Category Archives: Listen Dammit!

October 15, 2010

Listen Dammit! II: Get Whitey by Frank Zappa

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Frank Zappa - The Yellow Shark Sometimes one piece of music is enough to subsequently appreciate the complete oeuvre of an artist. Take “The Yellow Shark”, for example. It was the last album released by Frank Zappa before his untimely death in 1993. It features transcriptions of various pieces for synclavier and original compositions performed by the Ensemble Modern. The album is a mixture of fan well-known favourites, like “Uncle Meat” and “G-Spot Tornado” and some pieces which are a bit “challenging to the ear”; “Times Beach II”, “Pentagon Afternoon” and “Ruth Is Sleeping” to name a few.

I first got the album when I was 12 or 13 years old and rented a lot of CDs at my local library, which was very small and had a dreadful audio collection.1 Strangely though, they had one CD by Zappa: “The Yellow Shark”, which isn’t his most famous release, but was the most recent at that time. The only reason I took the CD home was because of the enigmatic old man on the cover of the album, and maybe because of the fact his name sounded somewhat like that of a wizard. So in short I choose the album because the guy on the cover looked cool.2 I remember liking the first few tracks and skipping the rest of the album until “G-Spot Tornado”.

I didn’t listen much to the album until I discovered Zappa’s whole oeuvre a few years back. For me, one track on the “The Yellow Shark” symbolises Zappa’s musical practice in quite a neat way. It’s called “Get Whitey” and it’s simply beautiful. Like “Outrage at Valdez” the fragile harmonies barely seem to hold together and come in and out of focus. After a while those typical Zappa chords appear, you can hear them in “Outrage at Valdez” as well, as the meander through the subtle melancholy. They’re quite noticeable when you pay attention around the 3.50 minute mark of “Get Whitey”, when most of the ensemble (piano, brass, percussion) joins in to play an array of chords together.

“Get Whitey” is the reason why I still play the complete “Yellow Shark”. Reaching track 18 always makes me want to turn the volume up.3

  1. The collection consisted mostly of the typical favourites by many of the dinosaurs of the rock and pop genre. ↩
  2. I know, I know, a terrible habit… ↩
  3. “Outrage at Valdez” as well, by the way, which is even more overtly sad compared to “Get Whitey”. Not strange, considering the subject matter. ↩

October 1, 2010

Listen Dammit! I: Scott Walker — Tilt

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Scott Walker - Tilt Bloody hell… Just finished listening to “Tilt” by Scott Walker. I’ve had this album for ages, after a friend played me some tracks on his car radio, and attempted to listen to it several years ago with headphones on. This was a mistake. “Tilt” is one of the few albums that scared the shit out of me. The second track “The Cockfighter” starts very tranquil but features some extremely sudden noises, which start around 1.30. I first listened to the album in the middle of the night and I almost threw my headphones through the room.

But when listening to the album again today and waiting in fearsome anticipation for the terror that is “The Cockfighter”, it didn’t scare me as much. Sure there are the sudden noises, but they didn’t put me off from listening to the remainder of the album.

“Tilt” is a strange beast. Especially if you know the history of Scott Walker, who started out as the lead singer of The Walker Brothers and a pop idol in the sixties. He continued solo and performed with the reunited Walker Brothers in the seventies. Pop ballads were his trademark, though his solo work is allegedly a bit more adventurous. Things start to get interesting with Walker’s sporadic releases (just three) from the eighties on. “Tilt” is the second release featuring the new Scott Walker who now sings with an almost operatic voice amidst electronic and orchestral soundscapes. “Farmer in the City”, “Face on Breast” and the aforementioned “The Cockfighter” are good examples if you want to know how the new Walker sounds. It’s a bit like the transformation David Sylvian underwent after his departure from Japan, culminating in his latest albums “Blemish” and “Manafon”.1
Walker has a much darker side than Sylvian however, who remains quite poetic in his solo output. Walker’s fascination for gruesomeness is even more evident on “The Drift”, where the sudden outbursts of noise are even more extreme. Using a pig’s carcass as percussion isn’t going to result in the most elegant rhythms either. Yes, he did that. Compared to “The Drift” “Tilt” is the more accessible Scott Walker. Sure, it’s theatrical, majestic and you really have to like Walker’s use of his voice, but the result is brilliant. It’s a bit like reading a Thomas Pynchon novel, terrifying at the start but all the more rewarding in the end.

The thing is though, now I’m too scared to listen to “The Drift”…

  1. Which are great albums as well, by the way. ↩

February 28, 2010

Three Tales

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“Three Tales” by Steve Reich is one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music written in the last two decades. It’s among Reich’s best works as well.

I generally don’t like operas and yet “Three Tales” is classified as a video opera — the visual accompanyment was created by Reich’s wife Beryl Korot. The piece is wonderful though, both in tone and timbre. And the complete lack of arias sung by pompous baritones and tenors certainly helps.

The opera is divided in three movements, each detailing a scientific event of the 20th century. The first part deals with the Hindenburg Zeppelin and the second about the American nuclear test on the Bikini atoll during the fifties.

The last movement is my favourite, an analysis of cloning, genes and the fusing of man and machine. You can have a different opinion than Reich on the matter (I certainly do), voiced by rabbi Steinsaltz and evident by the fact the previous acts of the opera end in disaster. But the movement itself is magnificent. This is largely due to the fact that the music follows the characteristic voice melody of the people Reich and Korot interviewed — inluding key scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks. But there’s something else, a sense of constant tension, of danger even. Nico Muhly, a composer and protégé of Philip Glass, explains the feeling than I’ll be able to:

Listen to how outrageous the choral harmonies are on the slow chords behind the active snare drum anxiety in the foreground: “Here we are, under the tree again!”
[…]
As is his wont, Steve Reich ends it in this weird modified six-four inversion, so you get the simultaneous feeling of resolution and suspense. This is a very effective technique for creating precisely the emotional ambiguities that works like Three Tales rely on.

Nico Muhly, “Beautiful Pictures”, 2007

*= Richard Dawkins says the following in “Three Tales”, which corroborates with my views on cloning and genetic engineering:

“Once upon a time there was carbon based life, and it gave over to silicon based life.
I don’t view the prospect, with equanimity maybe I’m just sentimental.”

Richard Dawkins, “Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality”, Three Tales Libretto, 2003

September 29, 2009

Moja bieda

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Franz Liszt
During my teenage years I was rather obsessed with Romanticism and the music of Frédéric Chopin in particular. My tastes have broadened since then, but I’m still very fond of Chopin and piano music in particular, so I decided dive into the piano works of two other Romantic composers; Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt.

Schubert is universally beautiful, but I’m still not sure about Liszt. Most of the work I’ve heard from him comes across as technically complex, but rather cold. Liszt was a piano virtuoso in his days, which accounts for the technical complexity of his works, but so was Chopin. It’s as if Liszt treats the piano as a one-man, one-instrument orchestra, while Chopin is attempting to let the piano sing. It’s a bit hard to explain in words.

Another problem I have with Liszt are the various interpretations by pianists. A popular consensus seems to be that all of his music should be played forte and if possible fortissimo. Now, it could be that they’re just following the original annotations by Liszt, but so much emotion is getting lost by such interpretations. It’s like listening to variations on György Ligeti’s thirteenth étude, “L’escalier du diable” (wonderful music by the way), which has extreme dynamics — fffffff near the end of the piece.

Consider the Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, popularly known as the “Minute Waltz”, by Chopin. This particular piece of music has been raped to death by pianists who frantically try to squeeze all of the notes of the waltz in 1 minute of playing time — which is the amount the nickname and popular myth dictates. Sure, it’s a fast waltz, but it wasn’t at all intended to be played within the constraints of one minute. It’s just as annoying as the musicians who overuse the tempo rubato, just because they’re playing music by Chopin. So much is lost in those interpretations.

It could be that Liszt just isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t care much about Rachmaninoff either, who suffers from the same cold approach to writing for the piano. But I’m going to listen to some more music of him to see if my opinion changes. I’ve got some recordings by Leslie Howard which are a definite improvement over Sviatoslav Richter*, I must say.

*= I know. He’s one the greatest pianists of the 20th century. But still.

April 20, 2009

Minimalism

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I really like the music of the composers who were categorised as minimalists in the 70s, people such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young.

Philip Glass’s music never did much for me, however, despite him being one of the most well-known composers of the latter half of the 20th century. I do own some recordings of his work and I have been listening to them again recently. The problem I have with Glass is that he basically stopped composing truly new music from roughly the early 80s. With “truly new”, I mean compositions like “Einstein on the Beach” or “Music in Twelve Parts”. Instead Glass seems to be content with a limited musical vocabulaire; as if the integral body of his later work is one big, integral minimalist composition utilising just a basic set of musical motifs.

It’s hard to describe what I mean exactly, you’d have to listen to some of his work. Listen to three pieces from his soundtrack for the movie “Koyaanisqatsi” (notably “Vessels”, “Pruit Igoe”, “The Grid”) and compare these with parts from “Glassworks”, for example. While the overall melody of these compositions might differ, the groundwork of all these pieces stems from an identical, almost hysterical, pulsating base motif which Glass uses eagerly in a lot of his work. I guess that’s what makes his work less appealing to me than the work of, say, fellow composer Reich, who is often in one breath with Glass.

Reich’s music also still explores themes which he started to use in the 70s — repetition, pulsating rhythms, voice vs. music, etc. — but he hasn’t stopped trying new things. Of course “Three Tales” can be seen as a continuation of his experiments with taped voices (“It’s gonna rain”, “Come out”), but it’s still very different from his work in the 1960s and 70s. I think Reich will be regarded as more important than Glass by musical historians in the near future, despite, or even because of, his celebrity status and high production.