Some contemporary classical music that I actually like

I have been very vocal in my criticism of contemporary classical music on this blog. But there is some new music out there that I do like, very much. Most of it falls under the minimalist category, made by Steve Reich and his followers. The coolest new thing I’ve heard in this idiom is “Timber” by Michael Gordon.

The piece is played by six people on wooden planks, using mallets and fingertips. I thought at first it was a conceptual thing — “look what we can do with ordinary lumber” — but in fact this is an actual instrument called a simantra, used by Eastern Orthodox monks and, later, Iannis Xenakis. You can take a look at part of the score.

A performance of Michael Gordon's

So why do I consider this to be good?  Continue reading “Some contemporary classical music that I actually like”

Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live

I just completed a batch of new music, which was improvised freely in the studio and then later shaped into structured tracks.

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/tabla-breakbeat-science

I thought it would be helpful to document the process behind this music, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I expect to be teaching this kind of production a lot more in the future. Second, knowing how the tracks were made might be helpful to you in enjoying them. Third, composing the music during or after recording rather than before has become the dominant pop production method, and I want to help my fellow highbrow musicians to get hip to it. Continue reading “Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live”

Marc Weidenbaum on remixes

There’s an interview on the Creative Commons blog with Disquiet Junto instigator and Aphex Twin historian Marc Weidenbaum. It’s full of his usual keen insight.

Marc Weidenbaum

Here are some key quotes. Continue reading “Marc Weidenbaum on remixes”

Recording Peter Gabriel’s Security

This post was originally written for the Play With Your Music blog. Also be sure to check out our interview with engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta.

Peter Gabriel’s songwriting and recording process in the early 1980s was unusual for its technological sophistication, playfulness and reliance on improvisation. While Peter was considered avant-garde back then, now that music technology is a lot cheaper and more accessible, his practices have become the baseline standard for pop, dance and hip-hop.

The South Bank Show’s long 1983 documentary on the making of Peter Gabriel’s fourth solo album Security follows the production of the album from its earliest conception to its release and critical reception. It’s an invaluable record both of Peter’s creative process and the technology behind it.

Continue reading “Recording Peter Gabriel’s Security”

Tabla Breakbeat Science is dropping an album

My new studio band has an album nearing completion. It’s called Music Information Retrieval, because our studio time was sponsored by NYU’s Music and Audio Research Lab — we contributed to a database of multitracks that will be used for music informatics research.

We made our DJ debut over the weekend at the Rubin Museum, where our brand-new track “Rock Steady” was dropped by DJ Ripley.

Continue reading “Tabla Breakbeat Science is dropping an album”

Repetition defines music

Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine.

Here’s the nub of Margulis’ argument:

The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’

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Play With Your Rhythm

As we continue to flesh out the video content for Play With Your Music, I put together this series on rhythm.

Continue reading “Play With Your Rhythm”

The state of the lullaby

Anna wanted to know what my friends are singing to their kids for lullabies. I posted the question on Facebook and got about fifty times more responses than I was expecting. Since I now have all this (highly unscientific) data about lullaby trends in 2014, I figured I would write it all up. Here’s what I found.

The most interesting commonality is the song “Hush Little Baby.” Many people report singing it, and my mom sang it to me. But it’s more complicated than that. Jonathan C says:

I made up about 50 couplets of “Hush Little Baby” over many consecutive tortured hours in 2006, and somehow we’ve remembered them all and still use them. It was a good rhyming puzzle to keep me sane at night.

As soon as I read that, I tried it out on Milo, and it was super fun. I recommend it.

Rewriting the lyrics is an especially good idea because, as several people pointed out, the original song is quite depressing. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a series of unsatisfying things that don’t address your basic emotional need.” A number of other traditional kids’ songs are similarly depressing. My mom sang me “You Are My Sunshine” and “My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean” as a kid, and while their melodies are beautiful, their lyrics are full of pain, loss, and disappointment. And don’t even get me started on “Rockabye Baby.” I sang it to Milo exactly once; never again.

Anyway, here are all the other tunes that my Facebook friends use for lullabies.

Continue reading “The state of the lullaby”

Play with your music theory

Last week I put together a new set of music theory videos.

These videos are aimed at participants in Play With Your Music, who may want to start producing their own music or remixes and have no idea where to start. I’m presuming that the viewer has no formal background, no piano skills and no reading ability. This would seem to be an unpromising place to start making music from, but there’s a surprising lot you can do just by fumbling around on a MIDI keyboard. Playing the white keys only gives you the seven modes of the C major scale, with seven very different emotional qualities. Playing the black keys only gives you the G♭ major and E♭ minor pentatonic scales. From there, you can effortlessly transpose your MIDI data into any key you want.

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Everyone can and should be making music

I have a strongly held belief about musical talent: there is no such thing. Every neurotypical human is born with the ability to learn music, the same way the vast majority of us are born with the ability to learn to walk and talk. We still have to do the learning, though; otherwise the capacity doesn’t develop itself. When we talk about “musical talent,” we’re really talking about the means, motive and opportunity to activate innate musicality. When we talk about “non-musicians,” we’re rarely talking about the Oliver Sacks cases with congenital amusia; usually we mean people who for whatever reason never had the chance to develop musically.

So what if almost everyone is a potential musician? Why should you care? Because participation in music, particularly in groups, is an essential emotional vitamin. We here in America are sorely deficient in this vitamin, and it shows in our stunted emotional growth. Steve Dillon calls music a “powerful weapon against depression.” We need to be nurturing musicality wherever it occurs as a matter of public health.

Continue reading “Everyone can and should be making music”