Month: July 2015

On The Tour De France And Time

Posted on by Thomas Brett

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“Time passed indifferently, barely leaving a trace.” – Haruki Murakami,
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“For these riders, time is running out.” – Phil Leggett

Though the event ended a few days ago, the last few weeks had me watching a lot of Le Tour de France. (I also wrote about Le Tour two years ago here.) By turns enthralling and humdrum, the cycling race put me in a zone while giving me stuff to think about. While watching this year’s race I thought about why I enjoy it so much. Some of the obvious reasons: the spectacular scenery, my recognition as an endurance enthusiast that the cyclists are pumping out mile after mile of steady speed, wattage, and high heart rates, and of course, the magnificent play-by-play commentary, especially the careful words of veterans Phil Leggett and Paul Sherwen. Phil is particularly good; he could narrate the goings on of a bee hive and I’d watch, totally entranced. But a deeper reason for my affection for the TDF is that it slows down my sense of time.

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Clocking in at twenty-one days, the TDF is the longest televised sporting event. For some two thousand miles, it just goes and goes and goes. For most of July you can tune in every morning and see cyclists snake their way through the French countryside and mountains. Progress–for both the cyclists and you the viewer—appears slow. On any given day at any given moment not a lot seems to be happening, in part because the distances the cyclists must traverse are so immense. Those aerial helicopter views of the peloton give you a sense of the vastness of the natural landscapes of forest, rock, and sky against which the cyclists appear as mere specks, pedaling away.

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My sense of time shifts when I watch the TDF. I notice change in much more gradual increments than what I’m used to, gauging progress happening so slowly, so imperceptibly, sometimes with the threat of potential drama up ahead (incoming bad weather, a steep decline), but usually nothing once we actually get there. And then I reach a point during the day’s TV coverage where I don’t care so much that it’s even a race and that the athletes and their teams are fiercely competing to come out on top. The TDF has become pure process, a very slow rhythm (distance traveled) with very fast subdivisions (the cyclists’ pedaling cadence). In a welcome change from my everyday soundscape, the race is like a music without sound, a performance that begins in one place, takes you on a gradual journey, and then ends when it’s done.

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On Street Musicians II

Posted on by Thomas Brett

There is a man in my neighborhood who plays guitar on the street corner each evening in front of an optical shop, next to the Burger King. No one asked him to come here, but one day a few years ago he just appeared. He plays in all seasons—in blizzards, in rain, in the summer heat. He looks weathered. His hair is long and straggly, his face creased, sunburned and stubbled so that it looks like a totem mask, his limbs bony, and he smells of smoke. His almost tuned acoustic guitar is plugged into a small portable amplifier not loud enough to mask the sounds of his plastic pick on the strings; a cigarette is lanced onto one of the pointy string ends on the guitar neck making it look like the instrument itself is smoking. Evoking a lost Neil Young, the musician seems to have been carried forward by time without having advanced any ideas of his own.

The man is not much of a guitarist or a singer. He plays a small repertoire of now oldish rock songs like “Definitely Maybe” by Oasis and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ’n Roses. His versions, with his strained singing and ragged strumming that reduces any song to four chords, has you wondering how it is that original songs survive their covers. The music doesn’t fit the neighborhood. Whenever a car with booming salsa or bachata drives by like a portable party—syncopated rhythms trumping classic rock chords—the guitarist’s songs are obliterated. For a moment while the party drives by the man looks like a mime imitating a musician. He makes no sound yet his gestures are intact and he keeps on singing, determined.

I see the guitarist on my way to work when the street is crowded, and then again late at night on my way home when the sidewalk is empty. Sometimes a drunk will stop and listen, cheering the musician on through first pumps and incoherent words: This is incredible! Go man! Great song! You’re performing and I’m listening! But mostly no one pays much attention. We step around the guitarist and walk right through his five by five foot sound world. Despite his intents and purposes and the smattering of change in his tip jar, the musician plays music mostly for himself.

On Street Musicians

Posted on by Thomas Brett

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Here and there along my city travels
I see musicians playing on the street,
offering their sounds
for whoever cares to listen.

There are guitar-playing singers
walking from subway car to car,
an accordionist at grand central,
the bucket drummer at 49th,
the kora bard,
and a child playing Beethoven loops
while his father looks on.

The sounds of these musicians
join the mix of ambient noise,
of moving people around them,
offering answers
as if we potential listeners
had questions.

Captive on the train, I listen.
Walking by on the street, I listen.
And as I listen I assess and consider.

No matter its particulars–a cover song, an improv, a riff or a ballad–
a musical performance always beckons,
always reaches out for our attention.
Musics speak in different idioms,
saying different things.
One–“I’m filled with heartbreak,”
another–“I’m filled with sunshine,”
one–“I hope you find this cool,”
another–“They said I was talented.”

As I assess and consider I notice
how few others have stopped.
The music could use a better place, a more suitable time,
less environmental competition.
But now it has all it needs:
an audience of a least one,
here and there, paying attention.

Notes On Musical Touch And Feel

Posted on by Thomas Brett

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The other day I was texting a drummer friend of mine about the difference between touch and feel. We were talking about how touch refers to how a musician strikes an instrument and the kind of sound that striking elicits, while feel is one’s rhythmic sense of musical time.

My friend—a pretty marvelous drummer with a smooth touch and a great feel on the drum set—has an ongoing interest in what he calls “ease” as an aesthetic goal for musicians. What he means is that everything should look, sound, feel, and be easy. No rushing. Take your time. Give yourself space. Stay cool. As I understand it, his theory of ease is that easy playing tends to produce satisfying music.

Intrigued, I pointed out that to have a sense of musical touch is to have a sense of ease and control with one’s technique and grasp of music. And I suppose the same thing could be said about rhythmic feel. After our conversation it occurred to me that the word feel means to be aware of a person or thing through, all of things, touch. Even when we’re not feeling someone or something physically, we feel things like music’s effects emotionally when on some affective level we’re touched by them.

Then another thought blossomed: Can a musician have a great sense of touch, but a terrible rhythmic feel? Or a great rhythmic feel, but lousy touch? I couldn’t think of any examples. Touch and feel are qualities that seem to be tightly bound together.

On YouTube there is a video of the late jazz drummer Papa Jones (1911-1985). The video shows Jones playing a magnificent solo on the song “Caravan.” His touch is amazing, and so is his feel. As one comment describes the performance: “Effortless, transcendent.” Jones makes making music look and sound so easy.

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

Posted on by Thomas Brett

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1. A short documentary about the work of sound designers and editors.

“The answer to all sound design is: storytelling…Putting together a world that will suck you in.”

2. An article about Chicago’s juke music scene.

“The genre grew from speedy, repetitive ghetto house in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet it also borrows from drum ’n’ bass with its double-time clave triplets, syncopated toms and huge sub-bass.”

3. An article about the psychoacoustics of rhythm programming.

“Swing is predominantly about timing, but in this article we’re going to look at how an understanding of certain psychoacoustic principles can affect our perception of the groove and timing of the beat. In other words, how changes in the level, length, tonality and pitch of parts of a rhythm alter the feel.”

On Listening Fast And Slow

Posted on by Thomas Brett

In his book, Thinking Fast And Slow, the eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes two modes of thinking that steer our judgements and decision-making. The first type, System 1, is fast, intuitive, and emotional: the second, System 2, is slower, more considered, and logical. I have talked about Kahneman’s book on my blog, here.

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Recently I remembered Kahneman’s work as I thought about how I listen to music. For me, listening is initially always a System 1 engagement. I make assessments about what I’m hearing fast–maybe too fast–as if answering a series of questions I didn’t know I had. Does this music speak to me? What is it trying to say? What of its materials holds my attention? Is it presenting something for me to grapple with and figure out? Does it manage to contain mysteries within its sounds that will keep me coming back for more? As you can imagine, not a lot of music passes this System 1 test. For worse or better, I often dismiss what I hear before giving it a chance to prove itself.

When I find something that sounds interesting my System 2 kicks in. Now I do two things. First, I listen to the music a lot, coming back to it over and over again, listening at different times a day in different places (to see how it travels), listening in a way that could be called well, obsessive. The second way I listen is I hone in on different points of intrigue in the music. The obsessive listening foregrounds things I never noticed during my first System 1 encounter with the work. Things like an unusual chord (“the bass note isn’t a stable root, it’s a dissonance!”), a rhythmic instability (“Why can’t I find beat one?”), or a timbre (“that organ in the high register is super transparent”). As I listen, I try to figure out how it is that what I like in the music works.

 

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

Posted on by Thomas Brett

 

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1. A short film about the American artist Agnes Martin with a soundtrack by UK electronic musician Actress.

“You are what goes through your mind, whether you are aware of it or not. But if you can become aware of it and if you then can try to express it, then you are an artist.”

2. An article about how job applicants are screened for “poshness” which includes the sound of their accents.

“I recruited somebody…she’s short of polish. We need to talk about the way that she articulates, the way that she, first, chooses words and, second, the way she pronounces them.

“When I went home…I could go back to, if you like, my old slight twang. When I’m in this environment I pretend I’m posher than I am.”

3. An article about electronic musician Moritz von Oswald and his musical interests.

“Drumming was fascinating…It’s something that grabbed me immediately – the sound I got from this variety of instruments. When you study classical drums, it’s a high range of colours of sound. The drum sounds to me are three-dimensional, the way they open up a room. I call them ‘non-tonal structures’: snare drum and cymbal, these are in-between sounds. I tried to get further into this, and get the best sound from all these instruments. I was always a sound guy.”

How Music Lost Its Body

Posted on by Thomas Brett

Not so long ago music
was a relationship between a musician and an instrument,
a performance in front of an audience,
a sharing of a space through sound.

Then those spinning discs took music
from the musician, the instrument, and the space of performance,
bringing sound right into ears, minds, and hands as a commodity form.

The discs became larger,
then were joined by tape spooling
and digital discs promising perfect sound forever.

But forever turned out to be
about twenty years,
as discs
slipped into computers
found themselves further reduced
to bits, copied and shared, spun
into downloads.

We used to pay for music as a thing–
an LP, cassette, CD,
or downloadable chunk–
until its thingyness became a stream.

Now music lives on my phone,
in my pocket,
a flow of sound for a monthly fee.
Where music was once a relationship,
a concerted sharing,
it’s now a portable soundtrack
following me wherever I go
but without a body of its own.