The Best Rapper Alive

Lil’ Wayne was simply known as one of the most famous rappers of our time until he declared himself to be more. On December 6, 2005 Lil’ Wayne released his album “The Carter II” and claimed to be the best rapper alive on a song titled “Best Rapper Alive”. After he made this statement much debate arose to the discussion as to if this was in fact a true statement or merely an overly inflated ego grown out of control. Since the time of the album’s release he has collaborated with practically every famous hip-hop, R and B, and Pop and artists of other genres including Enrique Iglesias(Latin Pop), Jason Mraz(Indie Rock), Weezer(Alternative Rock), and even Madonna. Naturally being so exposed across so many different platforms of music (his album titled “Rebirth” is in even in the style of rock), he is very easily recognized all around the world.

The reason this is important is because a very good lesson can be learned from this. What if Classical music were to be approached in the same sense in which Lil’ Wayne approached his career. To declare it as the best music around and to spread its influence across every musical and cultural platform possible until everyone had no choice, but to listen to its voice. As many people say these days, “Is there any song Lil’ Wayne isn’t in?” to which one could respond, “Yes. One that people don’t know”.

More Information about Lil' Wayne.

Essentializing

Definition of ESSENTIALIZE

: to express or formulate in essential form : reduce to

Anosognosia

Errol Morris's chilling New York Times series on unknown unknowns, mentioned today in class.

Nkosi Sikeleli Africa videos

Hey all,

I thought this would be helpful in light of our Cook readings.

This is a traditional version of the song before it became the national anthem.

This is the official national anthem version as sung at the Rugby World Cup in 2007.

Even though it's the same music, these versions feel quite different. I feel like the latter version has been "Anglicized" - it sounds much more like a European chorale or hymn than a traditional South African song. What do you think?

Enjoy!
Dave

Symphony Hall Organ

I will admit that this is copied from a summary of the organ, but it seemed all too perfect and concise:

The Symphony Hall organ, a 4,800-pipe Aeolian-Skinner (Opus 1134) designed by G. Donald Harrison, installed in 1949, and autographed by Albert Schweitzer, is considered one of the finest concert hall organs in the world. It replaced the hall's first organ, built in 1900 by George S. Hutchings of Boston, which was electrically keyed, with 62 ranks of nearly 4,000 pipes set in a chamber 12 feet deep and 40 feet high. The Hutchings organ had fallen out of fashion by the 1940s when lighter, clearer tones became preferred. E. Power Biggs, often a featured organist for the orchestra, lobbied hard for a thinner bass sound and accentuated treble.
The 1949 Aeolian-Skinner reused and modified more than 60% of the existing Hutchings pipes and added 600 new pipes in a Positiv division. The original diapason pipes, 32 feet in length, were reportedly sawed into manageable pieces for disposal in 1948.
In 2003 the organ was thoroughly overhauled by Foley-Baker Inc., reusing its chassis and many pipes, but enclosing the Bombarde and adding to it the long-desired Principal (diapason) pipes, adding a new Solo division, and reworking its chamber for better sound projection.


Æolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc. — Æolian-Skinner of Boston, Massachusetts was an important American builder of a large number of notable pipe organs from its inception as the Skinner Organ Company in 1901 until its closure in 1972. Key figures were Ernest M. Skinner (1866-1960), Joseph Whiteford, and G. Donald Harrison (1889-1956). The company was formed from the merger of the Skinner Organ Company and the pipe organ division of the Æolian Company in 1932.


Here is a link to photos taken when the organ was re-built in 2003.

Interesting Statistics

Kind of random, but a friend of mine posted this article on Facebook and I found it interesting. Make sure you scroll down to occupation number 1 on the list!

Performance Practice

There are experts who have read everything about certain performance practices, and have developed an opinion on how to play certain kinds of "classical" music, like the Baroque period. The biggest debate among many musicians is how to play certain pieces of music. Most classically trained musicians want to play with the correct style that each piece fits in. There are certain ways to ornament notes, and there are certain ways to articulate notes so it sounds like a piece from the Baroque era. Some musicians may think that you start with the trill with the above note, or start the trill with the lower note. How would one truly know how certain pieces were played? There are no recordings of the pieces from that period of time, and there is no one who lived during that era that is alive. It is really hard to say what is correct or incorrect.

I immediately thought of Glenn Gould while writing this post, who plays many Baroque pieces on the piano. If you lived during the Baroque era, you would typically play any of Bach's pieces on the harpsichord. The thing about the harpsichord, is that you cannot change the volume, because every note is at one dynamic level. One plays expressively with the tempo by speeding up and slowing down to play expressively and in the style that Bach might have played. One may chose to slow down at a cadence to play "expressively." The reason I bring up Glenn Gould is because first of all, he plays Bach's music on the piano, not on the harpsichord. He plays with the volume by playing certain sections louder than others. He also plays the pieces almost like you would from the Romantic era by having these long lush lines on the piano. He plays the trills a certain way, that someone from the Baroque period might not have played. He is one of my favorite pianists to listen to, and there are some that don't like his playing because he does not fit the Baroque style of playing. Is this really that big of a deal to play music a certain way?

I think the main point here that I'm trying to make is to say that there is no wrong or right way to play music. I believe one should play music to the style that is enjoyable to them, and there will always be someone out there that may not like the style that you play, and that's okay. I also believe that a musician who can play in the style that others might enjoy or want as well as playing their own style is a true musician. I believe this because it shows that you truly understand others opinions, and you have also formed your own.

One of the most important composers of our time.

This is an article from today's New York Times on the composer Arvo Part. In the midst of the world's hustle and bustle, the simplicity of his music can be arresting. As a singer, I am most familiar with his choral works, as I have had the chance to perform several of them over the years. However, I know he is an equally gifted instrumental composer.
In the context of our class conversations, he seems like a composer who who is completely unconcerned with whether his music is considered 'highbrow' or 'lowbrow'. He simply writes for the universal human spirit, which has no class or economic divisions. I did find it interesting though that he is now writing mostly for commissions, which ends up being only for those people or groups that can afford it....

A Recipe for Success from the "Cook Book"

Today in class, we discussed Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony. I was struck by the uniformly powerful effect that this piece seems to have had on most of the members of our class, and I enjoyed the quote we read aloud (I'm paraphrasing here): "I'm not a religious person, but when I listen to Mahler, I become religious. He somehow manages to capture a sense of the infinite." A quick google search after class revealed page after page of listeners who have had similar experiences with Mahler's 2nd; sheer numbers will prove that this piece has the power to effect change! So what endows a musical work with this kind of evocative, uplifting, altering power? Does the power lie in the music itself (in its craft and composition)? Does it rest in some musical allusion to a universal human journey, some expression of absolute truth? Does it demand something from its audiences (and if so, what)?

Here's what it seems to boil down to for Cook:

*The composer's job: To create an environment where listeners can experience music as a natural phenomenon while recognizing it as a human construction and then to use this "hidden persuader" to cross barriers created by faulty assumptions.

*The audience's job: To listen with open ears and minds, ready to gain insight into other cultures/subcultures (in a word, to be willing to consider and possibly accept new forms/levels of truth).

*The net result: The ability to bridge cultural gaps, to encourage individuals and societies to reconstruct their own identities, and to effect lasting, positive change.

Here's the full quote:

"If both music and musicology are ways of creating meaning rather than just of representing it, then we can see music as a means of gaining precisely the kind of insight into the cultural 'other' that a pessimistic musicology proclaims to be impossible. If music can communicate across barriers of difference, it can do so other barriers as well. One example is music therapy, where music communicates across the cultural barrier of mental illness. But the most obvious example is the way we listen to the music of other cultures (or, perhaps even more significantly, the music of subcultures within our own broader culture). We do this not just for the good sounds, but in order to gain some insight into those cultures. And if we use music as a means of insight into other cultures, then equally we can see it as a means of negotiating cultural identity. Music becomes a way not only of gaining some understanding of the cultural 'other' but also of shifting your own position, constructing and reconstructing your own identity in the process. Music, in short, represents a way out of cultural pessimism. If we don't experience music as though it were a phenomenon of the natural world then we cut ourselves off from a means of overcoming difference. But at the same time we need to know that music is not a phenomenon of the natural word but a human construction. It is the ultimate hidden persuader."

Do we agree?

Conflicts in Detroit

From todays New York Times: Violinist Sarah Chang gets drawn into union battles in Detroit.

A Challenge

By the end of my second post in this class, I came to the conclusion that we need to change the context of our music concerts; to somehow re-package them. I have full-faith in the musical product, but I believe we may have taken the personal aspect out of the experience.
After we talked about it in class, it boiled down to; well, how do you change it? So, that got me thinking. In this new musical utopia, what would my new concert experience be like? Would it be longer, or shorter? Would I talk more than I sang? Would I play things twice if someone wanted to hear it again? Would I let people clap whenever they wanted?
Well, I think it is time to put my money where my mouth is. I have a piece of music that was written for me and another singer, that is prepared and ready to premier, but have no date set. Could we, my fellow music-makers, devise a concert experience that breaks out of the social norms of the usual graduation recital that we see quite often? If we (granted I do have my own ideas) come up with a plan, I am more than willing to put it into action, and then see what the public thinks. We're only going to change the future of classical music if we go out and actually try new things.

Thoughts on Entertainment and More Wagner

I was thinking about our discussion last week about art and entertainment, and a particularly relevant essay came to mind. It is called "Trickster in a Suit of Lights," and appears in Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon. Chabon is one of my wife Shannon's favorite writers (Shannon is a Ph.D. candidate in English). His writing is also very witty and fun. I will try and make copies for everyone tomorrow, but here are the first few sentences:

"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement..."

Chabon goes on to suggest:
"...Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted - indeed, we have helped to articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment."

Just like "art," "high culture," and "lowbrow," "entertainment" has inherited a lot of baggage regarding its meaning. Perhaps we can discuss this as a class tomorrow.

On another note, I wanted to mention that there is an awesome article on the MET's Ring cycle and how they are trying to change the image of opera in the latest edition of Newsweek. I will also try to xerox this for tomorrow.

Last chance to catch Mahler 2 tomorrow!

Hey all,

Just in case you didn't know, the BSO is performing Mahler 2 one last time tomorrow night at 8 PM. College Card tickets are available for the performance, and you can start picking them up at 10 AM at the BSO Box Office. I am going to go to the Box Office around 9:30 AM tomorrow to make sure I get a good place in line.

If you aren't doing anything tomorrow night and you haven't seen it already, you should definitely catch it! The BSO is one of the greatest symphonies in the world (no joke) and it is kind of amazing that we live mere miles away from their home!

Cheers,
Dave

Mahler 2

I must say, I too agree that the Mahler Symphony was absolutely incredible. It was actually the first Mahler I have ever seen live and I must say that I will never forget what a powerful piece it truly is. I was amazed by the playing of the BSO. There sound was unified and at times frightening, it seems that when they pull a big name out of the hat like Mahler they must also pull the big members of the BSO on stage for the performance. I have never seen so many original BSO members on stage at once before. Usually, they are mixed with either subs or subbing section players, but this was the BSO stacked. The soloists were incredible, the choir was off at times but their size and volume made up or any lack of musicality, and the organ entrance was both thrilling and disappointing. I know that me saying I wanted to be blown away with volume and force could be expected from others as well, James Levine's true genius was seen in that 4th movement. The organ only added to the sound, never once overtaking the orchestra, which then allowed the orchestra to grow to a full ff making a far more exciting overall experience. All and all, it was an incredible concert and I urge all of you to attend the next Mahler concert considering it is the REAL Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Mahler Symphony no. 2 with the BSO

This past Thursday, I went to see the BSO play a live performance of Mahler's Symphony no. 2, and it was an absolutely amazing performance. If you have a chance to see it this weekend, all of you should make an effort to see this monumental work.

When I'm usually listening to Mahler symphonies at home, I usually take breaks between movements because his symphonies are extremely long. There wasn't an intermission when I went to see the BSO, and I'm not used to listening for a prolonged period of time without a break. Usually when you go to a recital or any classical music concert, a performance half usually does not go for more than 30-45 minutes. I don't want to say that I have a low attention span, but for a large piece like this, there needs to be breaks. Dave from out Futures of Classical Music class may speak from experience as a french horn player, but I believe a taxing brass piece of music should have breaks. I know they are professionals, but I think the audience and the players themselves would like to have breaks. What do you (members of the class and blog readers) think about having breaks between movements of a large piece?

Clapping in between movements is considered impolite, improper, and incorrect during any classical music concert. During the BSO concert, there was an applause between movements when the soloists (vocalists) came onto the stage. I think it is kind of funny when someone plays a terrific 1st movement anywhere, and no one claps after a virtuosic piece of music. I also attended the Pacifica Quartet concert this past Tuesday, and I noticed after they played a terrific first virtuosic movement of Shostakovich's String Quartet no. 3, you heard an overall approval with no clapping. I would describe it as a light polite "ahhhhhhhhh" from the audience. Why not just clap for the performers? Is it so ingrained in ourselves not to make exceptions every once in a while? Referring back to Levine, you would obviously not do a thunderous, boisterous, bombastic applause after a nocturne is played, but I think after an awesome 1st movement, you should give a polite applause.

One other thing I found interesting about the Mahler symphony was the chorus. The chorus sings in the last movement only, but they came on stage, and literally sat down the whole time and stood up for the last movement. I guess it may take a while for them to come on stage together as a group, but I thought that would be the most opportune time to take a break while the chorus comes on stage for the last movement. I guess you could say the same thing about the harp or organ player who just have one solo through the whole piece, but this is a large chorus that you could have an exception for.

A Short(ish) Post About Schenker

I think I'm becoming known for notoriously long posts. :-) I'll limit myself to one thought-provoking quote from the "Cook book" and a few follow-up questions this time:

"Music theory emerged from the ferment of ideas that surrounded the reception of Beethoven's music. Heinrich Schenker did a kind of reverse engineering job; this model wasn't intended to represent the chronology of composition. Schenkerian analysis assumed the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was of value, and tried to demonstrate this by showing how the music really was coherent. It was an apologetic discipline, in the sense of being designed to defend a valued repertory, to underwrite its canonic status. In the decades after the Second World War, intuition and emotionally loaded language were ruthlessly eliminated. Theory and analysis became increasingly technical, increasingly incomprehensible to anyone except specialists. In this way, then, theorists were guilty of refusing to engage critically with the music. Instead of just deferring such engagement, like the musicologists, the theorists proclaimed it unnecessary or even philosophically suspect."

1. Does Schenkarian analysis occupy the same role in today's musical world that it did in Beethoven's? Should it? Has the focus on increasing technicality widened the gap between classical musicians and their audiences?

2. What does Cook mean when he speaks of "engaging critically" with music? Why do we support a theory that carries with it the baggage of so many built-in assumptions? What purposes might other forms of criticism serve, and what elements of critique are frequently absent in a contemporary academic setting? What can we, as musicians, do to foster the sort of "balance" that Cook describes in our own critical engagement with music?

Cross-polinating

I do not have a lot to comment on this week, but after the "New Approaches to Teaching" Class yesterday, I would like to pose a question for us to munch on. As artists in the 21-st century, do we need to band together with other creative artists (authors, dancers, philosophers) to help more clearly define the necessity of our arts to a population who may deem them frivolous? And if so, should we be spending more time learning about each others creative processes?

Follow-up on cultural work

Hi all,

Per Professor Jackson's request, I did some research into the meaning of the word "cultural work." Unfortunately, I still wasn't able to come up with much information. Most music textbooks make no mention of the term, and a Google search does not prove to be any more enlightening.

I did locate one essay called "The Cultural Work of Music Education: Nietzsche and Heidigger," by David Lines. In the essay, Lines never explicitly defines cultural work, though he states, "From the perspective of the cultural work paradigm, the music educator is attuned to the wider dimension of plurality and multiplicity, and is simultaneously a generator or energiser of new values and forms of cultural music-expression." (p. 16).

Though there is no entry for "cultural work" in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, I did find the following definitions useful:

work (n) = sustained physical or mental effort to overcome obstacles and achieve an objective or result.

For culture, there were several intriguing definitions:

culture (n) = the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

culture (n) = acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills.

culture (n) = the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education.

(I feel like there are some transparent assumptions contained within these definitions!)

Based on the context of the term, snippets of information I have gleaned from the Lines essay, the Merriam Webster definitions and on Levine's use of the word in Highbrow/Lowbrow, I propose the following definition for cultural work:

cultural work (n) = any act or effort which attempts to either reinforce and uphold existing cultural values, or seeks to create new cultural genres to be either lauded or derided.

Please feel free to add on, modify, or subtract from this definition - I'm sure it's far from perfect!

Stealing Music?

I was reading John's post on concert ticket prices, and I thought to myself about mp3 technology, and the great amount of people that steal music off the internet. Artists that are alive today definitely deserve money for what they create. There are certain artists, like Michael Jackson when he was alive, who buy the rights to artist's songs and earn a profit off the artists who may not even be alive, like the Beatles (I'm speaking just of John Lennon and George Harrison of course). In a Nike's sneaker commercial, Michael Jackson used "Revolution 9" (article in this link), and this action really upset ex-Beatles member Paul McCartney.

What exactly are you stealing when you download an mp3 you haven't purchased? Are you stealing a sound or are you truly stealing an artist's creation? I understand many artists are making a living off selling music, but there are record companies out there that own the rights to certain songs, and they just want to make a profit off a sound clip. Or how about Tupac who passed away in the mid 1990s, and the fact that he is making a profit for Death Row Records?

The other thought that came up was about hip hop artists that sample. One of the biggest controversies was when Vanilla Ice was accused of stealing the bass line from "Under Pressure" from the rock band Queen. He changed a few notes in the bass line, and it wasn't stealing. Is this really being an artist when you sample other artist's works? Does this make it music and are you an artist when you do this? I don't know how I feel about this, so I'm leaving this open to suggestions in the blog.

Miri Ben-Ari & Cameron Carpenter

I highly suggest that all of you hop on the Internet and check out both of these artists. Mari is an incredible violinist who primarily works within the fields of Hip-Hop and R&B. Cameron is an outstanding organist which provides a different setting for his recitals. I don't want to ruin the surprise but these are two individuals who are indeed trying to fill the gap of old and new. Whether you like them or not, you can at least admire there passion and determination to change. Enjoy!