And a Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a Bobby McFerrin.
Ohio State Hello
An update on the state of things –
Graduate school calls, and I’ve begun work on a PhD in Music Theory and Cognition at the Ohio State University, working under David Huron. Things are chugging along quite nicely, and I’m slowly getting into the groove of things, so to speak. Surprisingly, though, there’s not much of an a cappella scene here; there are murmurs that something might soon begin though. In the middle-term, it’s life as usual, piano lessons, and more arrangements for hire. In the meantime, take a good look at Diana Deutsch’s speech-to-song page to get a feel for the type of work that will be happening here. As I get deeper into the work, expect some more incremental updates to the A Cappella guide, and other cognition-related posts.
Cheers!
SmarterMusic Renaissance
Really cool news here- SmarterMusic was recently named on a list of the 100 Best Blogs and Websites for Innovative Academics by accreditedonlineuniversities.com. Cool! I’m sure there are some good ones in that list as well, and we’re happy to be included.
Stayed tuned in the coming months for a lot of activity on this site. We’re gearing up for a new school year and there will be plenty of thunking happening. In the meantime, enjoy this incredible stop motion video someone forwarded me. Notice especially the absolutely stellar image quality that is a result of using a still camera and not a video camera to take the photos, then editing it into a movie. I can’t imagine all the work involved!
Staff, clefs, notes, and rests
To start off the Music Theory section of SmarterMusic, I’ve written the first article in the Fundamentals land: Staffs, Clefs, Notes, and Rests. It is a brief introduction to the most basic music symbols and how they tell us neat things. If you have no music training or you chose to drift into a coma while in General Music class, this article is for you! It is, as usual, full of puns, bad jokes, and occasional sarcasm. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a SmarterMusic article, no?
Otis Redding - My Girl
Otis Redding has a fantastic output, and everybody should take a good listen to a classic master singing his own and those of other people. Here’s some My Girl:
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Roadtrip!
So I’m hitting the road, off to adventure, with a tent and an accordion. No real plan, just going west from New York. If you see a guy on the side of the road with an accordion, say hi to me! I’ll be back before the middle of August- cheers!
Arranging Walk-Through: Happy Birthday
Blowing out candles helps build strong lungs.
In this article, we’ll be going through the motions of arranging a song. Instead of looking at a completed arrangement, we’ll walk through every step of the process to show how an a cappella arrangement evolves and is finally completed. Today, the tune is Happy Birthday, that old standby of yore.
Trial by fire
Just do it!
So to celebrate the Fourth of July when all my friends were not in Cape Cod with me, I took the accordion I acquired a month and a half ago to the streets. I didn’t really know any songs other than the Legend of Zelda theme song and a half-baked “Annie Waits,” but hey, holding an instrument when you’re around drunk people guarantees something.
But it was also a kind of tough love, which is very important for a performer or musician- get out of the practice room and do it. A guy asked me to play the Stars and Stripes Forever…which I had to figure out in a hurry (I did learn it, passably). I needed a way to get people to stop and listen, so I made up lyrics to an easy chord progression and called out the passer-bys (thanks to the Moldy Peaches for giving me the chorus). I realized that playing an accordion while walking causes chaos with the bellows. After smiling and trying my best, I came home a much better accordion player than when I left, and more improved than if I had just sat in my room and practiced. Also a big bag of taffy and 16 bucks.
So get out there and do it! Stop being a pansy! So what, you suck, deal with it. Make do with what you can do, and now you’re inspired to practice harder. You’ll learn so much that you didn’t know to practice, and you’ll learn what you really do know and don’t know. Don’t go to a formal performance unprepared, but go hit the streets and see how it goes.
Tough love.
Wouldn’t it be nice
One of the main facets of a composer’s growth is to study scores and listen to pieces by important composers. The idea is that by hearing the sounds and seeing the notes, a budding composer will learn new things and grow. Just listening to a piece doesn’t connect the craft as effectively as the two together, and simply looking at a score gets pretty boring after a while (trust me, though it’s a great opportunity to practice sight-singing).
But wouldn’t it be nice if a cappella arrangers could look at scores while listening to them? We derive so much of our craft by transcribing sounds without the music that an arranger’s main job is simply figuring out the notes, rather than being able to “art it up”. It’s a baseline assumption that a faithful arrangement sounds like the original, so building the transcribing skills is essential. However, phenomenal arrangements go beyond the mechanical notes-to-page (or notes-to-ear, if you don’t write stuff down): they make amazing harmonies, great voice-leading, new spins on old ideas.
I guess (as a composer), I’d like to make people think of a cappella arranging less as a mechanical skill and more as a slice of the composer’s world. Writing new music and arranging old music doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive, no matter how snobby “real composers” can get. But gosh, it would be so cool to have a cappella scores as readily available as the Well-Tempered Clavier or Mahler 1. I suppose that’s the cue to do more public score analysis here…
A little more on Satie
A very good friend turned me on to this lovely little website a few months ago, and I stumbled back on it today while going through my inbox- that once a year event. It’s always fascinating to consider your long dead artistic heroes as *gasp* actual people who had to fill their lives with all manner of things that weren’t necessarily musical or artistic. Often times this seemed to have been accomplished with some sort of debauchery (I hear Wagner regularly went on some pretty epic panty raids, although I’m sure he referred to them much more intensely and in German…), but I suppose Satie’s sensibility would beg something seemingly mundane. Anyway the site itself is worth a look, as it’s full of good nuggets.
