Buckingham

Fleetwood Mac was in Chicago last week, and I've always found their story fascinating.  Not the soap opera of their personal entanglements, that all had a cliché aspect to it that was more boring than anything.

No, it's the way that their massive fame and success tended to overshadow the real virtues of the band.  It's a pop group that had real chops, with a fabulous rhythm section and one transcendent talent who inhabits a world of catchy hooks and virtuosic guitar playing and has, despite the acclaim, been overlooked.  (I'm not going to get into the Christine McVie vs. Stevie Nicks business in this post, I've had too many battles over it in the past McVie is better).

I'm talking about Lindsey Buckingham, who's gone through an amazing journey of back and forth between his work with FM, his solo work, and his solo work that bled back into the reunions of FM.  He may forever be lost in the Fleetwood Mac mix, and that would be a shame.

So this Sunday I'm going to forget Rumours and Tusk, and think about Gift of Screws, Under the Skin, and the remarkably overlooked 1992 record, Out of the Cradle (which peaked at #128 on the U.S. charts).  There is a whole lot of good stuff on this album.

Here's a video from 1992 of Buckingham on Dave Letterman doing Countdown from Out:

And doesn't Dave look young here?

One more, this one a near-novelty song from the movie National Lampoon's Vacation:

One might consider Holiday Road just a throwaway, but it is as hooky and fun as anything Buckingham's done.

I want to dislike him

I want to dislike Justin Timberlake, really I do.  The whole Mickey Mouse Club, boy group thing seems like a career path calculated to make him famous and rich.  To see him as a male version of his erstwhile girlfriend, the insufferable Britney Spears, is almost too easy.

Yet, he is putting together a pretty decent career.  His music has continued to grow and develop since the 'N Sync days.  I don't know what portion of this is due to Timberlake, and what to producers and songwriters, but he's doing some reasonably complex stuff.  He even almost redeemed Madonna's 4 Minutes (but only almost).

His public persona has become appealing as well, despite certain missteps at, say, a particular Super Bowl halftime show.  He has a real chance to become one of the go-to hosts for Saturday Night Live, in the same company as Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  I can't hear Beyonce's Single Ladies without picturing the SNL skit where Timberlake appeared as a backup dancer.

Jimmy Fallon's late-night debut last Monday, that meltdown disaster, was almost saved by Timberlake.  Supposedly, he volunteered to fill in and do an extra number at the Grammys when Chris Brown was, ahem, indisposed.

JT seems like a good guy with some talent; maybe his biggest talent is seeming likable, but I remain to have it proven to me that he's actually a jerk.

Some Sunday fun

Since I had the temerity to publish something serious today, I want to also put up something fun. Since I was critical of the over-processing rife in the music business on Friday, I should point out how much fun music can be. One of my favorites is the song, well-known (extremely) in Canada, not so much here, "If I Had $1000000," by the Barenaked Ladies. This group has never become huge in the U.S., though their song "One Week" has received some play in commercials.

At any rate, $1000000 is a parody of a country song, but it is quite catchy in its own right, and the lyrics are to my mind as funny as any I've heard (of course, your comedic mileage may vary; my wife doesn't find it nearly as funny as I do). I won't recount the Kraft dinner business here, I'll leave that to Wikipedia and hope they got it right. This video from YouTube is apparently from a show in 1999:

"Not a real green dress, that's cruel" - makes me laugh, at least (maybe I'm a closet Canadian).

TIME-ly (??) music article

The current issue of TIME magazine has a lengthy story on Auto-Tune, the music pitch-changing software. We'll agree to ignore the fact that this article is largely a ripoff of a New Yorker piece from last June (Cher? Check. T-Pain? Check. Retune speed to zero, instead of the normal 10? Check.)

What is most remarkable about this article is its remarkable lack of timeliness, given how long Auto-Tune has been used to fix wobbly or, let's face it, non-existent pitch in our top singers. There are people out there who essentially can't sing, but they are propped up by technology. I understand that's always been true to some extent; listen to any record where the lead singer is "augmented" by backing vocals in certain difficult spots.

The technology behind this is fascinating, but there is a line that I think we're crossing now. If you caught the Grammys last weekend, you could hear that Taylor Swift and Katy Perry clearly cannot sing at all, yet on recordings they sound fine.

I think there may be people who don't quite understand that a song is just another data file, like a spreadsheet or a memo. Just as the latter two can be changed at will, so can music. If a producer wants to make Britney Spears sound like Leontyne Price, no problem, just boot the computer and change a few numbers.

To be fair, the TIME article does touch on some of this near the end, claiming that pop's current soullessness may well be the result of this technology. I don't know about that, I think corporatization of the industry may be more the culprit, as we take the photogenic (but talent-free) and turn them into brands. We also have a perverse reward structure, which takes a songwriter of some potential like Swift and provides incentives for her to become a performer, despite little aptitude in that area.

I'm So Paid

I don't profess to know a whole lot about the music industry, in particular the considerations that accompany release of various versions of popular songs. Take the Akon song I'm So Paid as an example. There's a radio edit that lasts about 3:20, while the video version goes another minute or so (it has an invaluable rap from Young Jeezy [!?]).

Since 4:20 is not overly long for a pop song these days, I'm not sure why there's more than one version (unless Young Jeezy with Lil Wayne is not as big a draw as Lil Wayne himself, which doesn't make any sense). More importantly, though, the mix is different. The main accompaniment, a series of synth block chords, is much less prominent in the video version. Perhaps there was some feeling that actual music would detract from the Miami Vice-like plot, but it seems like a curious choice.

I'm sure there are reasons for the change, but I can't come up with anything plausible (which means the answer is probably quite simple, right in front of my face).

Marley

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds - Redemption Song

Bob Marley would have been 64 today. He's been gone almost 28 years.

As the years go by, I find myself turning to his music more and more. It isn't just "world music," to which reggae is so often relegated. It's music with a social conscience, but it also rocks. If you are growing tired of hearing Britney work out her personal psychodrama, or accepting that music is best enjoyed as a backing track for a TV hospital show, put on some Marley. Some samples:

Could You Be Loved

A truncated Stir It Up

No, Woman, No Cry - a live version of a song that proves that Jamaica has its own version of the blues

Redemption Song

Review - The Life and Death of Classical Music

This book, The Life and Death of Classical Music: Featuring the 100 Best and 20 Worst Recordings Ever Made (2007), isn't quite titled correctly. What Norman Lebrecht, longtime chronicler of the world of classical music, is writing about is not the death of classical music, but the death of the classical music recording industry.

It's no secret that classical recordings have gone through peaks and valleys since the earliest Caruso records were cut 100 years ago, but it does appear that the Internet has dealt a death blow to the traditional model of artist and recording company making a CD and selling it in stores. This is what Lebrecht is writing about here, the arc of this industry, and that constitutes the first half of the book.

Unfortunately, a lot of this half is fairly tedious. It's really something of a corporate history, as we see companies rise and fall, executives installed and deposed, and, at times, there is too little about the glory of the music. It's an important history, I'm glad Lebrecht (who seems to have been around for the whole of the century) has put it down in print, but it's not the greatest read...excpet for the stories he weaves into it.

There are fascinating, if occasional, looks at the performers and conductors who made up 20th century classical performance (as such, this book is a useful counterpoint to The Rest Is Noise, which dealt exhaustively with 20th century composition, but spoke almost not at all about the performers). Lebrecht is extremely opinionated, very British-centric, but endlessly entertaining.

Where opinion really takes over is in the second half of the book where Lebrecht picks his best and worst recordings. These are not truly meant to be the best or the worst, but the most significant and the most maddening. This part of the book is a lot of fun, with anecdotes that justify the choices (the most entertaining, of course, are in the too short worst section; Lebrecht makes the recording of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the dream team of Karajan, Richter, Oistrakh, and Rostropovich seem truly excruciating).

If this review whets your interest, you can get plenty of Lebrecht at his web site (www.normanlebrecht.com). He is no less opinionated and entertaining on-line. The book is good, but I would recommend dancing through the first half, picking out the anecdotes (unless you have a real interest in the corporate machinations of 20th century record companies, of course).

Modern payola

I listen to a fairly eclectic mix of music, ranging from classical and jazz to '80s pop and top 40 (er, 20? 12?). I've always had a non-particular ear - it's all music to me - and, while it may show a lack of discrimination as much as anything, I'm happy with the fact that I can enjoy George Strait and Louis Armstrong, Dvorak and Coldplay.

There are things I don't like, of course, but they don't come from any particular category more than others (except for the reality that current hits are far more inclusive; that is, the top 40 of today will include a lot of songs that no one will listen to in 25 years, whereas any jazz that has lasted that long will probably be somewhat worthwhile).

Still, I wish I could understand how the hype machine gets so stoked in an era where payola is supposed to be behind us. This practice, where radio station personnel were paid to play certain records, has theoretically been gone for decades, but it's the only thing I can think of that accounts for things I see.

In particular, the Britney Spears "comeback," which has been enthusiastically promoted by every station that plays contemporary music and ABC (which hosted her birthday party). My question, how can she come back when she won't go away?

The first hit off her new album, Womanizer, is pretty awful. The second hit, sharing its name with the album, is Circus. Both are, as one might expect if one has followed her career, creations of producers and studios. Britney Spears is, even more now than before, a brand, usable for the publicity she generates, totally meaningless as a figure in music. Without Auto-Tune, her breathy, wavering voice would barely exist at all.

It's not that I can't see how these songs are dance hits, the producers are among the best in the business. It's just that you could take the lead vocal out and you'd have as strong a song as you do now...but you wouldn't have the photographer magnet that is Britney.

I'm not trying to argue that things are worse than they were when I was young, I certainly recognize that there were musical "artists" who were far more famous than talented. Bobby Sherman was big with the girls when I was a kid, and, while pleasant, he was certainly no Caruso. But he went away after a while, and someone else came along.

Now, it seems that, once someone reaches a certain point, they're here forever. I'd imagine I'll be hearing about Britney until I die or she does, and there seems to be little basis for that. Ah well, I've probably already thought more about this than I should.

Kanye's the new Mozart?

Following my review of The Rest Is Noise, the monumental book about 20th century classical music, Citizen Carrie left a comment (in part):

Although I like some 20th century composers (including Stravinsky and Ives), I really think that all music is a product of its particular era. As such, then of course a lot of people will think classical music (and you might as well include opera) will sound better from the 18th and 19th centuries than the 20th century. I don't know enough about music to go into why I think it happened, but I think that by the time the 20th century came by, classical symphonic music (and you might as well include opera) had just kind of naturally run its course.

This is an interesting idea, that classical music is no longer viable. A lot of people don't like this view, as they would rather not think of this art form as something that should be consigned to the museum; they (presumably Ross is among them) would argue that it still has vitality, but needs time to be appreciated. (I'll forgo the obvious comment, that "new classical music" is something of an oxymoron.)

So perhaps we ask ourselves, what is classical music? We're pretty sure it encompasses Vivaldi through Mahler, but, outside of that, it's not as clear. Are English madrigals part of classical music? I know the only place I ever hear them is the excellent Through the Night program hosted by Peter Van de Graaff, found in Chicago on WFMT-FM. Peter seems to consider them within the classical umbrella. Palestrina? Does his 16th century polyphony count, or is that more of a proto-classical music?

Coming forward, it becomes more difficult. The Rite of Spring was considered shocking at its premiere, but we're fairly comfortable hearing it in the concert hall now. I have my favorites from the past 100 years (I perhaps didn't make that clear in my review, that there are some pieces I like, some that have an impact on me, and some that don't work at all). But, in general, there's an inaccessibility to classical music of the 20th century, something that sadly would not be regretted by its creators to an amazing extent.

As I try to figure out what classical music is, I move to the thorniest case. Ross spends a fair amount of time on John Cage, and the critic Alan Rich continually writes about him. But Cage stretches the boundaries of what classical music is, and I wonder why he's classified as such. Much of his work seems far closer to conceptual art, yet he is evaluated in the classical genre. (Had a saxophonist come out to play Cage's famous 4'33", the silent piece, would it be considered jazz?)

I guess the real question for me is how this music will be seen 100 or 200 years from now. It's pretty well-known by now, the extent to which Bach was forgotten until his music was revived by Mendelssohn 80 years after his death. So it's dangerous to look at what is popular at any particular moment and assume what will and what will not go into the canon.

Whose music will emerge from the 20th century and be played in the concert halls of 2100? 2200? Are there composers out there who will rise to the fore, people who are barely noticed now, while Stravinsky and Schoenberg will fade from major attention?

My knowledge pretty much grinds to a halt here. I'm more or less groping in the dark here, but I find it hard to believe that the intellectual component of much of modern music will be appreciated outside of the music schools - I think the proof will come in the listening, and I think consonance and melody will always be prized. I'd guess that a lot of the minimalist music will fall by the wayside, and those things that are conceptual will rarely be heard. Corigliano, Pärt, Tavener, they'll move up alongside Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev, who will retain their places. Just my 2¢.

Review - The Rest Is Noise

I've probably written before that I can't wrap myself around the vast majority of the classical music that was produced in the 20th century. I'm clearly not alone in this, given the empty seats at Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts when "modern" music is featured. This has never been a particularly comfortable position for me, given that I like to experience new things and be fair to them. However, much of this music has always struck me as overly "thought-out," a triumph of a composer's concept over interest in the listener's experience.

So I've spent some time seeking out writing on the subject, hoping that intellectualizing the music would trump some disappointing experiences. (I know, that doesn't seem quite like the right approach, but I embarked on it out of some desperation, hoping to make sense of a lot of stuff that doesn't really sound like music to me at all.) My most recent foray came with the big and highly-acclaimed book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) by New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

And this is a fantastic book, written by someone who clearly has prejudices (a great lover of the music of Britten) and, necessarily, omits quite a bit of the vast landscape that classical music has inhabited over the past 100 years. But it deserves all of the praise it's received, it's well-researched and passionately written, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand this time and its music.

Yet...I'm still not convinced, and the evidence for it is in the book. At the end, Ross talks about how classical music is, while not a mass experience, still vital, and how its cross-currents with other forms of music will keep it alive and important. If he wants to argue that the Internet and other trends will segment this music, allow it to be sustainable without being truly "mass," he may well have a point. But I question the significance of any art form that plays to a few devotees at a time, unable to command the public's attention.

Because the most important concept I came away with was just how reduced classical music has become in recent years. Ross doesn't mention it, but the peak of classical music may well have been realized at the very beginning of the century, in 1901, when the largest mass gathering in the history of Italy took place at the funeral of Verdi. Even after that, however, as Ross makes clear, classical musicians had an incredible hold on the public's attention. Mahler and Strauss were major public figures, Caruso is still considered the major early figure in the spread of the phonograph, and Shostakovich was inextricably bound up with the politics of the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Any of this is unthinkable today. Classical composers, no matter what effect they may have had on jazz and rap (and some of this seems to me to be a reach on Ross' part), are at the margins of culture, shunted off to the academy, engaged in teaching ever more arcana to students who will follow the same arc.

To be fair, Ross does understand this:

The temptation is strong to see the overall trajectory as one of steep decline. From 1900 to 2000, the art experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height. At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures on the world stage...No one whispers "Der Adams!" as the composer of El Niño walks the streets of Berkeley.

As I indicated above, Ross does try to temper that, but I don't think he entirely succeeds. As I read the first half of this book, I felt I was reading a history of the 20th century through the prism of music. The second, post-WWII half seems detached from any real events, existing in a self-referential vacuum.

Ross senses this, and argues that classical music was inevitably altered by the events of the war; my sense is that he is contending that Hitler's "corrosive love of music" was sufficient to marginalize this art. The Cold War brought on:

Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone composition gave way to "total serialism," which gave way to chance music, which gave way to a music of free-floating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada happenings and collages, and so on.

Only later does Ross explore what I think is the more essential reason behind this trend, that composers, forced to survive in a world shorn of its traditional supports, moved into the academic world, with the insularity and turf warfare that implies:

Eschewing the audience-friendly gestures of the Copland era, they [American composers, who Ross chooses as the exemplars of the 1960s and beyond] seemed concerned above all with self-preservation, with building a safe nest in a hostile world. Their theoretical essays could be interpreted as so much barbed wire to keep untrustworthy strangers at bay.

Exactly.

I've always felt that modern composers felt trapped, that the likes of Tchaikovsky took tonality as far as it could go, that Beethoven and his immediate successors took standard rhythm to the limit, and that left little room for the novel. Mahler may have been the outward edge of the "standard" world of classical music. So classical music oozed out of those constraints, and seeped in all directions. (Ross points out that some, like Ligeti, recognized the dilemma - quoting Ligeti, "I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.")

What was lost here was the listener, the audience; I think certain aspects of music are natural to human understanding, and among those is the basis for standard tonality. It's no accident that thirds sound better than seconds. Telling us that seconds represent the chaos of the new millenium, or some such rationalization, doesn't hide the ugliness of the actual sound. There may be some literary point being made when the pianist puts her whole arm down on the keyboard, but that doesn't mean I want to fork over $50 a ticket to hear it.

I'm not qualified to comment on other parts of this book. Some of the descriptions of individual pieces don't mean a whole lot to me, not being trained in music theory ("The first movement of Musica ricercata...consists of nothing more than the tuning note A arranged in various octaves, until a D enters at the end" - that doesn't sound all that appealing to me). Writing about art tends to suffer from this affliction, that it is nearly impossible to convey much of anything about a piece in words - otherwise, why create the art in the first place?

I obviously do not have a great knowledge of this period in classical music, so I can't say much about what was emphasized, what was left out. I like the music of Alan Hovhaness, and he is mentioned only in passing: is that because he is truly not important, or because Ross didn't feel he fit into the major themes of the book? Is it fair to tell the story of this time through Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Cage (they are definitely not the only composers mentioned in 624 pages, but I came away with the feeling that they were the most prominent)? I don't know, I'll leave that to others. (I would be fascinated to be around in 100 years to see who would figure large in this story.)

The Rest Is Noise is a major work, and will help anyone understand the role of classical music across the century. I like having the background, but the book didn't accomplish the impossible - it didn't make me fall in love with the music. I suppose I'll have to go on with my quest to find a way in which it can touch me.

[Note: Since much of this is historical, passages can reach out and grab you, even if music does not figure into it at all. Thomas Mann, writing in the 1920s about hyper-inflation:

Nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in people anymore. [Germans] learned to look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their own effort but on sinister, mysterious forces.

Sound familiar?]

Review - Rock and Roll Cage Match

Rock and Roll Cage Match: Music's Greatest Rivalries, Decided (2008) is a fun read, a book that isn't comprehensive, or convincing, or consistent, yet will amuse you if you have been plugged into music over the past 40 years or so. The editor, Sean Manning, has chosen several music critics to weigh in on musical duels, for example, Phil Collins vs. Sting, or ABBA vs. the Bee Gees. (I don't know who actually chose the match-ups.)

As you can guess, the quality is uneven - The Album vs. The Single, rendered as a comic strip, struck me as particularly uninteresting - but, taken as a whole, pretty high. Occasionally too precious for insight, perhaps (I really couldn't tell if the selection of Bon Jovi over Bruce Springsteen was ironic), but the writing is generally varied enough to stave off fatigue.

If there is a problem, it's the lack of snark. The writers generally admire, at least to some extent, both of the "contenders," so there are fewer laughing out loud digs than I would have favored; I expected Whitney Pastorek to go to town on Mariah Carey in her battle with Whitney Houston, but she was relatively respectful (though her description of Carey's "The Noise" is chuckle-provoking).

What will strike you is that, at their best, these short essays (generally 8-10 pages) reveal something of the writer and why one band's music means so much. Gideon Yago's tale of Metallica vs. Nirvana has in it echoes of anyone who's ever found a sound that resonates in their soul, touches them deeply in (possibly) a life-transforming way. This seems to be universally true, not just in this book but in other music writing, that the attachments formed in adolescence are particularly meaningful. Yago first heard Nirvana at a time in his life he needed to, and it becomes fairly clear which way this duel will come out.

But that's OK, these are personal essays, and the process of getting there is far more important than how the matches really end up. There will still be people who believe that Lennon is a god and McCartney just a purveyor of silly love songs, no matter the evidence presented here. The writers here, though, are skilled enough to make you care about their opinion, and they turn a book that could have been silly into fascinating looks at the work and times of these musicians.

I'm Alive!

Even as a kid, I found Tom Jones kind of cheesy. It's Not Unusual wasn't too bad, if a little before my time, but it led to his variety show, and it appeared that he had moved into Vegas lounge act territory before he ever got a real career off the ground. And, at least for kids my age, there was nothing cool about variety shows, and Vegas lounge acts were even more uncool.

And then he pretty much disappeared. Oh, you knew he was out there, and he gained a kind of retro-coolness (especially when he recorded Prince's Kiss), and he's certainly pulled down a lot of money at the MGM Grand. Somewhere along the way he evolved into legend (to the point of being knighted); as a result, he was even more out of the mainstream. You might recognize the power of the vocals, it was kind of pleasant to hear one of his old songs come on the radio (even the most schmaltzy ones), but he was not what you might call a presence in the industry.

This past week Tom Jones released a new album, and I've seen him on Leno and Kimmel. In each case, he's performed his new single, I'm Alive. Now, if you knew that this was originally a Tommy James and the Shondells tune, and you saw the lyrics included such gems as, "Na na, na na na-na, na na, na na na-na," you could be excused for thinking, Ick!

And yet. When I watched the performance on the Tonight show, and again on Kimmel, I have to say I was intrigued. To see this 68-year-old belting out "I'm Alive!," or "I'm a Man!" is to see a man who's not retreating back to the hits of his youth. This song comes right out of the gate yelling; there's no easing in with tinkling piano. It's horns and guitar and big bongos, and the big voice of Tom Jones coming right at you, and it's what rock and roll is supposed to be, a shouting and a screaming and a defiance and a desire to knock over the cameras, the set, all of it. Darn, I hate it when my categorizations are overturned, now I have to take Tom Jones seriously again. Anyway, check it out - I still can't believe I was so impressed by it.

Snow White?

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote a post yesterday about software development metaphors, and it was pretty interesting, especially his citation from McConnell's Code Complete 2:

A confusing abundance of metaphors has grown up around software development. David Gries says writing software is a science (1981). Donald Knuth says it's an art (1998). Watts Humphrey says it's a process (1989). P. J. Plauger and Kent Beck say it's like driving a car, although they draw nearly opposite conclusions (Plauger 1993, Beck 2000). Alistair Cockburn says it's a game (2002). Eric Raymond says it's like a bazaar (2000). Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas say it's like gardening. Paul Heckel says it's like filming Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1994). Fred Brooks says that it's like farming, hunting werewolves, or drowning with dinosaurs in a tar pit (1995). Which are the best metaphors?

Atwood concludes that the best metaphor is "whichever metaphor helps you and your team get to the end of the project (emphasis his)." The one he favors is the Hunt-Thomas analogy to gardening, and it is clear that farming is especially resonant with him, and I suggest you read his ideas.

However, I think the list of metaphors above is a bit muddled, because development is actually two kinds of activity, individual and group. Some of the metaphors seem to apply more to one person doing the work, others to the process as a whole. Some thoughts....

For the case of an individual working on software, I've always found the work to be something of a craft. By that I mean the intersection of art and science, both combining to create something of value. It's really not an art; much of the effort is not inherently creative, and it doesn't generally have the self-directed nature of great art. It isn't a science either, in that the vast majority of code writing is not the result of a repeatable, verifiable process.

But development is akin to a craft, say cabinetmaking. One uses the results of science (a computer language and tools in one case, stain and tools in another), but neither person is actually doing anything new. It's similar to art, assuming you're trying to create something of beauty (and most developers are, believe it or not - for my definition of developer, as opposed to programmer and engineer, see my post of June 2), but it fails for the reasons above.

There is, and should be, a pride in that; I always have found it, but I have never tried to convince myself that I am an artist. If we believe that, we are forced to include all sorts of things as art that really aren't, simply because they have a kind of beauty. An organized desk can fall within that definition, and that's stretching the concept of art beyond proportion.

Programming more closely resembles science, but I think it still falls short. Perhaps one can make a case for some design activities as scientific, but the actual development is rarely so. I may have a more pure definition of science than others, though.

Development is also a group activity, and, there, others of the listed metaphors seem to apply. Yet none of them seem quite right, either. I imagine that this is because group development is inherently complex, and the more singular something is, the less likely we are to find a suitable or useful metaphor for it. It's possible that development is sui generis, that it is similar only to itself.

It's also possible that no single metaphor can be found because every project is different. I've worked on projects with strong methodologies, and they did come close to being like a manufacturing process. I've worked on others which were virtual chaos, in which no rational person could find enough consistency to create a metaphor.

In the end, I guess I'm not sure why people try to create these types of metaphors, other than we seem to have a natural tendency to do so. I don't think I need a metaphor to understand what, say, a firefighter does; if I'm motivated, I'll learn about the job itself - no metaphor needed. The same is true of software development...if you have to ask, you'll never know (to paraphrase the great Louis Armstrong). In fact, these thoughts have fatigued me; I think I'll go put on some Hot Five.

Modern music

I'm currently reading the book The Rest is Noise, the chronicle of 20th century classical music by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. This won't be a review, as I'm not finished yet (and there may never be a review if I can't bring enough perspective to be illuminating on a subject I don't know well - not that that usually stops me).

Ross was in Chicago on Saturday to give a talk for the Chicago Humanities Festival, and the Tribune printed two stories in their Live! section (and the exclamation point really does make the section far more exciting than it would be otherwise). Both were written by Bob Gendron, the one on page four being a straightforward and positive review of the talk. On page 1 is a bullet-point story (and we're seeing more lists and short items featured more prominently in the new Tribune) about how "'difficult' modern sounds permeate mainstream pop culture."

Five examples are cited, starting with the use of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathrustra in the opening of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ross also gave these examples: The Shining (music by Ligeti), the Beatles (Stockhausen and Cage), horror movies (Schoenberg), and music clubs, in which various strains of music come together and blur the lines, drawing influences from one another.

With respect to Ross, who is a far more eloquent proponent of modern music than I am a critic, examples like this tend to prove the opposite point to what is intended. That snatches of modern music can be effective to punctuate drama is unmistakably true, but these pieces are intended to be heard in their entirety in the concert hall. For many listeners, including me (though I lean toward the tolerant end, except when I've paid top dollar for someone's experimentation), this has led to some long unpleasant evenings.

When the Lyric Opera tries to entice listeners to Berg's Lulu by emphasizing the story and the sexuality of the title character, they clearly understand the reluctance of the customer to sit through the thorniness of the music. You can tell me, even show me in the score, all the fascinating things that Berg is doing, and I may well appreciate it on the intellectual level, but that doesn't make it desirable on the experiential level. I'll read, about some piece of modern music, "here, he has a passage in C major, then modulates through a 12-tone chord to E-flat minor, which demonstrates the alienation of the main character," which is all fine, and probably has them gasping back in the music school, but can be excruciating.

If you're a lover of modern music, you may think me a Philistine, and I'm not going to be able to argue against that, but I get weary of Prokofiev; I'm always struck by his music as a few minutes of something remarkable followed by 15 minutes of tedium. At any rate, back to my main point, those writers who contend that the use of modern music in short passages somehow justifies the whole thing are missing the point. I'm sure that a minute or two of Lulu is stirring, jarring, emotional, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be thrilled to sit through 3 hours and 50 minutes of it.

Three reviews

Each of the last three nights, my wife and I took advantage of the cultural riches Chicago has to offer and attended a different event. I have said before that I am far more an uninformed fan than an expert, so these are, of necessity, the scribblings of an amateur. Read these at your own peril.

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Wednesday night, it was off to the Lyric Opera. Bizet's The Pearl Fishers is an opera I've seen once before, and, other than a couple of hit tunes, I've found it rather flimsy. The story is preposterous, even by opera standards; worse yet, it is close to non-existent (the tale is told that the librettists, upon hearing the music the 24-year-old Bizet had written, apologized for the poor quality of the story). I won't bother to summarize, it's irrelevant to whether you'll enjoy it.

There are only four singing parts, one of which is the small role of the high priest, so we're left with two male friends and the woman they both love. The most moving and famous song is the friendship duet between the two men, and it was handled well at the Lyric. One thing that irks me about many of the recordings I've heard is that the remarkable flute parts often get swallowed up; Wednesday night, the flute was left as the third partner that it should be.

The rest of the opera just doesn't grab me much. There's some nice orchestration, if not as impressive as in the 12-years-older Bizet's Carmen. It's all pleasant, at times even lovely, but there's really nothing here that grabbed me emotionally. I have this problem with French operas in general, that they're light and delightful, but the stories are thin and the music unmemorable. Perhaps that's an unfair generalization, but it has been pretty consistent over the years. All that said, the performances by Nathan Gunn, Eric Cutler, and Nicole Cabell were wonderful. They invested this opera with as much gravity as possible through their singing and acting.

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Thursday night, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The hot young conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya brought his new Caminos del Inka project to Symphony Center, an attempt to bring the music of the Andes (he is from Lima) to the orchestral stage. The pieces ranged from folk tunes of the 18th century (or before) to a couple of works on which the ink was barely dry. The only one most people had heard before was El condor pasa, and that only because Paul Simon worked it into a famous Simon & Garfunkel song.

I am generally unmoved by these experiments. The brilliance of Dvorak or Bartok came from their ability to take folk tunes and spin them into serious orchestral works. Barring that, one ends up either with music that is inflated to fit a large orchestra, or that is largely standard fare with exotic accents (as in Soro's Tres aires chilenos, which came off as stirring Hollywood-type music with South American influences - not horrible, but nothing that couldn't be pasted together by a Waxman or a Herrmann).

Added to this was a slide show that detracted from realization of the music. It's difficult to trust that there is a complete commitment to the orchestra when the audience is asked to watch Peruvian scenes or, worse yet, completely unrelated abstract images. These are invariably attempts at expanding an audience that is presumably assumed to wish to multitask, but the images condition the music in ways that are almost certainly not the intention of the composer.

One piece was called Illapa, a tone poem for flute and orchestra, a piece composed in 2004. This one featured a soloist on Andean flutes, Jessica Warren-Acosta; oddly enough, she mixed the South American flutes in with standard flutes to no particular effect. Another was Mariel, a piece by the well-known contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov. This featured a remarkable solo effort by cellist Kenneth Olsen, but the orchestral part seemed underwritten and incompatible. I'd love to hear the original piece for cello and marimba.

There were a couple of other pieces, but the whole thing was pretty much unmemorable. When one looks at the "standard" orchestral program, where there is a short piece, then a concerto, finishing with a symphonic work, any of these seven pieces would fit into the first slot and give the audience some exposure to the culture. For a complete concert, these works just don't hold up.

Harth-Bedoya seems to be trying to bring the success of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project to gain some recognition of the music of his homeland. It's a noble effort, one that is worth pursuing, but not one that I feel works at this stage with a high-powered orchestra like the CSO. If the audience reaction was any indication, my opinion was widely shared.

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Friday night, it was off to the Joffrey Ballet. The three works on the fall program were quite varied, and the Joffrey did its usual impeccable job of bringing them to us. The company may not get quite the attention it did when it was based in New York, but, in my limited experience with "the dance," I find them truly superior. (As an example, the ABT gave a performance of Swan Lake in Chicago a couple of years ago, and the corps de ballet was appallingly out of synch. The Joffrey rarely has these problems.)

Each of the three works, though this is not expressly stated, seem to be focused around a series of pas de deux. Perhaps it betrays a lack of sophistication on my part, but I generally enjoy solo turns and large group dances over duets. So there was not enough of what I like for my taste, but there was still plenty here to enjoy.

The first piece, Postcards, was Robert Joffrey's final work. The revelation to me was the music of Erik Satie, a composer about whom I've always been pretty indifferent. (I own a version of his Gymnopédies which is dreadful, it's played so slowly.) And it was quite good here. The dancing was not so appealing to me. There wasn't anything wrong with it, it just struck me as repetitive and uninteresting. Maybe it was just me.

The second piece, In The Night, was choreographed by Jerome Robbins, famous for his Broadway and Hollywood work. This piece was so much more, showing three different phases of love. The last in particular I found quite moving as danced by Suzanne Lopez and Patrick Simoniello, but all the couples were good. This was kind of a revelation, as I had not realized that Robbins had created "classic" ballets, but this was absolutely gorgeous.

The final work, Age of Innocence, is a new piece by Edwaard Liang. I thought it got off to a rough start; the first two parts (of five) seemed stock and static. But it came into its own in a dance for four men, then moved into what was, in effect, a duet for Fabrice Calmels and Victoria Jaiani, two of the real stars of the Joffrey. This part was amazing, with novel holds and positions, and was followed by a fast-paced finale that marked Liang as a choreographer to watch.

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So that's enough culture for me for one week, it's time for a rainy weekend of football (and assorted chores and things).

Akon featuring Akon with a little help from his friend Akon

In embarrassing news from the music community, Akon's record label admitted today that he inadvertently did a guest vocal on his own new single. Said spokesman Dexter House:

Timbaland was up on the mixing board, but apparently he turned away for just a couple of minutes to record a new opening to the remix version of Madonna's "4 Minutes" ("I'm outta time and all I got is 8 minutes, got is 8 minutes, hey"). At just that moment, Akon was shuttled into yet another recording studio, he does about 12 a night, handed a music sheet, and told to get to it. By the time Timbaland turned around, Akon was gone. Nobody knew that he had done a track on his own song.

It is unknown how this mishap might affect sales, but industry insiders surmise that it might start a trend of performers actually working on their own records. Others pooh-pooh that idea, claiming that the guest appearance is a vital part of the industry: "We can't have Young Jeezy just wandering the streets, not when there are guest raps to do."

[OK, none of the foregoing is true, but I didn't want to wait until April 1st.]

Leavin' his Beautiful Soul

Sticking with music on a sticky late-July day...

Pop singer Jesse McCartney has expressed a desire to move beyond the kid-pop sound of his 2004 hit "Beautiful Soul." After all, he's 21 now, so it's time to man up, go the Timberlake route, get that harder edge.

Then why is his new hit "Leavin'" even less macho than "Beautiful Soul"? It's pretty frothy stuff, and features a performance of near-negative sexuality. I really doubt that Mr. Tough is going to convince his lady to "call your shorty and tell him you found a new man." (Of course, this gal with the amazing "thing you got behind you" may be impressed with Jesse's "G-5, G-5" - golddigger.)

Off night, or age?

I don't write often about classical music, despite my great appreciation of it. (In fact, I could find only one previous mention of it in this blog, and I would have thought it would have crept in a time or two more.) Never having played an instrument (though you should hear my rendition of Amazing Grace on a tin whistle - spine-tingling), and having been an extremely casual listener before I was 25, I would be presumptuous to throw around any particular commentary ("ah, his rubato was superior, but I can't say I cared for his use of gratuitous appoggiaturas at all").

Oh, I have definite likes and dislikes as to music, and perhaps one day I will feel emboldened (or desperate) enough to put some of those thoughts on this blog. But I have close to no clue in terms of actual performances, either about the choices the performer makes or their actual ability. I take that back, somewhat; I once heard a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto by the Chicago Symphony with principal clarinetist Larry Combs. The central movement, the Adagio, is in my view one of the truly shatteringly emotional pieces of music, even if I don't take into account that it was written soon before Mozart's far-too-early death. It is to be played slowly, as the marking would indicate, but Larry took it at a pretty good clip, as if he had some party to get to. For me, the structure was obliterated, and that angered me, so I do occasionally have an opinion as to performance choice.

At any rate, I went to the Ravinia Festival last night to hear an all-Beethoven program, the centerpiece of which was pianist Leon Fleisher playing the 5th Piano Concerto, the "Emperor." I won't recount the entire Fleisher story, remarkable as it is (the Wikipedia link I provided is a good summary of his long career and struggle with dystonia). He has just turned 80, and figures prominently in any taxonomy of piano performance and teaching, linked directly to Beethoven himself. Last year he was honored by the Kennedy Center with their prestigious award (of course, so was Diana Ross, so take it as it is).

The first movement was all right, perhaps a little muddy, but well within the boundaries of performance choice. The second movement, a truly lovely example of modified scales over a subdued orchestral background, was played beautifully (for the music-philes out there, I do recognize that there is more going on than my description would indicate, it's one of the few scores I've looked at, but the main impression is as I have said).

But, sadly, the third movement was just a mess. I accept wrong notes as part of live performance (I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Evgeny Kissin play all five Beethoven concertos with the CSO over two nights, and he missed a few notes - a very few). But Fleisher made so many mistakes that it was hard to listen to it, and every such disruption to a piece of music like that hurts the overall impression.

Perhaps unfairly, the first tendency is to ascribe a night like this to Fleisher's age. That may be wrong, he may have just had an extremely bad movement, but that is the first thought. And you think about that, and you begin to realize the extra pressure on a performer of a certain age, as every performance is taken as a referendum on their continued potency.

So I'm going to try not to think that way, but to remember a well-played, touching second movement, and chalk the ending up to a bad night. After all, not every blog post is absolutely top-drawer insight and revelation, some of them are just OK.

What is...Verdi????

I very much like classical music. I didn't get into it in a big way until I was an adult, and even after quite a few years of listening to it and attending concerts, I am certainly no expert. Oh, sure, I have my occasional peak moments (the other day I turned on our local classical station, started brushing my teeth, and thought, upon hearing an unfamiliar piece, that sounds like Alan Hovhaness - as indeed it was), but I have done little study or serious examination of the field (I did enter much of the final movement of the Jupiter symphony into some music software once, and it was fascinating to see the structure unfold - Mozart was phenomenal).

I don't watch all of Jeopardy very often; the value-time relationship of slogging through the relatively easy answers and questions in the first two rounds doesn't come out positive for me. If I'm around, I will catch Final Jeopardy; if I happen to turn it on a little early, I may catch the end of Double Jeopardy.

So occasionally I'll catch a Classical Music or Opera category on Jeopardy. And, generally, people do pretty poorly. What I've noticed, though, is, even if the players get it right, they tend to answer truly as a question.

If you're not that familiar with the show, the contestants are given an answer, and formulate their response as a question. Usually, though, they confidently answer "Who was Churchill" or what have you as a statement.

But, in anything having to do with "highbrow" music, the answer/question comes tentatively, and sounds very much like a question. Just an observation on a summer Sunday.

Taking it easy

I was planning to write some lofty post about the ideals of the United States, how this great experiment is, despite the compromises we've made and the failures we've had, the most noble in the history of man. I believe all that, but I'm barbecuing today, and I'm sure there are more insightful observations than mine to be had, so I'm going to confine myself to one observation.

If you are a music composer, and you want to be sure of being played, write a classical (or quasi-classical) piece about some aspect of America. Based on what we hear most of today on the Chicago classical station, WFMT, pretty much everything with an American theme will be played, no matter how ghastly. Sure, it's a lot of Copland, but it's also a lot of stuff you've never heard of, and wouldn't want to hear. So fire up the quill and get writing your own "American Story" or "American Portrait."

May everyone out there have a wonderful Fourth of July, even if you're not American and it's just another day at work. I'm out.