Search Results for: music

Music lessons

Jason Weinberger, resident conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, on becoming a conductor and, more essentially, a leader:

When you go through school you learn the mechanics and, hopefully, you learn about the repertoire. But as a conductor you don’t really learn how to be a leader in a larger sense of the word, whether it’s leading a performance or leading an organization. I try to build consensus and to encourage everybody I work with to buy into what we’re doing. I really admire some of the Silicon Valley companies for the way they do business. I think we could learn a lot from that.

Benjamin Zander, long-time conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and past TED speaker, on conductor as leader:

I had been conducting for nearly twenty years when it suddenly dawned on me that the conductor of an orchestra does not make a sound. His picture may appear on the cover of the CD in various dramatic posts, but his true power derives from his ability to make other people powerful.

Make other people powerful. Not be powerful, support others in doing so. I think of what Khoi Vinh’s colleagues said of his leadership style prior to his departure from the Times:

A good manager inspires those who work for him. A great manager inspires also those he works for.

No matter what field you lead in, it always goes both ways.

Sound dialogue

Max Neuhaus used the largest existing network in 1966, the telephone network, to create his sound-producing activities, music:

Using technology he had constructed himself, he was able to mix calls coming in to ten telephones in the studios of the WBAI radio station in New York in different ways, and then broadcast this melange of listeners’ sounds and noises. Once the listeners who called in had switched their radios on, he played with the feedback this produced and bundled sounds from introverted and extroverted callers together.

Because:

[W]hat these works are really about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is perhaps the original impulse for music in man: not making a musical product to be listened to, but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue.

See also:
New Scientist: Urban design, “sound walks,” and decibels

Today, phone ringers and lights are silenced yet there’s no shortage of urban noise. Hurrying through the subway network nearly daily one is part of another sound dialogue, absent of language, an urban dialogue comes forth with messier impulses. Recording urban sounds is part of my routine, as its a dialogue as natural as those I might have with fellow commuters themselves. It’s helpful to always have a good pair of noise-canceling headphones around, just in case.

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All of a piece

Composer and endlessly bewitching Nico Muhly talks to frieze on omnivorism in music and life:

On curiosity:

For me, the library was a dangerous place — I couldn’t get enough. My curiosity is voracious and canine; I am like a golden retriever and will slobber on every object in the room until I keel over!

On thinking about music in a broader way:

I think it comes from the lives that our parents lived, which for my generation are people who, in the 1960s and ’70s, had to redefine their relationship to the canon – academically, musically, socially, sexually. …. Now you just click and it’s done. And it goes both ways. If you’re a classically trained kid, you can buy the latest Joanna Newsom album or whatever, just as it doesn’t feel like buying porn to buy classical music anymore.

On the parallels between cookery and music:

I like to think cookery and music are to the same ends. If you do it really well, you can have a transcendent evening of food, and even if you do it OK, but with a lot of love, it can still be good. Where the analogy is helpful is in doing lots of different projects. It’s like being asked over to someone’s house and cooking together. There’s a spontaneity to it, and it doesn’t feel like it has to do with border crossing or boundary bending or any of that shit, it’s just cooking dinner at your friend’s house, and there happens to be this bag of mussels there, and this fabulous grapefruit and it’s all of a piece.

The interview is stocked with music and video, or you can simply listen to what he’s revisiting now.

Text playlist

Frank Chimero keeps a text playlist:

[O]ne made of the best writing on the web I come across. I take this list and revisit and reread it every 4 to 8 weeks. You could almost consider it a playlist of text: it’s very select (I artificially limit it to 10-15 articles), I typically read them all in one sitting, and the order and pacing is very purposeful. Most revolve around what it’s like to be making things in 2010, and a lot of the people that I respect the most have pieces in it. It’s almost a pep talk in text form. I visit it when I’m down, when I’m lazy, when I’m feeling the inertia take over.

In a bricked basement in Savannah earlier this year, I found myself trading playlists with a woman I’d never met. She, writing a somewhat academic second edition of a book that wasn’t hers the first time around, was experiencing some sort of block. Have you read the “Clackity Noise,” I asked?

It was then I realized that I had a writing playlist.

I explained to her that whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I reread a handful of things that remind me, ground me, reframe and reposition me, sometimes frighten me frankly, back into or out of where I was. I have websites of this sort. Posters. Trees. Scraps of letters. But these, these were the most threadbare. Does she not have that? She did not. I presented her with the playlist. Taking a page from Frank:

Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird

Shitty first drafts are applicable for writing of course, but it’s well beyond that. Broccoli also plays a protagonist.

Frank Chimero: Platforms as Tables, Tables as Platforms

I read this piece as a reminder that one should have research partners in the world, thinking parallel things, doing similar research, inspiring you, pulling you forward. It’s important to have them. You may never meet. In fact, sometimes it’s best if you never meet your research partner. But as partners, you inspire each other to be the best thinker and maker of things you can be. This piece is that reminder.

Jeremy Denk: Yet More Verbiage About The Goldberg Variations

That song you hear playing in the background but you can’t place it? You know you’ve heard it before, but you trust it, you know it. You feel comforted, informed, educated, transformed even by it? This is Jeremy Denk’s writing. No matter what you think of music, hurry off to take a look. A deeply trustable happiness.

Jonathan Harris: World Builders

I read this for the first time as I returned from time away from home where I was on land and space designed by an architect who’d carefully considered how people interact with the surroundings in a natural way. Authenticity, in particular, was intensely important to him. Ever since, I have been trying to build worlds without having to leave my place — to gain objectivity and authenticity while staying home.

Merlin Mann: Making the Clackity Noise

When I forget where I began, and when I can’t remember where to go next, this is what I read. There’s a piece of this post in everything I write.

Milton Glaser: Ten Things I Have Learned

Often recited from memory, and often used to validate tough decisions, I go back to them often. Timeless.

Paul Graham: What Startups Are Really Like

When a new thing isn’t making sense at all, it’s a good reminder of why we need to be perceptive, aware, paying attention. Familiar models don’t always fit, and the best we can do is be aware of them.

Ralph Caplan: Why you should write in your books. Or, Talking Back to Aristotle and Loewy

Aside from paying homage to my unnatural love for marginalia, this reminds me to get past heady and down to what one cares about as a teacher, as a designer, as a human. Feel something? Don’t shuffle around bewildered about how to get it across. Say it out loud. Shout it from the margins. Thank you, Ralph Caplan.

Robin Sloan: The Future of Designed Content

Ideas, whenever they occur to you — however — should be written about. Sometimes we feel that the desk must be perfect, life must be tidy, the world in order, before we have to do our best work, our clearest thinking. This, one of my favorites from Robin, was written as he sniffled from his bed. His sick bed! Had he thought that way, we would never know his thoughts on the future of designed content. This is my reminder.

Seneca: On the Shortness of Life

Perhaps dramatic and certainly not new, but reminders that need reminding.

There are many more. So, sporadically and without purpose, I track paragraphs I love for no good reason. No playlist per se. But if paragraphs were collected like stamps, butterflies, coins, and stickers, this would be that. And I would be a collector. Thanks, Frank.

Long-distance dedications

Apropos of other music memorabilia, a new dedication site, This Goes Out To:

[It] gives old-school radio dedications a life on the web. Some dedications are transcribed from radio broadcasts, but most come from viewers of the blog via email and Twitter. There is an alchemy to song dedications — canned ingredients combined to express earnest and deeply felt emotion. The music is often saccharine. The words of love and longing tend toward the generic, delivered in the slick, mannered voice of the DJ. And yet, with dedications, as with many forms of private sentiment expressed in public, the emotional pull is undeniable. The fact of an audience intensifies the dedicator’s sentiment, and listeners get a voyeuristic charge from the public displays of intimacy.

All shout-outs and dedications are accompanied by tunes expertly arranged by the talented Taylor Stapleton. From Hall & Oates to George Clinton to Kleer to George Michael, it’s not to be missed. While this project is still in its early stages, just like I was with Casey Kasem, I’m addicted.

Choose your own musical adventure

Jason Freeman is opening musical scores to audiences of all backgrounds, much like Choose Your Own Adventure novels:

I use technology to make the open score accessible not only to performers but also to audiences, inviting everyone to experience and participate in the work’s creative process. …. The structure is reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, of a flow chart, or of the hyperlinked structure of the Internet. Each version of the piece simply follows the arrows to create a unique path through the score. There are an almost infinite number of possible versions.

Only 12.6 percent of American adults play a musical instrument even once per year. And Jason suspects even fewer compose music. As a composer, he’s aiming to change that:

In my work, I blur the traditional divisions between composer, performer and listener, inviting others to make the music along with me. It is not enough for me to share only a polished performance or a mastered audio recording. I want to share the experience of composing music.

Anyone can participate:

Since this printed score is only accessible to musicians who play the piano and read music notation, I also developed an interactive Web site in collaboration with Akito Van Troyer. On the site, anyone can create a remix regardless of musical experience: the notation is graphical and you can hear your version as you build it.

The results are charming and addictive. Piano etudes on observing squirrels, learning to dance, reading a poem, and more.

[via]

The Gruen transfer

If you’ve been disoriented in a shopping mall, it’s not you, it’s them:

The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings play a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music. The effect of the transfer is marked by a slower walking pace and glazed eyes.

And:

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when consumers respond to “scripted disorientation” cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques).

If you’re in Australia, you can further investigate on television, but elsewhere, we have to depend on Douglas Rushkoff and our sense of spatial orientation for now.

[thx, Josh]

On the passing-ness of things

Jeremy Denk on Bach as essayist for his ability to create “in-betweens:”

I like the beat in-between: when the E-flat doesn’t know yet that it has been rethought. Where the melody’s and harmony’s tendencies clash, where the parts diverge, you get a kind of blurred double image of past and future. If you agree with me that Bach is a particularly profound essayist in the nature of time, you might agree with this leap of assocation: that dissonant beat is the present. It is neither here nor there. In its in-between-ness, it is the most beautiful, tastable moment of all. Why is it always the moment you want to hold onto, that is passing by?

Perhaps:

See also:
Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin playing Violin Sonata No. 4 in C minor (BWV 1017)

That’s why it sometimes seems to me that music theory is one of the most despicable disciplines there is, because you’d probably label the bass of that magical chord a “passing tone,” and once you’ve labeled it a passing tone it’s a bit deflating … doink!, it goes in the bin with all the other passing tones. Somewhat like passing through Trenton on your way to Philadelphia: unremarkable. …. But Bach had that way of using passing tones so that you could meditate on the passing-ness of things, what it is to pass, to move on, to leave beauties behind … of labeling the labels with meaning, breathing life back into the most basic, even the most unassuming, words.

Therein is the thing. We often miss the passing tones, don’t listen for them, don’t see them, but it’s their presence — their slippery, unnamable presence — that yanks us forth. Passing tones give us passageway to leave what must be behind, behind. They give words to it. Give focus to what is between past and future. Sometimes that is the way ahead.

Solar music box

A project by Whitevinyl design:

A simple ambient musicbox, with sounds generated using the orbital frequencies of our solar system.

It uses a virtual Orrery as a type of music box. Hear the music our solar system makes. Mesmerizing.

[via]

You can’t always get what you want

Mico Toledo with a weekly dose of song quotes:

Music Philosophy is a weekly graphic/typographic interpretation of philosophical song quotes. All the posters look great as an iPhone desktop wallpaper, so feel free to download them.

If you’re still thinking about your iPhone, that is.

The shape of music

Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, on the essence of music and art, told through a violin lesson he once gave to a schizophrenic musician:

This is the very essence of art. This is the very reason we make music. We take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core — our emotions. And through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we’re able to shape those emotions into reality. And the reality of that expression reaches all of us. And moves us, inspires, and unites us. (4:35)

He then went on to play “something I shamelessly stole from cellists,” his own transcription of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. (6:30) This piece was, nine years ago, the reason I — one evening without any training — forego reason and began playing the cello. (In this case, there was an available, rentable cello across the street in the local music store.) When something moves you, shape it into reality.