Playlist: Sleater-Kinney One Beat
Ani Difranco Out of Range

Knitting Project: New Fingerless Gloves (the left one of my hot pink cable knit ones has disappeared, if you've seen it please let me know). The new gloves will be grey and cranberry colored cashmerino.

I guess I never gave jam bands their due respect. Somehow in my head I have always seperated Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead more than is necessary. I think of the Dead and the Allman Brothers as pioneering jam bands, not musical groups furthering a jazz tradition. I was raised by hippie parents, so I am no stranger to jam bands, but the presentation today gave me new insight into and new respect for jam bands.

I laud the group for their emphasis on different types of music being jam ridden. My favorite band, Sleater Kinney jams on their most recent album, The Woods — in fact when I saw them live this summer during a jam they even sampled/stole/borrowed from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

Speaking of the issue of sampling v. stealing v. borrowing, the reading today was rife with interesting ideas. I love the Milton quote in the Oswald piece: "A good composer does not imitate, he steals" (136). Reading the Oswald piece on sampling and having listened to the Dolly Parton mix from Playlist 1, you can see how blending so much together could be a new piece of music. The Oswald piece made sampling more scholarly. What I want to know is, how different is Plunderphonics from License to Ill? Does the fact that Oswald doesn’t sing (at least on the Dolly track) or put his voice on it make it classier somehow? Is it his non rap background that helped him not actually get sued by the artists he enraged? If it is the rapping and sampling mix that makes the Beastie Boys more exploitive than John Oswald, then please explain the difference between Oswald and DJ Dangermouse. He mixed Jay Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album to make his own, the Grey Album. Sorry there is no way to actually obtain this music legally.as both Jay Z and I would assume Michael Jackson (he does own most Beatles rights, doesn’t he) have threatened to sue if the album is ever sold. In fact I think that for performing it hes been threatened with lawsuits. Anyway after that long ramble I was just trying to work out why DJ Dangermouse seems less academic than John Oswald. Funny that Oswald can seem academic, when you think about what he does and most artists you would study in a music course.

Modernist Music and Literature

Playlist:
Richard Thompson Mirror Blue
Various Artists Nick Hornby Songbook

The connection between modernist music and modernist literature continues to astound me. Maybe it is because both of the classes I have on Monday deal with this. It just seems to me that you can’t get through a Joyce piece without music entering in, and Joyce and other modernists seem to be omnipresent in modernist music. It must really be true that when you are an artist/philosopher/composer on the fringe there is much overlap.

It also makes me think of what drove art in this direction. Again I think of the Proud Tower, and Tuchman’s explanation of culture and the build up to World War I, it seems like modernism could be a direct reaction to World War I, but this isn’t the case. There are modernist pieces that predate the War, there were elements present in society that made modernism possible. What is it? I don’t know but there is certainly a feeling once the western world has industrialized that technology should be utilized to change the world for the better. There is some understandable backlash to ths idea post WWI, but the fascination with technology and newness survives. The change in how one views the artist and how the artist views the artist is very important. It makes me think of Joyce writing to Ibsen, how Ibsen was an artist that he put on a pedestal, but his correspondence with him makes you realize that the pedistal that the artist sits on is crumbling. The artist can no longer be separate from everything, the artist can no longer command absolute respect and awe. Joyce is an upstart student who is struck by awe, but still impudent when writing to his hero. The artist is no longer separate from the world so he can work, the artist is now down among the chaos. The chaos is very important. In the music, in the writing, everything was shaken up, traditional form mutated into a freer, yet possibly more complex style that was manipulated into a layered yet simple piece. When you look at Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Allemande you might first glimpse a simple scene or hear a simple song, but the complexity of the art lies beneath the surface. The art is complex in a way that is subterranean and subtle.

Noise Music

Playlist:
Mogwai, Rock Action
Architecture in Helsinki, Fingers Crossed
Julie Ruin, Julie Ruin


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Noise music at first its discordant noise, but after listening to it the way you judge music as music begins to change. I didn’t listen to much noise music before the project. I listened to a few noise bands and have been to a show with a noise dj. The noise DJ was like John Cage because it seemed as though it was composed/created on the spot. At first when you listen to noise music you only hear layered noises and a mixture of sounds. Then sometimes the rhythm of it comes out. Sometimes it seems that the rhythm never surfaces, but even then there is still value in the music. You can’t judge noise music by the same rubric you might use for other music.


Hawks and Sparrows, Untitled Track 2:

Intriguing how it came about, mixing different protests.
Starts with low percussion, the sort that you might hear from Fela Kuti.
Steady rhythm
0:14, a clanging bell like sound comes in with the locomotive percussive sound
0:34, more almost maraca like percussion
1:12 beats break up, become less regular
1:16 a haunting smooth sound
Would describe the way the beat is pulsating as lurching forward
1:34 the smooth sounds return for another four second bit
1:40 there is some overlap of the smooth and the lurching clanging beats
1:45 an upswell of noise and energy
lurching beat is more intense and louder
1:57 static sounds enter the mix
2:12 the absence of noise is more powerful than the clanging, the silent bits come through as much as the beat
The sound is muffled, then stops, starting again and finally muffling out completely.

I was excited about the first class. The playlist gave a sense of what the course was about. Plunderphonics as the second piece of music in the course was jarring in the way that they used ostenatos and Dolly Parton to pique your interest and then disrupt any notion that you ever had about Dolly Parton. Not that she really agreed to have her voice used for the mash-up, but it evokes a vision of her singing big boobs and bigger hair dressed in her Nashville finery while chaos erupts around her.
One of my favorite books that I have had to read for a class was the Barbara Tuchman book, The Proud Tower. In it she deals with art, music and culture leading up to World War I. One of the things she talks about is modernism like Stravinsky and the riots that would happen after a new, modern piece would appear. The outrage that the general public showed after seeing the modern dance paired with the new classical music was amazing. To think that people cared so passionately about composers and dance and propriety that they would rebel when they felt betrayed is refreshing. Stravinsky used ostenati and primitivism to turn the heads of his original audience. With impressionism, at least it was still music and yes the music might have painted with sound, but sound exploded on Stravinsky’s audience.
The mini projects should be fun. I am glad that for the first one I chose something I know relatively little about. Noise music is intriguing, and something that while you may know it when you hear it is difficult to define, and it seems even harder to research. The potluck was a good idea. We spent three hours eating food, talking and listening to noise music. I think that we all have an evolving sense of what noise music is and I hope that with further research (we specified more what we should be doing, so each person has their own piece of the project) we can learn even more. Slowly through research, class work and independent listening, what I may once have dismissed as dissonant sounds has evolved into music.