Glad you pointed out the implicit nastiness of "get the joke" and "seditious" -- esp. through the Fosse counter-example -- not that I imagine anyone writing such things will actually think twice about it.
My friend Ian has done some work like this -- he would never refer to his work as a "joke" (though he is specifically interested in how to use humor in a modern classical environment and *has* made a lot of jokes in his pieces) -- specifically with No Doubt's "Hella Good." It's called "Real Good," but I can't seem to find anywhere. But to assume that any connection between pop music and classical music is a "joke" is annoying.
Well, it's possible that Turnage himself is known as a jokester and considers himself seditious (I have no idea), and not necessarily merely for using pop in classical; I get the feeling that Tim Rutherford-Johnson, the guy whose blog it is, is an uncontemptuous fellow, and he was using "get the joke" in response to someone else's somewhat more contemptuous post (possibly the other guy was contemptuous towards Turnage specifically but not necessarily towards any attempts to mix). I decided to treat Aaron's post as carelessness rather than as something uglier. But maybe my post will make Rutherford-Johnson more likely to challenge his commenters. The thread is a couple of weeks old so I doubt that anyone but Rutherford-Johnson will ever see my comment, though maybe some Googler might.
I'm sure the primary author will have seen it at least. I used "implicit nastiness" because no one's tone in the post or the thread was outright nasty, just building off some assumptions whose foundation is a bit of a sneer (potentially). My fave post was the description of the impetus for the project as told by Turnage's wife -- his son hummed the song around the house all the time! And my second fave was the classical music critic admitting he's never heard "Single Ladies." Both seemed to be reaching toward a more honest discussion of motivations and/or blind spots (or any number of things one might discuss with this piece as the impetus).
(Btw, I was speaking loosely when I said the riff in "Surrender" was the same riff as in "Celebrity Skin"; it's the identical rhythm and the identical type of power-chord strumming, but played on similar but not identical chords. There's probably a relation between the chords on the "Celebrity" riff and the "Surrender" riff - if they were transposed into the same key - but my knowledge of theory isn't enough to say what it is. Maybe you can work it out for me. "Celebrity Skin" is A, D-Flat, G-Flat; "Surrender" is B-Flat, D, A.)
Thanks for the comment and the thread here. Hope it doesn't come across when I say 'get the joke' that I'm implying Turnage is making fun of anything - I don't think he is, and everything in his career suggests a genuine affection for popular music of all sorts. But the fact that he had attempted to hide the Beyoncé reference by not telling anyone about it beforehand, and letting listeners work it out for themselves ('surprise!') is the 'joke' I'm getting at. If he's making fun of anything, it's the classical music establishment that's commissioning him in the first place (hence 'seditious').
Having spoken to him, and having listened to the piece several times, I don't think he was setting out to do anything especially grand beyond write a fun piece, but I take the point that referencing popular music isn't necessarily lighthearted.
Would be interested in hearing any music by your friend, skyecaptain - does he have a site?
Haha, xpost! Thanks for the clarification, and it's worth noting that the part of Frank's comment I was referencing was more of a post-script that he didn't even cut 'n' paste here so grain o' salt.
I can't seem to find "Real Good" anywhere online -- perhaps he'll be able to link it here if it's still available -- but he's currently a graduate student at Harvard, and you can hear some of his work here: http://www.myspace.com/ianhpower
Since Dave skyecaptain didn't give you his links, I will: his lj and his Tumblr and his blog and his twitter, but none of them link to his playing music or anything (as far as I know). I'd like to hear his friend Ian's piece too.
But now that I've got you here, one thing that's been on Dave's mind recently and mine off and on for years is that music is difficult to describe and impossible to convey in words. The technical vocabulary is useful in reproducing the music on an instrument, or giving one an idea of how to technically follow what's going on in the music if you're a composer who'd like to learn from it, but the vocabulary is worthless for talking about what one really thinks is going on and matters about it. Or it is for me, anyway, but then my theory is rudimentary (as is my playing). I loved Peter Van Der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music, but he used staffs and notes and such to make his points (one of which was "the liberation of melody from harmony" as music approached the
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Cheers Dave - and thanks for the link to Ian's site. Interesting stuff.
Frank -
Re. writing about music - not sure I've posted anything meta as such. Will think and see if I remember anything. I'm coming from an academic background originally and I still think there's value in getting down to the nuts and bolts sometimes. You need to be able to substantiate what you're saying with some evidence from the sound itself. That said, what one has to do outside the academic sphere is find a halfway house of language/metaphor that is technically precise but not inaccessible to those without theory training.
Very not easy! For example, in what I wrote upthread about the "Celebrity Skin" and "Surrender" riffs, I use a quasi-technical term, "power chord," which actually means something pretty specific (several full chords strummed on the guitar in quick succession but with enough sustain and distortion that the chords blare out, as invented by the Who, e.g. "I Can See For Miles"); but owing to the word "power," the term communicates something of what I mean to a reader who doesn't know its specific application, hence I'll use it in my reviewing. Whereas naming the chords, as I do in that comment, is something I wouldn't do in a review, since what those chord names mean would be mud to the reader. In fact it's pretty much mud to me too, despite my knowing the sounds those chord names signify. The term "power chord" at least gives the reader an inkling of what such strumming does for the song, whereas my simply naming the chords conveys nothing about the role of those chords in the song's musical story.
this gap -- between the precision of the technical language within a given music (whether it's staff notation, or the jargons of jazz or serialism, or any number of instrument-specific instructions -- "con legno", vamp till ready) and the larger discussion of meaning, intent, significance, and etc -- is what i was getting at, long ago, when i talked about an "incommensuralibity" between the world of the musician-composer, and the non-playing listener
in retrospect, "incommensuralibity" -- given that it's a technical term from kuhn's histories of science -- is a bit of a red herring, however (even though kuhn was the context i brought it up in)
Yeah, I would probably swap out "incommensurable" for hard. Good music writing provides the context to understand not only the terminology itself, but also the impact of the terminology. I can easily imagine learning the phrase "vamp till ready" precisely because it was used well to describe or evaluate or analyze a piece of music!
Update from Ian: He sez that "Real Good" isn't really analogous (in it, he focuses on the minutiae of production and performance elements from "Hella Good," like breath between words, guitar noise, etc. and "stretches out" -- hesitate to say "deconstruct" because that's only literally true, not in the sense most people tend to use "deconstruct"; how 'bout "disassembles" -- the piece before an amusing coda/final beat where a bar of the song is played before the end.
I would use "surprise" rather than joke for this one, too, but one difference is that Ian actually writes about his reasons for using the inspirational text, and talks about it as such. The question that the Turnage piece begs for me -- if its value is primarily in the quotations (which I'm not convinced it is, despite the easy mash-up -- "My Humps" fits perfectly over Dvorak's "New World Symphony", and no one's interrogating this stuff from the other direction!), then so what? Is it an enjoyable piece of music in its own right? (I really haven't decided -- my rock-critic
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"I don't think Turnage is concerned with any of that"
Which is to say: the motors for this piece, what drives it forward and give it extension in time (and thus justify its existence) derive either from the Beyoncé original, or from some off the peg structural devices (such as a basic A-B-A form in which the original material goes away in the middle then returns at the end). A more critical piece would have as its motor some sort of development of those processes of compromise etc - an extension of the cracks between the original and the transcription, say. The artefacts of a compromised translation would become the musical material, overtaking the transcribed original itself - or at least entering into some sort of dialogue with it.
That's all a bit prescriptive maybe, but it's a vision of an alternative approach.
I'd love to see some speculation in the other direction! I mean there's obvious incorporation of classical music into some songs -- my fave is Nadiya's "Amies Ennemies," which samples and then quotes Chopin.
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My friend Ian has done some work like this -- he would never refer to his work as a "joke" (though he is specifically interested in how to use humor in a modern classical environment and *has* made a lot of jokes in his pieces) -- specifically with No Doubt's "Hella Good." It's called "Real Good," but I can't seem to find anywhere. But to assume that any connection between pop music and classical music is a "joke" is annoying.
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Thanks for the comment and the thread here. Hope it doesn't come across when I say 'get the joke' that I'm implying Turnage is making fun of anything - I don't think he is, and everything in his career suggests a genuine affection for popular music of all sorts. But the fact that he had attempted to hide the Beyoncé reference by not telling anyone about it beforehand, and letting listeners work it out for themselves ('surprise!') is the 'joke' I'm getting at. If he's making fun of anything, it's the classical music establishment that's commissioning him in the first place (hence 'seditious').
Having spoken to him, and having listened to the piece several times, I don't think he was setting out to do anything especially grand beyond write a fun piece, but I take the point that referencing popular music isn't necessarily lighthearted.
Would be interested in hearing any music by your friend, skyecaptain - does he have a site?
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I can't seem to find "Real Good" anywhere online -- perhaps he'll be able to link it here if it's still available -- but he's currently a graduate student at Harvard, and you can hear some of his work here: http://www.myspace.com/ianhpower
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But now that I've got you here, one thing that's been on Dave's mind recently and mine off and on for years is that music is difficult to describe and impossible to convey in words. The technical vocabulary is useful in reproducing the music on an instrument, or giving one an idea of how to technically follow what's going on in the music if you're a composer who'd like to learn from it, but the vocabulary is worthless for talking about what one really thinks is going on and matters about it. Or it is for me, anyway, but then my theory is rudimentary (as is my playing). I loved Peter Van Der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music, but he used staffs and notes and such to make his points (one of which was "the liberation of melody from harmony" as music approached the ( ... )
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Frank -
Re. writing about music - not sure I've posted anything meta as such. Will think and see if I remember anything. I'm coming from an academic background originally and I still think there's value in getting down to the nuts and bolts sometimes. You need to be able to substantiate what you're saying with some evidence from the sound itself. That said, what one has to do outside the academic sphere is find a halfway house of language/metaphor that is technically precise but not inaccessible to those without theory training.
Not easy ...!
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in retrospect, "incommensuralibity" -- given that it's a technical term from kuhn's histories of science -- is a bit of a red herring, however (even though kuhn was the context i brought it up in)
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I would use "surprise" rather than joke for this one, too, but one difference is that Ian actually writes about his reasons for using the inspirational text, and talks about it as such. The question that the Turnage piece begs for me -- if its value is primarily in the quotations (which I'm not convinced it is, despite the easy mash-up -- "My Humps" fits perfectly over Dvorak's "New World Symphony", and no one's interrogating this stuff from the other direction!), then so what? Is it an enjoyable piece of music in its own right? (I really haven't decided -- my rock-critic ( ... )
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Which is to say: the motors for this piece, what drives it forward and give it extension in time (and thus justify its existence) derive either from the Beyoncé original, or from some off the peg structural devices (such as a basic A-B-A form in which the original material goes away in the middle then returns at the end). A more critical piece would have as its motor some sort of development of those processes of compromise etc - an extension of the cracks between the original and the transcription, say. The artefacts of a compromised translation would become the musical material, overtaking the transcribed original itself - or at least entering into some sort of dialogue with it.
That's all a bit prescriptive maybe, but it's a vision of an alternative approach.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jpiPXwcr0c
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