What is NOT music & What is just BAD music

If you covered your house with a coat of Sherwin-Williams would you call it art?

No.
You painted.
You didn’t create art.

If you closed your eyes and pecked randomly at your computer keyboard would you call it a poem?

No.
You typed.
You didn’t write poetry.

If you put a pair of shoes in the oven would you call it cooking?

No.
You ruined a pair of shoes.
You didn’t make a meal.

If you dropped a television on your foot and screamed in pain would you call it singing?

No.
You made noise.
You didn’t make music.

If you poured a bucket of golf balls on top of a xylophone would you call it a song?

No.
You made noise.
You didn’t make music.

If you took a group of college students and asked them to make sounds using items found in Busch Academic Center, Room 1423 on the afternoon of November 16th would you call it music?

I wouldn’t.
But still, it was fun.

.
.
.
.
.

Sound comes in waves
& so does light.
My desk lamp
does not sing to me.

Radiohead rules. Coldplay sucks. (or Why Contemporary Music Listening Tests Are Hard – Part Two)

Radiohead’s first album Pablo Honey (1993) was not groundbreaking stuff – some fuzzy guitars, puzzling lyrics sung with tortured emotion, a heavy reliance on the juxtaposition between soft verses and loud choruses – they easily could have been mistaken for a British version of Nirvana.

The Bends (1995) proved that Radiohead was not a one hit wonder. While Pablo Honey sounded very consistent, The Bends explored new sonic territory with the addition of samples, keyboards, and heavily modulated guitar tones. The songs were also more compositionally complex, exploring chromaticism, mid-song key changes, and alternate time signatures.

OK Computer (1997) went one step further. Building upon the progress of The Bends, Radiohead delivered OK Computer, which was amazing as a collection of songs, but even more impressive when viewed as a whole. The concept album – a concept which hadn’t been popular since Pink Floyd’s heyday [The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), and The Wall (1979)] was back. OK Computer was widely praised by fans and critics alike:

OK Computer is consistently featured on 'best albums' lists, and has been seen by some critics as one of the most significant rock albums ever recorded. It received a number one placing in a 1998 Q magazine poll in which readers were asked to name the "greatest album of all time", and achieved top placement once again in 2005. Critics at Q magazine also named it as the 2nd greatest British album of all-time in June 2000. It was nominated for the 1997 Mercury Music Prize. In 1997 it was placed at number 7 in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM; while in 2003 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 94. It's often placed inside the top 10 albums of all time on the Rate Your Music: Top 100 Albums of All Time although this list changes regularly. Rate Your Music users also voted it as the greatest album of all-time in March 2006 .The Mexican version of Rolling Stone Magazine named it as the 4th greatest album of all-time in 2004. The album also came in at number one in Channel 4's 100 Greatest albums programme broadcast on Channel 4 on April 17, 2005 in the United Kingdom. In 2004 it placed number 5 on MuchMoreMusic's 40 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years. In 2003, Pitchfork Media placed it at number one in a list of 100 Best Albums of the 1990s. In June 2005 it was named as Spin Magazine's number one album of the years 1985-2004. And in April 2006 Irish musicians at Hot Press named it the 2nd greatest album of all-time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 162 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album ranks at #14 on The All Time Top 3000 Albums at Acclaimed Music.net (The Most Recommended Albums and Songs of All Time), and only second behind Nirvana's Nevermind for albums released in the 1990s. In December 2006, it was voted #3 in the My Favourite Album survey by Australia's ABC national media organisation, behind Dark Side of the Moon and Jeff Buckley's Grace.

So Radiohead had some big shoes to fill with their next album. But instead of delivering OK Computer, Part Two they completely changed their sound and put out Kid A – an album that eschewed multi-tracked guitars in preference of lush keyboard textures – moving away from alternative rock and towards electronica music.

And this brings up a common characteristic of great composers – they innovate. Great composers are constantly exploring new ground. Instead of playing it safe, they take risks. They may sometimes fail at their attempts, but when they succeed they have the potential to stumble upon unparalleled innovations.

And this can make the work of great composers difficult to identify. The consummate example of an innovative composer has to be Igor Stravinsky: neoclassicism, primitivism, nationalism, serialism, as well as the use of ostinato, musical quotation, and folk material. The scope of these innovations is beyond the scope of this blog (and frankly beyond the scope of my understanding) but they served to solidify Stravinsky as a major part of the musical canon.

Let’s contrast this with Coldplay. Coldplay is a second rate copy of Radiohead at best. (Even their name is similar – two short unrelated words merged into one new compound word.) Coldplay cribbed the sound of “Fake Plastic Trees,” the biggest single from The Bends, and adopted it as their blueprint for their entire repertoire. Coldplay has never produced one innovative musical idea, and it is doubtful that they ever will.


"Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead (1995)
"Yellow" by Coldplay (2000)
"Blue" by The Fruit Guys (2006)

Personal Timbre – The Missing Element (or Why Contemporary Music Listening Tests Are Hard)

In the 1990s Johnny Cash’s career was revived by legendary producer Rick Rubin, best known for working with acts such as The Beastie Boys, Slayer, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. These American series albums (as they became to be known because they were released on Rick Rubin’s own label American Recordings) are haunting and sparsely arranged. Most tracks are simply Cash’s voice and acoustic guitar and when other instrumentation is used it takes a backseat to the output of Cash himself.

A striking aspect of this collection is the large volume of cover songs and the variety of the covered material:

“Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails,
“Rusty Cage” by Soundgarden,
“Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode,
“One” by U2,
“In My Life” by The Beatles,
“Desperado” by The Eagles,
“I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty,
...and on and on and on

However, what is even more interesting is how Johnny Cash makes these songs his own. Without changing much from the original structure of the songs, Cash delivers these tunes in such a way that they all sound like Johnny Cash songs. He manages to turn everything from grunge to industrial to synth pop to classic rock into a Johnny Cash style country dirge. I’d venture a guess that listeners unfamiliar with the original tunes would not even question whether or not Cash wrote these songs. I’d hypothesize that this is mostly due to the timbre of Cash’s voice.

With the majority of music we’ve experienced this semester, in determining a piece of music’s composer we are left to guess from a list of clues – amount of chromaticism, instrumentation, genre, etc. However, these generalizations can prove to be misleading. Schoenberg did not always write atonally, Wagner did not only write operas, and Varèse didn’t just write percussion pieces.

Timbre is an especially sticky subject. A piano is a piano is a piano. (unless John Cage has instructed you to fill it full of erasers, tacks, and spoons) And I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (Maybe some people could, but I couldn’t.)

Many of the advances in timbre are related to new technologies – Steve Reich’s tape loops, George Crumb’s amplified string quartet, and the Moog synthesizer. The electric guitar has become an enormous source of timbral variety. There are so many different combinations of guitars, pick-ups, amplifiers, and effects available that the possibilities are practically limitless.

However, the most instantly identifiable timbral element in modern music is the human voice. In contrast to operatic singing in which it seems there is an ideal tone which all opera singers strive for, early on rock ‘n’ roll accepted the individuality of the human voice. Artists such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis probably wouldn’t have made the cut on American Idol (the nadir of contemporary music) but, what they lacked in technical proficiency, they more than made up for in sweat and soul. Thankfully this acceptance of individuality continues to thrive to today and provides us with a rich diversity of performers from which anyone should be able to find something they enjoy.

Six Little Piano Pieces in a Three Room House

“There must not be any preconceived notion or design for what the poem ought to be… I’m not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything… only poems. If the poem has got to be sonnet (unlikely tho) or whatever, it’ll certainly let me know.” – Amiri Baraka
(click here for bio)

“I’m serial. I’m super serial” – Al Gore
(click here for funny video)

I have a problem with serialism, twelve-tone technique, dodecaphony, atonality or whatever name you want to call it. It seems to take the emotion and creativity out of music and reduces composition into the solution of a mathematical equation. All twelve tones must be represented equally? Ridiculous. I tried to think of parallels in other art forms, but couldn’t really find anything to adequately compare. Can you imagine writing a poem in which all 26 letters must be used an equal amount of times? How about painting a picture in which all the colors of the rainbow must be represented – and in equal amounts. The closest metaphor I could find are some of the buildings of architect John Hejduk. Just as the serialists of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg) worked within the confines of rigid twelve-tone structure, Hejduk also experimented with the confines of simple geometric shapes. One series of his explored the use of three shapes (circle, square, and diamond) – and fractions of these shapes in the design of a single-family home. *The pictures below are from “Mask of Medusa”.

Half House

One Quarter House


Three Quarter House


To my knowledge none of these houses were ever actually built. This is most likely because they are impractical. I personally have enough trouble arranging furniture in a room while worrying about where the electrical outlets are and which way the door opens. Can you imagine trying to put a bookcase against a circular wall? Or figuring out how to decorate two walls which meet each other at a 45-degree angle? I think these buildings are interesting to look at, but they are best left in the hypothetical world.

In the same way I think that serialism was a revolutionary idea. However, the questions it forced composers to ask were much more important than the answers which those composers provided.