For over thirty years I’ve been disturbed by the location of the downbeat in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”. I listened to it dozens of times without paying a ton of attention to the meter, and naturally heard the verses like this: (vocal rhythms extremely approximate) and the choruses like this: Once […]
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I recently went on a James Bond binge and watched all the canonical movies, ranking the theme songs as I went. Ethan Iverson graciously offered to host the resulting piece on his super usually-jazz-but-always-interesting blog Do The Math. It begins: One of the more entertaining categories of popular music of the last 50 years is […]
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Thursday, January 16, 2014
I’ve had a little more time now to study the structure of this piece. First, I’ll lay out the form as I see it: 0:00—0:13 (mm. 1—5): Intro figure 0:13—0:28 (mm. 6—9): Guitar & bass cycle 1 0:28—0:43 (mm. 10—15): Head 0:43—0:48 (mm. 16—17): Bridging material (based on m. 2) 0:48—3:31 (mm. 18—41, 42—65, 66—89): […]
Thursday, January 9, 2014
One of my favorite tournaments at the Boylston Chess Club is the annual Herb Healy Open House held every New Year’s Day. You get to socialize and play four relatively quick (G/40) games of chess, and there’s an unrated section if you stayed up too late the night before. This year I played in the […]
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Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Over a year ago I started transcribing Henry Threadgill’s “To Undertake My Corners Open”. I got to the 90% point a long time ago, but as with many projects, it’s the last 10% that takes the most calendar time. One thing that slowed me down is that Threadgill’s flute is super sharp, especially in the […]
If you write C++ code like I do, when you add a new method to a class, you: type the function signature into the declaration in the header file; copy and paste it into the source file; either type in the name of the class by hand or hunt around looking for another instance of […]
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Mnemosyne is a spaced repetition program for aiding memorization; see my first and second posts for more information on the program and how I use it. I guess it is high time for another update; when digging out the above posts I was startled to see that they’re from four years ago. I’ll mostly discuss […]
Saturday, January 12, 2013
This is a book about music cognition: attempting to understand how people understand the music they hear. Temperley’s main thesis throughout the book is that a profitable way to study music perception is to pretend that the listener is doing a Bayesian analysis to determine the structure (e.g., time signature and key) behind the musical […]
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid group has made some really interesting recent music in an original musical language, but I’ve seen very little discussion of what the language is, and Threadgill himself doesn’t seem to be very forthcoming. The best description I’ve found comes from guitarist Liberty Ellman in a phone conversation with Nate Chinen, but there’s […]
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Another step in my continuing quest to learn more about jazz by transcribing recordings. I like Wayne Shorter’s 1960s albums a lot, and “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” (YouTube video) is my favorite tune from the most famous of them, Speak No Evil. The spur to do a Shorter tune came when Ethan Iverson transcribed his solo from Lee […]