Gilbert and Sullivan

Gilbert wrote the lyrics (and the rest of the dialog).

Sullivan wrote the music.

That's all I wanted to say, really.  I could never keep them straight--hopefully writing it down like this will help.

The Artist

The musical artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (who I believe has returned to simply calling himself Prince) is actually named Prince.  His father, one John L. Nelson, was a jazz pianist who went by the stage name of "Prince Rogers" (leader of the Prince Rogers Trio), and gave that name to his son as some sort of blah blah "he will surpass me" blah¹.  Prince, despite the built-in nickname, apparently went by "Skippy" during his childhood².

Sources :

• ¹Hahn, Alex (2004). Possessed: The Rise And Fall Of Prince. (supposedly)
• ²Gulla, Bob (2008). Icons of R&B and Soul: An Encyclopedia of the Artists who Revolutionized Rhythm. (also supposedly.  Both sources are quoted online, but I haven't seen them myself).

I am very mad at iTunes

I just discovered that none of the music that I purchased through the iTunes store before about 2009 will play on my iPhone.  I have gotten no satisfactory answer about why this has happened.  Additionally, I have been informed that if I want to try to re-download the music, I will have to re-purchase it.  I have also not yet received a satisfactory answer as to why this is the case.

This has made me exceedingly grumpy, as you can imagine.

Salsa Candy

1) This is not a food post.  2) The title will make sense by the end.

In the musical genre of salsa, there is a basic rhythmic device known as the clave.  There are two versions of it, neither one of which I can easily relate in a text-based format.  However, the "son clave" has proven to be sufficiently pervasive that it has appeared in many other genres, from jazz to funk to R&B to straight up pop. In fact, in some circles the same basic rhythm was known as the "Bo Diddley beat."

For example-- in the song I Want Candy, (which can be seen at http://youtu.be/MiiD8KeAFew as performed by The Strangeloves), the percussion is a son clave.  Three even beats, followed by two quicker ones.

The bass line of Born to Hand Jive (as seen in the movie Grease) is almost a son clave.

There's also a rumba clave, which is very similar except that the third beat is delayed by a half.  I have no other way of describing it in words, but if you search for it on YouTube you'll find plenty of examples.

Many outrageous accents

A point of information:

The French Foreign Legion is not a legion of French soldiers that serve or are stationed outside of France.  Instead, it is a legion of foreign nationals that wish to fight on behalf of France (they are in fact headquartered in Algiers, but that's beside the point).  They are technically part of the French Army, and they apparently have a reputation of being guys you really do not want to mess with.

Their marching song is "Le Boudin"-- the blood sausage.

Weekend random

This weekend I learned two things--

First, that if you see the abbreviation "geth." in a German music score, it's an abbreviation for "getheilt" and means "divided."

Second, Cotswold makes a damned fine grilled cheese sandwich.

It's been an odd weekend.

Sweet Dreams are actually made of this instead

In the early 20th century, one Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss musician, decided that the available schools of musical instruction were insufficient.  Students, no matter how young they started, were still focused only on the act of generating music-- moving their fingers, blowing into a horn of some sort, or whatever.  There was a huge percentage of the human body that was just being completely ignored!

So in Dalcroze's school, young children were exposed to music at an extremely young age (three or four years old), but were not specifically taught how to make music.  Instead, they were encouraged to move around, to first physically internalize the rhythms and patterns.  Only later were they taught the actual music-making process.  The results are hard to quantify, and there haven't been a lot of really rigorous studies done, but there are certainly indications that it helped the children's sense of rhythm if nothing else.

And now to bring this post back around to the title-- Dalcroze was inspired by eurhythmy, a sort of dance-like performance art (Wikipedia calls it an "expressive movement art") that had been developed a few years earlier in Europe.  Dalcroze called his new school Eurhythmics.  One of his most famous students was Annie Lennox, who would go on to form the band Eurythmics (dropping the h) in homage to her teacher.

Whistler

When I was first watching the new Muppets movie, I got to this segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrkIxTYymyE (embedding was disabled).

and I thought to myself, "That's fairly impressive.  I wonder if it's just a synthesizer, or if someone's playing a flute or something."

Apparently, not so much.  That virtuoso whistling was instead the legitimate work of one Andrew Bird.

It was probably cleaned up a bit, studio performance and all, but still.  That's freaking amazing.

Peter Gunn

Tonight I learned that the Peter Gunn theme was written by Henry Mancini (known for a great many award-winning works, such as "Moon River" and the Pink Panther theme).

Also, I learned that it's really hard to arrange that sort of music for an orchestra without it sounding really square.  Like, really square.

Duck Dance

It's a fairly safe bet that most of you are familiar with this little piece of avian boogie.  If you've been to a wedding in the last couple of decades, for example, it's practically de rigueur.  You flap your elbows, bob up and down, and generally make a damn fool out of yourself to the sprightly tones of a polka ensemble.

What's that?  Chicken, you say?  Well, no, I'm generally brave enough to participate...  Oh, you mean it's called the Chicken Dance?  Well, sure... now.

You see, back in the 1970s, in Switzerland, one Werner Thomas (accordionist) composed what was called at the time "Der Ententanz," or, "The Duck Dance."  The route by which it switched birds is somewhat obscured, but there are two major perspectives.  One is that it simply shifted from "Duck" to "Bird" to "Chicken" as it meandered its way through various languages before reaching Stateside.  Plausible, but boring.

More exciting (but a trifle dubious) is the story that it was played during the 1981 Tulsa Oktoberfest, and one of the organizers managed to procure a chicken suit from a local television station (in the absence of a duck costume), and the suited dancer subsequently created moves that will live forever.

Black Velvet

Black Velvet is the name of a song that was popular a while back, when I was younger.*  Apparently, it was about Elvis. "Mama's baby's in the heart of every school girl // "Love me tender" leaves 'em cryin' in the aisle"

"Black velvet," as it turns out, is apparently also a term used in Australia to refer to, shall we say, the proclivities of well-situated Caucasian males in the field of Aboriginal extracurricular activities, or possibly to those "activities" themselves.  Ahem.

A "black velvet" is also a drink made from Guinness and champagne, which to me at least, sounds completely wretched.  What a horrible thing to do to champagne.  It was created in honor of the death of Britain's Prince Albert.

Finally, it is, of course, the material of choice for paintings of sad clowns and unicorns.

I am reasonably certain that these things are essentially unrelated, with the possible exception of black velvet paintings of Elvis.  At the very least, we can hope so.

*Yes, I'm aware that that statement is semantically somewhat redundant, or at the very least extremely unhelpful.

Word for the day -- Redowa

A redowa is a Czech dance, kind of like an energetic waltz, that was popular in Victorian ballrooms.

That was very short, so here's a little extra that I learned at the same time.  In London, before 1924, printed works that were deemed worthy of legal protection were not marked as "copyrighted."  Instead, they bear the label "Ent. Sta. Hall," which stands for "Entered at Stationer's Hall."  The Stationer's Hall, as best as I can tell, is the official headquarters of what is now the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, originally founded in 1403 as the Stationer's Company, one of the original Livery Companies of the City of London.  Protection of copyrights appears to be one of their main duties in the contemporary era.

Perfect Musical Moment

I think it's official-- my favorite single measure of classical music is measure 158 of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D.

For those of you who don't have your scores handy (shame on you), it's the bit in the first movement where the key suddenly swoops from minor to major.  Not the first time it happens, mind you-- the second.  The first time it happens is before the soloist comes in, and there's a lot of orchestral noodling, and your reaction tends to be, "oh, that's pretty," but that's about it.  The second time, you recognize it, but it's underscoring the soloist, and it gets you.  Right in the soul.  Whammo.  Every time I hear it.

Now, my favorite actual piece right now is probably Beethoven's 7th Symphony, specifically the third movement, which not coincidentally has a very reminiscent chord progression.  But for a single pure moment of music magic-- measure 158.

Whammo.

Close Harmony

When I was in school, we'd sometimes use this phrase to make fun of the chorus.  "They're singing in close harmony," we'd say.  "Close, but not quite."  Then we'd snigger derisively.  Look, it was high school, and they weren't Glee.  Also, we were all jerks.  Anyway.

I knew roughly what the term meant, of course-- voices singing harmony that's, um, close.  You know.  Close together.  Or something.

As it happens, that's not a very good definition.  So here, for the record, is exactly what close harmony is.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, close harmony is "harmony in which the parts composing each chord lie closely together, usu. within an octave or twelfth."  Which is actually a bit less precise than I'd expect from them (how often is usually? What's the outside range?), so let's turn to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, which defines it as "the arrangement or distribution of the notes or tones of a chord so that the three upper parts lie within an octave."  There, that's nicely precise.  So next time I hear an OED editor describing a vocal chord distributed within a twelfth as close harmony, I can justifiably respond, "close, but not quite."  And snigger derisively.

Classical Laughing Gas

I've only been familiar with the name Mason Williams from his award-winning guitar instrumental Classical Gas.  It's not all he should be known for, though.  He was actually also one of the head writers for the original Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV show back in the last 60s, and as such, had a notable influence on comics of the generation (including such nobodies as Steve Martin).  He went on to write for Saturday Night Live in 1980, but let's not hold that against him.

He also claims to have had the original concept of the music video and DJ, although that's not quite as clear cut (he did play Classical Gas on TV in 1968 over a backdrop of art pieces, an event that is arguably the first broadcast music video).

Right, let's have a ding dong

Some belated Xmas info today (I'm a couple weeks behind with my Learning Pile).

Although Xmas hymns are extremely old, as you would expect, the tradition of the peppier popular Xmas carol is older than I had thought, and can be traced, somewhat unexpectedly, to a religious figure I recognize (no small feat, since I am not especially well versed in religious history).  But then, almost everyone has heard of St. Francis of Assisi.

That's right-- when he wasn't off doing his Dr. Doolittle shtick ("If I could preach to the animals..."), founding the Franciscan monastic order, or otherwise being moderately awesome, he was encouraging a shift from more formal Latin hymns to songs based on popular music in the native languages of the populace.  He didn't write any carols himself, as far as we know, although there is one apocryphal scrap of parchment attributed to him* with just the line "Ye Olde Bloo Christmass."

Apparently he also was responsible for arranging the very first manger scene in 1223.  Some busy guy, huh?

*Attributed to him by me, since I just made it up.

Chamber Music

Tonight, instead of orchestra rehearsal (we just had a concert so we got a week off), I got together with a couple of new friends and played some piano trios for a change.  A little Haydn, a little Schubert.  It was really nice!  And since I've been playing almost exclusively in orchestra-type groups for the last {mumble} years I was glad to learn that I hadn't completely lost the knack.  We're nowhere near performance level at this point, but we stayed together well, and started getting a feel for reading each other's styles and mannerisms.  We're definitely going to keep getting together, although we have yet to work out a plausible schedule.

Good Vibrations

That iconic wail in the background of the Beach Boys's's's seminal hit, Good Vibrations, is NOT a theremin.
I just always assumed it was-- I mean, what else could it have been?

It turns out it was a similar instrument, called the Tannerin.  Created by trombonist Paul Tanner to mimic the theremin but give greater ease of control to the player, it consists of a sine wave generator in a box with a slider to adjust frequency (clearly inspired by the trombone's slide) and a volume knob.  No dramatic waving of arms for this one.

Even more interestingly, this instrument was a complete one-off.  Only the prototype was ever made, and while it was used for several well-known songs, Tanner scrapped the idea and sold the prototype a few years later, deciding that new developments in synthesizer technology was making it obsolete (the Moog hadn't quite arrived yet, but the musical writing was clearly on the wall).

Oh, and the theme from the Original Star Trek also didn't use a theremin, even though it should have-- it was mostly heavily re-mixed vocals.

Zooty zoot-zoot

I thought it was just the name of a song, but no-- there actually were zoot suit riots in LA, back in the summer of 1943.

At the time, deep in the early involvement of the US in World War II, fabric was one of the many things being rationed.  And the zoot suits, with their large lapels, bit tails, and heavily padded shoulders, were seen as a flagrant symbol of rebellion and anti-patriotism.  And, shortly after some Latinos were railroaded during the investigation of a local murder, some Marines in town got hassled by a bunch of Latino teenagers in zoot suits, and...  well, things went south pretty quickly.  The servicemen turned out in force over the next few days, running pretty wild in the Latino section of town, beating up pretty much anyone who got in their way, while police looked the other way.  The Latinos fought back.  Eventually, the Armed forces intervened, confining and relocating the servicemen, while the Latinos were... well, mostly just arrested.  Not pretty, but at least it shut the fighting down.  Subsequently, zoot suits were declared illegal to wear in LA, a law that is apparently still on the books.