Last week, when my clutch began to fail, I called my dad for advice, as I always do when I have a car problem. Then we met up in Augusta and biked down the canal trail down to the old locks. He stood on the bank and within a few minutes figured out how they worked. Earlier that morning, we discussed the history of music theory. He loves to understand how things work, almost as much as he loves his kids.
My siblings and I owe much to our father: our interest in the natural world, our college educations, our appreciation of Al Green. So my 100th post is in honor of W.R. Okie III, the silver-bearded wonder from Hendersonville, NC. Already an expert in auto repair and plant genetics, he recently added "in-demand parenting guru" to his resume.
Happy birthday, Pa. Here's to many more years of home mechanics and tandem biking.
I think that there is no greater moment on Kathleen Edwards' Failer than these lines from the opening track "Six O'clock News":
And I know your momma calls you good for nothing
She says her baby is a failer and she don't want you calling
These are heart-breaking lines to be sure, but something happens on the title lyric that is absolutely exquisite. I must've replayed those lines 30 times to figure out what makes it so potent. Just that brief moment of weaving dissonance as she sings "fail-er" is the standout moment of the whole disc, and I spend the rest of the song wishing that they would reprise it. But they do not, and so I wear out my repeat button.
Thanks to a newly acquired understanding of music theory, I can say that it's Kathleen's voice dropping from 2nd to 1st scale degree, and Jim Bryson's harmony slipping from 7th to 6th, making a descending minor 3rd over the relative minor chord at that point, that makes for such a brilliant progression. So I know why it sounds so good, but I don't know why it sounds so good. I don't know why it makes my heart skip beats, or how it ended up in the final mix. I never will, and that's the beauty of it. It's just a serendipitous moment, a stunning mystery, eternally stuck in 1s and 0s.
My old friend Andrew has opened his own recording studio, and he uses industry standard technology to produce records, including Pro Tools and the evil genius plugin Auto-Tune. The latter has revolutionized the recording industry, and is second only to "partial nudity" in making Britney's career possible. The power in these tools are that they let you mold the sounds that people make into just about anything you want. With a few mouse clicks you can erase any musical limitation you bring into the studio. It simplifies the recording process, but it can suck the soul out of a song by making the singer sound like a robot. Now, Andrew tells me, there is a real-time version of Auto-Tune that frees a live performer up from the burden of singing on key. And a whole generation of young singers are growing up imitating the Auto-Tuned sound.
Failer is like I imagine the author's homeland of Canada: rough, beautiful, and often quite cold. There are parts that sound like they were done in one take without much preparation. But it works so well, especially for the melancholy, busted characters in Kathleen's songs. It's unpredictable and adventurous playing. This spirit of improvisation is the beauty of jazz, and on other levels, it's the beauty of life itself.
When you allow yourself to freewheel a little, sometimes good things happen. And when they do, because they weren't planned by an evil genius or a logarithm, they are striking and surprising, just like Kathleen and Jim's "failer". I think somewhere in this there's a lesson about the contrast between our efforts and the movement of God. When you get down to it, our best-laid plans are not that great.
This may not be a good analogy, but it's a bit like the difference between a cake and a baby: Work real hard, follow the recipe to the letter and the best you can hope for is a nice dessert. But you can make a baby just by fooling around.
Personally, I'd rather have metaphor on my birthday, but as long as it's delivered with applause...
Hey, Watanabe!!!
Congratulation for your baby & I sincerely hope many many good luck for the new commer to your family!
With simile&clapping,
Takamiya
Sylvia came to Spivey Hall yesterday to conduct a "masterclass". For those of you lacking in classical music pedigree, this is a session with a semi-famous professional musician where you perform for him/her and then get critiqued.
I haven't seen Sylvia's bio, but I know she is a diva because she showed up at the masterclass in a shiny, cherry red, leather pantsuit with scrunched up sleeves. She was pretty and statuesque and appeared to be much older than she appeared, if you know what I mean.
Most of the performers were just random people who paid to have Sylvia critique them, but a couple of my classmates sang. Chelsea, a 4th year mezzo-soprano with an uncanny resemblance to Jessye Norman, sang "Una voce poco fa" from Barber of Seville. Sylvia seemed genuinely stunned and actually said, "How do you sing all those notes?"
Then she made an interesting admission: "You just can't teach that."
I've been surprised to learn that singing well, even in opera and classical which require years of training, is still fundamentally determined by the sound you make when the doctor slaps your butt. No guru can make a great voice out of a bad one. You can only take a great voice and harness it, maybe polish it up a bit. The only people who get to be truly great singers are the ones that are incredibly gifted and work their [diaphragm] off.
Not that this bothers me a whole lot, since I've got no ambitions of being an opera singer. But my voice prof told me the other day that there have been studies of the best voices in history and most were found to have unusual bone structure in their hard palates. All this stressing over vocal chords and the key to sounding good is to be thick-headed.
I can see why there are a lot of music school dropouts. So much of it is wholly impractical. The faculty sometimes seem bent on hanging on, white-knuckled, to art forms that for all their beauty and complexity, have lost popular appeal and with it, relevance. And as someone who has returned to school to study music because I wanted what I make to serve people, this is distressing.
This was illustrated by the exchange that took place between Sylvia and my classmate Brandon, after his performance of "Lydia" by Faure.
Sylvia: You need to work on your French. Your vowels in particular are not far enough forward. Try this: oeuuuuuuwww.
Brandon: euuuuuuww.
Sylvia: oeuuuuuuwww.
Brandon: euuuuuuuuuuuwww.
Sylvia: (shaking head) oeuuuuuuwww.
Brandon: oeuuuuuuwwwwwgghhh.
And so on. I know that there is beauty here, in honoring the language, and in doing things well, with professionalism. But I can't help but feel that it's a useless beauty sometimes. And frankly, that's why I want to serve the Church with music. There's a context and a goal therein that makes all the beauty you can muster worthwhile, because it's nothing if not a reflection of Something else.
Filling in on short notice, I serenaded the following characters:
-1 owner of said establishment
-assorted homeless men
-1 suburban family of four
-4 extremely affectionate redneck punks from Douglasville
-1 portly white man with fake black dreadlocks
-1 semi-coherent ex-drummer
The latter, apparently deeply moved by my song, began to rap his table loudly with this hands. After the song, he asked if he could "play those congos".
"No," came the answer from the owner in the back.
I played the last song several times, and each time he urged "one mo'. playun mo'. i jusnow gettin' on." His name was Stanley, and he just had a birthday, which he was planning to mark with a couple of cylinders in a brown paper bag.
Afterwards, he asked for my number to start a band. "hey. uhm serious. got you. need two mo'. gon' make some cash," he told me. I gave him my number, but I doubt anything will come of it, since he wrote down a different number.
The dreadlocked white man just studied his Creative Loafing. At one point he stood up in the middle of a song clapping his hands loudly. Apparently this was not demonstrative enough, as he then began to dance frenetically around the room. Afterwards, he came up to tell me he "liked that song". The locks where attached to a fishnet wig, so that with his effeminate mannerisms, he gave the appearance of a kind of a drag queen Medusa. He asked what I did for a living, so I returned the question.
"Oh, nothing really. I'm a contestor. I win contests." He was going to South Africa on a trip that he recently won.
"Wow," I said, unsure of how to respond.
Yes, it was a strange night at IF.