The Entire History of Music. Abridged.

by

So, I thought I’d write something about the entire History of People and Music.

The whole thing.

From the Beginning to the End.

🙂

It’s a personal ramble and skips lightly over (and downright ignores) plenty of innovations, milestones and eras. I haven’t even bothered talking about musical genres, or what makes good or bad music; I’ve ignored the invention of music videos and I don’t even mention ‘decades’.

It’s a surprise I wrote anything when I ignored all that.

I hadn’t exactly realised where I’d end up but it turns out I was more interested in how our experience of music has changed over time.

If you want, you can ignore the words and just think of it like a weirdly themed mixtape or album.

By “music” I’ll use Edgard Varese’s definition of “organised sound” – not for his thoughts on ‘noise’, but mainly as he thought about such things for far longer than I have and I can’t think of a better description.

On vocals

So – lets begin at the beginning. What was the oldest music people listened to way back in pre-history?
Well obviously we don’t know (that’s why its called ‘pre-history’).

Personally (this is all “personally”) I think that we progressed from rhythmic chants which were just words said in unison (maybe in a call-and-response way). Words and rhythm are all that’s needed to give us “organised sound” but after that some clever trevors invented melody to go along with it (possibly as an enhancement to the ’natural’ intonation of the words themselves).

But why develop rhythm then melody along with the words?

Rhythm and melody aid memory and so chanting helps groups remember the stories of where they’ve come from, where to find stuff, how to hunt, where the dark goes, and when the cold will end.
Singing lullabies (which are words with melodies) also helps babies recognise and remember words as distinct from other sounds.
Rhythm and melodies help emphasise the emotions of the story, the love of the parent, the nostalgia, excitement, fear and hope in stories, the feeling of kinship by saying things in unison – as well as having fun.

The roots of the words even imply this beginning – the Greek “meloidia” means “singing, chanting” and the Muses (who helped inspire all knowledge) were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the personification of memory).

[I will at this juncture deliberately annoy some people and NOT link to Muse]

Instead I’ll link to a lullaby.*

(* I actually found a home video online of a father recording his wife singing lullabies to their daughter. Although their love is really evident it was massively creepy as was filmed in the dark with a filter – I’ll spare you the weird voyeurism I got watching it part way through and deciding that really, some things are best kept private!]

So music started with people singing with each other.

All instruments

Ok – how did music evolve from this point?
Well to my mind the quantum leap was the invention of instruments.

Initially these may have simply been rhythmic (eg handclapping and knocking bits of wood or rock together).

But then some more clever b@#tards (who probably had help from their mum) produced something that could make a series of notes.
Now, people can make a staggeringly wide variety of noises with their mouths and throats, but someone (who maybe couldn’t) invented an instrument to produce sounds.

It only struck me while writing this how bloody amazing it was for someone to do that.

The earliest instruments that have been found are flutes or pipes between 42,000 and 43,000 years old.

Pipes!
Ok, you might get hollow bones if you suck the marrow out or find very old ones lying around. But why blow through it? and why then make holes in them to vary the sound?
‘Even’ a simple bone flute seems an amazingly sophisticated tool. And it’s a tool specifically for making music (you can make better bird whistles just using your mouth – in fact your mouth can already sound like a whistle).

Well, certainly whoever was doing this was being visited by the Muses.

[again no link to Muse!].

Anyway, these instruments meant that melodic sound could develop away as accompaniment to ‘words’; from ‘just‘ as an aid to storytelling. Melodies could exist on their own, for dancing, pleasure and to share emotions.

Searching for ‘flute’ on my iTunes I got this.
From bone pipes to this – my version of that jump match-cut from a bone weapon to a spaceship?!?!

Studio Engineering

Ok – hands up. I first came across this idea when John Foxx {CLANG*} used it as the theme for a lunch lecture where I studied around 1992.

* that loud clang was me dropping a name – sorry. However I didn’t study music and he didn’t teach it, as he was back to being plain Dennis at the time teaching illustration. However, that talk has stayed in the memory so thanks Dennis!

I had written the rough idea of ‘buildings shaping music’ and then, while researching this blog post it turns out David Byrne has also been thinking about acoustics.

And it turns out that the 100 or so words I wrote are much much better expressed and with far more information by Mr. Byrne (who’da thunk?).
It makes me feel good that he uses the same example at one point, but that feeling of ego is quickly snuffled out by the extra erudition and insight he has, covering African music and birdsong.

But the general theme of this chapter that I had in mind was “music evolves as buildings allow for different acoustics”. Byrne’s theme is slightly different and wider, but you get more from his 15mins!

;¬)

So just a link to his TED talk!

So where were we?
From people singing words together, to non-vocal sounds through invented instruments, music develops in complexity (such as polyphonics) as a reflection of where people are performing and listening to music.

Recorded at Manor Farm

But still – up until the late 19th century, people are gathering to listen to music and be a part of the performance, as they have done since the Dawn of Time.

Its ‘live’ – a unique experience, a one-time only event.
Even with the invention of radio and people eventually being able to stay at home, everyone’s experience of music is still a one-time-only ‘live’ event that they are at.

And all that changes with Mr Edison.
(Ok – as with all inventions there were a variety of people inventing similar things at the same time – if you’re interested as to the evolution of recording here’s a resource I found quite useful).

The techniques and materials their inventions used had profound impacts on how people would listen to music.
Recording and playback required the capture of sound usually via a trumpet-shaped part. The sound causes a needle to vibrate and etch a groove into a material. The depth of groove changes with the air pressure caused by the soundwaves.
This recording is then played back by getting the needle to retrace the groove (where it follows the peaks and troughs that were cut by the original sound). This is then amplified via mechanical means.

What this meant was that people could listen to a specific performance that they were not part of over and over again.

The technical limitations of recording onto vinyl (cutting those grooves) influenced the form (the sounds and length) of music as much as buildings had.

The stories may be similar (love, loss, though less hunting) but powerful baritones were able to overcome the limited quality of early recordings and sing about where the dark goes:

As microphones improved singers whose voices suited them began to benefit, such as Bing Crosby.

3-4 mins was about the maximum amount of time that could be cut as grooves for a 78rpm (the popular form of early recordings), so from this point people started to get used to the 3 min song. When people simply play live, there is no such restriction…

The physicality of handling these ‘discs’ was also important. You had 2 sides of a record(ing), which introduced an experience of start-stop/flip-start again-end. Later, bands would ensure that the last song on side 1 was strong and that “side 2” of their Long Player kicked off with a good track.

As an example, The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” closes side 1 of Abbey Road.

You have the scream, the cataclysmic doom bass, white noise (almost heavy metal) and you think “whoa!”, sit a bit stunned, get up, walk over to the player and flip the LP, replace the needle and then almost in trepidation of what‘s coming now, you get the sweet “Here comes the Sun… ”

The Beatles kinda knew what they were doing.

Limited Edition

As mentioned, cutting grooves into vinyl has its limitations.
This is from the liner notes by Orrin Keepnews for the CD reissue of ‘Straight No Chaser’ by Thelonious Monk. [takes breath as have to type the bloody thing out – why ain’t this online!]

“But those old-fashioned pre-digital LPs had to be sequenced in terms of each individual limited-length side. Only careful engineering and some very impressive disc mastering techniques could handle the more than 27 minutes on Side 2 of the original release of the Straight No Chaser album. (And even with such skills, it was really only possible because the side included an uncharacteristically long solo piano piece… the absence of bass and drums meant that, in effect, the grooves of that selection ate up much less space on the record surface).”

It also included editing out “more than five and a half minutes” from ‘Japanese Folk Song’ as well as other edits to songs (which no listener had noticed so they were good edits, usually of bass or drum solos, but still – the medium couldn’t handle the actual music the musicians were playing).

Ironically(?) the medium is also annoying in this YouTube clip, as 15 mins seems to be the maximum that the poster can put up on YouTube and has to fade the song out at the end.
On the reissue album there’s another minute and a bit of playing.

But its not all limitations. The medium (in this case vinyl) also allows for experimentation in producing music.
Here’s Mixmaster Mike (because as the Beastie Boys say “nobody can do it like Mixmaster can”).

The development of tape as a medium to record and playback sound allowed people to play music in a more portable way, in public and between rooms. The development of cheap affordable personal headphones meant that people’s experience of music was now utterly personal wherever and whenever they wanted to listen to it.

For me as an iconic moment, those portable headphones attached to a Walkman represent the growth of the importance of the listener of music as distinct from the musicians.

Cool clothes, cool hair, cool music - its the rocking 80's for yer

Tape also allowed experimentation in the production of sounds themselves.
We’ve had people making noises either with their mouths or with instruments that they’re hitting, plucking, strumming or whatever.
Tape allowed people to do away with the physical sound created by making something vibrate, instead producing, manipulating and recording purely electronic sounds.

Now, not just because this is the Doctor Who Forum(!), but I’ll use Delia Derbyshire as an example of someone who used pure tones created by machines, manipulated and recorded onto tape and then cut up, edited, manipulated again, recorded and re-recorded over, to produce music.

Although she didn’t invent ‘electronic music’ [or whatever genre-name is being used to describe music like this at the moment], she sure as hell did something wonderful.

So, the medium allows for new forms of music as well as the growing focus of the (im)personal experience of it on one‘s own.

Mastering

Perhaps surprisingly for this ramble, ‘digital’ is a bit of a footnote.
Which will be the first and only history of listening to music where that will happen, but really from this point on there’s just more of the same. But the trajectory is set.
The next innovation (that I’ll mention; obviously I’m ignorant of and ignoring several innovations!) was digital playback eg CDs. These reduce the restrictions of vinyl and tape such as degradation and length, as well as not breaking albums down into 2 sides.
However the lack of time restriction hasn’t meant that we’re all listening to 8 or 12min pop songs – after 50 or 60 years of the 3 min popular song, (as well as the commercial aspects that surround radio) popular songs have only lengthened by a minute or so.

Digital did extend the access to recorded music – we’re not as restricted to a few 78s at home.

And only with this new ‘perfect’ reproduction would we get an aesthetic like Portishead’s fake crackle and hiss of the ’empty’ groove at the start of vinyl 45s and LPs (as well as scratching of course).

As an aside, over-familiarity really does breed contempt. For a couple of years you couldn’t move without being at someone’s house and Portishead or Buena Vista Social Club being on in the background. And maybe that over familiarity made me think of Portishead as being just a series of clichés and I stopped listening to them. On revisiting them for this blog I now appreciate how its so well constructed and playing live I can only imagine a nightmare of pre-recorded sounds, live musicians incl. orchestra and scratching, all in danger of being out of synch.

So what have we got so far?
Music starts as sung words between people together in the same place.
Then instruments are invented to widen the type of sounds people hear and allows focus on melodies.
The physical spaces people play and hear music in allows for more complex sounds and music.
Recording means people don’t have to be in the same place or time as the music being played – they aren’t part of the performance.
The exact same rendition of a song is now something that individuals can experience – divorced from the musicians.

But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t still enjoying live events and being part of music with others – its just that a completely different way of listening to music has developed over time (good!).

Here’s a recording of an event people shared in that you can listen to again and again on your own.

And there’s a fitting stop to my ramble.
Thanks for coming along as far as you did.

Thanks

So, as with all the best liner notes a section of “Thanks”.

Thanks to @Purofilion for all the information on Medieval music – I asked a dumb question but received a wonderful education! And as I was thinking that music began with lullabies, she made me rethink whether music actually began with ‘chants’. She also gave me the encouragement to carry on my rather stoopid idea of writing the “entire history of music”.

Thanks to everyone who has or will post on the Music thread – its always great hearing something again or that one’s never heard before! Please everyone (especially newbies!) feel free to post stuff!

And obviously thanks to @Phaseshift and @Craig who created the Music Thread after a simplistic question from me as to whether we might have one as there was one for Books and Theatre… sometimes simple questions are the best and especially when asked of generous people. Thanks also to them for helping me get this ramble up on the Forum!

Bonus Tracks

That last song is just a tad dreary – a ‘classic’ but I thought I’d add a coupla of others that occurred during production but didn’t make it to the final cut.

People do make the most amazing sounds:
Some overtone singing:

Mind you, if you’ve got people who can do this you don’t need anyone playing pipes to accompany the tune.

I also enjoyed finding this – Irish dummdelydumdllydum (lilting) music.

Having Irish parents, I grew up knowing about lilting, but no, just as I can’t sing, I can’t really diddlyedumdumdiddlydum (I go out of tune).
This guy’s doing it with family and friends – drink was taken and he’s kinda so good he’s taking the piss (as well as possibly being pissed!).

Lilting made me think of the Indian singing of sharing/learning/practising the rhythm to a song.

Sheila Chandra (where I first heard this type of thing being done).

I came across this when looking for the earliest music that has been found and interpreted – discussed and played here by a guy who specialises in that sort of thing.
You can imagine it’s a field with a lot of speculation(!) based on scraps, illustrated by this interesting version of the music (which he calls a ‘maqamised’ version) based on advice from modern musicians from the area it was found.

When looking for ‘call-and-response’ music I was thinking “I must have some Gospel with congregations or work-songs, boatman’s calls or shanties or something that is call and response…”
After going through loads in my library I came up with this.

But not before I’d given up and looked online and this is what came up:
James Brown – Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud

Glad I persevered as it’s a cracker but not what I was expecting to illustrate call-and-response!

I asked @Purofilion if she knew of “a good piece of music that sums up ‘early music played intimately between people within a closed setting, like lute music for a family or court‘?
Maybe 9th century or 10th?”
Well, it was a dumb question but she generously gave me lots of information about what was actually happening in music around this period (rather than the kinda stuff I was probably thinking of).

Here’s just one of the great pieces she told me about:

When I was going to write about architecture (and then stumbled on the David Byrne lecture and thought “bugger – he‘s done it and so much more!”) I was going to use the most obvious example once you’ve heard the story (and one he uses).
Spem in Alium was created by Tallis to be sung in an existing octagonal room, with 5 voices at each corner.
Its rather amazing – I was introduced to it by a work colleague one evening in the office (we tended to be the last people around) and after chatting about music he suggested I give it a listen. He was adamant about which recording I got as its for 40 voices which is a huge choir and hard to organise and record (which is the one he urged me to get). Most times its a smaller group recording the parts separately and overdubbed. I thought I could thread this ‘limitation’ into my blog, but Byrne… ah well.

I think in exchange for this I suggested some punk tracks (the Fall?) for him to listen to, as his wife was a big fan of punk and him not so much.
He was an interesting guy, but those tales are for the Rose & Crown…
This isn’t the version he urged me to get but it is quite good and unless you’re in an octagonal room with octophonic speakers(?!?) I guess it doesn’t really matter!

Looking for side 2 opening tracks wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. So much now is simply listed Tracks 1-12 or whatever. You can’t assume that each side has the same number of tracks and can’t even halve the playing time (and quite frankly that’d be beyond tedious for me to do!).
I had a look at my very meagre vinyl collection (mostly long-term borrowed) and then I thought “Hold on, there’s 2 bands that specialise in thinking about this kinda thing – the Beatles and Pink Floyd.”

I’d be interested if anyone has better suggestions (ie a vinyl collection they can rummage!) 🙂

Looking for examples of scratching actually took longer than I thought. Mainly as the scratching wasn’t foremost or was simply back-and-forward scratching (eg Buffalo Girls). Other stuff was fantastic Hip Hop but not so necessarily obvious scratching.
But as ’bonus tracks’ it’s a shame not to link to this absolute stormer:

Herbie Hancock – Rockit (possibly where I was first exposed to scratching as a sound – certainly I remember it as a kid)

And of course, I have to link to Terminator X by Public Enemy as its damn good (and even has a bit of sci fi Flash Gordon to boot!)

My final Bonus Track is one of my favourite Live recordings – Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix from Band of Gypsies. Its just so damn good but illustrative of nothing (other than a live event you weren’t at that you can now listen to again and again), so entirely crow-barred in.

Now that can end wars let alone end rambles and blogs.

Hmm, another ‘heavy’ way to end the ramble… ah well!

[still no Muse though]

🙂


40 comments

  1. Wow, @Whisht, well done. Loads of great talking points in here. I have to read through it again and listen to all your examples. For now, I will just say in response to this: “It only struck me while writing this how bloody amazing it was for someone to do that.” This happens to me all the time, mostly in regard to food. For instance, someone thought up olive oil. You have a perfectly inedible little fruit that is lovely when cured, and whose oil is one of the miracles of cuisine. But who would look at an olive and think to do that?

    I want to start rambling right back, about things like performances and physical spaces, but I won’t, because I would like it to make some sense. So I’ll just say, for now, that if you’d asked me what I and my peers tended to look like as teens, I’m not sure I could have said, but that Walkman ad now gives me something to point at!

    Thanks for writing this, it’s a huge topic to tackle, but what a great jumping off point for lots of smaller ones.

  2. @Whisht – great blog. Really enjoyed reading it.

    Such a shame that, due to Burning Mouth Syndrome, Sheila Chandra has been left unable to sing (or speak for that matter) since 2010.

    Those of a certain age will remember her from the 80’s band Monsoon, but most recently, she was one of many vocalists who lent their voice to Howard Shore’s epic Lord Of The Rings soundtrack. I’ll post the track over on the Music Thread.

  3. Massive thanks for this @whisht. Very apt that the curator of our General Music Forum has popped the cherry for music on our blogs.

    It raised a lot of smiles in me in choices and language. I have to confess – I’m still working though some of the choices, but you had me with the Cure track.

    I’m fascinated by our relationship with Music, even though I don’t understand Music full stop. Mrs Phaseshift does (being adept at piano, wind and string instruments) , and tries to explain the underlying concepts to me (she fails). Reading some of the muso posts on the music thread by you, @purofilion and others is like reading a text in Martian to be frank. 😀

    I hope this won’t be your last blog, because it’s bloody great! I’m thinking of a couple of “Classic Album” threads we could start. If people don’t like my choices, I can blame you, for starting this entire music in blogs thing, which will be a new thing for me. 😉

  4. @Whisht: “The exact same rendition of a song is now something that individuals can experience – divorced from the musicians.”

    Many musicologists believe that the writing down of music in the middle ages was a form of recording, in that it captured for posterity a specific performance of something that was normally transmitted orally. Some medieval “pop songs” exist in multiple places, and the versions can be quite different. Performers of medieval music often base their performances on this, and take a flexible approach to melody that is more like that of pop singers today than a typical classical music performance. “Can vei la lauzeta” is a good example, there are loads of versions that survive, which speaks to the fame of Bernart de Ventadorn in his own time, especially when it is probable that most secular music was never written down at all.

    As an aside, do you know when the practice of live recordings started? By this I mean, the first popular music recordings intended to reproduce a concert experience. I tried (briefly) looking it up online and didn’t come up with anything. But it’s actually an interesting question, because it demonstrates the awareness that a studio recording doesn’t always represent all the qualities of a performer. I’m sure we can all think of artists that we enjoy more live than on studio recordings, and vice versa. Comparing studio and live versions of particular songs could be a thread all by itself!

  5. Lovely post – particularly enjoyed the Hendrix.

    I was just playing my (in fact for real) Scottish granny’s (where is @Chickenelly btw?) old shellac 78s on her His Master’s Voice gramophone the other day. Although the sound was pretty terrible (old needles and a now dodgy wind-up mechanism) the pleasure of the machine, in wood and silver, and the ghosts of old jazz voices crackling with 1930s warm nights, simply cannot be solicited from the best digital file in the world.

  6. @Bluesqueakpip How cool is that? I’ll admit I wasn’t intending the question as far back as the wax cylinder era, but that is amazing. Yes, I imagine those recordings would have seemed pretty miraculous.

    I think that the “live recording” concept has been somewhat continuous in the classical arena, but what I’m wondering about now is how far the concept goes back in popular music recordings, where as @Whisht points out, the concept of the album moved between “collection of songs” and “unified art form”. But the live recording as it exists in pop music is neither of those, but an attempt to share with a concert experience with listeners who weren’t there. So at some point, artists decided that this was a thing of value, and not just a lesser version of their carefully-created studio recordings. What I’m wondering is how long that has been going on? Certainly since the 70’s, because I remember live albums from that era. I guess the 60’s, because there was the Woodstock album, and probably others that I don’t know or don’t remember. The 50’s, I don’t know. I’m suddenly finding this question interesting.

  7. @Juniperfish Really? A wind-up gramophone? That’s amazing. I love looking at those, but I’ve never actually had my hands on one. I remember listening to 78’s on my grandparents’ “modern” stereo many years ago. Didn’t they feel completely different even than the 45’s and LP’s that I was buying in the seventies? They had way more heft; but then, I have some LP’s from I’m guessing the sixties that feel a lot more solid than the ones they made later.

    I know shockingly little about the technology of recorded music, but I know there was a charm to it that has gone away (and don’t get me wrong, I love our digital music server and the ease with which we can find and select music on it, and play it all over the house). Who remembers those little plastic bits that you used to wedge into the middle of 45’s to play them on a modern turntable? And the stackable stereo, that made a lot of clacking noises as it dropped the next record down (my Nanna had one, and so I will forever associate it with the music of Englebert Humperdink, Tom Jones, and Andy Williams). My first “record player” was a portable turntable that closed up like a suitcase (not unlike the gramophone, in a way, except that I didn’t have to crank it!).

  8. Apologies all for not getting to everyone sooner!

    Firstly – thank you, you’ve been kind so far!

    @FatManInABox – oh, I hadn’t realised that about Sheila Chandra.
    I didn’t know much about her career, but always remembered her singing that particular song. Thanks for posting one of hers on the Music Thread – I’ll go over and listen.

    @Phaseshift – oh, you’re not suggesting I deliberately chose a Cure track to get on your good side and get this published are you… for shame! 😉
    Thanks again for your help in getting this up.

    Oh I’ll admit that I don’t understand music at all.
    I’m embarrassed by how innumerate I am in general, and talk of 5ths, diatonics etc leave me baffled (i’m fascinated but uncomprehending)! But I love it when Puro and Arbutus and others are talking as I do think I’m learning something, even if it is trickling in very slowly! And I really thnk that at some point the light will go on and I’ll ‘get it’ and have a wider appreciation – until then, I just like the tunes!

    oh – and always happy to take the blame for anything (though my stirring defence of Phil Collins’ Face Value may be a bit Patrick Bateman!!)

    @Arbutus – thanks for the info re Ventadorn. Funnily enough I was going to mention printed music as a way of people playing music at home before records came along (and how songs were thought of as ‘tunes’ rather than particular recordings – they were still live events often with family and friends around a badly played piano! Hadn’t considered that it went back as far as Middle Ages though!

    @Juniperfish – yes, the ‘warmth’ of vinyl – I definitely didn’t go there!! 😉
    There’s a lot of debate as to analogue over digital, the shape of soundwaves etc. For me just as interesting is the difference simply listening on headphones as opposed to speakers – music sounds absolutely different!

  9. Fascinating reading @Whisht Lots of thought provoking material there. Like @Arbutus I have often wondered the same thing in regard to food and the olive, (great minds and all..) in particular but I have never thought about the development of music. Two years ago I did a series of short videos on the development of human thought and left music out entirely but music, though verse, was integral to the process because we used verse to remember things. The laws of Iceland were recorded aurally through verse for over a thousand years. In societies that did not use writing music was far more than use entertainment, it was the means of retaining and passing on information.
    I will save listening to the clips till I am home alone tomorrow. (I tend to avoid the music thread of late because it seems to crash firefox which is annoying because I really enjoyed the variety of music posted there.)
    Cheers
    Janette

  10. @Arbutus
    I know what you mean in terms of live recordings – I much prefer Hendrix’s live stuff even though its often out of tune. His playing just seems clearer (there’s less going on with overdubs etc etc).

    To be honest, I wonder if most live recordings will be because the industry will have seen it as a simple way of selling some music (ie the musicians were assembled anyway!).
    But musicians who *knew* that the live event was specifically different to their studio album… I’ll give it a ponder (I do like a ponder – thinking about stuff you can’t ‘just’ google!).

    I’ll discount all ‘events’ (eg Woodstock) and revue tours from the 50’s (they feel more like ‘you couldn’t make it but you can at least listen). I think what you’re getting at is more like Keith Jarrett in Koln etc – playing live to an audience and feeding off them *because* it can’t be done in a studio.

    (but do let me know if I’m completely missing your point! 🙂 )

  11. Hi @JanetteB – thanks! and that’s absolutely what I was getting at at the beginning of my ramble!
    Music is a method to aid memory. I’d assumed mainly ‘stories’ but laws too – really interesting!

    I’m wondering if its Firefox or simply bandwidth that’s crashing your browser. I’ll admit that there are waaayy too many embedded videos in my ramble and that’s likely to hurt anyone on wireless broadband. Sorry (I just got greedy!).

    But hope you do get a chance to listen to some of the tunes. They’re not necessarily “the BEST tunes in the world EVAH!” but just things that I thought were illustrative or funny at the time.

  12. @juniperfish

    Although the sound was pretty terrible (old needles and a now dodgy wind-up mechanism) the pleasure of the machine, in wood and silver, and the ghosts of old jazz voices crackling with 1930s warm nights, simply cannot be solicited from the best digital file in the world.

    Lovely sentiment, and I know what you mean. I have two nieces and a nephew, now all growed up who are kids of the digital age. While they have immediate access to content in a way we couldn’t have envisaged in the past, it has lost something, I think, to them.

    As they grew and got into more diverse tastes, it was a revelation (for me) to show them my archive room in which resides my vinyl collection of about 2000 albums and singles. Far from pointing and laughing at my backwardness, they consider it something special pouring over the cover art – the picture discs, gatefold sleeves and lyric sheets. Selecting the speed, 33, 45, 78, and placing the stylus – listening to music becomes an event, something they’ve never really approached in that way before. It’s something you own and love, rather than a disposable thing to consume. It’s a really big change in perspective.

  13. @Whisht No, you have my point exactly right. Woodstock was not a good example of what I meant– that’s what I get for composing comments on the fly! Your Jarrett and Hendrix examples are more to the point. I suppose you are probably right about the music industry’s view of live recordings, more’s the pity. But it’s also probably true that the artists themselves would have been aware of the difference between live performance and recording. Years ago when I was playing in rock bands, I participated in the making of a studio demo. It was possibly the least enjoyable musical experience I have ever had, sitting in isolation in a little booth, fine for technical precision but entirely soulless. If you were the type of performer who viewed the audience as part of the musical process (unlike say, Glenn Gould, who was more of an intellectual and famously disliked live performance), then there would always be something extra in a live recording.

  14. And by the way, @Whisht, “just liking the tunes” is pretty much the point! There is a kind of harmonic analysis that @purofilion will know about, called Schenkerian after its inventor, Heinrich Schenker, that is meant to reduce all the chords in a work down to two, by defining most of the harmonies as being subservient to other ones (that is a pretty bad explanation of the process, but hopefully gets the idea across). It’s kind of interesting in a way, but all the times I had to do it as a music student, I was left wondering what the point really was, as it didn’t allow for the importance of any really distinguishing or defining aspects of the music. A musical education does give us a few more tools for examining why things sound the way they do, but you can’t beat enthusiasm and an open mind. 😀

  15. @Juniperfish, @PhaseShift

    I remember when my elder brother graduated from law school and took up a job as a solicitor in a country town. I was at the end of my high school years and proud of my collection of EPs and LPs, and just as proud of my first record player (the first one is always special). I went to visit my brother and looked around his new house, and asked him where his stereo system was. He told me he had sold it to buy a lawnmower. I knew from that moment on that our paths had fundamentally diverged.

    Alas, a few years ago, during one of many relocations, I realised that my treasured record collection had become a symbol of my past (rather like those old jeans that you cannot fit into anymore, but conjur up memories of the pubs and concerts you went to in them) rather than something I still listened to, and I sold them to the boyfriend of a work colleague who had a second-hand record shop. I don’t think I have ever quite recovered. But at least I still don’t own a lawnmower.

    @Whist

    Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed (and learnt) from your blog. My interest in music has always been sadly untutored and unknowlegable. I think I have always responded on a visceral level to music, but am painfully aware of my inability to understand it in the context of musical traditions. Your blog was a revelation. Thanks.

  16. @Phaseshift – wow! that’s a helluva lot of LPs! And you’re right about the covers etc.
    This blog could’ve been called “A Paean to Sleeve Notes”. I love reading them, trying to understand a little bit more about the album.
    One of the things about vinyl is that I’d imagine people skip songs more readily now, as its so easy to hit a button rather than get up, lift the lid, carefully lift the needle and drop it to the next track.

    Also, the other thing about vinyl, was the way that scratches would cause skips – every time I hear certain songs even now I expect them to skip and its jarring when they don’t (because I’m now listening to them digitally!).

  17. @blenkinsopthebrave – a tragedy to hear about your LPs. You did a noble thing (at least they’re being listened to!) and using the proceeds to buy a lawnmower would have been a travesty (and caused heartache with every use).
    I hope you bought something useful and deserved like wine instead.

    And thank you for your kind words – to be honest my response to music is purely visceral too. Any knowledge is gleaned from sleevenotes and listening to people who *have* had an education in music!
    But as Arbutus says, “you can’t beat enthusiasm and an open mind” which I also take as a massive compliment! Thanks again!

  18. @Whisht and @Arbutus and @PhaseShift yeeees, those lovely LPs skipping and gliding. One step on polished floors would send the needle shimmering across the vinyl and my elder brother and my dad would glare and I’d say: “What?”

    Arbutus, I loved the Gould reference as early recording -in his apartment in Manhattan singing and humming while glasses clink and people quietly laugh: you can imagine the gowns and the long cigarette holders and Gould sitting by the piano on the chair his father built with one lean leg thrown over the other. An image in one’s head come to life like the music. I love the idea of vinyl and sleeve notes and a Side B.

    Phaseshift : your family are very lucky to see such a refined room. They would love it because its something, with gentleness, they can both touch and really listen to. Beautiful. I lost all the vinyls in this house when I first moved in. I had everything stored in the garage and one of those freak floods caused a volcano of water to ‘sprout out’ and dash everything to bits.

    I recall when I was looking through a music library years ago, that there was a live recording of a Robert Johnson vinyl. Very nice indeed and a little gem.

    Great job Whisht, really magnificent!! And so much more to say…or sing and hum…

    Kindest, puro

  19. @whisht

    Not just my record collection I’d hasten to add. More a combination of misspent youth with my partner. If you’d met me and mrsPhaseshift when we first met and asked us what we admired about each other it would probably boil down to “they have a great record collection.”

    It’s funny though that @juniperfish’s post (and @blenkinsopthebrave and @purogilion’s response) made me think about the relative value we place on these things.

    I think as we’ve moved towards CDs and then downloads I’ve valued the vinyl more and more. And I do think that that era maintains a kind of mystique. Kids actually love the tactile feel of it, the big art and some of the quirks.

    I can remember my oldest niece (who thought the Spice Girls were authentic and original feminist icons) being led upstairs for a short sharp shock treatment by an exasperated MrsPhaseshift, who introduced her to Polly Styrene, Debbie Harry and Sousxie Sioux

    My nephew got into rock a few years ago and assured me (with the swagger of a typical teenager) that the Keiser Chiefs were the hardest rocking thing that had ever occurred in the history of everything. Again – a bit of re-education was required with us finally meeting a generational gap by agreeing that ACDC’s Touch too much is just about the most perfect hard rocking track there is. He was astonished to find a 12 inch picture disc of Nirvana’s “smells like teen spirit” in my collection. To him it’s venerable history. To me it’s a curio I picked up in HMV Sheffield for ninety nine pence.

    My youngest niece – let’s not go there. I’m afraid we infected her at an early age with our goth weirdness. She’s a bit emo, and into all sorts of weird shit. She wanted to read war of the worlds before she could actually read because of that gatefold prog rock album.

    She’s the red-headed fiery little gobshite that will respond to

    “The chances of anyone coming from Mars, are a million to one”.

    With

    “But still …. They come !”

  20. @Phaseshift – Wow your archive room sounds great – lucky nieces and nephew.

    And MrsPhaseshift has great taste in music 🙂

    @Whisht and @Purofilion the scratches and skips and crackles are definitely part of the charm of vinyl

    I wonder if the Who music will be revamped for Capaldi? I can definitely see his Doctor dancing to X-Ray Specs “I-dentity is the crisis can’t you see” in the TARDIS as it is finally revealed that he is, in fact, the Valeyard….

  21. @Whisht

    You could go on and on about music that was written to be performed in a particular space. You don’t really touch on religious music, but of course this is key to some great stuff. The earliest three- and four-part music written in late 12th-century Paris was written for the brand-new cathedral there, which was longer, higher, and taller than most (if not all) churches of the time. In the early 17th-century in Venice, music was written for the Basilica of San Marco that split the performers up into separate choirs and orchestras, and sent them to different balconies in the basilica, so you had a kind of Spem in alium thing going on there. I should say that I doubt that any recording will really reproduce what it must feel like to listen to Spem in alium performed in the round. I’ve never heard it live, but I know someone who performed it that way, and she said it was an amazing experience.

    I’ll try to find some of the Venetian stuff and post on the music thread, it’s extremely cool.

  22. @Juniperfish

    I’d love it if they came up with something new for the series! I like Matt Smith’s theme, but I definitely associate it with his energy. It would be lovely if they had a slightly darker, more ominous tone for Capaldi, maybe even harking back to the original.

  23. @Phaseshift – that collection of yours sounds like its performing a wonderful and valuable service.
    I wish my niece cared for more than One Direction (she’s 14 ffs!).
    I’d blame her parents but my brother-in-law is very much into his 60’s music, was/is a massive fan of Bowie and my sister likes 80’s music (ah, is this the problem…?).
    Maybe my niece will suddenly and sullenly get into terror-doom-goth-drone-thrash and I’ll spend my time trying out ambient and ‘world folk’ to dig her out (although actually, “terror-doom-goth-drone-thrash” doesn’t sound tooo bad, as long as its not the only thing!).

    And picture disc Nirvana??!! A definite curio, especially as they’re almost ‘holy’ now and picture dics seem so….. coporate!

    Ah @Arbutus – really interesting about the number of pieces of music that are ‘site-specific’ and completely agree that it would be an incredible experience to here it in situ.

    I think it was hearing about Spem in Alium, the lunch talk about technology (incl. architecture) affecting music, as well as reading liner notes around the limitations of vinyl for that song by Monk that were the various gestation points for this blog. Maybe odd points to start from or try to join up, but it was fun following a slightly vague train of thought and researching recording technologies and the arguments (that I didn’t understand!) around ‘ancient music’!

    And if nothing else we’ve discovered that Mr and Mrs Phaseshift are really into vinyl!!

  24. Hi @Arbutus – ok, here’s an album that (as far as I can find) is an album by a band that had already released a couple of albums but chose to record ‘live’.

    They had one helluva microphone though (probably a coupla grand’s worth) but still, a live album (I’ve still not found the “actually we did overdub it here..” etc).

    They supported Durutti Column for a gig in London around this time (1988/9) and I knew nothing about them. Complete surprise to hear Country as a support to DC but I was spellbound. Absolutely sumptuous! My mate who (like me) was there for DC hated them. “Thank God that’s over” he said with me looking disbelievingly at him.
    Oh and btw this YT rip seems to be from a particularly dusty vinyl!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOrNMDzJfzY

    Other than that, I’ll have to go down the Steve Albini route of a Producer/ Engineer who tries to get the ‘live’ sense of the band rather than create something the Label can sell. Though its always tricky to split the myth from the actuality (and I first heard of him as “ooohhh such-and-such got their album produced by Albini [kudos]”).

  25. Wow, Cowboy Junkies. I had forgotten about them. Such a lovely vocal sound. They came out around the same time as another Toronto country-crossover band, Blue Rodeo, who went on to become much more famous and are considered one of the grand old groups of Canadian rock these days. I think that CJ kind of got lost in their dust, which is a shame, because I always thought they were much more interesting. I have just now looked them up and am really pleased to see that they are still going strong, although somewhat under the pop music radar these days. Nice find!

  26. so, just back from a gig (a far too rare occurrence!) and thought I’d mention to @Arbutus (and anyone else who was wondering about the deliberate differences between recorded and ‘live’ music), that the band played in many places very similar to the recorded stuff but – importantly- it was a lot louder when it needed to be.

    Really f***ing loud in fact.
    So loud you felt it in your chest.
    So loud I now can’t hear the music on my headphones properly ie its no loud enough.

    🙂

    Overall a good gig when the equipment wasn’t falling apart (it was Slint for anyone who cares, who I’m sure I linked to a track before so here’s a link to the album Spiderland which they played quite a bit from).

    A lot of men were clutching the Spiderland LP on the tube afterwards.

    Yes @Phaseshiftmucho vinyl love. Perhaps unsurprisingly as it was a 70/80% male audience, I only saw men clutching LPs and T-shirts.
    These guys held the brand new shrink-wrapped LPs almost as precious relics (for an album released 13 years ago!).

    [EDIT – went back and added bold and italics and even a link cos I can now – @Craig is awesome!]

    😉

  27. @Whisht

    Interesting about the volume issue, especially this: it was a lot louder when it needed to be. So many performances are loud for the sake of volume, and that’s noticeably different than loud when it makes a difference. We have a pretty good stereo as my husband is something of an audiophile, and we almost never turn it up really loud due to the neighbours and so on. Every so often my husband gets into a pipe organ mood, and cranks it up for a track, and then we have a “live pipe organ in the living room” thing happening. You haven’t heard a pipe organ properly until you’ve sat in a big old church with someone reefing on all the stops and just wailing on some massive piece with loads of bass. No recording can really reflect that “feel it in your chest” experience! (But let’s try anyway, shall we?  🙂 )

     

  28. @Arbutus years ago I had that feeling (‘feel it in your chest’) when I accompanied the dude I was dating to Brisbane’s huge cathedral. He was finishing an Honours in Performance Music and had keys to practise on their organ. It was a miraculous experience. I sat beside him on the seat and pulled out some stops (all this has terrible innuendo: totally misplaced) and played around with the pedals. Awesome stuff. There was a tiny light above the pages I needed to turn and everything else was shadowy dark and smelled musty. The pipes heaved and wheezed. I’ve never forgotten that night. later, I had to pop down to the middle rows for a sound check; that’s when the nuance of the pipes and the intensity of the sound was made clear.

    Months later, he played the typical Bach piece for organ and orchestra at Main Hall (Univ QLD) -the acoustic wasn’t as great but the pipe organ was slightly more recent (by 20 years I guess) and it brought the house down.

    I can never turn up the music on our Bose stereo unless we’re watching some action movie as Mr Ilion dislikes loud music on weekends!! Only on days off when cooking, cleaning, ironing or even in the garden with the deck doors thrown open can I dial it up. No complaints after many years so people must be OK with the music: I’m not playing thrash death metal 🙂

    Kindest, puro.

  29. I’ll pass no comment whatsoever on @Purofilion and her experience of the organ with her friend.

    I think @Arbutus is right in that how recording changed live music would be an interesting blog. In fact I think it’d be fascinating!
    I didn’t focus on the experience of live music and am about to get really busy now so can’t research and attempt to write it (and to be honest it’d need a better writer than I to get across the sensuous nature of it)!

    In terms of ‘feeling it in your chest’ I’ve had a couple of really good experiences.
    One was a gig where the only way I could describe it was that it was as if 10ft high concrete dominoes were falling over toward you.

    Constantly.

    The whoosh of air and thunder in your chest was incredible.
    The music was some kind of heavy electronic music (by someone who I think was called Witchman but who I’ve not listened to anything by since and possibly wouldn’t much like, as it was the visceral nature of the experience which made it incredible).

    The other time was a ‘drone’ band called Bong. Utterly mesmerising to be in the space they created.

    The incredibly loud sound enveloped you totally. It was almost like being underwater, that the sound had a physical presence (especially as it shuddered within your lungs.
    The music might not be to everyone’s taste, but what they set out to do, they achieved utterly, and for me it was fantastic.

    Actually thinking about it, I had a couple of moments of this which are not music related but perhaps say something about how sound affects us.

    One was when I was in Manhattan many years ago and there was a Puerto Rican Parade – loads of people having a great time. The parade consisted of floats going ‘up’ and ‘down’ the avenues. The cops would temporarily stop traffic on the streets from ‘crossing’ the avenues to let the parade go past.

    As they stopped traffic on the street, it gave a great chance to step out into the middle of the road and take a photo of the parade without loads of people being in the way. I did this with my little camera, focussing on the cop who’d stopped traffic. I got bit engrossed in framing the shot when…

    bbbrrrrrrrrRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    this roar happened behind me and I felt an electric current from the base of my spine shoot up to my skull!
    The sound was literally electrifying!

    As I turned I saw that the local Hells Angels chapter of maybe 50 bikes, revving their engines behind me. They were criss-crossing the avenues up Manhatten interrupting the parade, but in a kind’ve good natured “nice floats, but we’ve got nicer hogs” way.

    I tremulously raised my camera and snapped a shot of them – with one rider amusingly raising two fingers from his handle in a ‘peace’ sign.
    Then I got the fuck outta the way as they roared through.

  30. @Whisht I absolutely hear you (punpun) about the Hell’s Angels: same thing happened when there was a wedding in Canberra and the ‘local chapter’ drove slowly and in a dignified manner right up near Parliament House.  The noise was totally engulfing. It also could cause a ‘skip’ in the heart beat which was weird but also sonorous and heavy.

    I remember mentioning the minimalist use of repetitive pitch in the piece ‘In C’. I recall playing the piano for  30 odd minutes  which actually wasn’t so bad even though the double bass was right beside me (I was trying to stay awake or at least not be put into an hypnotic state). When I witnessed a performance of ‘In C’ somewhere else, and they closed all the doors (there were no windows anyway), it bu-bumped thru the chest and stomach cavity. Being a bit further away so the sound coalesced, made the sound ‘hug’ the chest. People later said they had experienced reflux.

    Note: Could one suggest that not all music (even that dubbed classical) is necessarily ‘healthy’?

    Kindest, puro

    PS: Bong and Witchman are great names for bands!

  31. @Whisht, can I talk about modes? (Boy, that sounded strange!) Years ago, I was fortunate enough to twice take a two-week workshop with the medieval ensemble Sequentia; a terrific and formative experience. There was an exercise we did during one of them that involved modes, a kind of medieval version of key signatures, the difference being that where modern key signatures add sharps and flats to keep the semitones in the same part of the scale (giving us the familiar do-re-mi-fa sound), the modes as they originally existed didn’t add sharps or flats, so the semitones moved around to different positions in the scale, giving the music a very distinctive sound. Instead of every scale sounding the same (do-re-mi etc.), each scale sounded slightly different.

    The exercise involved us standing in a circle and cycling through the different modes, droning on the “tonic” note while we each took turns improvising in the mode. One particular mode, the lydian, starts on F and has a semitone between the 4th and 5th notes, so the fa-note creates a tritone against the drone. (I hope this is making some kind of sense… if you have a keyboard, and play a scale from F to F, you’ll see what I mean.) The tritone used to be called the “devil’s interval” because it is so harmonically unstable, and literally, people in the circle were getting headaches and feeling dizzy when we sang in that mode. It was an amazing sonic experience that I have never had from listening to chant recordings.

    (By the way, I loved your written expression of the roar of the Harleys!)

  32. ah @Arbutus

    “can I talk about modes?”

    Well, I should’ve left off reading till I put down the wine, but I plunged on!

    As you may have guessed, I don’t have a keyboard, but I do have the interwebs, so I’ve now discovered these lovely sites – one with a small keyboard but handily notated keys as you’d expect them to be, and this one with a full piano keyboard. But it worryingly didn’t have any letters on the keys and didn’t seem to be playing “G” when I hit “G” on the keyboard but….

    Yes! That’s right, its what you’ve always needed!
    A virtual keyboard that you play using…. your qwerty keyboard!

    Don’t tell me this isn’t what you’ve always needed!

    🙂

    Anyhow, I’ve got that and wiki’s pages on Modes and Lydian scales, and I reckon (excuse me if I get technical) that its the fourth note (‘b’ or ‘a’ on the qwerty keyboard!) which ‘should’ be a b-flat (SHIFT-p!] but that as you say, they didn’t use sharps or flats (or SHIFTs!].

    Am I right (god I hope I am) or am I missing this entirely??

    Actually, playing that weird qwerty keyboard is kinda fun, if only that the chords [ip] and [is] sound rounded, whereas [io] and [ia] sound more angular, with [if] (appropriately) being quite plaintive…

    As you can tell, I’m someone who really hasn’t had any musical education and is still giggling that there’s an online musical keyboard I play with a qwerty notation!
    There’s some great music sheets in qwerty here. I’ve tried sticking to the ‘easy’ ones.

    I’m gonna impress my niece wih my Greensleeves. Oh yes.

    Anyway, back to the actual serious point. I’ve heard of the Devil’s interval – is it the b and f [ie “ia”] played simultaneously? cos it sounds quite strident/ angular/ jarring on that ‘virtual piano’. And singing that must’ve been a nightmare.

    Luckily its not the reflux-inducing sounds that @Purofilion mentioned, nor the fabled “Brown Sound”.

    or at least I don’t think so…

    Thanks again for this and even though I sound like a numpty and not understanding stuff, I really do want to, so really love to hear how this stuff works.

  33. btw – if anyone out there happens to be a composer….

    if you use that ‘virtual keyboard’ and type your name, or words/ lyrics, you’ll get an instant melody.

    I mean, isn’t that a thing that composers do to unlock something creative (I’m thinking Reich ‘Different Trains’ and Arvo Part…).

    I’ll shut up now… but it is a bit like googling yourself!

    😉

    (though ‘whisht’ is quite strident (bloody ‘h’ then ‘t’!), my real name is a bit ‘the scene-after-something-sad-happened-in-a-family).
    all a bit angular (and possibly minor but I may be wrong!)

    [do] [ct] [or] [wh] o is quite interestig though.

    (I really will empty this wine bottle now….)

    🙂

  34. @Whisht    Oh my god that’s fun. And I have a real piano. And no wine has been opened yet. I thought “whisht” sounded quite lovely when I typed it in very quickly, in a flowing sort of way. Bach apparently used his name quite often, with B A C H meaning Bflat A C Bnatural in the German system.

    Yes! You have it exactly right. It’s remarkably hard to explain in words but not that complicated really. I actually think a bit of drink can help smooth the medieval music theory along; countless Tuesday evenings have been spent by my little group, debating rhythms or sharps and flats (I might start calling them “shifts” now!) accompanied by a nice pinot or a glass of bourbon. (Bourbon, you must understand, is the official alcoholic beverage of our group, tea being the official non-alcoholic one!)

    (B♭-A-C-B)

  35. @Arbutus and @Whisht

    modes scared the shit out of me back in ’85 . Each week in our composition classes for the first 8 or so, we had to learn ‘about a mode’ and ‘write a piece of music using that mode”. It could be piano, or a capella or orchestral.

    Mine all sounded the same!  This lecturer had ‘done’ this to his first years since, like, forever!  I think standing in a group and improvising around a mode would also terrify me. You are so clever Arbutus (not that I didn’t know that already!) but improv on a mode in a circle/ improv on a note in, say, the mixolydian mode is darn hard!   Kudos to you, girl!!

    Kindest,  (hanging her head as modes bring back the Sunday night panic about the composition. Lydian made me ill though I quite liked Dorian),  puro.

  36. doh!

    Though it sounds like @Arbutus and @purofilion may have figured it out from the links to the notated music, I didn’t provide an easy link to the “qwerty keyboard”.

    Wine I tell you – I really shouldn’t be allowed near heavy machinery or the internet.

    (or a keyboard).

    🙂

    btw – quite frankly Arbutus and Puro I’m impressed by the pair of you.

    Trying to wrap my head around whether the terms Dorian, Lydian etc refer to anything other than the particular scale as laid out on a modern keyboard (I presume the keyboard reflects modes/scales as they already existed)?

    [hm, something to read up on later tonight. Right now my head hurts but that may be the wine from last night!]

  37. @purofilion  @Whisht

    If you’ve listened to enough chant, the modes start to make a lot more sense (and I’ve listened to more chant than I have watched Doctor Who!). Puro, did you use the Grout textbook when you studied music history? I remember the little chart which laid out the scales for each mode and showed the principle notes of each one. But the workshops and my own listening showed me later on that the modes really function as a set of rules, in a sense. Note groupings and motifs that you commonly see in one mode, you would never see in another one, and so on. No textbook ever made sense of that for me, it was only the actual music that did it.

    @Whisht, the keyboard is definitely based on the system used by western music since at least the early middle ages. The modern scales were based on a couple of the early modes, and some of the other modes survive in folk music. Dorian (D-D) is essentially the mode that we hear in a lot of traditional Celtic songs, for example). Interestingly, chant notation was based around the note C, but the mode built on C didn’t show up until relatively late. By the middle of the 16th century, the modes didn’t really exist anymore, and things had pretty much morphed into the major/minor system that we have today.

    Puro, your mode composition assignments remind me of the ones I had to do in counterpoint class. We had to compose pieces in the style of different eras and composers, following all the rules of counterpoint (unless we could produce an example where Bach had broken the same rule, then we were good to go). My future husband was in that class, and we still talk about it. Having done some songwriting before going to music school, I had a reasonable knack for composing themes, but my husband hated it. He would put together something perfectly correct by the rules, and then our quite eccentric old prof would criticize his thematic material for not being elegant, or creative, or something equally unfair when one is not a composer.

    Lecture over, we can all reconvene in the pub!

  38. @Arbutus I totally will turn teen!  OMG: Grout!  Yes, yes it was him that awful monster!  Although for other assignments and outlining of musicology and discography, I must admit he was great!  Wow, your hubby in that class. I dated a bloke about 2 years ahead of me in music school and by 2-3 rd year, I had convinced him to help me compose music -except for minimalism (I had a knack for that -probably because it was so easy by comparison!)

     

    Kindest, puffo 🙂

  39. Wolfweed alerted me at least to Kate Bush being on the telly (not sure who reading this gets iPlayer!).
    However, plenty of her stuff online and the only extra element was to also remind me why I like Guy Garvey and Annie Clarke so much (they get music as listeners but also as practitioners).

    anyway, it led me through Rocket’s Tail to the Trio Bulgarka and this lovely little interview of Kate with them singing as drone.

    But that led me to this video of the Trio singing 3 songs and the last one’s a cracker!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA4mOz-wqtY

    (just curious if that’ll embed – its the same link as “singing 3 songs”).

    Not sure if modes or polyphony lead to this but the tones are incredible!

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