When I think of what musical stuff I did this year, I feel that while I've certainly progressed, I've only started to really do stuff. Mostly, this is in terms of writing and engineering. During 50/90 this year, I wrote two pieces that - if they aren't fugues by definition - certainly have some fugue elements in them and an-other piece that's sort of close to a string quartet. And since I've been recording at least two songs a week, I've become more familiar with Cubase. I've been writing more complex pieces, and I'm getting better at recording them.
At the beginning of the year, I gave myself four goals - although I don't think I ever really announced one.
Note Continuity - every song I recorded would start on at least one of the notes that the previous song ended on. I actually did accomplish this, but now that I have, I think it's sort of a stupid idea. As far as sequencing, I think it has its merits (and I'm working on a project that employs it), but it gets sort of frustrating when it's the factor that dictates what song you'll record next.
Alternate Audio - because I can't think of any good music video ideas and wouldn't have the means to do them anyway, I just film myself playing the parts at the same time that I record them. I had the idea to take the audio that the camera picks up and use it to do an alternate mix of the song. This lasted until about mid-April. Like Note Continuity, I think it's an interesting idea, but this wasn't the right context for it. Especially since a lot of the songs I was recording at that time included only one or two instruments.
Complex production - I had had the idea to write complex arrangements for my songs, but I'm not sure this goal ever really got off the ground. Some of the songs I recorded this year would apply, but I certainly wouldn't say that I achieved this goal with everything I did this year.
Post two songs a week - this I actually did, as long as you don't count this last week of December (it's only three days!). Every week, I posted a regular song on my YouTube channel (although many I took down after I re-did the song), and I posted a hymn for Hymnal Habitation on my tumblr.
While it wasn't as broad a goal as the four above, for FAWM this year, I decided to forgo using any string instruments. A lot of the songs I wrote aren't the best, but it was a good experience, and I learned more about keyboard instruments. I even started using harmonica and trombone in my songs. I started playing around with open D tuning in January and really got into it in starting in June, and during 50/90, I started experimenting with slide guitar. Using open D tuning also led me to experiment with inverting guitar chords and playing around with chord voicings.
I'll have an-other post that details my musical goals for 2014 (most of those goals are projects), but I do want to talk a bit about posting two songs a week. I feel it helped a lot as far as my finding my way around production. If you do something for long enough, eventually, you'll start to get better at it, and I feel that was my experience. But it's also rather draining (the video element in particular is time-consuming), so I won't be doing it next year. I'll still be doing Hymnal Habitation weekly, and I'm going to try to post videos with some frequency.
Along with all of the music that I created this year, I also listened to a lot. I even started a blog to catalogue (almost) everything that I listen to. With one exception, I listened to the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle every Monday, and I listened to the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed every Tuesday. I listened to all of the Funk & Wagnalls' Family Library of Great Music LPs in May. With one few exception, I listened to all of my Zombies albums every week in June, all of my Colin Blunstone albums every week in July, and all of my Argent albums every week in August. And from around April to the end of September, I had particular albums that I listened to every day of the week.
I've been getting into more classical music too. At various points in the year, I was listening to a lot of Vivaldi, Bach, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saëns. I even learned a bit of Schubert's Octet in F major D. 803 and Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor No. 6.
And I started "auditing" music classes by watching all of the video recordings of lectures that various universities have posted. I went through all of Yale's MUS 112, and I have about a third left of Missouri State University's MUS 241.
I still haven't been getting much attention in what I've been doing; I released three EPs and two singles this year (some of them for free), but no one's bought any. Still, I feel like I'm getting closer to actually achieving something with my music aside from just personal satisfaction.
Finals week is next week, so this week has been mostly review week. In my history class to-day, my professor told us to work on our study guides, and he turned on some classical music station on Pandora. Near the end of class, he asked if it helped. I didn't hear if anyone answered, although I guess somebody must have said something because then my professor said that that's why classical music is good to study to - you don't know any of the songs and you can't sing along. Of the pieces that were played, the only one I was even sort of familiar with was the fourth movement of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 5 (I had to listen to the whole symphony afterwards to find what specific movement it was, which was only the second time I've heard the whole symphony).
I don't think he's wrong about people's not being familiar with classical music, but I sort of want him to be. Not because I want to see his being wrong but because people should be familiar with classical music. Because it's great.
Recently, I've started to get sort of annoyed with this premise - that classical music is good only for studying or relaxing. I think it's a stupid view. People didn't write this music just so that you would have something to listen to in the background while you're studying for your finals. Relaxation probably wasn't the highest priority they had either.
This may be where my rôle as a writer/composer supersedes my rôle as a listener, but I think that if you look to classical music only for relaxation, you're missing out on a huge part of it.
I listened to a greatest hits album of Chicago (the band, not the city) to-day, and because I hadn't listened to Chicago for a long time (I think this is the first time I've listened to them this year), I noticed some things I hadn't previously been aware of. Actually, it was pretty much just one thing: some of the songs had electric piano in them.
So I got thinking about this (as I often do). I really like the sound of an electric piano. In my own compositions, I'm more likely to use electric piano than regular piano. Partially because the sound of the fake piano on my keyboard doesn't sound particularly good to me but also because I prefer electric piano. It's probably because of all of the Zombies songs I listen to. At their time at Decca, only three songs were released with piano; the rest feature electric piano or organ.
In any case, I got thinking about certain musical elements I like. Along with the sound of electric piano, I adore the sound of a Hammond organ, and I like hand claps as long as they're in an interesting rhythm. I hate the standard one-clap-on-the-first-of-four-beats sort of clapping.
Because NaNoWriMo was last month, I'd been reading Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! In the section of the book that explains how to come up with at least a general plot, he explains his two Magna Cartas. On the first, you're supposed to answer the question "What, to you, makes a good novel?" He writes that "Anything that floats your fictional boat should go on the list" and explains that "the things you appreciate as a reader are also the things you'll likely excel at as a writer. These bits of language, color, and technique, for whatever reason, make sense to your creative brain."
The second Magna Carta (called "Magna Carta II, the Evil Twin of Magna Carta I") lists "those things that bore or depress you in novels." The point is to avoid writing these into your novel.
I couldn't help but notice that my mental listing of instruments that I like the sound of was akin to the Magna Carta Exercise. And then I had the idea to apply my list in the same way that the Magna Cartas apply to NaNoWriMo. February Album Writing Month provides me with the perfect opportunity to do this. Like NaNoWriMo, it's a challenge that takes place during a single month. I can create a list of things I like about music and then try to stick as many of those elements as possible into the songs that I write during FAWM.
Of course, it doesn't apply in exactly the same way. Just because I like the sound of an instrument doesn't mean that I have the ability to play it. But I still think the Magna Carta idea could work as a general template.
And while I do intend to do this idea eventually, I don't think I'll be doing it any time soon. My problem is that I have too many musical projects that have objectives that conflict with each other. I stick with these projects for one year at a time, and the projects that I have in mind for the next two years either totally prevent my using electric piano and organ or constrain me from using them as fully as I'd like.
But I still think that applying the Magna Carta Exercise to FAWM is a good idea. I just probably won't get around to doing it for a few years.
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, one of my on-going musical projects is learning all of the songs by the Zombies. Lately, I've been putting a fair amount of effort into the middle of "Care of Cell 44." (I'm hesitant to call it a "bridge" or a "middle eight" because I have no proper understanding of either of those terms.)
In any case, I came up with some chords that sounded right, and I wrote a short post about it on the blog where I document my process. I wrote that I thought it was G A7 Cm G / G A7 Cm Dsus4 D. And then I clicked "publish."
But then I got thinking about it. I don't know my scales as well as I should, but I do know the A major scale and that it contains G#. But when I played what I thought was A7, I was playing A C# E G. That was the whole point of that particular post - just like the bass part in "This Will Be Our Year," the bass part in the middle of "Care of Cell 44" plays a note (G) that is in all of the chords played on top of that note (or at least I think so). So then what I played couldn't be A7 because A7 is A C# E G#.
I looked it up to find that I was actually playing Adom7. This led to the realization that I've been confusing major sevenths and dominant sevenths for pretty much as long as I've been playing them. So this whole experience has told me two things - 1) I need to learn my scales better (or, you know, just learn them in the first place) and 2) I need to learn chord spellings beyond just major and minor.
At the end of October, I got (yet an-other) copy of the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle - the 30th anniversary edition put out by Big Beat that includes the whole album in both mono and stereo. As I've mentioned before, Odessey and Oracle is one of my favorite albums, and I've been working on learning how to play all of the songs from it. I've also been transcribing all of the lyrics. However, I was actually a bit disappointed when I discovered that this edition has all of the lyrics written out in the liner notes.
Mostly, it was the lyrics for "A Rose for Emily" and "Changes" that caused this slight disappointment. These liner notes claim that the first line of "A Rose for Emily" is "The summer is here at last," and yet - when compared to the rest of the song - it makes so much more sense if the first line is "Though summer is here at last." I wrote a more in-depth post about that here.
I'd been trying to figure out the exact lyrics for "Changes" for a long time. I'd seen people writing them as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sad how brown her eyes." Yet, I often heard it as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sighed how brown her eyes." I had been thinking about that particular line - whether it was "sad" or "sighed" - for months. To come up with an answer, I looked at the rest of the lyrics.
There is more than one instance in Chris White's writing where he takes the grammatical structure of one phrase and inverts it for the next phrase. For instance, in "Friends of Mine" - "That's something to see / That's nothing to hide." So I took this parallelism approach and applied it to the lyrics of "Changes." If the one line is "In spring her voice she spoke to me," it made sense to me that the complement was "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes." Both of those lines are linked by breathing (speaking and sighing) in the same way that the other two lines are linked by the concept of seasons as wearable items (summer as crown and winter as cloak).
That's how I interpreted the lyrics, but then I find that in the liner notes, it's listed as "And autumn sad how brown her eyes." Which is the very line that I had decided against based on parallelism.
I'm not sure where the lyrics in these particular liner notes came from - whether Rod Argent and Chris White were consulted or whether it's someone else's transcription, but I'm still going to hold to what I heard - "Though summer is here at last" and "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes." Based on the other lyrics of the songs, those make more sense to me, and - ultimately - give the songs more meaning for me.
A few years ago, I had the idea to learn every part to every song by the Zombies because they're my favorite band. Eventually, I expanded this and decided to learn all of the songs by the bands that formed after the Zombies' break-up: Argent (the band) and Colin Blunstone. Last September, I started a tumblr where I've been posting rough versions of parts as I've been learning them. Over the past two months, I've brought the catalogue up-to-date with all of the parts I know.
Through doing this project, I've become somewhat obsessed with the idea of learning every song by a particular band or even just a whole album. It is sort of a crazy premise, but it has real and applicable benefits. Learning how to play the songs is an obvious one, but a project like these also forces you to become a better musician. In order to play all of the parts, you need to be able to play all of the instruments and you need to be able to critically listen to the recording in order to figure out how to play the parts.
Aside from all of that, you start to gain a familiarity with the music in a way that's impossible to do just as a listener. Because you're able to play the songs instead of just listen to them, you're familiar with them kinetically instead of just aurally. Plus, you may also start to uncover certain musical features that your favorite band frequently uses. I've noticed that Rod Argent likes to employ two sequential half steps in his bass parts ("I'll Keep Trying," "Whenever You're Ready," "She Loves the Way They Love Her") and that Chris White likes to use chord progressions that center around D F#(m) G and A ("Don't Go Away," "I Don't Want to Know," "Don't Cry for Me," "Brief Candles," "The Feeling's Inside").
Really, the whole point of this post is to promote the idea of learning if not the whole output of your favorite band at least a whole album. You may never learn everything, but it will certainly be an enlightening experience.
I got a new electric guitar last May, which has become my primary instrument. But I still wanted to use my other electric guitar (which was also my first guitar) in some capacity, so back in January I tuned it to open D tuning with the goal of learning how to play slide guitar on it. This has worked out rather well, but not in the way I had expected. I don't really know any more about slide guitar, but I have learned open D tuning relatively well. And I love it.
I remember reading somewhere that open D is sometimes recommended to beginning guitarists because you can play all of the major chords just by sliding your finger up and down the fret board. (I'm pretty sure that Tommy James [of "and the Shondells" fame] explains in Me, the Mob, and the Music that he learned guitar this way [though I read that book about four years ago, so I could be mis-remembering].) And while this is true, I think it's a bit lazy from a musician's perspective. I think that it's important to understand the logic behind the shapes - to know which notes constitute a particular chord. So while the single-fingered-chords are indeed a feature of open D tuning, that's not really a reason why I like it so much. (Though my position on this may change if I ever start learning slide guitar in open D.)
There are three main reasons why I like open D tuning so much. The first is that the chords seem a lot closer to-gether. I'm not sure if this is actually true, but it seems easier to transition from D major to A major in open D tuning than it does in standard tuning. You just switch two fingers and move down a fret.
An-other reason is that you don't really have any barre chords (unless you choose to use the single-fingered-chords technique), and I tend to find barre chords uncomfortable. This may be because I'm a self-taught guitarist and have poor form, but I find that using a lot of barre chords quickly becomes tiresome. There's too much wrist bending. Open D tuning doesn't have any of that.
And finally, I like open D tuning because the notes are in order within the chord shapes. In standard tuning, the notes are all over the place.
For E major, the strings are E, B, E, G#, B, E (root, fifth, root, third, fifth, root).
C major is E, C, E, G, C, E (fifth, root, fifth, third, root, fifth).
A major is E, A, E, A, C#, E (fifth, root, fifth, root, third, fifth).
There really isn't any consistency of note positions between chord shapes. But in open D tuning - using only the middle four strings, which is what I do - the chord shapes have the constituent notes in order, even if you use inversions.
D major is D, F#, A, D (root, third, fifth, root [an octave higher]). You could play the outer most strings too, since they're both tuned to D. And, in fact, you could just play all open strings.
The first inversion of A major is C#, E, A, C# (third, fifth, root, third [an octave higher]).
In my experience, having different notes of the triad on the bottom (mixing thirds with the more regular tonics and fifths) can make for more expressive chord progressions. While inversions with the third on the bottom are possible on a standardly-tuned guitar (if you use the bottom four strings, they're the same shapes as some mandolin chords), they're much easier in open D tuning.
Aside from standard tuning's being a standard, the only superiority it has to open D - as far as I can see - is how easy it is to form suspended chords. It's really easy to transition from, say, D major to Dsus4 to Dsus2. Though I don't think that suspended chords are often a concrete part of any chord progression. I see them more as embellishments than anything else. The same goes for chords with extra notes on the top. Like an E major with an added G# on the high E string. So as far as straight chords go, open D tuning is the best. Although I'm still more familiar with standard tuning.
And, aside from all of the music theory stuff, I like open D tuning because it gives me new shapes to play around with. Because I'm still learning open D, I don't fall into conventional patterns, which is a possibility when I'm using standard tuning.
50/90 ended yester-day, so I thought I would go through and comment on all of the songs I wrote. In general, I'm pretty happy with how I did this year. I actually achieved most of the goals I had. It would have gone even better had I not had a summer class during the middle or had fall semester not started. But next year, I won't have either of those (hopefully), and I can work on what I actually like doing.
Untitled 2013.07.05
50/90 Description: I don't expect too many of these to have titles. For me, that's one of the hardest parts.
I started playing around with the first few chords of the Zombies' "I Remember When I Loved Her" and came up with a nice guitar part. And since I haven't really written anything for mandolin since November, I thought I'd try that on this.
The tracking on this was a bit difficult, and I actually forgot to play a part, but I think it turned out pretty well.
Commentary: There isn't really much I would change with this. The guitar isn't loud enough, and I forgot one mandolin part, but those are faults of just this particular recording.
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Untitled 2013.07.07
50/90 Description: I'm not sure if I'm happy with how this turned out or not.
Commentary: As I recall, my main goal here was to try out this finger-picking pattern with the third on the bottom. Perhaps also to move away from chord-centric keyboard playing. Both of those it does fairly well, but I don't think it's a particularly remarkable song.
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"Permutation"
50/90 Description: I wanted to try integrating two different finger-picking patterns, and I also had some ideas about format, so I just indulged both in this, which is why it's about seven minutes long. If I'd stuck to a more normal format, it would have been two or three. (And if I go back to revisit it, I'll almost certainly shorten it.) I also wanted to use my twelve-string guitar, but I'm not sure that it's exactly suited for this.
Commentary: I'm not sure if I'm going to revisit this, but if I do, I'd certainly condense it. I'd probably revise the melodies and move them to something other than twelve-string.
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Untitled 2013.07.10
50/90 Description: I'm not thrilled with how I lead into the repetitions, but aside from that, I'm pretty happy with this. It's a bit short though.
Commentary: In order to make the transitions between the sections smoother, I think I just need to write an-other part. Also, since recording this, I've written a slightly different ending.
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"Coyote"
50/90 Description: This is basically my attempt at an instrumental R&B song. I followed the format of the Zombies' versions of "Road Runner" (the guitar riff), "Sticks and Stones" (the solos for both guitar and electric piano), and "I Got My Mojo Working" (harmonica).
I've never played slide guitar before, but I think that turned out better than the harmonica part.
I took the name from "Road Runner" too, via the Road Runner and Wiley E. Coyote association.
Commentary: I was having some problems recording guitar, so the sound here is a bit more raw than I would have liked. But as far as the song itself, I don't think I would change much.
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Untitled 2013.07.16
50/90 Description: I've been playing around with the guitar part on this for awhile, but I couldn't get a melody that I really liked. This is the third attempt, and it's good enough.
Commentary: I still feel like I could have written a better mandolin part. I'm almost certain this is the first (and so far only) time I've used parallel thirds, and I feel like I could be more inventive than that.
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Untitled 2013.07.19
50/90 Description: I think I like this the best of my 50/90 songs so far. I was playing around with open D tuning and found a new chord shape, and this was basically an exploration of that.
Commentary: The two electric guitar parts don't work very well to-gether at one point, but aside from that, the only complaint I have against this one is that it's too short.
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Untitled 2013.07.21
50/90 Description: I wanted to try playing the same chords on different guitars - a six string in standard tuning, a six string in open D, and a twelve string - for some sort of interplay among them. I'm not sure if it works very well though.
I think I put more work into this than it deserves; I start doing demos back on 6 July.
Commentary: I'm pretty sure the opening part of this was inspired by Driftless Pony Club's "Dymaxion Chronofile," although where theirs is a descending melody, mine is ascending.
I don't think I realized this as well as I could have. I think I should have kept the open D guitar and the twelve-string guitar playing chords and then overdubbed additional guitars playing those parts. I think I need to write a longer bass part, too. And I'm not too happy about the tone of the guitar playing the main riff.
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Untitled 2013.07.26
50/90 Description: I've wanted to write a song for two mandolins for a while, which is pretty much why I wrote this. One section sounded a bit empty, so I added guitar chords, but I'm not sure if that was the best way to fix it.
Commentary: I'm still bothered a bit by the added guitar chords, but I think if I soften them a bit, this would be fine.
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"The Array"
50/90 Description: I just threw a bunch of stuff to-gether.
The first guitar riff I've had written for ages, so I'm glad I finally got to use it in something. It's so old that I adapted it into a bass part for a song I wrote for 50/90 last year. It's actually a re-working of the riff from the Surfaris' "Wipe Out."
Even though I haven't really played it for nine years, I wanted to use trombone in something for 50/90. I used it in a song during FAWM, but this one turned out much better (even if it still isn't the best).
I'd also wanted to try inverting the guitar chords & bass part so that the bass is playing the chords and the guitar is playing what was the bass part. And then I had the idea to have every string play the same note but constrained within the lower twelve frets. I got a bit carried away with that. Also, I did that thing where you hit record twice and then miss the thing you intended to record, so I'm missing one of the guitar parts (and instead got a minute of my re-setting for an-other take).
I think I should have increased the tempo for the last part. After the first riff, it seems pretty slow.
Commentary: Mostly this is just "I got carried away." Especially with the colors at the end....
I'm sure I could record a better version of this, but I'm not sure I want to.
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Untitled 2013.08.03
50/90 Description: Way back in November 2011, I came up with a melody that sort of sounded familiar. I later figured out that half of it was pretty much the opening to the Beatles' "Nowhere Man," but the other half was apparently my own. Last July I further developed it, but it was still missing something.
Just recently I listened to "We Can Work It Out" and realized that there's a harmonium in it, which I had either never noticed or never paid much attention to. So I thought that I would try to add something like that to this (although I ended up trying to evoke a mellotron sound instead). It doesn't sound exactly like I want it to though. I can't tell whether it's too heavy (texture-wise) or too synth-y.
Also, I played this much too fast.
Commentary: I think my only complaint about this is that it's too fast.
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"Ruban"
50/90 Description: I'd been listening to a lot of Les Paul when I wrote the opening guitar part, which I think is the reason for its jazziness.
I think I've been playing around with this acoustic part since 50/90 started this year; I didn't really know what to do with it. But then I'd remembered this melody that I'd written last June (it's the third of the three main "verses" here), and the two seemed to fit.
Commentary: Of all of my 50/90 songs this year, this is probably my favorite. I'd make only minor changes to the way I recorded it here. A few less note bends, and a few extra notes in the electric guitar part.
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Untitled 2013.08.09
50/90 Description: I hadn't really intended to do this one to-day, and I haven't spent that much time on it, so it could probably be improved.
Commentary: I haven't worked it out yet, but I want to combine this one with the untitled song from 3 August. I feel like they go to-gether somehow.
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"Vantage"
50/90 Description: I wrote this opening mandolin part during 50/90 last year, so I'm glad I finally got to use it in something.
Commentary: I think I could record a better version of this. This one seems a bit sloppy and maybe a bit too fast.
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"Middle Mountain Flight"
50/90 Description: I feel like this is missing a part, but I've already been working on it for two weeks, so I thought I'd just record a version.
Commentary: This still feels incomplete to me. I think it needs either an-other part or some revision of what's already there.
Also, the title of this is a reference to Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book I, he writes, "I thence / Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th' Aonian mount while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (lines 14-16). Probably too lofty of a title for the sparse track I've recorded....
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"Idolon"
50/90 Description: I wrote the main guitar part of this after playing around with "Dies Irae," so I figured a title in Latin would be fitting. "Idolon" means "ghost" or "apparition," which is also fitting, since one of my 50/90 songs from last year was titled "Apparition," and this resembles it to some degree.
Commentary: I think I liked this a lot more when I wrote it then I do now. It's repetitive without being interesting. And, while I didn't realize this when I was writing it, I'd already used one of those guitar parts.
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Untitled 2013.08.22
50/90 Description: I'd been doing so well with actually giving my songs titles until this one.
I recently figured out how to do the guitar chime-y thing. In messing around with that, I wrote a thing in G, and since the rest of this is (mostly) in G, I figured that I would put that in the beginning. This chord progression is something I came up with last summer that I finally got a chance to use. I'm pretty sure it's inspired by the chord progression of America's "Lonely People."
I also recently got a harmonica in G, so I tried that too. And then I revisited the idea I had to double track harmonicas (which I tried during FAWM). One is in G, and the other is in C. The harmonica parts don't exactly match because I'm still not very good at harmonica; I've only really been playing it since FAWM.
Commentary: To some degree, I feel like this is too similar to other things I've written - specifically in the structural organization - but I still like it. The only change I'd make is adding a few notes to one of the guitar parts.
I got the idea for multitracking harmonicas (not double tracking, as I erroneously wrote) from Brian Wilson's SMiLE. At one point (I think in "Cabinessence"), there's a part with harmonica and melodica, and I had mistaken it for two harmonicas playing different things.
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"Stone Rooms"
50/90 Description: I'm not super happy with some of the melodies in this, but I've been working on it long enough that I felt I should post something.
Commentary: This one has sort of grown on me, and I think I would make only a few changes to what I have here.
The title I took from a line in Argent's "Like Honey."
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Untitled 2013.08.29
50/90 Description: This is kind of short and more repetitive than I'd like, but I think some simplicity is permissible considering how inexperienced I am at slide guitar (this is only the second time I've used it and the first time I've used it for the melody).
Commentary: I wish I would have prepared a bit more for this; at the end, the two slide guitar parts aren't very much in sync - not because of any technical reason, just because I didn't really know what I was playing.
I doubt I'll do anything with this. Mostly, it was just a chance to see if I could use slide guitar for a melody.
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Organ Piece in F minor
50/90 Description: This could stand some expanding. It's pretty much just the same melody with different accompaniments, so it becomes a bit redundant.
Still, I like what I have so far.
Commentary: Since writing this, I've expanded it somewhat, but I'm still not finished revising it.
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Untitled 2013.09.05
50/90 Description: For some reason, this doesn't feel very cohesive to me. I wrote most of these parts at the same time though, and they are related musically, so maybe I feel that way just because I recorded it in so many pieces (I'm not a very good keyboard player).
Commentary: This still feels disjointed to me. I'm not a very good keyboard player, and I think that everything I write on it is too short and too chromatic. That's a lot of what this suffers from.
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Untitled 2013.09.12
50/90 Description: I started playing around with "Dies Irae," hoping to use it in one of my earlier 50/90 songs (the organ piece in F minor). It didn't fit, but I still liked the variation I'd written, so I used it for the first part of this. In many ways, this is a continuation of that other piece, so I may eventually combine the two, but I'll have to re-work some parts.
Commentary: I don't think I should have used twelve-string guitar for this. I'm still not very good at it, so it's a lot twangier than I'd like. And because I used three of them, it ends up just sounding like a lot of noise.
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"Calculation"
50/90 Description: This is probably the most experimental thing I've done. I have one part in 4/4 playing a linear repetition and one part in 3/4 playing a cyclical repetition. So occasionally, the notes change at the same time.
I'm not sure if I'll do anything else with this, but I suppose the next step would be to try to write a melody for it.
Commentary: I think most of the motivation for doing this was just getting an-other 50/90 song. It's not particularly musical.
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Untitled 2013.09.20
50/90 Description: I wrote this guitar part earlier this month, and, after a bit of playing around, I wrote one of the mandolin parts. But then I had the idea to try to write something fugue-like out of it. As long as you accept my four note/two pitch subject and overlook how I don't change keys, I think the second half of this does qualify as a fugue for two mandolins with a guitar continuo underneath. I'm a bit hesitant to call it "Fugue in Em" though.
I wish I would've played it a bit faster, but some of the chord changes are difficult to pull off, so I kept it at a slow tempo.
Commentary: The tempo is the only thing I would fix here. I probably could have done it faster had I taken the time to do it, but I had other things to do besides 50/90 at this point.
I don't think I noticed this at the time I was writing it, but this is quite similar to my first 50/90 song this year. They both use the same finger-picking pattern; they both start on a minor chord; and they're both for guitar and mandolins.
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Fretted String Quartet in G major "Alberti"
50/90 Description: I recently "audited" an online music class from Yale, in which I learned about the Alberti bass. So I started playing around with it and wrote something I liked. Then I wrote a brief melody on top of it and a second part (which turned out more complex than the first). I kept playing around with it and then had the idea to write it as sort of a string quartet. (It fits the definition, but it doesn't quite fit the tradition.)
Commentary: I've been contemplating about inserting a key change into this. It would make it longer, and I think it would also lend some more credibility toward the traditional definition of a string quartet. Aside from that, the only thing I would change is the highest part. It plays the same notes through all of the variations, and the piece as a whole would be more interesting if it changed.
I recently got an album of Peter Hurford performing some of Mendelssohn's organ works. The liner notes explain that Mendelssohn was "a skilled performer and a very fine organist." An-other composer who fits into that category is Bach, who was actually known as an organist more than as a composer during his life. In any case, this got me thinking about influential composers and their relationship with the organ, which reminded me of a position I adopted a few months ago: that the organ is the ultimate instrument. I have three reasons for thinking this:
Because it is played via a keyboard, the organ can allow for more musical complexity. For brass and woodwind instruments, you're limited to a single note. String instruments can play as many notes as the number of strings they have, but that still pales in comparison to keyboard instruments because keyboard instruments can simultaneously play chords and a melody but string instruments cannot. Additionally, they can play a melody with a bass accompaniment or simultaneously play multiple parts, as in a fugue. As far as playing multiple parts on a single instrument at once, strings are better than brass or woodwinds, but the organ is still greater.
Organs have a longer sustain than most instruments. The length of the notes it plays isn't bound by the player's physical limitations, unlike brass or woodwind instruments, which can hold a note only as long as the player has breath left. Or string instruments, where the string's vibration eventually ends.
Because of the different stops, organs can sound a bit like other instruments. The mellotron is often cited as the first synthesizer, but organs have been doing the same sort of thing for hundreds of years. Different stops are meant to sound like strings or horns. Different playing techniques can alter the sound of other instruments to some degree (like strings playing pizzicato), but I wouldn't say that they're as drastic as the changes the organ undergoes when playing with different stops.
If you want to get the most complexity out of a single instrument, organ is the one to play.
A week ago, I released an-other EP (you can find it here). So - as I've done for the others - I thought I would type up a post with some more information about all of the songs.
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"1900 Epicycles"
This is one of the oldest songs on the EP. I wrote this for FAWM 2011 and revised it extensively in November 2011. I'm pretty sure that the main melody was inspired by Nick Drake's "Know." I also snuck in a bit inspired by Edvard Grieg's Symphonic Dance, Op. 64. At the time I wrote this, I'd been listening to Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's, which had some effect. When I revised this, I added some different chords, and although they're not in the same order, I used the same chords that are in the Searchers' "When I Get Home," even including the key change.
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"Burghley"
This was the first song I wrote for 50/90 in 2011. I named this after Lord Burghley by flipping through a book of quotes I have and picking one by him (though I don't remember it now). I'm really bad at titles. The electric piano part in the middle was written about five months after the 50/90 version.
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"Murque"
This was the last song I wrote for 50/90 2011. In fact, I posted this on 30 September - the day before 50/90 ended.
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"Island"
This was also a 50/90 song from 2011. When I first recorded this, it used all of the string instruments I had. One of the mandolin parts re-arranges the notes from some incidental music from Shaun the Sheep.
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"Emerald Circles"
Yet an-other 50/90 song from 2011. I started writing the chord progression for this on mandolin and had always intended to record the final version on mandolin, but it just worked better on guitar.
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"Ogle"
An-other song from FAWM 2011. I had only recently gotten multi-tracking software at the time I completed this, which is why it's simpler than some other songs. It's named after Ogle County.
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"Snowy"
This was a 50/90 song in 2011, but I have demos from June 2011 that have this pretty much intact.
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"Nail 5"
From 50/90 2011. I believe this was one of the first times I wrote two simultaneous parts.
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"Chanson de l'ombre"
An-other from 50/90 2011. The chord progression is much older, at least from the end of 2010. At the time, I had thought it was inspired by the chords of the Zombies' "It's Alright with Me," but, just recently, I listened to some songs by the Easybeats, and it has more similarities with the chord progressions that they use. In particular "Sorry," which is one of my favourites.
As previously noted, I've been listening to all of the Argent albums I have this month. I've also been using this as an opportunity to make some progress on the Verulam Cover Project - my attempt to learn and cover all of the songs by the Zombies, Colin Blunstone, and Argent. Mostly, this has just been lyric transcription. And while transcribing lyrics, I noticed something, which led me to an idea.
Rod Argent and Chris White started sharing writing credits for the Argent songs, and I had the idea that it might be interesting to try to figure out whether a song is more of a Rod Argent song or a Chris White song. It seems that people are always trying to decide whether a McCartney/Lennon song is more McCartney or Lennon, so I figured I would try the same with a Argent/White song.
I would wager that "The Feeling's Inside" from Argent's eponymous debut album is mostly a Chris White song for two reasons.
First, there's the line "there is nothing to hide," referring to someone's love. This is extremely similar to a line in "Friends of Mine," which is undoubtedly a Chris White song. In "Friends of Mine," there's the chiasmus "that's something to see / that's nothing to hide," again referring to love.
Second, there's a chromatic descending bass part that goes from A to G to F# (and then to lower notes which I haven't figured out yet). This is also characteristic of White's writing; this same thing occurs in "Brief Candles" (both descending and ascending) and in "Don't Go Away" (though only ascending)
So between the lyrical and musical similarities with his earlier work, I'm almost certain that "The Feeling's Inside" is a Chris White song.
I've run across this enough times that I feel something needs to be said about it. The first line of the Zombies' "A Rose for Emily" is "though summer is here at last." I think that every time I've seen the lyrics written out - even in the sheet music I have of the song - it's rendered as "the summer is here at last." And while just listening closely enough will reveal that it's actually "though," looking at the rest of the lyrics provides sufficient evidence.
The first stanza sets up the contrast between summer and loveless Emily, which the rest of the song develops. Summer is usually seen as one of the best times of the year, but despite that fun connotation, Emily's life is sort of dismal.
She watches her flowers grow
While lovers come and go
To give each other roses from her tree
But not a rose for Emily
Emily, can't you see there's nothing you can do
There's loving everywhere but none for you
And while much of the song talks about this by illustrating the contrast between Emily and the other lovers, it is also illustrated by the contrast in the weather: "Though summer is here at last / The sky is overcast." Summer is usually a time of enjoyable weather, but here "the sky is overcast." The though indicates the opposition between the first two lines.
"The summer is here at last / The sky is overcast" does not have that opposition, and it seems choppy and contradictory. Though signifies a subordinate clause, which improves upon both of these shortcomings. It illustrates that the two lines are grammatically connected and intentionally opposite.
Over the past week or so, I've decided that there are three main types of clapping and that I like only one of them.
The first type is just regular applause. The sort you hear at concerts and award ceremonies and the like. Applause is in a weird position for me because I realise it's necessity but I find it ugly. When you want to acknowledge appreciation for someone and you are also part of a crowd, applause is - admittedly - a good way to do that. Everyone does the same thing (though not precisely at the same time), so you avoid the confusion that would arise if, for example, everyone said something specific to communicate appreciation. And since it's an audible sign of recognition, it has a greater effect than if people just saluted or something.
But it's the not-at-the-same-time feature that annoys me. Because everyone claps at different rates and volumes, it just ends up being this cacophonous noise. I hate it when people clap at me because it's just such an ugly sound.
The second type of clapping is the audience participation type of clapping. At concerts during easily count-able songs (usually 4/4, I should think), audiences feel the need to clap at every fourth beat. It's one thing if a band asks the audience to do this, but it's eye-rollingly banal and annoying when the audience does it on its own. In my opinion, clapping to every fourth beat adds no-thing to the music. It's just noise. And I'm sure that bands don't have any problem with keeping up with the beat (if they did, there would not be people coming to their shows). The audience's acting as a giant, collective metronome is not effective.
I think an-other part of this that annoys me is that by starting the fourth-beat clapping, the audience asserts that it knows how the music should be accompanied. And as a musician, I feel that that should be the musicians' decision. So when a band asks the audience to do this, I'm not as annoyed because they're sanctioning the clapping, but I still think it's aurally ugly.
The third type of clapping is syncopated clapping, and it is the only type that I like. Unlike clapping to every fourth beat, syncopated clapping has some complexity. There's rhythm in it, and because of that, it doesn't getting monotonous like fourth-beat-clapping does. Sometimes, it can be one of the most exciting parts of a song.
So syncopated clapping is permissible and perhaps even encouraged; applause is decent until some other method of wide-spread recognition is developed; and fourth-beat-clapping is terrible.
I've finally started doing the idea I had back in February. Namely, listening to all of my Argent albums every week in August (also, alliteration). However, since I decided to do that, I bought Circus. It had worked out perfectly: seven albums for seven days of the week. Now I have eight albums that I have to squeeze into seven days. So I've decided to listen to Greatest: The Singles Collection and Encore on Sunday and then listen to the other albums on the rest of the days of the week, going chronologically:
Monday: Argent
Tuesday: Ring of Hands
Wednesday: All Together Now
Thursday: In Deep
Friday: Nexus
Saturday: Circus
So because to-day is Thursday, I listened to In Deep to-day. And I realised a few things:
I've heard "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" dozens of times, but until to-day, I had never been able to understand what Rod Argent sings at about 3:45. It's "To every boy he gave a song to be sung."
I'm pretty sure that Rod Argent musically quotes some classical piano piece in "Be Glad." I'm fairly certain that it's something he later recorded for Classically Speaking, but I have yet to listen to both albums back to back and figure out which one it is.
I revisited an earlier idea I had about "Candles on the River" and figured out something interesting. According to Bob Henrit's comments on the LP sleeve, "Candles on the River," while billed to "Argent/White," is mostly a Chris White song. And the "candles" part reminded me of "Brief Candles" from the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, which Chris White also wrote. He re-uses the metaphor of people as candles. But then I remembered that that wasn't his original idea; he took it from Aldous Huxley's collection of short stories titled Brief Candles. And Huxley took "brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth. But I realised that Shakespeare didn't really come up with the metaphor of people as candles either. It's in Isaiah 42: "Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench." (Emphasis added.)
Which has a lot of interesting connections. Even though it doesn't appear that Chris White was familiar with the "brief candles" line in Macbeth, the Zombies did list Shakespeare as an influence. There's a quote from The Tempest in the original liner notes to Odessey and Oracle. Similarly, while Argent (the band) may not have recognized the Biblical reference that the people/candles metaphor has, there are religious influences in their work. There's the musical quotation of the Latin hymn "Dies Irae" in "The Coming of Kohoutek" from Nexus. In the version of "Hold Your Head Up" on Encore, Rod Argent includes part of "God of Grace and God of Glory" in his solo. And there are also religious connections (or at least hints to them) in "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," "Gonna Meet My Maker," "Music from the Spheres," and "Rejoice."
So even though it doesn't appear that these bands realized where some of their references came from, the references still fit within the context of the band's past work and acknowledged influences.
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