When Jihyun suggested we watch the film Sound of Noise, I was skeptical at first. Musical terrorists in Sweden, that just sounded potentially too cheesy to be good.
Well, a couple of reservations aside, I actually found myself charmed by the film.
In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that.
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.
When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it.
Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was lost and confused about who I was; and my peers were, like all schoolkids, none too sympathetic.
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.
Last time, in Part 2 of this series, I talked about “ear training” and the skills that are required by certain kinds of music if one is to listen to them competently–the requirement of a degree of work, a degree of slogging up a learning curve to grasp those kinds of music.
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.
Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit.
I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over.
Those who visit my webpage (as opposed to reading it via RSS) will notice that over the last few months I changed my gravatar (to a friend’s caricature from 1995 of me with a saxophone, which you can see to the right), and then I changed the template and the layout of the pages in the top menu, and added a lot of headers, including a few with me playing saxophone, like these below:
The template change had been necessary for a while, but the selection of images of me playing music in the headers has not been incidental.
UPDATE (9 April 2012): Part 2 is up! See below.
ORIGINAL POST: Well, I’m sure some of you out there are waiting for an update from Saigon, but I’m not up for writing one yet: I’ve developed some kind of a cold and been in bed all day, and want only to say that we’re settling in fine, and things are good.
But I do feel like posting this:
I recently received an email from Stephen Malinowski notifying me that the graphical score for the first part of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was complete and online. (I assume he ran across references to the piece on my blog, like this one.)
When I was still delivering newspapers (er, okay, fliers) for pocket money, I discovered Stravinsky’s masterpiece, Le Sacre de Printemps, known in English as The Rite of Spring. I immediately found the music somehow bizarrely familiar and comfortable, despite its dissonance, its extremity, the unnatural use of the instruments, and so on.
This is hardly surprising, of course: anyone who watches a lot of film knows how influential this ballet by Stravinsky has proven to be on the work of film score composers, and some of what Stravinsky did even entered the common language of orchestral music afterwards.
Ben Ratliff — a jazz critic for The New York Times, among other things — is like Trane in that he comes straight out with what he’s up to, though it might not be right away that you realize it. The title Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, if you look at it carefully, tells you what this book is really about, and it’s not just John Coltrane — it’s the story of the sound (or rather, the sounds) that burst into one’s mind when Trane’s name is mentioned: how Coltrane developed that sound from the beginning, how it evolved in different groups he played with (the Miles Davis Quintet/Sextet, the Classic Coltrane Quartet, and the various groups he played with after 1965). But the book is also about how that sound reverberated through the horns of younger generations of players, late in his life but also after his death… how it continues (to whatever degree it does, and why) to echo through jazz music today.
Not long ago, I mentioned John Coltrane’s youthful interest in SF and pulp zines. But he was apparently also quite interested in science itself, something I’d suspected but don’t remember seeing confirmed as clearly as in this anecdote from David Amram, a French horn-playing jazz man who knew Trane in New York in the 1950s, and ran into him just outside a club, where Amram had just finished playing a set with Charlie Mingus. Coltrane was eating a slice of pie, and:
[Trane] said, “How are you?” I [Amram] said, “Everything’s fine.” And then he said to me, “What do you think about Einstein’s theory of relativity?”
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NC_pl_9wT_0" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
Arguably one of the most significant musicians in American history (and unarguably one of the most significant saxophonists and jazz musicians ever), John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina. It might be a weird thing to bring up — where he grew up, that is — except that, when we think about major artists, we so often imagine them having sprung into being fully-formed, if not in technique or approach, then at least in their essential selfhood. This is also often how we tell their stories: for example, in Coltrane: Story of a Sound (a book I’ve just picked up) Ben Ratliff starts with Coltrane’s discharge from the Navy, in 1946. (Which is not a complaint about the book — it’s an understandable place to start.)
I don’t know how much of this is going on in Seoul, but I was pleased to run across a channel on Youtube featuring a bunch of it.
Now, when I say “contemporary music” I don’t mean people playing Beatles songs on traditional instruments. I especially don’t mean “fusion” music where people on traditional Korean instruments try to play in a jazz-fusion or rock-fusion setting, something I think rarely works. (Though I have heard tracks by a few indie bands that made great use of some instruments — haegeum in one song by 3rd Line Butterfly, and samul nori in one track by the Uh Uh Boo Project Bang.)
While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed.
Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all just picking up the same phrases from the same sources–but it is an interesting pattern nonetheless.
Some John Coltrane-related links, because yes, I’m working on that story that involves him again:
A link I discovered on the above site, which is also amazing, is to Improviz, a project by Jon Syndal to render visual representations of jazz improvisations. There are links to various PDFs containing Improviz content from this page.I’ve heard people, time and again, compare jazz to SF in terms of them both being very “American” artforms, and, along with the cowboy movie, among America’s original contributions to the common human repository of art and culture.
The cowboy movie, I’m afraid, has roots that go way deeper than American history, which is why it resonates so powerfully with other forms of literature and narrative. I see a lot of the Gothic novel in the Western, and a lot of the Bible too.
Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington anmd Farah Jasmine Griffin. The University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, 1998.)
The collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane is an interesting topic, and it’s especially interesting that it’s framed as such right from the title of this book. Coltrane, after all, started out as a “junior” to Davis, if not in age then certainly in credentials and in the establishment of a personal, individual style. It’d be difficult to argue otherwise, but Griffin and Washington acknowledge this. However, they quite correctly note, collaborations need not begin with two individuals as equals… nor, of course, do the credentials and skills of individuals exist in a fixed state.
