Music

Z is for Frank Zappa

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Who does not love tying divergent strands together to finish a project as a unified whole? I know I do…

A recent Kickstarter project raised over a million dollars to help finance a documentary about Frank Zappa and preserve his archive of works (known as The Vault).

Zappa died in 1993 but remains ever present (he has been featured in several A to Z posts here) as he has throughout my life since I was thirteen when he made quite an impression…

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.”

One may imagine that had he lived to see the growth of the web he would be all over it. Long before iTunes and MP3s were imaginable he proposed a system where music would be played down a phone line and the recipient would record the music on to tape. Such was his growing resentment towards record companies and their control over the production and distribution of music. And it always returned to the music…

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.”

From Cage and Varèse to Tuvan throat singers to Reggae to Doo Wop he was fascinated by it all.

He was one of the first to own a Synclavier but was frustrated by its limitations – things that today one can achieve on even a modest laptop computer.

But why would you believe anything I say…

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V is for Vinyl

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Who does not love reminiscing about old gramophone records? I know I do and having once owned several thousand records I can understand the appeal of vinyl. But there is some weird stuff going on with the current so called vinyl revival. Firstly it hardly registers as a revival – more a slight blip…

And then there is the strange case of people buying vinyl records although they do not own any means to actually play them. Conversely many years ago (early to mid 1970’s) I purchased a secondhand Garrard 301 from someone locally and he had an impressively large and expensive HiFi system but only owned three records.

garrard301

Where as once one could spend a lot of time and money finding the obscure records of choice today we can access most music for very little money and hardly any effort. As wonderful as such streaming services are it can be a little disconcerting to have Apple Music stream a pristine digital version of an old record when you are anticipating the old snap crackle and pop dubbed from vinyl one in your library.

S is for Erik Satie

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Who does not love brief eccentric piano works? I know I do and have done for most of my life.

When I was very young I would Listen With Mother and on a good day the not very exciting story and inane song would not be of sufficient length to fill the space before the news headlines and so a short piece of music would be played. On a very good day the short piece of music would be by Erik Satie. As he composed numerous short pieces it was often a very good day.

One exceptionally short piece was Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqmNAYUayZs

Biqui was his affectionate name for the one love of his life during their brief relationship.

Another short piece was never published/performed during his life but includes a suggestion that it be played repeatedly 840 times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBhjGIdL5cM

In the 1960s John Cage and a relay team of pianists decided to give it a try. It took over 18 hours to complete (it can take longer). At the completion a member of the much diminished audience shouted “Encore!”.

391 Cover
Satie contributed to the Dada magazine 391 with his eccentric sense of humour fitting well with the Dada spirit. Anyone arriving at a theatre to see the ballet Relâche may wonder if the performance is cancelled. The performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring the Fratellini family clowns, and supervised by Edgard Varèse never opened and as Varèse soon departed for America they did not collaborate again.

Things to do before I die: Learn to play the piano and play Satie’s piano pieces.

R is for Steve Reich and Reaktor

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Who does not love exploring the musical warp and weft of minimalist music? I know I do and Steve Reich is a particular favourite.

In the good old analogue days I would make a large (room size) loop of magnetic tape and run that through half a dozen assorted old tape recorders arranged around my room – with some intricate Meccano constructions to keep the tape taught and moving. With some recorders set to play the sound and others to record the sounds played a sound recorded as the tape passed through one recorder would be replayed when that portion of tape reached the next tape recorder and re-recorded on other tape recorders. Thus building interesting delays and overlaps of sounds.

Reich’s experiments revealed that two loops containing the same sounds could be started playing together but one, from slight mechanical variation, would slowly fall behind the other thus creating interesting shifts in the combined sound. He used this technique for both constructed tape pieces and composed pieces such as Clapping Music…

As we moved from the analogue world to a digital world one no longer had to mess about with bits of tape. Reich once observed that where he would spend a month splicing bits off tape together to construct a piece you could now do the same thing on your laptop over a couple of evenings – while watching TV.

One of the best tools for such sonic experimentation is Reaktor which has a an extensive library of User created instruments – several of which are inspired by Reich’s work such as..

Reich Tape Looper:

and It’s Gonna Grain (a play on Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain) and Reichatron which I used for Purple Shift – using two identical loops with one slowly drifting out of sync until it completes its orbit and ends up back where it started

https://soundcloud.com/duncan-moran/purple-shift

Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed:

But of course the repeating patterns of minimalism is not everyone’s idea of good music and the maximalist Frank Zappa found it ripe for parody with Spontaneous Minimalist Music Composition…

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O is for Oscillators

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Who does not love messing about building software synthesisers? I know I do and a basic component for these are oscillators.

Oscillators are used in all manner of things but it is the wobbly wobbly oscillations that can be used to produce a sound that are of most interest. Such things have been around since the late 1800s but today one can recreate their functions with computer software. Here is a simple example I made using the excellent Audulus app.

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L is for Live Coding

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Who does not love the confluence of coding and music? I know I do and live coding adds a performance element to the process.

Live coding involves writing code that is producing music from scratch and editing and changing the code as the music develops.

As can be seen here once values are changed the revised code is passed to the computer for processing (when it flashes pink) and the revised music is played…

There are an increasing number of languages available for live coding. The above example is Sonic Pi which is probably the easiest to start with as it comes as a ready to go app and does not require any faffing around in the Terminal etc. Others include ChucK, Alda, Extempore which grew out of impromptu (Mac only) etc. There is some debate as to whether graphical languages count as coding but I say they do so that is the end of that debate.

Here is an excellent demonstration of the process by Andrew Sorensen using Extempore…

So that this A to Z thing does not become a catalogue of old records L is definitely not for the greatest record ever made…

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K is for Ko Ko

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Who does not love a bit of Bebop? I know I do and one of the first Bebop records was Ko Ko by Charlie Parker.

Bebop grew out of a desire to break away from the swing and dance bands popular at the time. The young (early 20s) Charlie Parker’s experimentations allowed his to improvise over a melody with out being tied to its structure. From 1942 to 1944, the time that Bebop was taking off, there was a musician’s strike that stopped them working for record companies. In 1945 Parker and his band recorded Ko Ko. Miles Davis, then 19, was the band’s trumpet player but it is thought that Dizzy Gillespie played on the recording as Davis struggled with the piece although he is included on this broadcast version…

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J is for Jammy Smears

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Who does not love eccentricity? I know I do and Ivor Cutler was an acceptable role model.

Ivor Cutler

Jammy Smears was one of his mid 1970s albums. During that period he was frequently featured on John Peel‘s radio show. Although never being considered part of the mainstream he seemed to always have a record contract and an appreciative audience that spanned several generations.

Abandoning a teaching career, including a spell at Summerhill in the 1950s, his quirky poetry and songs could be found on the radio and by the 1960s on television. It was one such TV performance that attracted Lennon and McCartney to him giving him a part in their Magical Mystery Tour film.

If you are anywhere near Brighton in May you can see a show about his life and works…

G is for Grounation

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Who does not love listing to old records? I know I do and one of the best old records to listen to is Grounation.

Grounataion refers to the visit of Haile Selassie to Jamaica on April 21st 1966.

The three record set was made in the early 1970s by Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelations of Rastafari.

grounation.jpg

Count Ossie and his drumming group had first been recorded on the Folkes Brothers’ Oh Carolina (1959) which marked a first step along the Ska, RockSteady, Reggae path.

They included a version of Oh Carolina on Grounation

but it mostly comprises extended drumming and chants relating to the traditions of Rastafarianism and the teachings of Marcus Garvey.

The whole work stands as a perfect snapshot of the time and place alongside such iconic works as Trout Mask Replica and Escalator Over The Hill.