance had problematic consequences for the arts in the C20th, since it set up a false expectation that being shocking was a guarantee of a work’s profundity and relevance. Thus, by the late C20th, it became assumed that an audience’s shock was by definition an inauthentic response (which is not the case – sometimes being shocked is an appropriate and human response). But that’s a big topic …
The Rite later became one of the centrepieces of C20th concert-hall music and rightly so. It reached a generation of children via an adulterated version in the Walt Disney film Fantasia. It remains a startling, invigorating and thrilling 35 minutes, in which Stravinsky discovered a new continent of rhythm and harmony which composers have been exploring ever since. His use of dissonance is at times strikingly beautiful. The Rite is also a paradoxical work in which Russian folk tunes are re-worked into irregular un-folk-like forms, just as a sophisticated orchestral score is used to evoke the primitive.
A few weeks ago I heard a live performance of the four-hand piano version made by the composer. With the elaborate orchestration removed, the rhythmic and harmonic effects stand-out in bold relief. I’ve been looking at this version closely myself for the course and it is fascinating. I know of no more unearthly and seemingly inexplicable chord progression than that which forms the introduction to part two of the Rite (which I read recently was originally titled ‘Pagan Night’), where minor triads oscillate over an unrelated D minor. The Rite is full of the most amazing harmonic and melodic sounds which you can never experience if you only listen to popular music.
If you want to explore the Rite there are many orchestral recordings available. There are also recordings of the piano version, though I would not start with this. The films Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and Riot at the Rite evoke something of the reality of the first performance. There is also DVD of a recreation of the original ballet with Gergiev conducting. If you find you like the Stravinsky of the Rite you should explore the earlier ballet Petrouchka and the later Symphony in Three Movements.
Over on Soundcloud
In addition to the two out-takes from Atlantic Canticles I’ve started loading a few songs and other music of mine onto Soundcloud.com. These are not downloadable, just for listening. One is an extract from ‘Rainbow Hunter’ which will be on the album and gives a flavour of its style with the combination of guitar and strings.
I hope you’ll visit the site and have a listen. I’m currently swapping the mp3s I loaded for some of them to wav files for better quality of listening.
Rikky Rooksby's site 