Why is music so important in our lives?

Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There’s a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. Read about it here:

Humans’ success as a species is due entirely to our social organization, and music is a crucial tool for group building and bonding, more than we give it credit for in the western world. We think of music as a form of entertainment, mostly divorced from its most basic purposes. But taking the macro-scale historical view, music isn’t recordings of specialists making pleasant background noise. It’s all the emotional-laden patterned vocalization, percussion and gestures we perform, consciously and not. For example, all parents use music to comfort babies. Sometimes it’s in the form of overt singing and dancing with them, but even routine speaking to very young children is mostly musical in content. There’s the singsong cadence, the repetition, and the warmly modulated tone. This “motherese” is universal among human cultures and is probably very ancient.

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Harmonica guide

I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession with the Grateful Dead was at its high water mark. The Dead’s first frontman, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a more than respectable blues harmonica player. Through the Dead, I got exposed to all the blues and country greats. I forget exactly how and why I started playing harmonica myself, but it’s probably because it was inexpensive and looked easy. I started with Country And Blues Harmonica For The Musically Hopeless by Jon Gindick, which I enthusiastically recommend.

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The major scale and the circle of fifths

I studied music theory for a good long time before it dawned on me that you can read the major scale right off the circle of fifths. Here’s the C major scale on the circle. The white notes are the ones in the scale and the black ones are the ones outside the scale. The white notes correspond to the white keys on the piano, and the black notes to the black keys.

Circle of fifths

The circle of fifths trick works for all the major scales, not just C. Pick any note on the circle and think of it as the root. The note immediately counterclockwise from the root will be the fourth of the key. The five notes going clockwise from the root are the fifth, second, sixth, third and seventh of the key respectively. The other five notes will be the ones you omit — the “black keys.”

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Interviewing Leo Ferguson

My friend and sometime musical collaborater Leo Ferguson is releasing an album of his adventurous jazz compositions and arrangements.

Leo Ferguson Ensemble (2011) by Leo Ferguson

As part of the album’s extended liner notes, I interviewed Leo on May 5, 2011. Here’s an edited transcript; you can also hear the audio on Leo’s site.

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Na Na Na Na

If you’ve been following my internet presence, you know how much I love flowcharts. So naturally, I was amused by this Randall Munroe cartoon:

I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, na na na na, na na na naaah na na na na na na” part from “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Then I got to thinking, this cartoon is actually an inspired recipe for a mashup.

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Bach and Paul Simon

Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion while we did stuff around the house.

A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.”

This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. Anna says she’s sung it many times in church. Bach didn’t write it; the text is an older Latin poem translated into German by Paul Gerhardt, set by Johann Crüger to a secular love song called “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret” by Hans Leo Hassler.

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Facebook and multiple identites

Here’s an alarming Mark Zuckerberg quote from The Facebook Effect by David Kirpatrick:

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

How nice for Mark Zuckerberg that he doesn’t feel the need to keep any part of himself private. Zuckerberg doesn’t have an identity outside of his work, which is common enough in Silicon Valley startup culture but is neither possible nor desirable for most of us. When family members have illnesses, or friends are feeling down, or I’m thinking or feeling something that doesn’t reflect well on me in that moment, how is that any of my coworkers’ business? Zuckerberg understands human psychology very well within the context of college and startup culture, but Facebook is an increasingly poor fit for the complexities of my social life.

Nexus white

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Lost In The World

This week I’ve been all about Kanye West’s “Lost In The World,” the most gripping track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye is one of the few commercial producers with a high enough profile to be able to license whatever samples he wants, so he carries the banner of memetastic collage-based music in the mainstream, and god bless him for it. Click through for the song on YouTube.

There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.

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The Facebook Effect

Last night I caught a lecture by David Kirkpatrick on his book The Facebook Effect. This post is going to be about Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the book, not the book itself, since I just got it last night and haven’t started reading it yet. But his talk certainly conveyed the flavor.

Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

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Promoting music through social media

As part of New York Social Media Week, I attended a panel entitled “The Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy of Social Media as Music’s Savior.” It was first thing in the morning, which really asks a lot from the music hipsters. I would normally have just live-tweeted this thing, but the wi-fi in the place was too weak, and besides, I figured it deserved a blog post. So here’s the more coherent, edited version of what I planned to post on Twitter. Since the event was dominated by Kanye West from the title on down, I’ll be featuring Twitter-centric pictures of him.

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