Ringing in the New Year (well, the new school year...)

As much as I love technology, I've always lagged contentedly behind on the cellphone/smartphone train; I don't really like talking on cellphones in the first place, and having the Internet at my fingertips isn't really worth the price of admission for me since I'm near a computer almost all the time.  However, we did just buy the first family smartphone for my wife; it's useful on trips and when out and about, and she's much less likely to over-ride the data plan than I would be. (I never said I wouldn't enjoy having a smartphone.) Meanwhile, I "upgraded" to her old Sony not-so-smart phone. To make this upgrade more exciting, I decided to do a little personalizing.

I'm always astounded that anyone would pay for ringtones (absurdly priced for what you're getting), but then people will also pay ridiculous amounts to send texts that use a fraction of the bandwidth a "free" voice call would require. But aside from the cost, it's just more fun to create your own ringtones. (Perhaps you remember my Rite of Springtone post from the technical dark ages of 2007.) So, last weekend, I sat down with iTunes and Audacity for a couple of hours and came up with this exciting assemblage of ways to be summoned.

I'm not pretending this is a comprehensive list of the best of all possible ringtones - these are just ones that came to mind and for which I had mp3s readily available. You'll notice there are a few works that get raided more than once and a few composers who show up multiple times. Honestly, the difficulty now is deciding which tone to use since I like them all; it almost makes me wish I used my cellphone more regularly. Almost. (If you want to know what's what, you can see the whole playlist here and even download your favorites.)

Of course, aside from making phone calls more exciting, there's something interesting about condensing a large musical work down to a 6-10 second calling card, and it's fun to think about which musical ideas work best for this kind of situation (especially ones that have a sort of "ringing" quality). Maybe that's a subject for another blog post...

Techfail For the Win

I wrote back in April about my slightly perverse affection for musical mistakes that sound right to me. This leads fairly naturally into an affection for musical imperfections that sound undeniably wrong to me, but in a way that's still enjoyable. "Delightfully wrong" might be a way of putting it. A couple of recent real-life examples come to mind, and although technology is often seen as an enemy of the kind of musical imperfections that are gratifyingly human, I'm delighted to say that each of these examples is the result of technology gone wrong.

The first has been provided courtesy of our Honda Odyssey's CD player. Although buying our first minivan a couple of years ago was midlife-crisis inducing, I was delighted that the CD player plays mp3 CDs. The mp3 CD is an underrated medium - while it's not quite the same as having an iPod's worth of music at hand, you can typically get about 10 album's worth onto one disc, so we usually have a disc in the player with lots of kids' favorites. It's always there, ready to go - no worries about hooking up wires, etc.

Now, try as I might to convince the children that Bach, Schumann, and Prokofiev should be their musical favorites, I've got to admit that my daughters enjoy the musical stylings of one Taylor Swift, so Ms. Swift gets a lot of minivan airtime. However, one quirk of the mp3 CD system is that the discs tend to age fast, for reasons (weather?) I don't fully understand. Unlike records which might crackle and skip, or tape cassettes which tend to warp and bend the pitches, these discs start skipping just little tiny bits at a time, so it sounds rather like Taylor's had too much coffee. (Taylor Too Swift?) Measure after measure, there are these little lurches ahead, rarely significant enough to obscure the melody or lyrics.

Of course, pop music is nothing if not predictable as to where the beat falls, so it's still pretty obvious when the skipping starts because the beat gets weird. My 4-year old son, who's often angling to switch to some other musical choice, will frequently notify us right away when the irregularities begin - a beat gone awry can be felt quite easily. The techy side of me gets a little annoyed that the technology breaks down so often; but the mischevious side of me really enjoys the funhouse polyrhythmic results. Suddenly, music that can be mindnumbingly banal (I'm probably being too hard on Ms. Swift, but whatever) has a wonderfullly unpredictable kind of manic energy. Here's a little sampler:

Yes, it's maddening, I suppose, but it's also engaging and kind of fascinating to hear the poor CD player try its best to keep the music going, even though something has obviously been corrupted. At any rate, I enjoy hearing it this way more than this way. (Taylor, if you're reading this, maybe you can write a song about how mean I am.)

So, yeah, my daughters have inflicted more Taylor Swift on me than I would've predicted, but they are also excellent young violinists in training, so I can't really complain. In fact, much as I've always loved accompanying, I'm finding nothing is more satisfying than being their accompanist, so I don't mind at all accompanying them to their lessons. Except....their generally old-school Russian teacher has a very new-school piano in her studio. It is not, in fact, a piano at all; it is a digital piano. Ugh.

Ironically, one of the biggest problems with a digital piano is that its sound is too clean and carefully modulated. I think the piano is the most wonderfully imperfect of instruments (all viola jokes aside) - it can never be perfectly tuned, the upper register never sustains enough, it's a percussion instrument often masquerading as a lyrical instrument, etc., etc. All of these imperfections are part of what make the piano so special - a great piano sound is the product of all sorts of compromises and sleights of hand/foot that meld into something much greater than its parts. Too often, a digital piano bypasses all the magic and just produces a dry, pale shadow of the true piano sound. I'd generally rather play a badly out-of-tune, uneven upright piano than a digital thing, so I'm always left a little unsatisfied playing at the girls' lessons.

Until...some time last Spring, this dry, predictable machine sprung a leak of a kind that should logically be even more frustrating than a skipping CD player. The keys are "touch sensitive" as one would expect from a digital piano, but for some reason, the touch sensitivity started failing on the second B below middle C. This turned out to mean depressing the key would have one of two equally depressing results: no sound at all, or the loudest sound possible, as if the key had been pounded ferociously.

The first couple of times I experienced the latter, it was truly disorienting. There I am, absent-mindedly playing along fairly softly when, for no apparent reason, there's this cannon-shot effect. Pianists are so used to having the level of sound correlate to the physical input that this kind of synthesized anomaly is wildly unnatural. As it happened, one daughter was playing a piece in B minor that day, the other a piece in E minor (which features lots of low B's as the dominant), so sightreading suddenly took on a minefield-like quality. I quickly learned to scan ahead for low B's, and then make quick decisions about whether an octave displacement was practical or whether bailing altogether would be best. Inevitably, I'd miss a few (meaning I'd hit a few) and then WHAM!

From a musical point-of-view, this was and continues to be a very frustrating problem. But I've come to look forward to the challenge of avoiding that B, week after week. I've written often about how sightreading can be like playing a video game (hence, the whole Piano Hero thing); this just adds an extra layer of difficulty to the experience. I suppose it's also gratifying to see the technology fail so bizarrely. Lots of things can go wrong with a piano action, including having notes that don't play at all, but the experience of having a very gentle touch converted into an aural karate chop is just SO wrong. It definitely keeps me on my toes.

It's a complicated question as to whether or not this is a kind of musical satisfaction. I would argue that it is - that part of the joy of musicmaking is the thrill of negotiating the technical minefields any instrument presents. And while the pleasure I get from the over-caffeinated Taylor Swift is not a sophisticated kind of musical taste, it is a reaction to the same kind of tension-through-unpredictability that Stravinsky and so many others have exploited via complex meters,syncopations, and the like. When technology goes wrong, even in its own inhuman ways, it can seem comfortingly human, because what's more unpredictable than humans?

Or maybe I'm just getting bored.

My Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring

To end my summer blogging hiatus as summer nears its end, I'm finally getting around to recording and uploading an arrangement I made at the end of the spring.

I'm planning to write a good bit more about this piece in the weeks ahead, but for now I'll just say that it was written in honor of Judson and Janice Carlberg, the recently retired president and first lady of Gordon College. The Carlbergs were wonderful leaders of our school for the past nineteen years, and they also happened to be enthusiastic supporters of our Piano Hero recital series. Although Piano Hero was on hiatus this past year, we presented a special year-end recital in honor of the Carlbergs on May 23. A couple of days before the recital (which featured fan favorites such as the overtures to Candide and 1812), I had the idea of arranging the college hymn for our two-piano context.

Gordon's college hymn is the classic "My Jesus, I Love Thee," its tune having been composed by A.J. Gordon, the college's founding father. The melody is quite simple in shape and structure,

and as I thought about it, Bach's famous "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" came to mind. Bach's flowing triplets are anything but simple, but they were designed by Bach to accompany another very simple hymn tune, so I figured I might as well steal from the best.

Bach's triplets are re-imagined to some degree because this new arrangement is in duple meter, whereas Bach's is in triple time. I originally tried switching Gordon's hymn into triple time, but because it has such a simple melodic profile, it tended to get lost that way. (Actually, the hymn tune Bach borrowed was originally in duple meter; you can see many versions of the tune here.) Stretching Bach's triplets from 9 to 12 per measure turned out to be a fun challenge, but I think it works, both as an extension of Bach's idea and as an accompaniment to Gordon's tune.

Although I was pleased with the two-piano version, I decided to record it here with violin and piano so that the tune floats clearly above the counterpoint. (Also, I forgot to hit the record button at the premiere!) The recording itself is an unedited take from an hour or so spent in the recital hall this afternoon with my "house violinist" - having a daughter learning to play the violin is really starting to pay off! She was quite patient as I faked my way through a hybrid piano part I patched together from the two-piano score.* Some day I'll try to make a more polished version, but I think this captures the spirit of the arrangement pretty well.

  My Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring by MMmusing

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* Actually, the day before the May 23 Piano Hero recital, I was at church early in the morning preparing to play the 10am service. I didn't have a prelude picked out yet, I needed something in G Major, and it occurred to me that the then arrangement-in-progress would work nicely with violin. So, I called home and asked my wife to bring our house violinist along early with fiddle in hand; then, I whipped out the laptop and tossed together a very quick violin/piano version which we premiered an hour or so later. She's a pretty cool customer. (She wasn't thrilled about being asked to play on the spot, but not having to practice much seemed to make up for it. Growing up as Daughter of MMmusing is going to be an interesting experience.)

Mozart Mashup Decoded

I've been meaning to write a more substantial post about this video version of my Mozart violin concerto mashup, but in the meantime, for those who don't follow my Twitter feed, here it is:



I think it does a pretty good job of showing how this hybrid concerto (can a hybrid have more than two sources?) weaves back and forth among Mozart's three concerti.  I do wish I'd used higher quality score images to begin with - the video's a little jumpy at times; but, the basic idea is that material from the 3rd concerto always appears on the top level, material from the 4th appears in the middle, and material from the 5th appears on the bottom. You may notice that #4 in D Major (which has 2 sharps) is often the gateway between #3 and #5, since #3 is in G Major (1 sharp) and #5 is in A Major (3 sharps).

And perhaps some day I'll write more about it, particularly about my favorite moments...

[If you missed the original blog post, the basic idea is explained there.]

Atonality on Ice

Last weekend, the Boston Bruins had a big parade to celebrate their first Stanley Cup since 1972. Although I've always been a big sports fan, I grew up in a part of the country where no one played or talked about hockey, so aside from the unforgettable winter of 1980, I've rarely spent much time caring about it. Still, I ended up watching a lot of playoff hockey this year, what with all the local Bruins mania, and I did enjoy it. Here's a Twitter post from April of 2010 that kind of sums up my feelings about watching ice hockey:

Watching hockey to me is like listening to really wild atonal music. The gestures/speed can be exciting, but I have no idea what's going on.

I've actually used variations on this line a couple of other times on Twitter and even in conversation at parties (see, you should invite me to your party). Actually, I just did a quick search of my Twitter archive and discovered that the atonal/hockey connection started back in 2009. A pianist and hockey fan named @mariocast tweeted during a playoff game:

"Carter SCORES!!! Flyers 1, Penguins 0," 

to which I cleverly replied,

"and you can purchase Carter SCORES here: http://bit.ly/xl7Vx."

He responded,

"uh...thanks for the link. I do dig some of Elliot Carter's music, but I was talking about a hockey game."

And that prompted my epiphanic observation:

"to me, watching hockey is kind of like listening to E. Carter. It's fast-paced and exciting, but I'm never sure what's going on."

There now, wasn't that an interesting little historical journey? And it proves that Twitter can inspire interesting insights, because I think there's actually something to this idea. For me, the basic atonality/hockey connection has to do with the perceptive framework each imposes on its audience (or, at least, on me). Hockey moves at such a lightning pace, with possession of the puck constantly shifting from team to team, scoring opportunities always a second or two away, yet rarely being fulfilled - as one is watching, it's hard to process everything that's going on, partly because the action is so continuous. Aside from a few timeouts per period and the occasional power play (when a penalty means one team has to skate with fewer players for a couple of minutes), it's challenging to organize the events of a game in a clear way.

In the same way, atonal music (though not always fast) tends not to feature the kinds of cadences, resolutions and general harmonic contexts that help the listener organize the musical events as they go by. This doesn't mean that one can't make sense of the events: die-hard hockey fans can find much more structure and intent than I can in what often looks like random darting around the rink. The announcers will often speak of set "plays" that I can sort of make sense of on replay - much as the theorist might be able to show me row statements and transformations. But the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky will use clear phrasing/harmonic clues to group the pitches of a melody distinctly, just as a baseball game clearly separates into distinct plays (almost always initiated by a pitch!).

In fact, based on my own culturally conditioned perceptive framework, I'm going to suggest that taking in a baseball game reminds me the most of 18th-century music (especially the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart): there can be tremendous passion, heart-rending surprises, etc., but usually within a neatly structured series of events. Carrying this not-too-serious kind of comparison along, football has more of a 19th-century Romantic kind of feel - the emotions of the game are more heart-on-sleeve, there's more obvious drama and violence, but the game still organizes into very clear "plays." Romantic music, for all its energy and revolutionary fervor, is often even squarer and more predictable in its phrasing structures than music of the Classical Era (see Kyle Gann on Dvorak here), and football also has a very regular pattern of stopping and starting.

Basketball moves along much more continously than baseball or football, but unlike hockey, the game is pretty clearly defined by which team possesses the ball at a given time. So, in terms of organizing one's perceptions, the game still falls into clear, if irregular, chunks, helped along by the fact that regular scoring also helps to structure one's viewing. So, I'm going to align the helter-skelter but mostly easily processed pacing of basketball with the early modernists like Stravinsky, Bartok, Shostakovich, and Prokoviev. (I know, that's a very Russian list.) Their music is often asymetrical and unpredictable (lots of sudden fast breaks), but melodies and phrases are still pretty easy to discern. There's usually something to hang on to. [The rules are often a bit of a mystery in each case as well.]

And then there's hockey and the atonal gang. It's true that one of the most important distinctions here is that hockey and atonality are simply less popular and well-understood than baseball, football, and tonal music. Some people will always love them partly because of the outsider-y status, but hockey suffers from a world in which the average sports fan doesn't really understand its strategies or know how to follow the puck, and Schoenberg's fans are still waiting for the day when children whistle 12-tone tunes in the street.

Of course, when the stakes are high, the non-stop, "anything could happen any time" feel of a hockey game is an asset - again, I'm not even a big fan of the game, but I found myself almost breathless watching the Bruins playoff games, especially the Game 7s (they had 3!) and the overtimes. There's almost no way of knowing or guessing when the big moment is coming, which can be tremendously exciting, but the game still strikes me as less artful than baseball/football/basketball because so many of the "plays" don't work out.

Passes are routinely missed, shots are often blocked in ugly fashion as the puck bangs into a series of legs and sticks that are running interference. And, perhaps my biggest complaint, often the goals that are scored are not that aesthetically pleasing. Yes, careful player positioning and a skilled shot may set things in motion, but more than not, the actual goal seems to come from a rebound that's hard to see and that seems a product of chance as much as skill - just as so much atonal music ends up sounding kind of like chance music.

Which reminds me of another similarity between the worlds of atonality and hockey. Each embraces ugliness with a curious sort of pride. I don't know if it's because men on skates are afraid of being seen as un-masculine, but hockey has evolved into a brutal sport that features not only lots of violent hits, but even looks approvingly on fighting as part of the game.* I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that the Bruins' breakout star was rookie Brad Marchand, who's been referred to as a "little ball of hate." In one memorable "break in the action" from Game 6, Marchand punched Vancouver's highly skilled Swedish star Daniel Sedin in the face seven times in a row, for no other reason than he felt like it; although I'm sure Vancouver fans didn't like it, the mainline opinion on this goofy scene is that Marchand proved himself a tough warrior and Sedin, by trying to get a penalty called rather than punching back, was soft.

Atonal music is likewise full of brutal sounding sonorities that can feel like assaults on our civilized sensibilities

- and, again, it can seem like a sign of weakness to admit to not liking these sounds, at least in some circles. Ironically, many hockey players turn out to be surprisingly mild-mannered and good-natured off the ice - kind of like Milton Babbitt and his love for musical theater. Kind of.

But, to wrap up, I think the biggest similarity is that whole goal thing. There aren't many goals in a typical hockey game and it's hard to hear where the goals are in a typical atonal work.** That doesn't mean there's not a lot of purposeful action in either - I listened to the Schoenberg Piano Concerto for the first time in a long time last week, and was surprised by some of the gorgeous orchestral sonorities that floated by early on, almost like refugees from a lush bit of Gershwin. I know it's not fair to hear the music that way, but I'm just being honest about my own perceptive framework, which is the point of this whole post. I keep wanting these sounds to organize into a clearer harmonic framework, just as I long for a hockey possession to look organized and intentional for more than 6 seconds. But maybe it's just me...

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* I realize football is also ridiculously violent, but somehow its violence is more aesthetically pleasing to me - maybe because I grew up watching it, but maybe because hockey has those big ugly sticks waving around and that brutally hard, cold surface. At least football players get to land on soft turf and they don't get slammed into walls.

** What about the lack of goals in soccer, you say? Yes, that's a problem for us unenlightend Americans, but soccer doesn't have the wild, ugly side of hockey, so I'm going to align soccer with the world of Renaissance counterpoint. Lots of beautiful, controlled play that seems endless in its purposelessly purposeful flow. (I actually like Renaissance counterpoint much more than soccer, but will admit I've never given soccer much of a chance.)

[This is perhaps the least timely post I've ever written. I actually starting thinking about writing it on June 15, the day of Game 7 in the Stanley Cup playoffs - then I wrote a good bit of it last Saturday, the day Boston celebrated the Bruins with a big parade. And here it is, more than a week past hockey season and officially a summer hockey column. Oh well.]