One last bit o’ random linkage, before I retire from Blogging until….well, tomorrow: an intriguing article about the trials-and-tribulations of various authors, before they were published. I’m somewhat past the point of being soothed by the fact that the path to print pretty much sucks for everybody, but it’s still nice to read this stuff once in a while.
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Yar will soon be doing his part to ensure the liberal heremony of the Next Generation. Mwooo-hoo-hahahaha. (And send him some congratulations.)
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I’m giving the Image of the Week a breather this week. Tune back in next Thursday. (Actually, tune in tomorrow. But for the Image, look back next Thursday.)
(ADDENDUM: No wonder I don’t feel like digging about for an Image today. It’s not Thursday. Holy Crap, I’m totally off my rocker this week. Ugh!)
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WE ARE BUFFALO! HEAR US ROAR!!!
(This is the attitude Buffalo needs, and lots of it. Go, Donn Esmonde!)
A few other Buffalo notes abound on this most crappy of Thursdays (it’s cloudy and breezy, actually not “crappy” at all, a nice break from the hot and humid of the last couple of days):
:: Via Bookslut I see that, on this list ranking American cities by literacy, Buffalo ranks 33rd. The first thing that strikes me is that they use a population figure of 328,123, which is an old figure: in the 2000 census, Buffalo’s population dipped below 300,000 people for the first time since…well, it’s been quite a while. But 33rd seems like a pretty decent placement, considering that Buffalo manages to outrank New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and other much larger metropolises that I would figure would be much more literate. (Especially NYC! But then, I’m certainly proud of Buffalo outranking Indianapolis…heh!)
The study on which the ranking is based looked at five factors in determining overall literacy: Education, Publications, Newspapers, Libraries, and Booksellers. Buffalo’s rankings on these is as follows:
Education: 58
Publications: 46
Newspapers: 18
Libraries: 5
Booksellers: 41
Obviously, Buffalo’s relatively high placement in the main ranking is largely due to the excellent Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system, which is surprisingly extensive for a city of Buffalo’s population. And I’m a bit surprised that Buffalo’s bookselling rank is actually as high as it is, given that Buffalo really isn’t that great a city for bookstores.
:: I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but one project I think is pretty nifty is the building of a filling station, based on architectural designs by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Buffalo. This is in connection with Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Museum, and will further cement the city as a prime destination for people interested in Wright, as well as being another jewel in Buffalo’s architectural crown.
:: Finally, congrats to Kara Kerwin on her new job, even if it means another smart person leaves Buffalo.
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I didn’t catch much of last night’s Baseball All-Star Game, even though it counted*. I watched some of the player introductions, enough to get annoyed that some of these guys look like they played in last year’s Little League World Series, and I caught a spare moment here or there in the course of the game. What struck me most, of what I did see, was the seventh inning stretch, when Amy Grant came out and performed one of the shakiest renditions of “God Bless America” in history. It was painfully obvious that something was amiss with Miss Grant — as if she couldn’t hear the accompaniment and thus wasn’t sure what key she in which she was supposed to be singing. She kept wincing and putting her hand to either ear, and when she was done she couldn’t keep the “My God, that was horrible” expression from her face. I’ve never been a big Amy Grant fan, but you hate to see someone tank like that. Wow.
* For those not paying attention, the idea this year is to have the winning team of the All-Star Game — the NL or the AL — secure home-field advantage for its league champion in the World Series. Previously, it’s been the case that they simply alternated year to year: last year, the AL had games 1,2, 6 and 7; the year before that, the NL had those games. Now, the AL will have them, by virtue of their victory last evening. It’s a pretty goofy idea, but there it is.
(By the way, here’s a good trivia question: What are the only two days of the year when none of the four major professional sports — MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA — are active? The day before and the day after the MLB All-Star Game.)
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Over on Reflections in d minor, Lynn has a nice article about the first musical instrument: the human voice.
(What follows involves a lot of simplification and glossing-over of technical points. So, if any of my readers happens to be a professional musician or has a Ph.D. in Composition or Performance or some such thing, don’t lock-and-load with both barrels. Please oh please.)
There is a sense in which all instrumental music consists of attempts to simulate the human voice, and the terminology really drives the point home: instrumentalists are often said to be “singing” through their instruments, and young instrumentalists are constantly being advised (if their teachers are any good, that is) to listen to good singers and study the way they use their voices to shape and shade their music. The simple truth is, you can’t be musically aware if you’re not well-versed on the working of the human voice. That’s a point that I didn’t really understand until I attended a summer music camp late in my high school career. I had already been practicing my instrument (the trumpet) for years, but it wasn’t until that camp that I was required to participate in a choir. The change of focus was exhilarating. Singing honed my musical ear, both in terms of intonation (a basic requirement of any musician) and in terms of phrasing (what, in large part, differentiates between a competent musician and a good one).
What is “phrasing”? Well, music — in large part — deals with melodies. But melodies aren’t mere collections of notes so as to produce an appealing tune; a good melody will actually consist of several distinct phrases, and phrasing is simply learning how to tell one musical phrase from another, and being able to make clear in the course of performance where one phrase ends and another begins. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Take a famous melody — the great chorale theme of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for instance. As you hum it to yourself, you’ll probably find yourself taking a natural breath between the fourth and fifth bars. Not a full, deep breath, but a short snatch of air. You’ll do this for two reasons: (a) you probably can’t hold enough of a breath to sing all eight bars, and (b) given that, the natural place to breath is at the midpoint. Now, the “natural place” for that break won’t be in the exact middle of every melody, and this is partly why it gets harder to perform more modern works of music: the phrasing is less obvious. But it should be clear that the origins of phrasing lie in the demands of the human voice, and simply in breathing while singing.
Sir Georg Solti, who is probably my favorite conductor of all time, made this exact point in his Memoirs when he wrote about how, since he had learned conducting in the opera world, that when he came to symphonic conducting he still approached entirely-instrumental works from the standpoint of singing, looking for those natural breaks. It’s those “breathing spots” that allow music to take life. Music performed without such “breaks” in the melody tends to sound very unconvincing and mechanical. (This is the case of a lot of Baroque music, because the focus in those times was not on melody per se but on counterpoint and line, which is part of the reason why Baroque music is difficult for modern ears: we are accustomed to Classical and Romantic norms of phrasing. This is also true of improvisational jazz, where the phrasing can resemble a “stream of consciousness” type of thing, which in a sense it is.)
It’s odd that the sense of phrasing, which is intimately connected with breathing, is almost never to be found in young musicians. It has to be cultivated, and it’s harder to develop a fine sense of phrasing than it is to develop mere technical proficiency. That’s why young wunderkind virtuosos are fairly common, but young great musicians are not. It takes time, years of exposure to great musicians, before the sense of phrasing starts to develop. From my own experience as a wind instrument player, I remember comparing lung capacity with my fellow band members. We’d brag about how we could get through an entire strain of a Karl King march, with both repeats, on a single breath. And we had the most supreme admiration for those freaks-of-nature who could circular breathe. (That’s the ability to continue to play a wind instrument while taking more air in, at the same time. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that circular breathing wasn’t some mystical ability but a skill one could learn, and a nearly useless one, too.) We never realized that doing so shackled the music. A dance isn’t just motion; it’s a blend of motion and non-motion. Likewise, music isn’t just tones arranged artfully: it’s a blend of tone and silence, of exhaling and inhaling.
Now, composers have their own ways of helping with the phrasing: they can employ rests and fermati, for instance. But in large part, the responsibility of phrasing falls on the shoulders of the performers. They have to figure out where and how the music should “breathe”. This applies not just to soloists, like a pianist, but to entire orchestras. And then the difficulty of conducting becomes clear, because it’s much harder to find the correct phrasing when you have eighty or ninety musicians all playing at once. Hell, sometimes it’s hard just finding the melody in the first place, much less worrying about how to phrase it.
So that’s why the human voice is so important to the course of musical history: because all instrumental music relies not just on the voice’s sound, but on the voice’s necessity for breath.
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Rush Limbaugh will be doing NFL commentary on ESPN this fall. Well, OK. I’d get worked up about it, but I don’t really have a problem with it, especially since I don’t have cable and thus don’t watch ESPN anyway. I do recall that, years ago when I worked as an office temp in a college admissions office under a supervisor who insisted on listening to him every day, he’d occasionally break off his political stuff to talk a little bit about football, and I recall thinking, “I’d probably like this guy if he’d do sports and nothing else.” So, fine. Give him a shot. Doesn’t bother me.
And once I was watching his abortion of a TV show — you know, the one where he said “There’s a White House dog too” and held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton — and he did one football-related humor bit that I found funny. (Yes, just one.) This was when the main charge against President Clinton was that he was a waffler who constantly spoke from both sides of his mouth. Limbaugh held up a list of the week’s NFL games, with what he said were Clinton’s picks for the week circled. Every team was circled. I thought that was funny.
(Yeah, Limbaugh is almost never funny. But as Ian Fleming once wrote, “You cannot sow a million seeds without reaping one potato.”)