I’m pretty sure the title of this post could be paraphrased as the Mother’s Day of all the mothers that belong to all the mothers out there.
A friend of mine just mentioned Mother’s Day to me through text and I had to pause when writing back because it seemed that any version of mothers/mother’s/mothers’ would make sense when talking about the holiday. This is a topic that John Wells has blogged about at least a few times. He likes to go on tirades against apostrophes, and I think for good reason. They’re often unnecessary when context will due and the phonetic realization of each version is the same. If we can handle this in speech, why not in writing?
Maybe because no one is likely to understand a title like Mothers’ mother’s Mothers Day in speech. If someone actually uttered this phrase, I’m sure their listeners would need to ask for some clarification. In this case, the orthography actually has the option to disambiguate without any clarifying questions. So what if we end up writing things “wrong” because of confusion over apostrophes and polysemy: a purpose is still served.
It may not be too obvious what’s going on in this music but all those sounds are coming from one person and mostly from that one person’s voice. She uses a loop station which allows her to record short bits of sound and have them to continue playing immediately after. They can be left alone or stopped and started back up and additional sounds can be recorded and looped over top the loops that are already playing. Essentially, she has the ability to be a whole acoustic band through electronic means.
What seems important here is process. Minimalist composers like Terry Riley or Steve Reich have been playing with this idea since the 60s at least but not in this way because the technology just wasn’t there. What I mean by process is that we’re essentially hearing a song being composed on the spot. In fact, Julianna Barwick has explicitly stated that her music starts out as improvisations. Improvisation is a bit different though. In that form, the music can change drastically at any point whereas, in process music, that’s not possible/wanted. It’s repetitive instead. She can’t suddenly change everything that’s being played all at once, say, if she wanted to modulate to a different key. What you’re hearing is simply one musical phrase that repeats and only changes subtly as layers are added and removed. It creates a sense of calm, because you know what to expect, but also a sense that something is happening.
To me, more poetically, it’s like breathing. Very long, deep breathing. The music naturally builds, each new layer both hides and is supported by the previous layer until you end up with a mass of sound that tends to gradually dissipate as layers are then removed again until all that’s left is that original line of sound in isolation. I imagine each song as one incredibly drawn out breathe. I’ve been thinking a lot about breathing lately.
That phrase is only vaguely intelligible to me even with context so I’m not gonna try to explain it. It comes from Recanati’s Deixis and Anaphora:
The point, though, is pretty clear, and interesting. Apparently some five objects in your perceptual field can be held in some sort of automatic index that can be drawn from when making sense of your surroundings. Recanati brings this up when talking about pronouns and how it’s possible for us to make sense out of a sentence like:
Yesterday, my brother talked to the policeman about the burglar we saw. He told him he thought he had escaped, but the policeman would not believe him, arguing that someone was awake, and he would have seen the burglar if he had left.
The pronouns used here are somehow not confusing even though they could each refer to various people in the context. Recanati suggests that there is a tracking mechanism for indexing pronouns analogous to Pylyshyn’s visual tracking mechanism. What interests me more is the last sentence about an auditory analog, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve come across ideas like this for music as reasons why 12 tone music sounds completely random to most people, for instance: a melody that arbitrarily hits all 12 pitches of an octave before repeating is simply too long to keep in memory and build a gestalt from. It might explain why noisy busy music, with many things happening at once, is sometimes unnerving as well.
Think I’m gonna file this as yet another thing I’d like to look into but will never ever have the time for.
I’m increasingly convinced that the point of semantics is to prove that we have no idea what anyone else means by anything. Communication seems to be just coincidental and we’ve only convinced ourselves that it’s real. This is why we have art. What need would there be for art if we could actually understand each other? Art is like desperately trying to claw our way into someone else’s being. It’s like a Gricean implicature, letting us know that we fail to connect on a regular basis. Or maybe I’m just not understanding what the author is saying here…
From around 4 minutes in until the end, this track feels like it’s massaging your eardrums. It only works if you’re using headphones or have your speakers angled so that stereo sound actually sounds stereo. (Excuse the palindroming.) I imagine this is how deaf people can enjoy music.
Belong originated in New Orleans, by the way. Sooo, if anyone has any idea whatsoever where this kind of music gets played in NOLA, please let me know.
I’m a big fan of last.fm. I’ve discovered so much amazing music through the related artists section and it helps me generate RSS feeds for shows in my area that I’d like and even feeds for new releases via Soundamus. It’s the perfect organization tool for someone who listens to entirely too much music (seriously, it’s difficult to keep track of all 1,500 artists I like). It also occasionally teaches me something I didn’t know like it did the other day when I came across this picture:
You probably don’t recognize this guy. Hell, I wouldn’t recognize him if I didn’t know who I was looking at beforehand. He’s Anton Webern: early 20th century Viennese composer of works such as this:
You may notice that he looks a bit different in the image used for the video. That’s how you normally see this guy, as a stoic intellectual writing music based purely on theory and dissecting stray cats for the sake of science in his spare time. (The latter never happened, but shouldn’t it have?) Even the name of the composition is sterile. Five Pieces for Orchestra? Yes, I guess that’s what they are. He’s not someone we’d expect to be creating flower arrangements.
This is what’s so striking to me about the picture, though. This one image summarily destroys all our preconceptions about what this guy must have been like. It’s tempting to listen to his music and read about him and look at the pictures most commonly used to represent him and determine that he has no soul, that’s he’s barely human, but he clearly is.
This is something that I think happens every day to just about everyone. You look at the people around you and instantly develop ideas about what they are, often overlooking who they are. Even the ugliest, most hateful people are still human; there’s simply no escaping it.
I’m obsessed with time. I’m very nostalgic, constantly afraid/excited about the future, and I get lost in reading about history, particularly personal histories. I like how time seems to stop, how it seems to pass so quickly. I like/hate how each new year feels shorter, how weird it is to compare how much time has really passed with how much time has really passed for people who are younger than me or older than me. I check my phone constantly and set alarms for all sorts of little things then I ignore them all day. For someone without a career or many obligations, I have a pretty elaborate calendar that has things scheduled for up to a year from now. Even my 2011 project is intimately tied up in how time is experienced: it both aims to condense a year into an hour or two and at the same time trap me in that year for probably the next decade. I like time.
I thought it would be interesting to play around with how music fits into this for me. I was going through my collection and came across Ben Folds’ Evaporated and just had to listen to it and immediately it was 2001 and I was walking down the street to the Wawa in Cape May, New Jersey on a sunny fall day on my break from Acrat, the head shop I was working at which was perpetually empty during the off season. I was listening to that album a lot at the time and that song would play in my head constantly on those walks. This sort of thing happens really often for me and I imagine it does for many others as well so I thought it would be interesting to put my whole collection on shuffle and post a few tracks that come up with a description of when and where they take me. I’m no narcissist, though, I’d really like others to do the same. So here, I’ll start off with the Ben Folds song:
The next is Che Gilda Manina from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. This is one of the first operas I ever watched. It brings me back to around 2006 or so, sitting in my bedroom at my mom’s house where I was unfortunately living at the time. There’s sort of a double time travel thing going on with this one for me because I’m both at my mom’s house and also in a run down apartment in Paris in the middle of the winter of 1890. For those who don’t speak Italian, Rodolfo just met this girl, his neighbor, and has fallen in love with her and is explaining his bohemian lifestyle. He’s saying how he doesn’t have a thing but he has everything he needs:
David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion brings me to 2011 in San Francisco. My ride to work included a bus trip (on the 28 for those who know, it’s a really nice route) that went up to the Golden Gate Bridge then along the bay to The Marina district where I’d walk another mile over hills which gave me great views of the Coit Tower and all the staggered and colorful houses of North Beach. I listened to this piece for the first time on one of those trips on a sunny day and I remember being transfixed. I hated going to work to begin with but this made me want to stop on one of those hills and just stare out and listen. To hell with work. (Incidentally, this performance is at the San Francisco Conservatory’s Hot Air Music Festival which I’ve been to before and even wrote a little review on. You should listen to other versions if you’re interested, though, as this one is pretty stripped down.)
Ironically, the next thing to come up was Philip Glass’s 5th String Quartet, which I first heard at that very festival in 2006. It was really a nice piece but it actually brings me back to a Missy Mazzoli piece that was also played there called Lies You Can Believe In. It’s a trio piece which was played by a high school group with such vigor and enthusiasm I could hardly believe they were just teenagers. Or maybe that’s why they could play it so well. I think I brought my friend Beryl to this event. These pieces remind me of nights at The Revolution Cafe in San Francisco, too, where you could drink sangria and listen to spontaneous open-mic style classical music: casual as all fuck. (The Mazzoli piece is near the bottom of the link underneath the Glass piece.)
Ah, the Foo Fighters. I really love their first two albums but they sorta crashed into generic pop nonsense after Pat Smear left them. Good Grief isn’t my favorite song on the album but it came up. In this case, it’s really the whole album that transports me, not one particular song. I end up back in junior high in 1996 or so, listening to my friend Mike tell me about how the Foo Fighters are gonna be the new Nirvana. He was wrong, but that’s okay. I also associate it with fall. I associate a lot of music with fall.
This source is even broader than the Foo Fighters album. I started listening to the Mountain Goats after they had already released numerous albums so I just got all of them and listened straight through. I would always listen in the middle of the day, between classes at City College of San Francisco. I had to take a bus from the the Ocean campus to the Mission campus. I’d try to do homework on the way but the ride was so bumpy that I’d mostly just listen to music. It was fall, again, so of course it was always ridiculously hot (fall is summer in SF). I’d have to kill some time after the ride so I’d just wander around The Mission, taking in the people and sights. There was always something new to discover whether it be a cool looking house or some interesting plants or a mural that I never noticed. I really enjoyed those directionless hours.
This one is a little more embarrassing, but what the hell. Elemeno P’s Urban Getaway brings me to 2004, when I was in the midst of an addiction to the MMO Dark Age of Camelot. I say addiction in all seriousness. I loved that game but it stole two years of my young life and I’m not happy about it. I would literally play whenever I wasn’t at work or school. I once spent the entire week between Christmas and New Years without leaving my studio because of that game. (Point is, don’t be like that. It’s bad.) Anyway, I would watch a lot of videos of other people playing the game at the time, for pointers I guess but they were also just entertaining. The one below I watched quite a bit and it’s where I first heard Urban Getaway (it’s the first song he uses). The song actually places me not in any particular physical space but in a digital space. It’s strange feeling such an attachment to a world that doesn’t really exist. (Incidentally, I just now realized that the second line in the song is “Feeling Shostakovich.” I like that.)
It’s kind of interesting to me that my associations don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the music is about. I could go on and on, and I will, but I’m not gonna share the rest. Seriously, though, share some of your own. I’d love to hear what other peoples’ associations are.
I was recently reading an article in NeuroReport entitled Music in minor activates limbic structures: a relationship with dissonance?. My understanding of neuroscience is very minimal so there was almost nothing in this that I could really think critically about. My understanding of music, however, is pretty damn good, and the assumptions the article seems to make about music came across as very questionable to me.
One of the main suggestions was that the level of dissonance in a melody may play a role in which part of the brain is activated when listening to music. This was an attempt at explaining why minor melodies would have a greater effect in one part of the brain than major melodies. Minor was assumed to be more dissonant than major:
Musicologically, a main difference
between major and minor mode is that minor allows for
more dissonance than major mode (711).
I’m not sure how they came up with this idea. Here’s what a C major scale looks like:
And here’s what an A minor scale looks like:
The only difference between these two scales is where you start. They literally consist of the same exact musical intervals. The article even refers to them as “modes,” a musical term that essentially refers to which note of a scale you will treat as your home base. The scale itself does not change between different modes, just one’s starting point. Somehow, the author knew enough to recognize that major and minor scales can actually be viewed simply as modes of one scale yet also came to the conclusion that minor allows more dissonance.
More vague is what’s considered dissonance. The article does mention minor 2nds as a dissonant interval at one point while talking about a chromatic scale but that’s the only mention of what is considered dissonant. We’re also talking about melodic dissonance here, too, not harmonic dissonance. Even a minor second, an interval that would sound extremely harsh if both notes were played simultaneously, sound completely innocent (to me) when played melodically. Maybe I overlooked a referenced study that they used as a basis for dissonance but I’m leery of anyone at all who claims to have scientific proof of what dissonance is. At one point in time, a perfect 4th was considered a dissonant interval to be avoided at all costs if one wished to compose beautiful music but today this interval is everywhere and no one bats an eyelash. How do we separate our cultural inclinations from empirical facts for something like this? (No really, if someone knows, please tell me.)
I think this is an inherent problem in attempting to treat art of any sort in a scientific manor. Art is extremely difficult to define and until that can be done in some sort of standardized way, science dealing with art will always have at least one foot sitting in a pool of broad assumptions.
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