J. K. Huysmans: “The mouth organ”

From the novel A rebours (Against the Grain), 1884

For Francis Schwartz

He made his way to the dining-room, where there was a cupboard built into one of the walls containing a row of little barrels, resting side-by-side on tiny sandalwood stands and each broached at the bottom with a silver spigot.

This collection of liqueur casks he called his mouth organ.

A rod could be connected to all the spigots, enabling them to be turned by one and the same movement, so that once the apparatus was in position it was only necessary to press a button concealed in the wainscoting to open all the conduits simultaneously and so fill with liqueur the minute cups underneath the taps.

The organ was then open.  The stops labelled ‘flute’, ‘horn’, and ‘vox angelica’ were pulled out, ready for use.  Des Esseintes would drink a drop here, another there, playing intense symphonies to himself, and providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear.

Indeed, each and every liqueur, in his opinion, corresponded in taste with the sound of a particular instrument.  Dry curaçao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its piercing, velvety note; kümmel like the oboe with its sonorous, nasal timbre; crème de menthe and anisette like the flute, at once sweet and tart, soft and shrill.  Then to complete the orchestra there was kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky raising the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones; marc-brandy matching the tubas with its deafening din; while peals of thunder came from the cymbal and the bass drum, which arak and mastic were banging and beating with all their might.

He considered that this analogy could be pushed still further and that string quartets might play under the palatial arch, with the violin represented by an old brandy, choice and heady, biting and delicate; with the viola simulated by rum, which was stronger, heavier, and quieter; with vespetro as poignant, drawn-out, sad and tender as a violoncello; and with the double-bass a fine old bitter, full-bodied, solid, and dark.  One might even form a quintet, if this were thought desirable, by adding a fifth instrument, the harp, imitated to near perfection by the vibrant savour, the clear, sharp, silvery note of dry cumin.

The similarity did not end there, for the music of liqueuers had its own scheme of interrelated tones; thus, to quote only one example, Benedictine represents, so to speak, the minor key corresponding to the major key of those alcohols which wine-merchants’ scores indicate by the name of green Chartreuse.

Once these principles had been established, and thanks to a series of erudite experiments, he had been able to perform upon his tongue silent melodies and mute funeral marches; to hear inside his mouth crème de menthe solosand rum-and-vespetro duets.

He even succeeded in transferring specific pieces of music to his palate, following the composer step by step, rendering his intentions, his effects, his shades of expression, by mixing or contrasting related liqueurs, by subtle approximations and cunning combinations.

At other times he would compose melodies of his own, executing pastorals with the sweet blackcurrant liqueur that filled his throat with the warbling song of a nightingale; or with the delicious cacaochouva that hummed sugary bergerets like the Romances of Estelle and the ‘Ah! vous-dirai-je, maman’ of olden days.

But tonight Des Esseintes had no wish to listen to the taste of music; he confined himself to removing one note from the keyboard of his organ, carrying off a tiny cup which he had filled with genuine Irish whisky.

March 10, 2010, 9:54am

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Johannes Kepler, Willie Ruff, and John Rodgers: “The Planets from Mercury Outward”

From the album The Harmony of the World: A Realization for the Ear of Johannes Kepler’s Data from Harmonices Mundi (1619)

Most famous for his “first law” declaring that the orbit of planets around the sun traced ellipses, and not circles, as was previously believed, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is not usually thought of in connection to music.  But in his 1619 book Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the Worlds), Kepler gave the ancient Pythagorean and Platonic notion of the “music of the spheres” a new and precisely empirical formulation.  He compared the angular velocity of the planets at perihelion and aphelion (the orbital points closest to and furthest from the sun), and expressed the relationship between these speeds as musical intervals:

(The interval in question is between the outermost notes of each scale; the inner notes are filled in as a formality.)

Kepler’s calculation of the “music of the spheres” was remarkable for a number of reasons.  First, as explained in Joscelyn Godwin’s excellent book Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, the intervals are calculated not in relation to the Earth, but rather, in accordance with the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, from the auditory perspective of the sun.  Second, although Kepler’s notation could not indicate it, he imagined their tonal ranges as being continuously sounded in the manner of a glissando.  Finally, Kepler’s cosmic music is explicitly polyphonic.  Previous theories were constrained by conventional understandings of what was musically acceptable: Aristotle, for example, rejected the notion that each planet simultaneously sounded the note of a scale, for the result would be cacophony.  But Kepler saw no reason to believe that the music of the spheres would cleave neatly to human notions of musical beauty.  He believed, with his medieval predecessor John Scotus Eriugena, that “all the musical consonances can be made by the eight celestial sounds, not just in the three genera (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic), but even in others beyond the conception of mortals.”

Because the time-scale of these planetary motions is exceedingly vast (Saturn’s trip up and down a major third requires no less than 30 years), things have to be accelerated to make these harmonies audible to humans.  This has been done in an exceptional recording made by Willie Ruff and John Rodgers.  The music you are hearing introduces the planets one by one: first Mercury, high and fast, with its eccentric orbit covering a large interval of a minor 10th; then, both in the treble register, Venus and Earth, whose nearly circular orbits create tones that barely change—Venus oscillates within a quarter-tone, Earth a semitone.  Next enters Mars in the alto range, with a fairly wide ambitus traversed in 10 second cycles. Quite a bit lower, Jupiter sounds its stentorian baritone, spanning a minor third. Finally comes Saturn, a growling bass about an octave below Jupiter.  Its range is a major third.

The outer planets, unknown in Kepler’s time, are represented by rhythmic impulses instead of musical tones: Uranus vacillates between a rapid 9 and 10 pulses per second, Neptune keeps a near-constant rate of 5 per second, and Pluto enters with a slow but irregular beat, which is the last to be heard after all the other voices drop out.

March 06, 2010, 3:23pm

“Another world is possible”

Peter Ablinger’s “speaking piano” declares the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court.  A stunning piece of work—conceptually, technically, and emotionally.

March 03, 2010, 10:19am

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Don Simmons: “Limehouse Blues”

From the album A Session with Don Simmons (1966)

It is necessary to hear the Wurlitzer organ as the summation, in a single apparatus, of the sonic ideal of an entire human milieu.  Just as the Baroque pipe organ was that era’s templum musicum, a machine for the transmission and reception of divine forces, the Wurlitzer musically invoked a higher power in the public rituals of American modernity, namely shopping and leisure.

Like the pipe organs, but with a much shorter life span, the Wurlitzers are now carefully preserved relics, the sole denizens of otherwise abandoned holy places. And indeed, one has a similar uncanny sensation in old movie theaters and shopping-centers—these forlorn palaces of consumerism—as in the empty cathedrals of Europe.

The Wurlitzer repertoire is filled with songs you’ve heard before a millions times but never known the name of—anonymous earworms like “Sweet Georgia Brown, “We Three,” and “Limehouse Blues.”  This last number gives a good sense of the Wurlitzer’s sound.  It’s played here by Don Simmons, who (seriously) was the resident organist at the Oaks Park Roller Rink in Portland, Oregon, from 1962 until his death in 1985.

February 26, 2010, 5:24pm

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Alois Hába: Suite for Four Trombones in Quarter-tone System, Op. 72 (1950)

From the album Centenary: Alois Hába

Alois Hába is one of the most important composers associated with microtonal music in the 20th century.  Born in 1893 in Vizovice (present-day Czech Republic), Hába moved between Prague, Vienna, and Berlin from 1914 to 1923, when he permanently settled in Prague.  Beginning in 1924, Hába offered courses in quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory; these developed into a full-fledged department of microtonal music, which lasted from 1934 to 1949, although its operation was interrupted by the war.

Jiří Vysloužil’s claim in Grove Music Online that Hába “may justly be regarded as the originator of the use of quarter- and sixth-tones in Western art music” is dubious in the extreme, considering the contemporaneous endeavors of composers such as Ivan Vyschnegradsky, Willi Moellendorff, and Richard Stein, not to mention the considerably earlier experiments of Jörg Mager and Julián Carrillo. But Hába’s success in propagating microtonal music within the mainstream of European “classical” music is likely unsurpassed.  Beyond his work as a composer, Hába oversaw the construction of new instruments for the performance of microtonal music, including three types of quarter-tone piano (1924–31), a quarter-tone (1928) and a sixth-tone (1936) harmonium, and a quarter-tone clarinet (1924), trumpet (1931) and guitar (1943).

This lovely mid-century suite for trombone quartet comprises five short movements, marked Maestoso, Andante cantabile, Allegretto scherzando, Moderato cantabile, and Allegro risoluto.  Hába’s music, by turns magisterial, elegiac, and playful, demonstrates irrefutably the expressive viability of quarter-tone composition.

February 25, 2010, 1:14pm

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Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)

From the album  Avis de tempête

Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane.  As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.

The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique.  Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).

Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing.  Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another.  An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere.  (Georges Aperghis)

February 20, 2010, 4:43pm

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Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet, third movement, “Andante” (1931)

From the album Chamber Works

One of the most important and neglected musical figures of the early 20th century, Ruth Crawford associated with the “ultramodernist” circle of American composers in the 1920s, including Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger.  These composers championed a radical break with European musical traditions, and thus represented an alternative to the dominant neoclassical orientation of Aaron Copland and Walter Piston.

Crawford composed her String Quartet in 1931, while she was studying in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Upon returning from Europe, she married Seeger, and in 1936 the couple move to Washington, D.C., in order to work on New Deal projects for the preservation and dissemination of American folk music.

The remarkable third movement of this quartet is bereft of anything that could be called a melody. The music begins with gently surging tones in close proximity, weaving together to form a hypnotically dissonant sound-fabric.  As the piece progresses, the strings move slowly upward in pitch and the music gradually becomes louder and more discordant.  The tension built up by these grating sonorities finally explodes the texture: a violent, expressionistic outburst is followed by a sudden downward cascade of tones, as if a cord had snapped and the slow upward ratcheting were undone in an instant.  The movement ends as it began, with ominous pulsations in the low strings.

Comparable only to the contemporary work of Varese, this music anticipates the later development of “sound mass” or Klangkomposition by Xenakis, Ligeti, and Penderecki in the 1950s and 60s.

February 16, 2010, 10:50am

Guest essay

“The Tinkering Method: How Computer Learning Informs Music Pedagogy,” by Jeff Lundy

Music and statistics are among my most passionate intellectual dabblings.  Recently, I struck upon the crazy idea of seeing what people have done at their intersection. To my luck, I discovered that the statistical analysis of music recently experienced a small resurgence among music analysts.

There are many interesting avenues pursued by this new research.  In the interest of being brief, however, let me just say that this work is still in the “proof of concept” stage.  From what I’ve gathered, it’s going to be a long time before a piece of software robustly dissects the style of a work, or before it creates a custom-tailored piece of music.  But of course, academic research is rarely about finding practical, ready-to-use products.  Just striving to get a computer to understand music is in itself quite informative.

For instance, consider the opinion of British computer scientist, Darrell Conklin.  In a recent review piece he explains the best process for getting software to create stylistically-competent compositions.  Essentially, his message is this:  software does the best job of imitating a musical style when you give it a piece of music from which to start, and then let it modify it thoroughly.  This is infinitely better than the rather brittle process of letting the computer try to create its own melodies from scratch.  Why is modification better than creation?  Because software that starts from scratch lacks a long-term vision of where it’s going, and it frequently can’t find a good “next note” to put in a melodic sequence.  By giving the computer an existing piece of music from which to work, you give it a guide-wire to get past localized problems.

What does this have to tell us?  Well, I believe there is a pedagogical insight to be gathered here.  Computers are fairly dumb when it comes to understanding and creating music.   Being dumb at understanding music, computers are not unlike novice musicians.  Thus, what we learn about teaching computers to understand music may have something to tell us about teaching human beings to understand music.

In particular, the modification method outlined above supports an opinion I’ve held for a while; namely, that conventional music pedagogy suffers from a flaw.  When presented with a novice composer, many teachers try to fill a student’s head with the “fundamentals” of Western music.  Admirably, these teachers hope to get the student started with a complete foundation.  However, I believe this approach falters because it misses the cognitive gap between analytically understanding a language’s grammar, and experientially understanding how to manipulate that grammar in a useful way.  This misunderstanding is akin to giving a child her first bike, and then sending her off to ride it, with no further guidance than the assembly instructions.  Hearing how the various components of the bike are assembled – “Place screw A into the pre-drilled hole labeled D, and turn with a Philips-head screwdriver until tightened” – is not going to help poor Sally learn to ride a bicycle.  Similarly, novice composers have trouble grasping how fundamental musical elements translate into full-blown musical phrases.

In opposition to conventional teaching, I would argue that novice composers need to follow a process similar to the learning process of statistical software.  For the sake of convenience, let me call the following approach the “tinkering method.”

At first, students following the tinkering method would listen to lots of music in a certain style, and even try to absorb as much music theory as they possibly can (this inductive approach is similar to how predictive software “learns” about new music).  With their limited processing skills, however, novice composers would benefit from having a guide-wire, much like their computer counterparts.  So instead of trying to expect complete originality from students at the beginning of their journey, it seems preferable to let students lean on the compositions of others.  Perhaps the best approach is to instruct students to rearrange phrases in an extant work; or (following the process outlined by Conklin) to have students randomly select notes in an extant work, which they replace with alternate notes believed to be stylistically appropriate.

This tinkering method will give novice composers the experience of creating something new, right from the outset (increasing their engagement with the process).  Moreover, it’s likely that after a while, students will begin to connect their small bits of superficial understanding into a larger whole.  By tinkering around with already existing works, it should become apparent how various momentary choices shift the direction of a piece into various long-term directions.

Eventually, students following the tinkering method would advance to a little more freedom.  Specifically, I envision them creating compositions with the understanding that they are permitted to steal whole phrases or devices from other composers (warning them of the dangers of plagiarism, of course).  Basically, students would be advised that they are free to take as much from other composers as they wish, but that they are encouraged to use as little existing materials as possible.  Given time, I believe that students would require less and less stealing from other composers; until eventually the students would no longer need to lean on an existing piece of music at all.

In conclusion, I would say a word to those concerned about using computers as a model of the human brain.  I recognize this is a valid concern.  Prominent cognitive philosophers have argued that the computer’s serial processing is a terrible analog of the brain’s parallel processing.  Nonetheless, I believe in this instance I have drawn an appropriate conclusion from an example of computer learning.  The idea for the tinkering method comes not from a direct analogy to the computer (i.e. students should listen to lots of MIDI and then draw correlation tables).  Rather, it draws from the spirit of trying to teach a new trick to a poorly-equipped information processing device.  In fact, if there is a fault in following the computer analogy too closely, I would say that it lies in the conventional pedagogical approach.  It is this view of the student that seems over-enamored with the ideal of programming basic commands into a student’s head.

Jeff Lundy is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego.  His dissertation is a statistical analysis of how and why American households overspend (i.e. spend more money than they make).

February 13, 2010, 9:58am

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Thomas Bloch: Formule (1995)

From the album Ondes Martenot

Invented by the Frenchman Maurice Martenot (the instrument’s name means “Martenot waves”), the Ondes Martenot was first presented to the public in April 1928, though it was begun much earlier.

Like many early electronic instruments, the Ondes is based on the sound-generating principle of heterodyning, in which to very high and inaudible frequencies create an audible tone which corresponds to the difference between the two high frequencies.  One of these high frequencies is constant, while the other (and thus the resulting tone) is controlled by the player.  In the case of the Ondes, the instrument is played by either traditional keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire (called the ruban or “ribbon”), which allows for continuous glissando tones similar to those of the Theremin.

Because the Ondes is monophonic, the player generally uses only her right hand, keeping the left hand free to manipulate the “intensity key,” which controls the amplitude of the instrument.  In order to create a sound, the key must be pressed at the same time as the keyboard or ribbon, allowing for a variety of potential attacks and phrasing.

The intensity key is located in a drawer on the left side of the instrument, along with switches controlling the timbre and transposition buttons (including quarter-tone inflections).  There are also two foot pedals for activating the filter and shaping volume, in case both the player’s hands are busy.

Finally, the sound of the Ondes is routed to up to four specially-designed loudspeakers, some of which employ external resonators such as strings or a metal plate.

More than any other electronic instrument, the Ondes was embraced by contemporary composers such as Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen.  As an indication of the cultural standing won by Martenot’s new instrument, Messaien’s 1937 composition Fête des belles eaux for six Ondes was performed on a boat in the Seine as part of that year’s World’s Fair.  Such ceremonial uses of the Ondes were apparently not uncommon, judging by a photograph of an all-woman Ondes octet (plus two pianos) from around 1935.

Representing a recent and decidedly unclassical use of the instrument, this wonderful little piece entitled Formule (“Formula”) was composed by Thomas Bloch, one of the world’s foremost players of the Ondes.

February 10, 2010, 7:59pm

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Armando Sciascia: “Circuito Chiuso”

From the album Psych Funk 101 (1968-1975): A Global Psychedelic Funk Curriculum (2009)

February 09, 2010, 10:39am