Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
[75] Totally agree.
  

    
Undoubtedly the dirty, distorted, rule-breaking guitars, the sloppy
who-the-fuck-cares drum track, and the tobacco-scratched vocal cords which
make "Smoking in the Boys' Room" more than a poem are a recent cultural
phenomenon as well.
  

    
In retrospect, that tune sounds like the folk music of the 70s to me.
Literally thousands of garage bands sounded just like that and any of them
could have done it, had they had a songwriter who could hook a ride on the
zeitgeist.

 But the dirty, distorted guitars are breaking no rules.   It's just
generic mid-western folk music of its era, and actually quite well-
played.   It's Chuck Berry from 20 years earlier, only with the guitars
mixed hotter.   Even the song could have been written by Chuck.

Rule- breaking would be Larry Carlton, Mike Stern, Robben Ford and Lee
Ritenour using rock and blues overdrive in the jazz they were playing in
the mid-70s.
  

    
Listening to it just now made me think of Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen"
and "School's Out," but both of those are actually more complex, more
"written" songs. But all three commiserate with the high schooler in the
same way, and serve a similar purpose.

Thinking about the idea of emotional reactions to music -- that is, to
specific intervals, chords, and so on -- it does make me wonder whether
there are some shared, brain-based reactions to, say, the difference
between a major and a minor chord. I'm guessing that humans share
similar reactions to colors based on associations from nature (red is
danger, green is safe). 

Some intervals, like a perfect 5th, must be found in all music
systems, but do Indian or Japanese listeners react differently from
Westerners when hearing a minor 3rd, or a minor 2nd? (They must!)
  

    
[79] The emotional reactions we have to major and minor are culturally
relative, as are the emotional, perceptual and cognitive (consonant or
dissonant?) reactions to minor 2nds versus minor thirds.  Some of the
brain reactions are going to be similar across cultures, those that
register the pitches of the individual tones.  But any emotional,
semantic, or pragmatic associations we have with certain intervals are
going to incite different neural reactions across different people,
even within a culture.  Also, not all perfect 5ths are the same even to
us - it depends on their function within a tune.  I could be playing
you a jazz tune with flat five chords and suddenly surprise you with a
major triad featuring the open perfect fifth and your reaction would be
one of surprise (and it would be measurable with scalp electrodes as a
reaction called the P300).
  

    
Do musicians react differently than, um, civilians to surprises like
that? I could see them acknowledging it in a different way; surprise,
but understanding.
  

    
Interesting question.   I'd suspect the answer's yes, but would love to hear
from the guy with access to an MRI machine.
  

    
Surprise and understanding typically occur in different parts of the
brain.  In general, musicians' brains are different in subtle ways, but
so are the brains of anyone with expertise: athletes, writers,
painters, carpenters . . . that's what learning *is*.  But in the case
of musicians, they have more efficient systems for processing music and
more finely honed expectations, and this shows up in brain scans.
  

    
Do you see a difference between the brains of those that emphasize
exploring new way of music and those that a trying to "perfect" a form
or skill.
  

    
being a musician is a job

there is the music  one does for money
 and other music one does as part of ones personal life

you have to be very very self critical to reach a high enough standard
to earn a living, which means ones is seldom satisfied by a
performance
  

    
[85] Hugh, you sound like someone for whom all the joy has gone out of
making music, and I feel sorry for you.  I know lots of musicians who
are at the top of their field and they love what they do,
unselfcritically, and look upon each performance as a priviledge, an
opportunity to reach people, and to grow.  What you wrote might apply
to you, but I don't think that the non-musician readers here should
assume that all musicians share that feeling.
  

    
It's funny, I've known musicians of all stripes. Those who with musical
"day-jobs" that are quite separate from their efforts at self-
expression (art, if you will), and others who seem to still get joy out
of playing weddings or cruise ships. Likewise, in matters of taste,
those who soak up everything and those whose experience has led them to
a narrower view that vehemently excludes all but their own passions
(these have often been skilled jazz or classical musicians).
  

    
I've just read a fascinating article in the November Harper's, a review
of two books about "the invention of the blues" and a CD of early blues
records by "phantoms," artists about whom no information is known. But
the article largely describes the obsessive white collectors (including
the guitarist John Fahey) who gathered and preserved these early
sides. Two things stood out.

The first was a parenthetical aside: "the early blues was almost never
played in a minor key." There goes one of my cultural assumptions. 

The other is that the blues are somehow "pure" expressions from a folk
tradition, luckily caught on record, and not deliberate art in the
sense we reserve for Beethoven and Coltrane. Bluesmen like Robert
Johnson learned their craft from recordings as much as each other. The
author writes,

        Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing
        along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were
        chamber compositions.
  

    
But if you couldn't play a dance, you couldn't make a living. Not many
chamber recitals amoung country black folk in the '30s, I'd bet. 
  

    
I believe Robert Johnson could play all sorts of things, and played
street corners as well as dances. But what he recorded wasn't how he
made his living. And his "living" was mostly on the move, staying with
friends and strangers and playing for meals; at least, my impression
of itinerant blues musicians doesn't involve royalty checks.
  

    
Yeah, that's how I understood it. 
  

    
Wow.

'Playing for Change' -- interview on Bill Moyers:
<http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10242008/profile2.html>

<http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10242008/profile2.html>

This had me up dancing in my livingroom.
  

    
That is a pointer to an 18-minute episode of Moyers interviewing MArk
Johnson, codirector of Playing for Change, http://playingforchange.com.

It's a documentary that "brings together musicians from around the
world blues singers in a waterlogged New Orleans, chamber groups in
Moscow, a South African choir  to collaborate on songs familiar and
new, in the effort to foster a new, greater understanding of our
commonality."

Thanks for the pointer.
  

    
Daniel,

I enjoyed the final chapters of "Six Songs," especially the discussion of
ritual. I did find one erratum in the description of "Pomp and Circumstance":

    The first fifteen notes are all stepwise and then the sixteenth note of
    the piece takes a large ascending leap of a perfect fourth immediately
    followed by a falling perfect fifth, a move that grabs our attention.

There are in fact a couple of falls of a fourth before that, between notes 4
and 5 and notes 10 and 11. Probably you meant there are two jumps in a row for
the first time at the point you mention.
  

    
[94] You're absolutely right.  IN fact I caught this at the copyedit
stage but the correction didn't make it into the book.  Publishing is
fraught with pitfalls of all sorts.  Future printings will correct
this. Sorry about that!
  

    
Dan, maybe you can talk about your current projects. You seem to be
balancing science, book promotion, and music -- I note you'll be
playing a rock festival for scientists in spring.

What's going on at the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and
Expertise at McGill? Can you explain the workings of the lab and the
topics you concentrate on? 

For instance, I note you research the musical functions of people
diagnosed with the genetic disorder Williams Syndrome, which sounds
intriguing.
  

    
[96] My lab has 15 researchers - full time technical staff, visiting
professors, doctoral students, post-doctoral students, and undergrads. 
We look at the science of musical sound from a number of different
methodological perspectives, using brain scans (neuroimaging),
psychophysics, and studies of special populations such as Williams
Syndrome, autism and Down Syndrome.  When the special populations are
defined by a genetic abnormality, it helps us to better make links
between genes, brain development, and behavior.

I have about 25 projects going on in parallel.  We've just finished a
3 year project on the nature of music cognition amongst people with
autistic spectrum disorders.  I can't (ethically) talk about that work
until it is reviewed by peer-reviewers, but I can say we found some
important structural differences in the way that individuals with ASD
understand music.  We're also working on understanding the perceptual
differences in mp3 vs CD vs SACD; absolute pitch perception; the
perception of timing; and the way in which timing and amplitude
variation in music conveys emotion.  

I'm able to travel and write books and play music because I have a
very talented group of people in the lab who do most of the work.  We
meet regularly in person, by phone or email, and that's how things keep
on keeping on.  One measure of their talent is that I've been able to
confer 5 doctoral degrees (PhD) in the 8 years I've been at McGill, and
supervised the training of 3 post-doctoral fellows, and all are now
employed at top places such as UCLA, University of Michigan, and
University of British Columbia.  
  

    
It seems like it must be a heady time in the field, which you described
as being small enough that you all are relatively familiar with each
other, personally and academically. Even the lay reader gets a chance
to participate not only with your books, but Oliver Sacks's excellent
"Musicophilia," Robert Jourdain's "Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy"
(which I own but I haven't yet read), and several other books Amazon
reveals are available on the subject.

Did you read Sacks's books, or any of the others in this space?
  

    
I've read all the books on music and the brain.  I had the opportunity
to read Oliver's in draft form.  The books are really complimentary in
that there isn't really any substantial duplication from one book to
another.  If you're interested in the field, my books and Oliver's are
perhaps the best place to start (they're intended for a lay audience)
and then the excellent books by David Huron (Sweet Anticipation) and
Ani Patel (Music, Language and the Brain) are higher level and
rewarding.  Two books by Leonard Meyer are considered classics in the
field (
  

    
Emotion and Meaning in Music, and Music, The ARts and Ideas).  I read
Jourdain's book and although it is a bit dated, it is also a good read.
For the more ambitious/advanced reader, I strongly recommend Diana
Deutch's "Psychology of Music" book from Academic Press.

There has been an exponential increase in research articles on music
and the brain over the last 20 years. This is indeed a heady time.  As
my old boss David Liddle (ex Xerox-PARC) used to say, it's a fertile
field with a lot of low-hanging fruit.