a music journal
October 31, 2006 (link)
7:08 PM
While doing research a few weeks ago in a local library, I came across an uncatalogued collection of unpublished manuscripts from the turn of the century, mostly translations and transcriptions from medieval and Renaissance texts, bound into a single volume. I didn't have time to go through the entire book, and many of them seemed awfully dull -- financial documents, real estate records (!), and so forth. I was, however, really struck by one of them -- partly because it was completely different in tone from the others, and partly because, as it turned out, it had been written about events that happened almost exactly four hundred years ago.
I had my laptop with me, and decided to do a quick-and-dirty transcription of the contents -- difficult because the manuscript was in poor condition, difficult to read, and was itself a copy of a fragmentary text. That turns out to have been a very fortuitous decision: a few days ago, I went back to have a second look, and -- despite a search that lasted nearly two hours -- neither I nor the librarians could find the volume that had me so intrigued. ("Was it a vision, or a waking dream?")
Thus I present to you a text that, as far as I know, is completely unknown to scholarship. It has only a peripheral connection to music, but I've transcribed unusual and found texts before, so this is very much in a tradition of sorts. (I obviously make no assurances nor guarantees to its accuracy, or even its authenticity -- simply put, I have no information.)
So: four hundred years after it apparently happened, and on my thirtieth Halloween to date, I give you this. Happy Halloween, and remember: if you're on a foreign path, then let me do the lead.
Current music: 92442-2, 6:33.
(Comments for October 31, 2006)
October 17, 2006 (link)
8:19 PM
A while back, this place had a thread that was something like "Name a song by Band A that Band B pretty much based their whole career on". For instance, "Surf's Up" and the High Llamas, say, or Blondie's version of "The Tide is High" and Ace of Base. (OK, maybe those are both kinda crappy examples.)
Anyway, it occurs to me that "I've Just Seen A Face" = Simon and Garfunkel. This is by no means an original thought; it'd probably been had tens of thousands of times before I was even born. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the history of FM radio, at least a thousand request-line callers have asked for "that 'falling, yes I'm falling' song by Simon and Garfunkel".
7:39 PM
An awesome discovery I made recently:
On her website, Carla Bley has put up lead sheets of many of her compositions, in PDF format. What can I say but: "Paws Without Claws"! "Sex With Birds"! Awesome!!
The real revelation for me was "Crazy with You", which has what one of my professors would call a "D8-1 subliminal displacement dissonance" throughout. In other words, all of the phrases are displaced backwards by one quarter note from where I've always thought they were -- and I had no idea, really, that there was anything of the sort going on in the piece: I thought all of the phrases coincided with the barline.
It's very much like certain things that happen in Schumann, whose work I've been studying a lot this fall, and who has at least one piece ("Des Abends") that features a subliminal dissonance from the very first bar all the way to the last. Unlike Schumann, however, I already know "Crazy With You" so well that I can't really encounter it afresh and "rehear" the barlines. And in truth, I'm not convinced that it's possible to do so (though I think I'll cue up "Night-Glo" and give it a shot).
Oh, and while you're at it, gimme five. I've been walking around with this in my head for a week. I wish I had a falsetto like Bob's -- no, more accurately, I wish I had phrasing like Bob's. That slow vibrato!
(Doesn't Luis look a little stiff up there, somehow? His upper body isn't rotating, or something. I wonder how much of it is lip-synched? And: "Hello. I'm Bob!" Could Bob be any more Bob?)
Current music: Led Zeppelin - "Fool in the Rain"
(I'll admit it: I used to think this song was a silly sell-out, but now I think it's great. It's the perfect blueprint for what Led Zeppelin needed to do with themselves once Plant's voice changed. And those lyrics: "And if you promised you'd love so completely / And you said you would always be true / You swore that you would never leave me, baby / Whatever happened to you?" I love the way he sings that last line, it manages to be both direct and good-natured, somehow. And yes, the drum fill after the samba breakdown is near-perfection.)
Current reading:
Fantasy Pieces, Harald Krebs
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