What we talked about in Music Theory today...

Whilst discussing voice leading by root movement of a third, art songs, fugues, and sonata form (it was a busy class!), a number of random topics came up. Here are some of them:

Animusic - a cool series of animated musical machines and robots

Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project - Animusic in real life.

Steve Reich's early minimalist piece, Drumming.

Bach's crab canons. This a piece that one player performs from top left to bottom right while the other performs backwards, from bottom right to top left--a retrograde canon. Because Bach was a genius, the two parts work together perfectly. I tried to find a good version of his "mirror" or "table" canons, where the players sit across from each other and play the music simultaneously right side up and upside down--a retrograde inversion canon--but I was unsuccessful. Sorry!

I also told my legendary Bach joke. I'm not posting it here; you had to be there...

I really love teaching music theory--I get to cover everything from parallel fifths to serialism and Bollywood to The Clash with a bunch of students who are just as passionate about music as I am!

Podcasts and Other Road Trip Diversions

Last week I drove several hours north into Wisconsin to observe a band rehearsal for my dissertation research. It was the last of four site visits to see directors who scored highly on my survey on comprehensive musicianship. This means that the director I saw goes way beyond teaching just notes, rhythms, and performance skills. His students truly learn about the emotional content and historical background of every piece they play. It was a great experience, seeing CM in action in a very small, rural high school that has about the same number of students as we do in our band program alone.

What I really want to write about, however, is the audio accompaniment to my travels. I have been downloading podcasts of a great radio show produced by Chicago Public Radio called Sound Opinions. Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, the rock music critics from the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively, have a one-hour show every Friday night at 8:00 on WBEZ 91.5FM. It's a mixture of news, reviews, interviews, and... (rats, nothing else rhymes) music history and criticism. Now I'm rarely in my car when the show is live, but you can download every show from their website or subscribe to their show through iTunes. The episode I was listening to had an extended examination of a classic album by The Clash, London Calling. They shared wonderful insight into what makes it such a great album, along with stories about how it came to be, including a crazy producer who chased the band around the studio and threw chairs at them. Other episodes included a Best Albums of the 2000s show and an introduction to synth-pop. All very informative, entertaining, and full of great music clips. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to know about rock history and what's going on in the world of rock today.

In addition to this podcast, I enjoyed two episodes of NPR's This American Life, and some fine CDs. The first was Ornette Coleman's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning album, Sound Grammar. Why this won a Pulitzer, I'm not sure, but it is very approachable, ear-friendly free jazz from the man who coined the term in 1959. I also listened to a CD of Vaughan Williams' orchestral works (can't get enough of RVW) and Rambling Boy by Charlie Haden. The latter is a curious recording. Haden is an important jazz bassist, but he got his musical start at the age of two on his family's country music radio show. While he went on to other musical pursuits, he never gave up his love of old-time American folk music, and a couple of years ago he recorded this awesome album of classic tunes with his wife, son, triplet daughters, and Jack Black. That sounds odd, but Black is his son-in-law, and thus part of the family band. In addition, he brought in top-shelf country musicians like Ricky Skaggs and Roseanne Cash as well as his good friend, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. If you like good acoustic music, traditional folk stylings, and above all, a huge, warm acoustic bass sound, I recommend you check out Rambling Boy.

Interesting Things to Check Out

Here's something you've got to see to believe. If you've ever watched any of the Animusic DVDs, you've seen futuristic music machines that seemingly play themselves. They are so lifelike that there's an internet hoax that claims one of the videos is of a real instrument set up at some college. But in the real world, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has built an entire orchestral ensemble that he triggers in real time with his guitar. Check out the video below to see how he can accompany himself on keyboards, marimbas, drums, hand percussion, and a giant set of bottles. They are all controlled by various solenoids and pneumatics, right from his guitar.

If you'd like to see this live, Metheny is going to be playing a concert at Symphony Center in Chicago, one set with just solo guitar and a second with the Orchestrion.

Do you love Disney movies? Do you love string basses? Of course you do! Check this out:

I recently ran across a page that has a recording of a piece I've been trying to find for a long time. It's an example of electo-acoustic music, one of the interesting new ideas in classical music in the mid-1900s. Composers of this school combined recorded natural sounds with electronically generated effects, and one of the most famous and successful of these was Karleinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglingen, or Song of the Youths. It's a bit spooky, but very effective, and you can hear it here.