Here’s my synthesized rendition (recorded using my Yamaha digital piano as a MIDI controller into Apple GarageBand on my MacBook Pro) of the first movement of Vivaldi’s concerto grosso in D minor (opus 3, number 11).
Or download vivaldi-cto-11-1.mp3 (possibly by right-clicking). It’s just under 5 minutes and 5 megabytes.
On most days, I am an extreme rationalist and philosophical materialist, but I have one major weakness. Any ‘delusion’ that inspired (for example) J.S. Bach to compose the Mass in B minor is definitely worth maintaining.
I recognize the fallacy. In Bach’s culture, credo in unum deum was the only game in town. Apologists may claim that without it, the Bachs could have been a family of bakers. And perhaps their panem diem would have been divine too, but centuries later we could not partake.
At counterpoint is the old sentiment that an ordinary person must be thoroughly trained to excel, but we’d have to train a prodigy not to. Who is to say what Bach could have composed if he grasped our deep and ancient connection to all life on earth, or perceived the majesty of the cosmos as we understand it today?
Still, what a tragedy it would be not to have the Mass in B minor.
Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.
Dona nobis pacem.
Ever since I was eight years old, a succession of piano teachers have told me I have ‘perfect pitch’. Such pronouncements invariably followed a brief, poorly-controlled test wherein I turned my back to the piano and guessed whether the teacher had played C, F♯, G, B♭, or whatever. I could do this semi-reliably, though not very quickly. As a parlor trick, it would do. Much later, I heard of people that could instantly name all the harmonics in the screech of a car’s tires. My ability was never to that level, but still I assumed that what I could do qualified as perfect, or ‘absolute’ pitch.
So when I heard that there was a pitch study at UCSF with an online test, I jumped at the opportunity to try it out. And I failed miserably:
If I interpret the scores correctly, it basically means my pitch recognition was useless — bottom quintile or so. Half the tests were with pure tones (sine waves), while the other half were piano tones. I did significantly better with the piano, but still pretty miserable.
So what’s going on here? Maybe what I have is just relative pitch (recognition of intervals, not absolute pitches), combined with a fairly reliable memory of what ‘middle C’ sounds like on a piano. And in my defense, I hadn’t even touched a piano for a few weeks before taking this test.
But still I think it’s more than that. I can hardly play my digital piano when it is set to transpose everything even a half step up or down. Unless I concentrate very hard on watching my fingers on the keyboard, I make many mistakes because the pitches arriving in my ears do not match the keys that I know I just played. One would think that difficulty playing on a transposed keyboard is a hallmark of absolute pitch.
Luckily, I found a more friendly and configurable pitch tester hosted in Japan. You can specify how many octaves and which keys to test. I can do pretty well if you stick to 1.5 octaves of white keys:
Filed under musicI missed a big chunk of yesterday’s Simpsons because it was delayed by some silly game and the DVR is not smart enough to compensate.
But in what I saw, the Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saëns (from Le Carnaval des Animaux — that link is to the iTunes Music Store) played a significant role. It was the soundtrack during the home movie. (I wish I could say I identified the piece on my own, but the closed-captions gave it away. In fact, they’re often helpful for decoding cultural references in the Simpsons, e.g.: [March theme from The Great Escape (1963) playing.])
It occurred to me that I don’t have much Saint-Saëns in my collection. Now, I’m not typically an enormous fan of French impressionists — in music or painting — and I guess I sometimes lump Camille in with Debussy and Ravel. Maybe not an entirely accurate classification, but I’m not a musicologist. Anyway, I certainly enjoy the Saint-Saëns Organ Concerto. In fact, I thought I had a copy, but if so, it never made its way onto my hard disks. (My grandmother was a big fan of that piece, having encountered it in the France part of Epcot… I believe it’s the soundtrack during the simulated lift up La Tour Eiffel. Took us several visits to identify it when I was a kid.)
No, it turns out the only Saint-Saëns in my collection is The Swan from Carnaval — probably the most famous piece therein, and part of some other compilation — and a Havanaise for violin and orchestra. Will have to remedy that.
Filed under musicAni DiFranco was great last night at SummerStage in Central Park. We had hoped to see her in Montréal while we were there, but that show was sold out.
Ani and her accompanist coaxed a lot of varied sound out of just an acoustic guitar and upright bass. But the highlight for me was her lyrics: very clever and complex, full of word play and irony. We have nearly all her albums, but I’m mostly familiar with Little Plastic Castle and Up⁶. The performance encouraged me to listen more carefully to the others as well.
One of the strongest segments was the poem called ‘Reprieve’ from her upcoming album of the same name. Now, I’m generally not very big on poetry, believing as I do that eight of the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m going to read this poem I wrote.” But this was pretty amazing.
It did allude to the concept that war is a product of the patriarchy, and if women ran the world there wouldn’t be any. I hear this sentiment voiced periodically as part of the new anti-war movement, where it dovetails nicely with modern adaptations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Although it might be a heartening thing to believe, I am aware of precious little evidence that it’s actually true. Admittedly, all women throughout recorded history have been products of the patriarchy themselves, and so their behavior can be understood only as reaction to it. We have yet to perform controlled experiments that could confirm or refute the hypothesis.
I guess I basically believe that all humans are engaged in a constant struggle to mollify their inner barbarians. And while there may be differences between the sexes, this isn’t one of them.
Filed under music
We went to see Dayna Kurtz last night at Joe’s Pub. This was a release party for her new album, Another Black Feather. She has a rich, amazing voice and presence. The words ‘husky alto’ spring to mind. It’s a cliché to call an artist you like ‘hard to categorize,’ but with her I really think that’s true. There’s some blues, some jazz, some folk. On this album, even a little bit country.
I first heard Dayna on NPR when Beautiful Yesterday was released. I love that album, but it is almost entirely covers of other people’s songs. Incredibly original covers, to be sure, but her own song-writing is brilliant. Or so I would learn later.
In March and April Dayna played two weeks in a row at the Living Room in the East Village. As its name suggests, this is an intimate space: about 25 people and the girl with the guitar. At these sets, she mostly played songs from the upcoming album, and I fell in love with most of them immediately. At Joe’s Pub last night, she played with a 5-piece band, and there were probably more like 120 people listening.
The most touching song, for me, is Venezuela, based on a dream Dayna had while in Spain. In the dream, she wakes up in Venezuela, where a nice man tells her he’s been waiting his whole life for her, and they’re meant to marry. She has to break it to him that she’s already spoken for… in another dream. Here are some excerpts from the lyrics:
He approached me like a prince,
Said he’s loved me all his life.
He said he knew that I’d come here,
He’s been waiting all these years,
And I’m meant to be his wife.Oh Fernando, I’m so sorry.
Whatever could I say?
To a man I’ve never met
who’s the one who got away.I cried to see his heart so plainly —
For he was such a formal man —
Handed to me like a daisy,
In the presence of my family,
From his damp and shaking hands.Oh Fernando, I’m so sorry
For the love you saved for me,
But my heart is locked forever
In another lovely dream.
I have to admit that the performance last night had me crying a bit into my Malbec. The line “Venezuela looked like Brooklyn” always gets some giggles though.
The most rousing song is It’s the Day of Atonement, 2001. The angry-girl-with-guitar version at the Living Room was actually a little more powerful, and had all 25 of us erupting into spontaneous cheers. The version on the album features a klezmer band though, which is clever. Some excerpts:
Mohammed is pacing when he isn’t kneeling.
Jesus can’t talk ’cause he’s to busy weeping.
Yahweh is a mother who sighs at the ceiling.
If only they knew how good it could have been!It’s the day of atonement, 2004.
Would Jesus be happy? We evened the score.
You hypocrites, bullies who profit from war:
May your gods all spit on your graves.I say, all of you gods tell your squabbling children,
Whatever their color or call,
They can all go to hell if there is such a thing.
Go to hell, have it out, have a ball.
There are some other gems. The story behind Banks of the Edisto is touching, especially as she told it in her April 5th set. I’ll have to spend some more time listening before writing about the other tracks.
Anyway, thanks, Dayna!
Filed under music
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