Bowie exhibition musical commentary: who would you choose ?

Full of vibrant enthusiasm to visit the David Bowie exhibition that’s just opened, I discovered earlier that a commentary on the music of one of the most creative, challenging and inventive musicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been provided by …er, Howard Goodall.

Now, I may be wrong here, but I can immediately think of at least four or five cultural commentators whose insights and observations on Bowie I would value. Former NME writer Tony Parsons’ Dispatches from the front-line of popular culture must be required reading for anyone interested in, or interested in writing about, pop music. Was he away when the phone rang with the invitation ? Was Phil Jupitus out ? Alexis Petridis ? Alex Ross, even ?

Actually, I can think of at least four or five other people whose views I would prefer to those of Mr Dull As F*@k. Three of them are dead….and the other is my toilet-brush.

Still, it won’t put me off going to see the exhibition. Thankfully… Whom would you have chosen ?

The Mozart Effect: who cares ?

Look, I fear we may have our priorities in the wrong place with all this talk of the ‘ Mozart Effect’ and the supposed scientific research in support of / contradicting the idea that playing classical music to babies will develop certain neural pathways, will improve cerebral connections or empathetic emotional understanding.

Every so often, some Worthy Boffin either propounded or rails against the view that a baby’s development can be greatly enhanced if classical music, particularly the music of Mozart, is played to them. What strikes me about all this is that it isn’t important At All. When we are concerned with how we can programme our children through the use of music, we have perhaps lost sight (or, more pertinently, sound) of what music can bring.

As a professional musician and parent, I can say with complete conviction that it’s not the supposed cognitive-enhancing possibilities of listening to music, or the more developed emotional empathy with others that music can assist in developing that interests me, or that I want for my children from music. What I want is for them to have the opportunity to experience music for themselves, to listen to a wide variety of music, from Minimalism to Miles, and find out if there’s some that they like, and for them to have the chance to explore more of it if they do. I want them to learn to play an instrument or to sing so they can find another creative pastime, a social activity in which they can participate with others if they enjoy doing so.

I’m not interested in attempting to programme my children into wunderkindern through exposure to pieces from the Austro-Germanic musical tradition, in the hope that they develop superior synaptic connections in order to make them better children, if such a thing were actually possible. And for anyone who’s seen A Clockwork Orange, surely that way madness lies…

So, let’s just forget all the bullshit about the enhancements that the Mozart Effect is supposed to offer, and just allow our children to enjoy music for themselves as a creative pastime, rather than as a conditioning tool for the betterment of their cerebral performance. Music is not, and should not be, about making ‘better’ babies, or assisting in the development of certain physiological capacities that will improve children. Music can do many things, not least of which is to offer fertile ground for lots of utter crap to be talked by lots of idiots.Get a grip, everyone…

Shock revelation: music article contains 90% horseshit

In a shocking moment of revelation, it has been shown that a piece of music journalism contains approximately 90% horseshit.

Investigations into a recent article by Norman Lebrecht have proved conclusively that much of what passed for factual information in the writing was in fact actually horseshit.

It is widely expected that investigations being conducted into other articles, not just those by Lebrecht, will reveal the widespread use of horseshit in music journalism, whereby reputable music critics have been contaminating their product with groundless supposition, specious arguments and pure horseshit. The additional use of tripe and bollocks is also suspected.

“It’s a bad time for horse-based product contamination across the country,” admitted an entirely fictional government spokesman in a pretend interview, “and consumers are losing confidence in products they thought they could trust.”

The culture of music criticism is holding its breath in anticipation of further revelations.

Will becoming an Academy mean the death of music in schools ?

Talking to a Music specialist primary school teacher recently, it transpires that, from today, the school at which they teach is becoming an ‘academy.’ What this means in real terms for music provision at the school, is that the school will now have to pay for all the instruments it uses, which previously it had borrowed from its local music advisory service.

Now, at a rough cost of £30 per instrument (such as a cornet or violin – other ‘instruments’ like the ocarina or recorder are in a bundle-package), for a class of thirty children, that’s £900 per year simply to hire them. The school will receive a one-off lump sum as part of its move to academy-status, but with close to £1,000 per year to hire instruments, that’s not going to last long. And with other areas in school – IT provision, real estate up-keep, resources – all clamouring for funding, using funds to hire musical instruments is not going to be high on the list of priorities. (And I appreciate that it’s unlikely that a school will require an entire class-full of cornets or violins – breaking them up across the numbers required throughout the school, though, yields an approximate number).

It seems counter-productive, nay, let’s pull no punches here, totally stupid, that developing a school’s status should in fact lead to its no longer being able to deliver a part of its curriculum.

As of today, therefore, all the instruments will be being boxed up in order to return to the county music service. The opportunity for young children to access instruments to start to learn will be lost, as will the Wider Opportunities aspect to curriculum delivery. The school could, of course,  pass on the cost of instrument hire to the parents,  but with many of them low-income families, with priorities of their own, that’s not going to help.

I wonder if other primary-turned-academy schools are in a similar situation.

Wozzeck hell was that ?

A very good friend, in fact my son’s godfather, came to stay at the weekend, and was regaling us with stories of his cultural life in London, where he works as a systems consultant for a very well-known financial firm.

He is a music-lover – at school, we became friends over a shared love of jazz, in particular, albums by Chick Corea and guitarist Al Di Meola – although he also enjoys classical music. He went to hear Gheorgiu and Alagna in La boheme at Covent Garden earlier this year, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and mentioned a previous experience.

“A mate of mine rang me,” he launched into the story, “saying that he’d got a box at Covent Garden, and asked if I wanted to come. Well, I thought, why not… I didn’t know what opera was being performed, and I just turned up at the appointed hour.”

“And what did you see ?” I asked him.

“Wozzeck.”

I fell about laughing at the expression on his face as he delivered, dead-pan, the title of Berg’s brutal, atonal opera.

“How was it?”

“Well,” he replied, “it wasn’t exactly up-lifting. In fact, I found it rather impenetrable.”

“It’s the sort of piece,” said my wife, “that you ought to be warned about beforehand” (and she’s a professional singer, so she knows about this sort of thing). “You can do a bit of research before you go into the story and the characters, so you can learn to recognise their tunes.”

“TUNES ?!” exploded my friend in disbelief. “Tunes?”

“Well,” I murmured, “perhaps it’s not exactly full of hummable ditties fleshing out a rib-tickler of a story.”

My friend shuddered. What a work to have thrust upon you blindfold…

How to open a jazz solo: Frelon Brun

Although I’ve known and loved Filles de Kilimanjaro for more years than I care to admit, it was only recently that the gem of a phrase that is the opening to Davis’ solo on ‘Frelon Brun’ has struck me.

CBS, 1968

The album itself represents a point in Davis’ career as he was changing from the more modal explorations of his second great quintet (with Wayne Shorter on sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter, bass and Tony Williams, drums) to the embracing of electric instruments and paraphernalia that would form the basis of albums from Water Babies (itself a collection of studio session ‘leftovers’ from 1967-68) through to In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Filles marks a transitional moment, yet is full of the trademark devices that characterised Davis’ approach from Kind of Blue through to Silent Way.

The fourth track on the album, ‘Frelon Brun,’ is characterised by a shuffling percussion punctuated by a decisive rising-sixth figure in the bass and left-hand of the keyboard beneath a sparse melodic line in trumpet and saxophone.

Once the skeletal melody has been played, there’s a short section where the accompanying textures move to the foreground, before the trumpet solo begins. There is a pleasing symmetry in the way it ascends a scale of Bb major, beginning and ending on the fifth degree of the scale, and then peaks briefly on the sixth, hops and skips back down to the starting note, and then does a short decorative burst as it settles.

There’s also a wonderful way in which Davis repeats the skipping rhythmic figure of the first four notes, but misplaces the primary beat such that what began as a downbeat on the second beat of the bar begins the next four notes as an upbeat; the downbeat therefore falls on the first beat of the bar, turning the last two notes into an iamb (to borrow a poetic term) and a feminine ending.

Listen for yourself, as the solo starts at about 45 seconds.

Click to enlarge

The phrase shows the truth of the maxim, ‘Less is more;’ the simplicity of the arch-shape, scalic ascent and rhythmic repetition combines to create a striking opening gesture to Davis’ solo.

Sign of a masterpiece: Mallet instruments, voices and organ

I’ve known Steve Reich’s hypnotic Music for Mallet instruments, voices and organ ever since my second year of college, when someone in the sixth form made me a recording, together with Six Pianos, Large Ensemble and Vermont Counterpoint, which pretty much defined my musical love ever since. That means I’ve known the piece for well over … *coughs, mumbles into hand… years; it’s gone through most of the recorded formats I can think of – cassette, CD, mini-disc, mp3, DVD – and yet I am still hearing new aspects of the piece when I listen to it.

This may, of course, be due to several factors; different recordings have different values, perhaps highlighting different lines or patterns compared to others; seeing the piece performed means the ear can be draw to different lines by virtue of the eye being drawn by some aspect of the visual spectacle; and listening in the car, immersed in the sound emanating from speakers fore and aft, is a very different experience to listening through headphones.

But I’m still being surprised and delighted by the discovery of patterns I hadn’t heard before, textural shifts I’d not noticed, harmonies that are altered by suddenly hearing a new pedal-point or sustained note. There’s a wonderful, deft live performance by Alarm Will Sound, broadcast as Reich at the Roxy that I’ve watched often, which showed me new material by my watching the performers in actin and highlighting certain textural aspects I hadn’t discerned previously.

It’s often said that one of the signs of a masterpiece, in any artistic medium, is the work’s ability to sustain the repeated experience and yield new elements. If this is true, then Reich’s piece stands as an example of just such a work.