Last year in the summer I experimented with creating a major key version of Schubert's Erlkönig, and then before long, I'd added new English lyrics and eventually a voice to sing them in a post called: "It talks." So, perhaps it's no surprise that, having created a mashup of Vivaldi's Concerto in A Minor with Dr. Dre's Still D.R.E., I realized I needed to create a rap to go with this new/old beat.
So I did, and though it's pretty silly, perhaps some music history profs will find it useful to help teach Vivaldi; the Red Priest drops some knowledge here students might want to know. Although I will likely find some need to tweak this more (getting the mix to work is a challenge - not so different from being an orchestrator/conductor), I'm going to release into the wild so you can use it for your cool weekend parties.
I'm teaching a new class (for me and school) in digital audio production this fall. Although I've been toying with audio in various ways since this blog debuted in 2007, I'm still learning my around more modern styles - specifically the concept of "making beats" (not in the sense of 'pulse' but rather as backup for raps, etc.) and working with loops, etc. Obviously the most fun way to prepare is to practice, so I remembered an idea which had come to me over the summer and decided to take it for a spin.
Over the last few years, I've found the most requested "song" non-pianist students ask to learn to play on the piano is the very simple looping hook from Still D.R.E., a 1999 song by Dr. Dre, featuring Snoop Dogg. It really only involves learning two bars of mostly repeated 8th note chords in the right hand with a simple three-note bass progression that is empty on beats 2 and 3. So when a student at summer chamber music camp asked if I could play this song, I confidently launched into it. However, having just accompanied a famous Vivaldi violin concerto in the same camp that week, an idea came to me, unbidden (as ever).
And that's mostly all that needs to be said. I think the connection, with the quarter pickup leading into repeated 8th notes, is pretty obvious. I'm proud to say that this was just a 24-hour turnaround from when I started to when I posted the "completed" video on YouTube. Although there are many options for how I might have handled the visuals (including a score animation, which however might give away some of my work), I settled on the simple idea of "stills" to go with the "Still D.R.E." theme. There is some very low-quality animation if you pay attention, but the images are really just space-filler. Since Snoop Dogg amplified his status as fun-loving, good-time celebrity during this summer's Olympic games coverage, it was a nice coincidence that he appears in the photo I used from the original song, so I put him to work a little.
One last production thing. I was having a hard time finding a good digital match for the lo-fi cello which plays the bass line at the beginning of the original song. Then I realized I'm a pretty lo-fi cellist myself, and my cello now has a pickup installed since my son will be playing it in a school jazz band this year. So, although most of what you'll hear is generated by synths, the cello line is played by a real life cellist! I still didn't really achieve the squeezed sound on the original, but that just means I have more to learn - or unlearn.
As these last few days of summer drift away (faculty meetings start tomorrow for me), I had an unexpected experience a couple of days ago. I accidentally composed a piece! Ok, it's less than a minute, and it's quite derivative (of itself), but I still kind of like it.
The very short story is that I was trying out a re-install of Finale notation software (punchline: re-install did not solve my problem*), and so I just started entering notes kind of mindlessly. After I had three simple bars in three-part counterpoint written, I used some Finale copy/paste/invert techniques, and basically had something I kind of liked within no time. I have since tweaked a few things over the past couple of days. My main tweaking goal was to make it a little more naturally pianistic, but I ended up liking the way this requires the left hand to roll a few things.
It is very simple - somewhere between the worlds of Bartók and Poulenc - with no accidentals. Other than that, I might as well let its 50 seconds speak for themselves. I haven't really given it a title, although it does conjure up something of the feeling I have as summer vacation draws to a close. Perhaps it will be the beginning of something...
* also, the notation you see in the video was not produced in Finale.
Four or five days ago, a Facebook friend posted an image of the opening two pages from the finale of Brahms German Requiem. Alongside, he wrote:
"I've just spent 55 minutes on these nine bars. The downbeats evaporate at m. 5 like a bubble popping...."
Part of the experience of being a musician is getting happily lost in a tiny bit of music. Or maybe not always happily. I and, I'm sure, many other music students have memories of lessons where the teacher somehow never got past the opening bars. Although the purpose of such microscopic focus is to make sure everything is good under the hood when an actual performance happens, such moments are also part of the fascinating way in which music intersects with time.
These experiences can go both ways from a time perspective. I've been in rehearsals where obsessive focus on tiny details has made time seem to stop in the worst sense - a two-hour rehearsal suddenly seems like four hours. And I've been in rehearsals (usually when music is being run continuously) where time stops because one stops noticing time, only to realize that two hours felt like thirty minutes. Both are experiences of being lost in the music - one unpleasant and maddening and the other a state of flow or even transcendence.
Score study has a special relationship to time because it often involves mentally twisting and turning the musical object at particular moments to see what's going on inside, all while the real clock is still running. We often don't notice the paradox of how much time we might spend thinking about one or two seconds of music. Thus, getting lost for 55 minutes in the opening bars of a richly layered work can make a lot of sense.
Of course, I also playfully reinterpreted my friend's comment to mean he was just listening realllly slowly at a tempo which stretched 36 seconds into 3300 seconds. Indeed, stretching the music to last that long can actually be done, and I'll reveal what that sounds like below. There's a website called 9beetstretch where a complete performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, stretched out to 24 hours, is continuously livestreamed. That's stretching things by a factor of about 24. You may sample the effect here: the first movement only takes about 5.5 hours! I've never listened to the whole thing, but listening in is something else.
Mostly, the super slow Beethoven sounds like some sort of untamed ambient music. Even in the three instrumental movements, it often sounds like wordless voices from an apocalyptic soundtrack. The precision of a world-class orchestra is revealed at a fractal level to have all sorts of tiny discrepancies of attack which become rhythmic events of their own. The fact that music is fundamentally about vibration becomes apparent as the concepts we usually use to understand the vibrations (melody, harmony, rhythm) lose their meaning. If you know the quick-paced scherzo, I recommend sampling some of that in the x24 version because the notes go by quickly enough that it is just possible to follow what's happening. But it mostly sounds like...well, you decide.
So I was interested in various ways of slowing Brahms down, and though it is possible simply to distort the audio of a live performance to pretty much any length, I also thought it would be fun to hear a synthesized version where the notes are just played really slowly (and not distorted). This eliminates the otherwise inevitable imprecision of attack and pitch - so much that I found it necessary to add some very soupy reverb to smooth out the edges, creating a dream-state effect. I've tinkered with this on and off the past few days and have found the process really satisfying, even if the result is little more than a curiosity.
What I find appealing:
Getting to know just about every single note and instrument choice used by Brahms in this short passage. The time spent listening and manipulating is its own kind of score study. It's a kind of literal experience of what it means to get lost in the details.
Getting to spend time "conducting" the result by adjusting general levels and attack levels for various pitches, etc. I am no expert at mixing audio, but it is fun to think like a conductor, in this case using sliders and automation curves instead of baton and words.
Basking in the admittedly hallucinatory soundworld which results.
For various reasons, I settled on a much less dramatic stretch factor of around 3.5x. (Synth sounds are just kind of boring if note changes are too far apart.) This makes it quite easy to process the familiar music, but it still enables a new awareness of certain passing moments, like how non-harmonic passing tones create a lot of tension when one takes the time to listen to them.
Brahms' music itself is quite striking as a beginning (the beginning of the end of the requiem). Coming on the heels of the large-scale and emphatic sixth movement, this seventh movement begins as if in the middle of something over a secondary dominant. Sopranos first and violins next are sent into their stratospheres as we seem to be glimpsing heavenly realms. (The German text translates as: "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth.") The mostly rising accompanying figure in the strings is written so that the 8th note pairs are constantly reaching across the beats, which provides a restless kind of forward motion in what is otherwise a steady tempo. As my friend's quote at the top suggests, Brahms also plays with texture with the pedal bass notes dropping out after four bars, almost as if we're leaving earth's gravity behind.
So, hopefully you will find two minutes to indulge this little indulgent thought experiment of mine. At least I only did nine bars! You could do worse than to get lost in these good vibrations.
And though I do NOT recommend listening to all of the following, the technology just made it so easy to stretch Brahms' 36 seconds out to 55 minutes, I couldn't resist. My son and I did listen (please don't alert DSS) to the first seven minutes in the car yesterday. It takes a little over six minutes to get to the entrance of the sopranos in m.2. After that, the wobble of the high voices would probably give you a headache. (I don't make any claims for how precisely the yellow highlighter tracks exactly where things are!)
This is not my first entry into the world of videos that flirt with eternity. Here's a short playlist. My favorite, by far, is a very slow, synth string version of Schoenberg's gorgeous, but super dense a cappella Friede auf Erden. I find this "performance" to be genuinely beautiful. (I even...shh...kind of prefer it to the original!) The other three videos found here are more about looping infinitely, but I've listened to all of them all the way through with some satisfaction. Perhaps I have...unusual tastes.
I was flying back to Boston from Atlanta Friday night, and by good fortune had a port side window seat in front of the wing. I hadn't thought much of the view I might get on this budget Spirit Airlines flight, but as we descended from clouds into the Greater Boston area, I started noticing I could see a lot of detail out the side, although honestly the window looked too small and smudgey to think I could do any worthwhile photography. I took a few phone photos that looked pretty bad and kind of put the idea way.
Then as I started seeing the Boston skyline way in the distance, I thought this might be a nice approach and started video-ing. In this way, I captured the last two minutes of the flight in gorgeous, dusky skylight, with clear views of the South Boston waterfront all the way to the crossing of Boston Harbor (almost at water level!) and onto the Logan Airport runway which sits just across the harbor from downtown.
When I got home, I did some triangulating with Google Maps, working backwards from the very clear view of the "Rainbow Swash" design on a giant National Grid LNG tank that sits right on the ocean's edge, followed shortly thereafter by a spectacular view of UMASS-Boston and the JFK Library. In the opening of the video, I could pretty clearly see what looked like a cemetery, and after following the flight course backwards, I identified the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Boston's southeastern Dorchester neighborhood; the long white roof of another nearby location turned out to be the Ashmont MBTA station. Here's the basic flight path I retroactively charted:
Anyway, I came here not to talk about Boston geography (though the views coming in over the city and harbor are gorgeous), but rather to talk about the music I chose to pair with this majestic descent into town - because I had to share this video on social media, and the cabin sounds of overhead announcements are so pedestrian. [To be fair, although the views are awesome, you don't get a great view of the Boston skyline which is more classically photographed from a little further north across the harbor. The three tallest buildings in Boston (including the Hancock and the Prudential) can be seen early on rising up over Back Bay in the upper background, but as they are west of downtown, they always remain in the distance.]
When looking for the right soundtrack, I thought of the terms "soaring" and "flying," and I think I even did a search for those terms with "classical music." But on my own, I pretty quickly thought of the glorious "whales" scene from Disney's Fantasia 2000, which is accompanied by music from Respighi's Pines of Rome. There are lots of great "big finishes" in classical music, but this one has just the right kind of stately, inexorable grandeur that an airplane descent calls for, even if Disney has its whales ascending. (Notice how often slow, steady, rising scales are heard amidst all the gleaming fanfares.) It took just a little experimenting to get it to line up pretty well, and I feel confident in saying this soundtrack complements the visuals very effectively. In fact, for me the music elevates the experience quite a bit, mainly because the music is SO good. (But I'm also genuinely amazed at the quality of video one can get from an old iPhone through a small, smudgey window.)
This reminds me that just last week, I was looking for some music to go with a spirited game of tug-of-war between my dog and a niece's dog last week. In this case, I intentionally sped up the video for comic effect. I'd wanted to post it for family members but thought it awkward to include the unrelated conversation going on in the background, so I brought in some great fight music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and shortened the fight itself so that it ended along with a good stopping point.
One of my favorite aspects of this kind of thing is how our brains can find connections that weren't necessarily intended between sight and sound in such situations. I'll let you find your own! In the meantime, here are a couple of older posts/videos where I experimented with adding unrelated soundtrack music to new video.
In the former, video was edited to match some of the changes in the flow of the music.
In the latter, each repetition of the short looping video allows the viewer to make all sorts of connections between images and audio.
Curiously enough, I'm not always a fan of music doing so much heavy lifting in movies. I sometimes find the overly manipulative soundtracks someone like Spielberg prefers to obscure/overwhelm subtler aspects of storytelling. I'd prefer that good actors be given the room to act without music telling me what to feel, and sometimes silence is the best frame for that.
As a final note, I'll add that the first two videos here are evidence of what a wonder it is to live with high-quality cameras at hand so readily in the form of small phones. There's a lot that's wrong with smartphone culture, but I'd hate to give up this part.
LYRIC POET: Are we embarking on a study of the meaning of meaning? YOUNGER BROTHER: I sure hope not. (from Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music)
NOTE: There are more than 600 possible outcomes.
About Me
MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and professor in the Boston area. This is not me. Neither is this. Curiously, these most Googleable Michael Monroe's are each musicians. This IS me.
