Portamental is dedicated to the exploration of music in all its forms and the promotion of musical understanding for all. Contributors include:
Yuri Broze
Pianist, instrumentalist, vocalist, arranger, molecular biologist and music theorist. Former Music Director of the Achordants. For arranging services, see Broze Brothers Music; for performing and lessons, see Yuri Broze.com.
Jeff Fowler
Accomplished guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, and photographer.
Dan Newman
Composer, arranger, double bassist, writer, and didgeridoo builder. Music Director of Brandeis University's Rather Be Giraffes. For arrangement and other sundry music services, check out MusicaRanger.
If I asked you to measure the distance between two objects, you could reply with a variety of valid responses-
Feet and inches
Meters
Paces
Cubits
Smoots (Anyone from MIT?)
Well, the same can go for the aural distance between two notes-
A number of pitches
Several notches
Steps and skips
These musical units of measurement are called intervals. An interval as a unit of aural distance between two notes, basically. A crucial skill in ear training is to recognize interval distances, which is the aim of this section. Yes, you’ll have to practice. I’ve set up goals for you. Don’t worry, I care.
Posted by Dan Newman on August 2, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Tons of people have guitars. Affluent people have pianos. Those two instruments are almost as ubiquitous as singing voices (though suffer from far less social stigma), so I think it would behoove society to give some passable instruction to every youth so they could raise the quality of life with a I-V-IV progression at a party. Imagine a world where many more people could play an instrument well enough to have it be an accepted social event- whip out a guitar and make music. Wouldn’t that be bohemian? Instead of insipid conversation or gorging on freshly baked cookies, we could stand around a piano and sing selections from Wicked, with everyone taking a turn at the keys.
Then again, our school systems are failing so hard that high school graduates are effectively ninth graders from 10 years ago, so I guess this dream can wait so Madison can learn how to read.
Posted by Yuri Broze on August 2, 2010 at 10:48 am
Quiz: is this a diacritic, a diaresis, both, or neither?
Something of a language-evolution-now observation: I had always thought that “an historical” is wrong, and the result of us getting lazy with our aspirated “h” sounds. It should be printed as “a historical,” at least for now. Nonetheless, I and many others pronounce it “anistorical” when speaking quickly, so I’m totally down with not pronouncing things completely correctly.
I do cringe when people pronounce the phrase “an historical” very carefully in their public speaking voices. Kinda like the CEO of a company carefully pronouncing “LOL” without irony. Course, this is how language changes over time, so what we’re witnessing is really the same sort of thing that took the aspiration OUT of “who” and “what”. Or changed all the “in-” prefixes to “im-” in words beginning with bilabials, like “impossible” or “immoral”.
But there’s more to the story than that, involving several opinions. Tina Blue has more, invoking a whole hierarchy of syllabic stress:
In the word historical, the first syllable is actually slightly stressed, though far less so than the second syllable, which carries the primary stress. But in the word hotel, the first syllable, though less stressed than the second, is significantly more stressed than the first syllable in historical.
In historical, the first syllable receives only tertiary (third-level) stress, whereas in hotel, the first syllable receives a secondary stress so strong that it is nearly equal to the primary stress on the second syllable. For this reason, the h in a hotel is pronounced almost as fully as the h in a hot day.
Earlier this summer, I finished reading Meyer’s Music the Arts and Ideas. Now Leonard Meyer is no slouch in the field of music theory—his classic text Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) has been endlessly cited for convincing music theorists that there might actually be something to *gasp* empirical descriptions of musical works! Of course, I jest; it’s only half-true. The postmodern wave in the humanities was still a decade off when Meyer published his opus (the same year as George Miller’s The Magical Number Seven), and Claude Shannon’s introduction of information theory was still tickling the minds of humanities scholars, who thought we might have struck on an Urtheorie of culture. Well, the short story is: no such luck. Humanities types retreated into hermeneutics and hyperrelativism, and that seemed to be that for the time being. Meantime, Leonard Meyer shifted his focus to studies of musical style, since meaning was too fraught with postmodern peril. Oh, silly academes.
Which brings us to Music, the Arts, and Ideas, published in 1967. The book is something of a ragtag collection of essays, but there are some common threads. Most importantly, Meyer sets out to describe how he forsees culture in the postmodern age progressing. This happens to be exactly the age in which I was born, so I figure I have a reasonably good standpoint from which to evaluate his statements. But oh, what statements he makes. Get a load of this one, chosen by flipping through and pointing with my eyes closed:
Though analytic formalism and transcendental particularism are clearly in conflict regarding the efficacy of causal explanation, it should be emphasized that they do not necessarily disagree about either the existence or the nature of causation. (p.163)
Woo-ee! now that’s a humdinger there. Meyer is an incredibly well-loved and much-missed personality, and deservedly so. But boy does it take some effort to wade through his prose. Here’s some reader’s digestif:
Easy-drinking format.
Meyer has learned from cross-cultural studies of the 20th century that sayings like “Change is the only constant” don’t really apply world-wide. Sure, in Western history from the Romans on up, we’ve seen a huge parade of history, a flowing river of chaotically repeating eddies and flows. But looking around, it seems like stasis in culture is far more “normal” than the constant bustling change that we’re used to in the Western world.
But what has changed, says Meyer, is that technology has grown to the point that we are able to look back and enjoy recordings of music produced forty years ago just as well as we can enjoy recordings of music produced yesterday. All time periods and fads, all historical styles are equally accessible.
So in the end, he describes rather effectively what it looks like for culture to move to a steady-state system with local fluctuation. He even predicts that, due to a “psychological accessibility of the past” (p191), all sorts of recycling of old culture will take place.
Is this an artist, an oeuvre, or a work?
Furthermore, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that “A multiplicity of styles, techniques, and movements, ranging from the cautiously conservative to the rampantly experimental, will exist side by side… past and present will, modifying one another, come together not only within culture, but within the oeuvre of a single artist and even within a single work of art.” (p209)
Sounds like remix culture to me. More distressingly, he seems to have a certain Williamsburg, NY demographic pegged, but didn’t correctly predict the ultimately uncontrolled spiral of meta-snark and strangeloops of ironic kickballing. We can compliment ourselves for those!
Paul Williams of the Temptations, singing For Once In My Life by Ron Miller and Orlando Murden. The tune was originally composed for the Motown label, and Stevie Wonder’s version made it famous, but it has been performed and recorded by a variety of other outstanding artists. This live rendition, Williams’s most famous, is from December of 1968.
The performance is monumental and triumphant! It’s a cruel irony that Williams himself died at age 35 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had been experiencing marital problems at the time, and struggled his whole life with Sickle-Cell Disease.
The Gregory Brothers, more popularly known as the people who Auto-Tune the News, are not only satirically cunning, but they use their musicianship in a particularly effective manner. If you don’t troll YouTube like I do, seeking out memes and delighting in double rainbows, Auto-Tune the News is when popular/recent news clips are set to music and the speech is altered to jive with the music. It’s pretty hip; here are some of their works.
Anywho, these guys are more than satirists, but pretty savvy musicians. It takes a creative mind to come up with compositions, then they splice-slice-dice live non-musical footage into the compositions. The rhythms need to be kept to some extent so the speech can still be understood, but there are snips and repetitions so it slides right into the musical groove. It also allows satiric emphasis- you hear what the creators want you to hear again and again. The visual element gets spiced up by having the creators green-screen themselves to provide musical/satiric foils to the actual news bits. The music makes it memorable and catchy, but the real point is the political satire.
While a lot of the messages are liberal in nature, the musical style is pretty standard pop music. The heavy electronics, the ubiquitous auto-tune, and the ostinato and repetitions are very “pop”. I think the music genre lends a topical aura to the source material: that which is literally topical. While it definitely makes a splash today, the musical workmanship in the future will probably only be admired for its innovation, rather than as a work of art. You don’t go listen to old episodes of Auto Tune the News because the news is out of date, therefore the video is out of date. Topical becomes stale, stale becomes history, history becomes retro, and retro churns out hipsters and thrift stores, and who really likes thrift stores? Really? You just want to admire old things for being old. “These dresses are so silly! Let’s go get a bubble tea.”
Out of date isn’t necessarily bad. Some choice phrases (“Very thin ice,” “Hide yo kids, hide yo wife”) make the music a little catchy, but you sing that on the streets and people will give you the crazy eye. [aside: I may have turned the auto-tune remix of the double rainbow clip above into my ringtone. Listen to the end, and you'll see the whole troupe doing a live version. ] But still, there used to be lots of classical compositions that “quoted” other popular composers in their works…and nobody knows who those quoting composers are. They were topical. Now they’re forgotten (mostly).
Old clips of the Daily Show? Entertaining only because of the gags, not the news. There’s a huge difference between John Stewart making an impeachment joke about Clinton when Clinton is in office versus out of office for 8 years. It’s old. Yeah. Get with the times.
We are now Portamental—and an official dot-com! What is Portamental?
A portamento is fluidity of pitch in music. It’s a slide from one pitch to another, blurring the boundaries between notes. Portamental is mental fluidity, playing with concepts, eschewing quantization for analogue, or even vice-versa. Don’t worry, though, the SmarterGuides are still here.
Why the change? A change in the status of the collective. I’m at Ohio State University, pondering the ins and outs of academia, and busying myself with the literature of music theory. In particular, I’m immersed in academic literature in music perception and cognition. But this leads also to mathematical and computational modeling, philosophy of language, evolutionary theory, and social psychology. Ridiculously exciting, but also ridiculously insulating, if we’re not careful. Others have transitioned and moved about, and need a broader platform.
I just finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I must say is an awesome TV series. Evidently the movie was a shame, which pains me considering that the TV series was so good. It’s the kids of series where you don’t want the show to end because you’ll miss the characters so much. Kind of like leaving summer camp.
The music in it, while not particularly epic or amazing, was perfect for the show and I wouldn’t have asked for anything else. Synth sounds, traditional Asian instruments, and artfully stylized character motifs all arise naturally, without being too stilted. Huge ups for a great TV show!
Posted by Dan Newman on March 10, 2010 at 10:13 am
~I wholeheartedly support all kinds of research that you can do before putting notes to a page. Steal ideas! Save yourself time! Don’t reinvent the wheel with every new arrangement, especially if you’re cutting your teeth for the first time.
~Ostinatos, or repeated bits of music, make teaching and retaining a lot easier…so you should do it! Do a single measure motif, then repeat it for a section. Every part can have a different ostinato (which makes it sound flashy), but it drastically cuts down on the amount of material you need to devise.
~What may seem less important than notes- the dynamics, shaping, and syllables- are just as important as the notes. Don’t forget them.
~Be enthusiastic about yoru arrangement, even if it’s your first. Attitude changes a lot, even if it’s a crummy arrangement. If you come in tentative, your singers will be tentative, and your performance will be tentative. Tentative performances suck.
~Try to avoid putting the highest notes of the arrangement near the beginning or middle. Let them be a literal high-point near the end of the arrangement.
~Arrangements take time. It’s ok if you’re spending hours and hours on it. That’s normal! Just keep working until you believe that it is ready- don’t try to finish it in an hour.
