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13 strings for Christmas

This is by way of a footnote to the post about John Doan and the harp guitar. There are other guitars made with more than the conventional six strings. Today I had a newsletter from the Swedish record company BIS advertising new releases. One is a disc (SACD hybrid that will play on standard players) of Christmas instrumentals played on 13-string guitar by Anders Miolin. I haven’t heard this but it seems like it would make an unusual and attractive present if you’re thinking about music gifts for friends to play at Christmas. Here are some links:

www.bis.se

http://www.miolin.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=75

http://www.chiaviguitars.com/

The CD info from BIS is:

Christmas Dreams on 13 Strings BIS-2026 | SACD      EAN 7318599920269      TT: 72’22 Fantasies on Christmas songs, composed and performed by Anders Miolin on 13-string guitar

Stille Nacht (Fr. X. Gruber); Good King Wenceslas (trad.); Lulajže, Jezuniu (trad.); Noël nouvelet (trad.) / Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle (trad.); V lesu rodilas elochka (L. K. Beckmann) / Nu tändas tusen juleljus (E. Köhler); Es wird schon gleich dunkel (trad.) / Adeste fideles (J. Fr. Wade); Convidando está la noche (J. García de Zéspedes); Les Anges dans nos campagnes (trad.); Maria durch ein Dornwald ging (trad.) / Canzone d’l zampognari (trad.); It came upon the midnight clear (Arthur Sullivan); In dulci jubilo (trad.) / I Saw Three Ships (trad.); Baloo Lammy (trad.) / Balulalow (Peter Warlock); Azure Christmas (Anders Miolin); Stellæ nocte hibernali somniantes (Anders Miolin).

Posted by  |  November 15, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

November news

I recently mentioned that I had been working on some guitar instrumentals. This project first came to my mind about a year ago and then got pushed aside by work. In the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to write another six pieces, so I’m a fair way now toward having the 12-14 pieces needed to make an album. Talking to John Doan was certainly an inspiration. They’re not particularly difficult to play but explore the resonance of certain altered tunings on acoustic guitar. I hope to post a couple on youtube, and then record them with a few overdubs.

I recently recorded a set of video clips for my publishers to promote my songwriting books. They should be posted at some point on the Hal Leonard website.

I’ve completed a 5,500 word essay on the Led Zeppelin O2 Arena gig that will be published in book form next year as a contribution to the book Dave Lewis is working on (details on the tightbutloose website). There may be more writing to be done on Zeppelin next year following the announcement that Jimmy Page is currently working on remastering the albums with additional tracks. What exactly these turn out to be we will have to wait and see. I’ve come across some suspicious-sounding tracks in connection with other bands’ archive releases, which have been offered as alternate takes when they sound like mere remixes or monitor mixes. I hope the Zeppelin catalogue is treated to some SACD / 5.1 high-definition audio treatment.

Posted by  |  November 13, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Anyone who had a harp … guitar

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing American guitarist John Doan. John is one of the world’s leading exponents of the harp guitar. He’s been studying and playing it since the mid-1980s. We first met in the late 1990s when he was touring in the UK. The main focus of our talk was the signature harp guitar which John is involved with that will be available (for about $1500) in 2013. This is the first such affordable instrument – previously you would have to have one hand-made. Simply put, the harp guitar is a six-string guitar with an additional set of sub-bass strings and ‘super-trebles’ which extend the range of the guitar in both directions. If you search youtube for ‘john doan harp guitar’ you’ll be able to watch him play. It’s an impressive sound. It’s always great to talk to John because his thinking about the guitar is always subservient to his musical commitment (not always the case with guitarists). The short version of the interview will be available on guitarcoach, the download for the iPad. I hope to publish a longer version elsewhere.

I had a couple of concert experiences last weekend. I saw John Williams and John Etheridge play in the Sheldonian Theatre. A day or so later I saw the Led Zeppelin Celebration Day film on the big screen. Whatever one thinks of the band’s performance, this has to be one of the best ever shot rock concerts. If you like Zeppelin you have to see this.

I’ve recently been reading Pink Moon, a book of miscellaneous writings about Nick Drake which is enjoyable. If you don’t know Nick Drake’s music go and order Five Leaves Left or Bryter Later from somewhere. I’ve also read Leslie Ann-Jones’ new biography of Marc Bolan which, despite having some new information (especially through some new interviews) is poorly written and unsophisticated. It is also amazingly uninterested and uninformed about the actualities of Bolan’s music. I can’t see the point of writing biographies talking about musicians if you’re not going to talk about the music. There are more lines in the book about the 1966 World Cup Final or the JFK assassination or personal stuff than Beard of Stars! The book doesn’t even tell you what songs are on each release.

On the personal front, I think I have a green light now for the next songwriting book, although it seems it won’t appear until 2014. I’ve also written a number of acoustic guitar instrumentals which will go toward an album of such.

I’ve acquired a few more symphonies and enjoyed them very much. In addition to still investigating different recordings of Nielsen, I’ve been delighted to hear the Finnish composer Merikanto 3, along with George Lloyd 8, Riisager 1, Atterberg 6 in another recording, and Tubin 2 – one of those symphonies which is brash and noisy with a sublime pay-off at the end which makes it all worth it. There’s also a very pleasing disc of minor Vaughan Williams on Dutton Epoch called Early and Late Works.

Posted by  |  October 25, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Of Mann and men

I had an interesting evening Monday night up in London courtesy of a Faber night at the Social club. Barney Hoskyns was promoting his recently published book on Led Zeppelin, which has received good reviews. The Zeppelin book shelf is not exactly unoccupied, but it seems that he has managed to bring some new material to light, presenting the band’s story through an oral narrative constructed from hundreds of interviews. Barney invited respected music journalists Keith Altham and Charles Shaar Murray, and Swansong insider Phil Carlo, to share some of their memories and views of the band. I particularly enjoyed listening to Keith, who had some amazing tales to tell, and simply exudes the vibe of the 60s London rock scene. He interviewed anyone who mattered on the music scene, including doing the last interview ever with Hendrix a couple of days before he died. For more about Keith try this link to Rock’s Backpages: http://www.rocksbackpages.com/writer.html?WriterID=altham which you can read even if you’re not a subscriber.

Also in attendance was Dave Lewis who publishes the long-running and ever-improving Tight But Loose fanzine and runs the tbl website. If you like Led Zep both website and magazine are essential. Dave is currently doing a day-by-day countdown to the cinema screenings of the 2007 O2 Arena gig.

Musically this past week I’ve heard a Greatest Hits of 60s band Manfred Mann. MM (as I’ll call them) are one of those 60s bands that have never been taken up and written about by rock critics, so they don’t loom large in rock histories. But they’re one of those groups who were constantly on British pop radio during the 60s and were as much a part of the everyday sonic tapestry as bands like the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, etc. Primarily a singles band, none of their LPs has much of a reputation as a classic album. They mixed pop with R’n’B and a little light blues, their sound owing as much to electric organ and piano as electric guitars. Their covers are usually not very good (they did merely average versions of  ‘Oh No Not My Baby’, ‘I Put A Spell On You’, ‘Just Like A Woman’,and  ‘With God On Our Side’) with one exception: Dylan’s ‘Mighty Quinn’ which they made as much their own as Hendrix made ‘All Along The Watchtower’. They were good at high-spirited pop songs such as ‘54321’, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ and ‘Pretty Flamingo’. Their greatest moments came in the later 1960s with the hits ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones’, ‘Ha! Ha! Said The Clown’, ‘Ragamuffin Man’, ‘My Name Is Jack’ and ‘Fox On The Run’, where the songwriting is brimming with hooks and melodic and harmonic twists. These, along with ‘Mighty Quinn’, deserve a permanent place in 60s pop history. In the early 70s they changed into Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and did a fine cover of Springsteen’s ‘Blinded By The Light’.

While I’m thinking about 1960s bands I should mention that on Friday  September 30 The Times newspaper carried a wrap-around photo of the Who to promote Pete Townshend’s autobiography. On the reverse of it there were chord songbook transcriptions of three of their 60s hits done by yours truly (though not credited). So I finally made the cover of The Times … facing in … 😉

On the classical front I’ve acquired another 5 recordings of the Nielsen Sixth Symphony (which I mentioned a few posts back) and have been working my way through those. It’s very interesting what an effect slightly different speeds and emphases can have, and also the amount of reverb on a recording – which can blur some details even as it makes others sound better.

I’ve also been making more notes toward what I hope will be a book on the symphony. This meant trawling through the reviews of a couple of years of a magazine called International Record Review. I was partly looking at the frequency with which certain composers have their music re-recorded. Among the most recorded in the symphonic tradition are people like Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Mahler. There are a handful of recordings of most of their symphonies coming out every year. This would be amazing if you took as an analogy in the rock field that there were new versions of Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon coming out every few months!

Posted by  |  October 4, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: | Leave a comment

Led Zeppelin’s Last Stand

News has just been released that the official DVD film of Led Zeppelin’s performance at the O2 Arena in December 2007 is to be available from mid-November. There will be cinema screenings of the two-hour film all over the world in mid-October. The release has been keenly anticipated by the Zeppelin fraternity for a number of years, and there have been periods when it has seemed that it might not appear. This was not of course Led Zeppelin mark 1, since mark 1 finished on the death of drummer John Bonham in September 1980. Mark 2 did however have another Bonham on the drum stool – namely, John’s son Jason – who acquitted himself extremely well.

Over the years the surviving members of Led Zeppelin have reunited on a handful of occasions, and the results have been often underwhelming – notably at Live Aid in 1985 and the Atlantic Records 40th Birthday concert in 1988. The O2 gig, properly planned and rehearsed, was leagues ahead of those earlier efforts. It was also the most over-subscribed concert in musical history with millions of people trying to get one of 18,000 tickets (nope, I didn’t get one either).

There was some hope that the O2 gig would be a curtain-raiser to a bit more activity by the band, but this petered out in 2008 when attempts to find a replacement singer for Robert Plant failed. Plant had made it clear he did not want to do anymore. For him, singing songs from 30 years or more ago was a tall order. About one-third of the songs performed were actually played in keys one tone below their original pitch.

It raises an interesting question about what a re-united Led Zeppelin mark 2 might have achieved. Could they have produced new material? Could they have brought the band’s undoubted power to bear on lyric subjects suitable for an ageing audience and 3 out of 4 members in their 60s? I found myself thinking of Dylan Thomas’ poem about death ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ with its refrain ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. If ever there was a band that had the power to potentially rage against the dying of the light it was Zeppelin. Though much of their 70s output is a Dionysian celebration of the joys of the flesh, tracks like ‘When The Levee Breaks’, ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and ‘Kashmir’ ventured into more serious lyric territory. On that territory the age of the band would not matter. Sadly, it looks like we will never know.

I shall be writing some pieces about the O2 gig for a Tight But Loose special (Dave Lewis’ renowned Led Zep magazine) coming out at the end of the year. I’ve also recently written a couple of short pieces for guitarcoach, the downloadable guitar magazine for the iPad. Last week I taught my Beatles course once more at Rewley House in Oxford.

Posted by  |  September 17, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Back to mono? / Carl Nielsen

I recently had a conversation with a 20-year-old on the subject of explaining what an SACD was, and also what was a 5.1 mix. To do this you have to start from an understanding of stereo in order to grasp how a 5.1 mix pushes sound at you from five different directions rather than two. Like many young people, this person had an iPod and often listened to mp3s through ear-buds. To my horror, it became apparent that there seems to be a generation of music listeners who have always used iPods and similar devices, who think that the reason you have two ear-buds is because you have two ears and music needs to go into both of them! Furthermore, if you take one out you can hear what a friend / bus-driver / barista is saying to you and still have the music.

In other words, these listeners have apparently no conception of stereo! They don’t understand that the left signal is different to the right, and that both are required to create a stereo musical image whose centre is right in the middle of your head. I suspect that most have never owned a proper hi-fi system with a balance on the amp which lets you turn the left or right channel off –  a trick which can be revealing on 60s tracks which were mixed oddly or were originally intended to be mono. (What happens in these cases is that whole chunks of instruments disappear or are muted, leaving you with a partial backing track you can sing over or play guitar over.) If you have tried to transcribe music for yourself you learn to use this balance alteration as a way of isolating the instrument(s) you are trying to hear.

They might as well be listening to mono, where everything comes from a single direction. In the early 1970s record producer Phil Spector led a brief campaign extolling the virtues of the mono recordings which dominated popular music until the late 1960s. I never understood the appeal of mono, because our ears naturally function in stereo, integrating sound from a wide range of left and right. I’m always disappointed to find on a remastered box-set of 60s material that a mono mix has been used instead of a stereo one. Give me stereo any day.

So the upshot was a feeling that as music technology develops (SACD, 5.1, etc) so people’s interest in really hearing music is, in some quarters, diminishing.

Aside from this I’ve been taking some initial steps toward putting some guitar-related videos on youtube. I’ll announce them when they’re done. I stumbled across the website bandcamp recently and thought that might be somewhere I can place some of my songs.

I’m getting music inspiration from the Danish composer Carl Nielsen at present. I’ve always loved his fourth symphony (‘the Inextinguishable’), but heard a Prom performance of the 5th which impressed me, and for the past week I’ve been starting most days in semi-darkness listening to his quirky sixth – the Sinfonia Semplice – which is quite a controversial work. It is only comparatively recently that criticism has started to appreciate this strange work. It is such a tragedy that he did not live to write another, because I’m sure he would have found a way to re-integrate his musical language after breaking it down in no.5 and no.6.

Posted by  |  September 3, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments

C over G

Today I was looking at David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and in particular the question of which shape to use for a C/G chord. This is a second inversion, the type of chord where the 5th is the lowest note rather than the root note or the 3rd. In traditional music harmony there are many rules about the use of second inversions; how they are approached and how quitted. Guitarists tend not to be much bothered about the special identity of second inversion chords. Instead, they tend to use them as a means to have more strings sounding.

Here’s an example. An open C chord in first position is usually played x32010. If it is turned into a second inversion – 332010 – the 6th string can be played. Bowie seems to have been fond of this way of playing a C in songs like ‘Queen Bitch’ and I think it was for the extra resonance. But it isn’t functioning as a second inversion, just a more resonant C chord.

For a C/G that sounds like a second inversion, especially in a sequence where the bass note was at A and is falling to F# or F, I recommend 3×2010. It’s a subtle difference, but the removal of the low root note makes the second inversion stand out with more of an identity.

Posted by  |  August 29, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | 2 Comments

Flowers for San Francisco

A couple of days ago the death was announced of singer Scott McKenzie. McKenzie is remembered in the history of popular music for his Summer of Love anthem ‘If You’re Going To San Francisco’. For people of a certain age probably few songs evoke a period, in history and in social myth, with such immediate and haunting power as this. The song itself was written by John Philips of The Mamas and the Papas. It reached no.4 on the U.S. Billboard charts but did even better in the UK, entering the Top 20 in mid-July and leaving the chart in mid-October, and spending 5 weeks at no.1 during August and into September.

According to the Telegraph’s obituary, McKenzie spoke of the song being more about an idea than a place. “My heart was in that song,” McKenzie agreed, “and I didn’t have to change my image. I already had a pretty loose life. I was wearing flower shirts, weird flowing robes and kaftans, and we picked flowers the day we recorded the song. One girl gave me a garland of flowers and my friends were sitting in the lotus position, meditating, while I was recording it.”

I have always suspected that true ‘heads’ / counter-culturalists of the time probably dismissed it as a pop cash-in on their roots movement. Certainly, the production tries to send the right signals (like the sitar noises on the bridge). But it never struck me quite as vulnerable to that charge as The Flowerpot Men’s ‘Let’s Go To San Francisco’ which was released, rather late for the Summer of Love, that autumn (Eric Burdon’s San Francisco Nights was another hit linked to the city). And I guess I should mention Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ as a song that marked the culmination and the end of the 60s dream – a hit for Matthews Southern Comfort in 1970.

Anyway, it seems that ‘If You’re Going To San Francisco’ not only inspired people around the world, but continues to touch people to this day. It’s a beautiful melody and there’s a key-change to lift the later parts of the song and a very pleasing bit of re-harmonizing on the words ‘For those who come to San Francisco’. McKenzie sung it very well, in a cool, under-stated way which just made it more powerful, and thus gained immortality as the voice summoning the idealists and the innocent to a city which exists now as another vision of the celestial city – as much as the Byzantium of W.B.Yeats’ poems. In reality, the actuality of flower power in San Francisco was rather different. George Harrison has some interesting recollections on visiting it on the Beatles Anthology DVD. But the ideal will live on in the imagination.

Now if only John Philips had written a song for Yeats …

Posted by  |  August 21, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | 2 Comments

The Love Affair

So, for another year, as of last Friday night my teaching for the Oxford Experience is complete. Music featured strongly on my courses this year, with two out of five courses devoted to it, and will do so even more next year when three of the six courses I hope to teach will be musical (the third is a new one on Stravinsky). Now it is time to re-focus and think about my other work, including the next book.

In the meantime the Olympics have come and gone, with British popular music featuring in the opening and closing ceremonies. I will confess to being uneasy about the careless way in which some of the songs were used with an apparent disregard for their lyric content – The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’ being a good example (I can’t think of a song more in rejection of such a mass-participation event as the Olympics), not to mention ‘Pretty Vacant’ – and the use of bits of songs such as ‘Baba O’Reilly’ (teenage wasteland, anyone?). The description of the closing ceremony as a ‘symphony of British music’ will go in my book on the symphony as another classic usage of the word to eclipse an important concept.

I have managed to sketch a few musical ideas these past couple of weeks. It’s a good compositional discipline to try to write something as often as possible, regardless of whether you’re feeling inspired. I find it helpful to open a manuscript page in Sibelius for one or two instruments – harp or piano (both harmonic instruments which can play chords) and perhaps a single-voice melodic instrument like violin or flute. It’s a good way to think about melody or reaching for new harmony.

I’ve also re-visited and transcribed some late 60s British pop hits by a band called Love Affair, who were slightly associated with the Mod movement, though they came on the scene pretty late for that. This was sparked by hearing one of said hits on the radio: ‘Rainbow Valley’. The band had their run of hits between 1968-70. Their sound (rumoured to have been executed in the studio by session players) is a British take on mid-60s Motown: yearning romantic melodies (sung by Steve Ellis), big brass chords, high strings, great drum fills, and busy syncopated ‘click’ bass (the picked equivalent of James Jamerson’s Motown bass-lines). If anyone ever wrote a book on what made British pop at the time work and how it differed with the US they’d have to be in it. The four big hits were ‘Bringing On Back The Good Times’, ‘Everlasting Love’, ‘A Day Without Love’ and ‘Rainbow Valley’, with the second going to no.1. From a songwriting point of view, there are some interesting points about them, notably the use of first inversion chords in prominent positions, and in ‘Rainbow Valley’ a daring break in rhythm during the later verses. You can probably find old clips of them on youtube.

Posted by  |  August 13, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

July on the Oxford Experience

It has been awhile since I last posted because of the run-up and start of the Oxford Experience summer school programme on which I teach. So far I’ve taught the courses ‘From a Blues to the Symphony’, ‘The Beatles, Popular Music and 1960s Britain’, and ‘The Romance of the Railways’, and everything seems to have gone fine so far. It was interesting to see the reaction Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘Stolen Car’ got on Day 1 of the first course. Several people were obviously quite moved by it, despite its simplicity (mostly two chords but haunting). It was released on his 1980 album The River.

The railways course is really about how they have inspired poets, writers, artists and composers. There are hundreds of railway songs, especially in the American tradition, but less familiar to my students were some of the classical pieces inspired by trains – notably Honegger’s Pacific 2-3-1 (1923), Charles Ives’ ‘The Celestial Railroad’, Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ (1988) – something of a minimalist classic – and (a recent discovery of mine) a string quartet by the Danish composer Rued Langgaard, the second movement of which is a 2:15 evocation of a fast train ride, written for just the four strings.

I meant to blog about several rock documentaries shown on BBC4 recently. One was on The Who’s Quadrophenia album and the other on Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. Both were eminently watchable, but showed an alarming tendency to make highly uncritical claims. It is rare these days to get any contrary view on a music doc to take the heat out of the exaggerated praise. The world really didn’t change THAT much when Bowie put his arm round Mick Ronson on TOTP one June night in 1972. You would think it was the trigger for the reversal of the magnetic poles and the fall of various governments …

I’ve been listening a lot to various works by Weinberg, the Estonian composer Lepo Sumera, and the Swede Kurt Atterberg. This morning I had a blast of Nielsen’s third symphony, which I don’t know as well as no.4. The more I hear of Nielsen’s music the more I admire the positivity which much of it radiates – a fascinating contrast to another favourite of mine Jean Sibelius, whose music’s positivity is often harder won.

Speaking of Sibelius the man reminds me that for the past two weeks I have  watched with horrified and avid (pun intended) attention the drama playing out over the Sibelius notation system’s future. Sibelius was sold by its originators the Finn brothers to the company Avid 15 months ago. Avid have announced that they are closing the London office of Sibelius. This apparently means the break-up of the very team whose skill and dedication have made Sibelius a world-beating notation software. It is unbelievably short-sighted. A campaign to save Sibelius has been launched. You can read about this over at the Sibelius forum. I’ve used Sibelius for 10 years now for my composing and it revolutionized my musical creativity.

And just to prove that rock music documentaries don’t have the monopoly on misleading claims, there have also been a couple of radio programmes about the alleged resurrection of Sibelius’ lost 8th symphony. All that has happened is that three tiny pieces of music – lasting about 3 minutes – have been transcribed from manuscripts in the University of Helsinki Library. They might have been intended for the 8th, but perhaps not. Again, they’re online if you google Sibelius 8.

Posted by  |  July 25, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments