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“Look What I Found!”: On Music And Mushrooms
Having recently spotted some mushrooms that were growing in an unlikely place I thought (loosely) about some of the similarities between mushrooms and musical life. Here is what I came up with: Both mushrooms and musics grow in very particular conditions, thriving particularly well in cool, dark, and hidden places. Mushrooms are fungi and musics are fungi-like,… Continue reading
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Real/Fake Drumming On A Fake/Real Keyboard: Thinking About Virtual Musicianship
The photo is me–playing a percussion part on the keyboard. This is one of the stranger wonders of the digital turn in music over the past quarter century: triggering sounds with instruments or controllers that themselves have nothing to do with those sounds. I don’t mind playing drums on the keyboard though. In fact, I’ve… Continue reading
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On The Beastie Boys And The Hip Hop Enculturation Of 1980s Suburbia
With the news last week that Beastie Boy member Adam Yauch (aka MCA) had died, I thought about the seismic impact hip hop had when it first burst the bubble of kids living in suburbia all over North America and beyond during the 1980s. As the producer Rick Rubin noted in a recent interview, “The… Continue reading
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Free Of All The World’s Heaviness: Karl Pilkington On Sound And Listening
I recently watched a few episodes of the animated HBO series, The Ricky Gervais Show (based on the popular audio podcast of the same name), on which Gervais and fellow comedian and writer Stephen Merchant chat with their perfectly round-headed friend Karl Pilkington on any topic they feel like just to hear what Karl might… Continue reading
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A Silent Palette Cleanser
Walking down Main Street without music in my headphones, I Iook up and see three balloons–one red, one yellow, one white–tethered to a string, hanging just above a store awning, moving. As I watch the balloons I wonder just who the string attaches to: Someone flying the balloons like they’re a kite? What celebration might… Continue reading
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On The Musicality Of M.C. Escher
“Order is repetition of units. Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm.” “My work is a game, a very serious game.” “Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?” – M.C. Escher I’ve long been curious about M.C. Escher’s (1898-1972) drawings and woodcuts because of their precision, their order and symmetry, their use… Continue reading
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On Teaching Music: Visiting A Friend’s College And Elementary School Classrooms
A few weeks ago I traveled to Boston to visit my friend Fred at his college and elementary school music classes. Fred is an ethnomusicologist, musician, and craftsman (primarily an instrument builder) who spends his mornings teaching college students and his afternoons teaching kids at a Montessori elementary and middle school. Teaching the two different… Continue reading
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On Vocal Frying
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.” – Mark Liberman, linguist, University of Pennsylvania The image is impossible for me to prevent in my mind’s eye: spoken… Continue reading
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On The Rise Of Cultural Populism: We’re All Musical Experts Now
“Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency.” – Alexandra Molotkow I recently came across a resonant NYTimes article by Alexandra Molotkow titled “Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter.” The article describes how file-sharing, first introduced in the late 1990s with Napster, made Molotkow and her friends’ esoteric insider… Continue reading
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On Charles Duhigg’s “The Power Of Habit”: Exploring Music Listening Habit Loops
“Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored.” – Charles Duhigg In his best-selling self-help psychology book, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business, Charles Duhigg examines the structure of habits and the ways they shape everyday life for individuals, businesses… Continue reading
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