[Terez]

worry, on 20 July 2015 - 09:53 PM, said:

It's interesting that you come back to the buildup and release of tension in a song, because a lot of the musical repetition in hip hop is about crystallizing one or two emotions so musically it often intends to do the opposite. It's meditative or exemplary, rather than wandering or building towards something.

That is why I called it minimalistic earlier, in the academic sense. If there is a climactic approach it is deliberately done in a minimalistic fashion, by small variations, dynamic increases, etc. The instrumental video you posted is a perfect example of that style. The instrumentation and coloring in academic music is different, but the basic idea is the same. It doesn't do anything for me either way.

worry, on 20 July 2015 - 09:53 PM, said:

There's also plenty of non-vocal hip hop that doesn't get radio play for obvious reasons, but it's perhaps freer to explore sounds because they won't interfere with a vocal.

This is a very odd concept to me. If music and vocals are written to complement each other, then they can't interfere with each other. They can only magnify each other.

I mentioned earlier that somewhere around the 12th century the Church (the only source of written music) started to experiment with polyphony, i.e. more than one voice at a time, which creates harmony. Polyphony and harmony are not the same thing, though; harmony is vertical (in terms of written music) and polyphony is horizontal. Each voice does its own thing which is coherent when the other voices are taken away.

Bach was kind of like the Isaac Newtown of musical counterpoint. I posted two examples earlier, one for organ which is a beautiful example of counterpoint, and the other for violin, an instrument which can barely manage polyphony. Sometimes, though, the counterpoint does get really thick and the voices interfere with each other.

This is one of my favorite fugues. It's got 4 voices and they're really busy, but every now and then you can hear one of the voices distinguish itself by contrary motion.



[Glenn Gould: this is what happens to you when you take too much valium and spend your life hunched over a piano (wait for it). Or as one guy said in the comments of the above video, "neurotyczny i genialny".]



Anyway, that is part of what I was talking about earlier when I said there's more to it than just "layers".

worry, on 20 July 2015 - 09:53 PM, said:

You won't hear that on rap radio, of course, but on the other the radio sucks for most formats.

It's not bad for classical and "oldies" because they have a wide pool to choose from and by consequence about half of it is good. But I still tend to think that, as recently as 10 years ago, most genres had a better good/suck ratio than hip-hop stations. In the last 10 years or so minimalism has become the norm in pop music too. Pop music has really fallen in love with perfect 5ths, like the Church of old. That is the specific reason why so much pop music sounds the same these days. The vocals go back and forth between the root and the 5th a lot, and most of the melody falls within that 5th. That's...dumb. It's only like, half an octave. Mariah Carey has a 5-octave range. Or she did; I don't know if she can still hit the high notes but I bet she still has 3 octaves (which is an amazing range even for an opera singer, not counting falsettists and castrati).

[HiddenOne]

Thanks Terez, it's been years since I was reminded of Gould. I just spent a few minutes reviewing his bio on Wiki, and I can say for sure that he would have had a grand time with the digital audio workstations that we have access to now. It was interesting to me that he modified his pianos to attain superior action from the mechanism.

[Terez]

HiddenOne, on 24 July 2015 - 04:09 PM, said:

Thanks Terez, it's been years since I was reminded of Gould. I just spent a few minutes reviewing his bio on Wiki, and I can say for sure that he would have had a grand time with the digital audio workstations that we have access to now.

He was very much unlike other classical pianists in his fascination with the technical side of things and he was very much involved in the process with his own music, despite being more capable than most pianists of doing it flawlessly in one take.

HiddenOne, on 24 July 2015 - 04:09 PM, said:

It was interesting to me that he modified his pianos to attain superior action from the mechanism.

I am personally not fond of the resulting sound. I just like Gould's playing because there's not much affectation in it; he puts so much effort into suppressing his emotions that what remains is really honest and (ironically) spontaneous.

[worry]

Terez, on 24 July 2015 - 03:46 PM, said:

worry, on 20 July 2015 - 09:53 PM, said:

There's also plenty of non-vocal hip hop that doesn't get radio play for obvious reasons, but it's perhaps freer to explore sounds because they won't interfere with a vocal.

This is a very odd concept to me. If music and vocals are written to complement each other, then they can't interfere with each other. They can only magnify each other.

Well that's kind of my point. Instrumental hip-hop doesn't have to complement or accommodate a vocal. Rhythm and vocal cadence working together are key when both present (though I'm not excluding experimental stuff, and there are exceptions to every rule), and instrumental hip hop can get really spazzy, off kilter, improvisational, and there are sounds that potentially cut through vocals (like scratching). You might say it's even in place of vocals sometimes, as it usually still goes over a beat.

Re: radio, I imagine that's regional. Strict oldies stations have died around here (there might be a few better ones towards L.A.) and even classic rock stations are starting to infuse off-brand alt-rock and post-alt-grab bag stuff like Sublime of all things. It's...uh...off-putting.

Annnyway, I guess I might be a minimalist at heart. I tend to find those Gould videos impressive rather than enjoyable, if you catch the distinction. It's closer to watching someone run skillfully through a Ninja Warrior course than it is listening to a song I like.

[worry]

On another note, today is Paul's Boutique Day at KEXP Seattle, and they're spending 12 hours breaking down the album start to finish:
http://blog.kexp.org...-crate-digging/

[Terez]

worry, on 24 July 2015 - 09:14 PM, said:

I guess I might be a minimalist at heart. I tend to find those Gould videos impressive rather than enjoyable, if you catch the distinction. It's closer to watching someone run skillfully through a Ninja Warrior course than it is listening to a song I like.

As I said earlier, this is a pretty common reaction to Bach. There's nothing wrong with that. Most talented musicians (by the tests I mentioned a long time ago) have extremely eclectic tastes in music. When I went to college in 1996, at a state university with 500 music majors, "country and rap" were almost universal exceptions; almost everyone had a distaste for those two genres no matter their race. Many also had a distaste for real metal. (I used to think I liked metal; as I got older I realized I didn't really; most of what I actually liked was more accurately classified as hard rock.)

Things had changed by the time I went back to finish my degree in 2007; these kids (now 10 years younger than me roundabouts) grew up listening to hip-hop and some of them actually liked it (there were still many who professed hatred of country and rap). There was one girl who was on my trip to Vienna in 2009 who, if I recall correctly, said she liked it for different reasons and appreciated it in a different way than she did classical music. She, on the other hand, was amazed that I didn't really get into most of the Viennese composers, particularly Beethoven and Mozart. I think she said something along the lines of, why are you a music major if you don't like music?

There is some real irony there, but it's an oversimplification of my musical tastes. I like some Beethoven and Mozart, but they're from what "classical" musicians call the Classical period, the composers of the early Industrial period (second half of the 18th century), and I am not generally fond of that period. I think Beethoven and Mozart were both very good composers (in different ways) but I also think both of them were, and still are, highly overrated. I asked another girl on that Vienna trip what it was about the Classical period that people like so much since everything was repetitive and boring, and she said something about the beauty of simplicity and "clean lines".

I like many different composers and listen to them occasionally but I mostly listen to lots of Bach and Chopin. Those two were, as far as music can be objectively measured, unparalleled masters of functional harmony. I think most academics would put Bach above Chopin without hesitation, but many pianists would hesitate, and music theorists tend to appreciate him better than most non-pianists. Many other pianists don't like playing either; they're only interested in "new" music (meaning written in the last 100 years or so). Par exemple:






Many pianists love Chopin from an early age and only come to appreciate Bach as they get older. Partly that's because Bach didn't write for piano. He didn't write for modern instruments at all; even string instruments have changed a lot since then; the piano prototypes of Bach's age weren't that great (and Frederick the Great was hoarding them); they got better in the early Classical period (around Haydn's time) and were essentially modernized as a response to Beethoven destroying his pianos, just in time for the Romantic Generation: Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. They were all born within a few years of each other, and they all knew each other and were friends to various extents. (Schumann and Mendelssohn were closer to each other, being both in Germany, and Chopin and Liszt were close in Paris.)

Anyway, playing Bach on piano is difficult and doesn't always sound like we think piano should. It's not designed for the damper pedal which releases all the dampers on the piano, making a really sonorous sound. You can't do that with Bach because his running lines are written in lower registers where you can't get away with using the pedal much at all. Especially in that second Gould video in the previous post, you can see Gould stomping on the pedal briefly at each beat; that's basically how it's done with Bach. It's all very counterintuitive to someone who grew up playing the Romantics, who were the first generation to really write for the piano as it was meant to be written for. We could just play harpsichord, but we like the piano better in general, so no one has harpsichords any more, and we're not sure we want them anyway. Just like few people play Bach's violin pieces on baroque violins. (It makes a difference, if not quite so big a difference as harpsichord vs piano.)

I think Chopin grew up liking Bach; he had Bach in his lessons from an early age (which was actually an exception then because Bach was not yet well-known; the Romantic Generation revived him); you can see the basic contrapuntal lessons of Bach all in Chopin's early music. But I don't think even Chopin fully appreciated Bach until he was older; he went through that midlife crisis that I think many classically trained musicians go through where they realize at some point that they never before realized how incredibly awesome Bach actually was.

That b-flat minor fugue from WTC II is a particularly obtuse example of Bach being awesome, especially as Gould plays it (faster than most, and with little dynamic variation—one might say "mechanically"). The d minor concerto, not so much. If anyone happened to listen to the first video but not the second, I'd highly recommend the second (in my previous post, in case that wasn't obvious). I like both but I think the concerto is more likable, at least for the average listener.

[Studlock]

Hey Terez, and I'm fully admitting I was simply being an asshole in thread (both musically, and in terms of accusation of 'racism' though I do think such claims can have racist and classist fallouts--the another discussion), I've been thinking about what kind of hip-hop you might like simply because I really enjoy it and I like spreading it and I've come up with a couple songs (not necessarily artist) you might like and honestly I can't really think of any--maybe Outkast--maybe the instrumentals of Dr. Dre--maybe Lauryn Hill. Honestly I doubt you'll like anything within the genre but maybe Worry and Amphibian know more than me on this subject.

[Illuyankas]

I've always had a soft spot for Akala.

[Terez]

I meant to ask this earlier but I have been stupid busy. Outkast counts as hip-hop? I only know Hey-Ya because it was on the jukebox at work. I liked it relative to other things on the jukebox. It honestly struck me as pop. I remember looking him up on Wikipedia or something after work one day and I saw that he recorded all his tracks himself, and then I liked it even more. But I haven't worked at the place with the jukebox since 2008. A lot of the dedicated hip-hop listeners at work hated that song, but there was one exception who said she "just couldn't help" liking it.

[polishgenius]

Hey-ya isn't really a hip-hop song but they're certainly a hip-hop act overall, although André 3000 likes to mix it up (which is why Hey-ya is like it is, as that was from a double album that was essentially one solo album from each, and it was from his half).

[Terez]

See, I thought Outkast was one person who recorded all his tracks like Bobby McFerrin.

[polishgenius]

Yeah, Big Boi often gets overlooked by casual listeners...

This is probably their most famous song before Hey-ya. But their sound switches up quite a lot. They should be releasing some new stuff quite soon after a solo diversion for the last few years, looking forward to it.


Eta: not to suggest that I'm not a casual listener of Outkast.

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 25 July 2015 - 03:27 PM

[Terez]

I looked them up again and I was reminded that "The Way You Move" was also on the jukebox where I worked. The (rap) verses don't even register in my memory at all; I only remember the choruses where there is actual music (notes) happening. That old R&B style pleases me. It's not the kind of thing I would listen to in my own time for pleasure, but I liked it at work because it was the kind of upbeat ear-candy that makes work more tolerable.

Ms. Jackson apparently never made the jukebox at my job. (I worked at several different locations with a different selection at each one, but I don't remember this song.) It seems kind of boring to me in comparison to the other two.

[Terez]

As I mentioned earlier, I have been stupid busy lately, so I just got around to listening to phib's recs.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Try D'Angelo's Devil's Pie: https://www.youtube....h?v=8fNtipp5RLs

This is decent, and I like it, but it's still not incredibly interesting to me and not the kind of thing I would want to listen to repeatedly.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Common's Come Close remix: https://www.youtube....h?v=prQ8YkBSrYc

This does nothing for me. Orthodox hip-hop in the musical elements.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Janelle Monae's Electric Lady: https://www.youtube....h?v=LPFgBCUBMYk

This appears to me to be solidly pop/R&B rather than hip-hop. I gather there's a lot of confusion on the borders of these genres, but you have to recognize their basic qualifying characteristics or the labels don't mean anything and we might as well not use them. Pop and R&B have occasionally carried rap verses for a long time; it's all about proportions.

As to this particular tune, it's not bad but it doesn't do much for me. I think I might like it as a work tune on the jukebox, but it's not as interesting as Outkast's two aforementioned tunes, despite being more solidly musical than either tune. The 4 chords are a common progression: think the chorus of "Love Child" or the verses of "25 or 6 to 4" (not exactly the same but close enough to be old hat). But that's basically all Electric Lady has to offer musically. The progression in "Hey-ya" is much more unique, and the layers are creative. It's a repetitive song but it's clever.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

The Roots' The Next Movement: https://www.youtube....h?v=qm7Xt2Qsjcg

This manages to be both fairly orthodox hip-hop and at times quite interesting. I think anyone who has been half-reading my posts at this point could guess exactly which parts I like best. The choral bop voices use an old hat classical chord progression, but the alien quality of it gives it a different effect, especially the atypical intervals at which it is introduced. I would like listening to more stuff like that if the majority of the song wasn't so void of notes. I like notes. Why can't there always be interesting music in the background? That is my #1 gripe with this genre.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Pharcyde's Runnin': https://www.youtube....h?v=pwHuEDCM7xs

This, I like. I decided I liked it in the first 4 chords, though I knew that they would repeat over and over again. The voices in harmony on top of that added yet another interesting layer on top of the first 4 bars which were already interesting. I don't mind the rap voices so much because of the quality of that loop track, and the higher rap voice (the second one) is verging (quite purposefully) on being tonal.

I will give you this one (vs Electric Lady) as being solidly in the hip-hop genre despite the abundance of notes.

PS: The harmony reminds me a lot of this bit from a popular Korn song, which I hope I have linked directly to 2:32.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Pete Rock and CL Smooth's They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y): https://www.youtube....h?v=BONgL61snlM

I appreciate the gestures to jazz in this one, and I like the sax bit in solo mode, but overall it just doesn't do much for me. I wouldn't mind it at work and would rather listen to this than Joey Boringass any day.

amphibian, on 16 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

I tried to marry the "interesting beat" to "non-braggadocio lyrics" and "genuinely important songs in the genre".

Thank you for taking the effort, and sorry it took so long for me to respond.

Because I mentioned Bobby McFerrin earlier I want to use my two allotted videos for this post on him. Most people only know him for "Don't Worry, Be Happy", but he had a solid career in the academic circuit; DWBH was sort of his venture into pop music. He's a first-rate beatboxer, but he uses that same kind of technique for tonal singing.

My very first public piano performance in 1986, if I recall, was playing Bach's C-major prelude from book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC, or WTK for the Germans). This is the standard of Bach's keyboard repertoire, 2 sets of 24 prelude-fugue pairs. The preludes are in various styles. The fugues are in strict imitative counterpoint. Anyway, this prelude is really easy to play on piano, and unlike most of Bach's keyboard pieces, it works well with the damper pedals, so lots of young pianists play it. In the mid-19th century a composers named Charles Gounod wrote an Ave Maria to go over what Bach wrote (except Gounod had to add a measure to what Bach wrote to make it work).

Bobby McFerrin likes to sing the keyboard part written by Bach (more or less) at his live shows and have the audience sing the Ave Maria, which many of them often know.



So yeah, this is my beatboxing standard. Here's Bobby doing "Spain" live with Chick Corea.



A friend of mine used to have a recording of them doing the Charlie Brown song; I wish it was online. But Spain is a more iconic representation of their partnership anyway.

This post has been edited by Terez: 25 July 2015 - 07:14 PM

[worry]

Outkast have plenty of songs that roughly fit the hip hop template of verse/beat & chorus/hook, but even from the start they've infused their music with personality and their tweaks and quirks have set them apart, and they've continually used their progressive levels of success to expand their sound. While Ms. Jackson pretty much is to hip hop what a perfect pop song is to pop, they had turned non-fan's heads before that with Bombs Over Baghdad which features a truly aggressive drum n bass rhythm section (don't think they're live instruments, but the drums sound great regardless), some Hendrix-like guitars, organ & keys, and even gospel vocals.


Hip hop (particularly in the south) also occasionally integrates marching bands, and few to greater effect than Outkast. I don't know if it's academically complex, but it it has multiple layers that come in and out, shifting melodies, and displays the twin forces that make hip hop the pop format with the widest reach: integration and collaboration.


On another note, that earlier post did remind me that I do know a hip hop track that samples Bach, though it's flute rather than harpsichord. It's a study in doubletime cadence dexterity, breath control, turntablism, lyricism, and of course playing with a killer sample. Busdriver's Imaginary Places:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpP-8tJ-9Js

[Terez]

worry, on 25 July 2015 - 08:51 PM, said:

On another note, that earlier post did remind me that I do know a hip hop track that samples Bach, though it's flute rather than harpsichord. It's a study in doubletime cadence dexterity, breath control, turntablism, lyricism, and of course playing with a killer sample. Busdriver's Imaginary Places:
https://www.youtube....h?v=HpP-8tJ-9Js

That was kind of hilarious.

The Outkast didn't do much for me.

[polishgenius]

This thread has caused me to listen to every single hip-hop song with at least part of a thought towards 'I wonder if Terez would like this'? I had The Score on (the Fugees album) and it crossed my mind that it has a melodicness that might not offend, although it does commit some of the earlier discussed hip-hop 'sins' (in Terez's book).

That Lauryn Hill has an amazing voice helps, of course.



It also got me thinking, since I don't know the genre so well myself: what are the greatest hip-hop albums of all time?

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 25 July 2015 - 10:39 PM

[worry]

Yah, it's tempting to just start throwing darts at the thread and seeing what sticks! I'm sure the first person to find a rap song Terez loves will feel like they won the Lotto. Buuut I've tried to avoid that in favor of just showing a diversity to contrast with rap radio...cuz ultimately if something's not your thing then it's not your thing, even if there's exceptions, but it's still worth cracking up the mainstream monolith (I do like plenty of mainstream rap too though).

There's also the matter of this just being on the borderline of being a music thread. And listing greatest of all time, or favorite, or must-listen-for-history's-sake rap albums might be suited for a separate thread in the TV/Movies/Music forum. It could definitely be fun. On the other hand you might destroy lives of certain people who've struggled for years not to become a High Fidelity character.

[polishgenius]

I'm mostly just finding it interesting to get the occasional perspective from someone who's musical outlook is so completely alien to mine.



Eta: I found this study interesting and potentially relevant to this topic. I suspect it's not a coincidence that a genre with an aforementioned relative lack of musical variation smashes all the others hollow in terms of lyrical variation.

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 26 July 2015 - 12:08 AM

[Terez]

polishgenius, on 25 July 2015 - 10:38 PM, said:

This thread has caused me to listen to every single hip-hop song with at least part of a thought towards 'I wonder if Terez would like this'? I had The Score on (the Fugees album) and it crossed my mind that it has a melodicness that might not offend, although it does commit some of the earlier discussed hip-hop 'sins' (in Terez's book).

That Lauryn Hill has an amazing voice helps, of course.

It also got me thinking, since I don't know the genre so well myself: what are the greatest hip-hop albums of all time?

I noticed that a lot of phib's selections had "greatest hip-hop song of all time" or the like as the top comment.

I seemed to remember liking something by the Fugees. If you could point me to some song in particular that I might like? Also, the 'sins' have largely been oversimplified because music can be really complicated sometimes, and it's ultimately personal.

But maybe I should have made it more clear from the get-go that there are other styles I don't like for similar reasons up to and including Mozart. Beethoven was less repetitive and boring than Mozart tended to be in his uninspired moments but Beethoven did not have the logical skill that Mozart did when it came to functional harmony. He made errors of eloquence all the time in his quest for bigness, while Mozart churned out lots of perfectly-conceived rabâchage of common musical ideas in order to pay off his gambling debts. He was a famous boy genius and he could get away with that; the burgeoning new middle class could afford to prop him up according to his already-earned stature. In other words, he had brilliant moments, but he had as many or more lazy moments, even in his brilliant works. Chopin for example took much more care in what he released to the public and thus had a less prolific output. He often wrote things like this:

Quote

Napisałem u niego [w Antoninie u Radziwiłła] Alla polacca z wiolonczellą. Nic nie ma prócz błyskotek, do salonu, dla dam—chciałem, widzisz, żeby X^czka Wanda się nauczyła.

(Lazy translation for everyone else: he has composed a salon piece for some important ladies, nothing there but glitter.) But he would tell the ladies in question that they must on no account attempt to publish the little autographs he wrote for them and of course many ignored his request that these things be burned upon his death. So there is a small posthumous collection of waltzes and songs and the like that are just that: shiny stuff "for the ladies".

Bach did not have to take much care on that account because his particular style of composing left no doubts as to his general work ethic. That style, the "imitative" style, takes the already difficult task of composing well within the functional system and makes it more difficult by imposing sort of arbitrary rules on top of it.

On that subject, I googled that song I liked earlier, perhaps the only one of all these things I've listened to that I really liked with so few reservations (Pharcyde "Runnin"), and someone wrote on the internet somewhere that it sampled Run DMC's "Rock Box". So I googled that, and got this:



Dude's nonsense rant at the beginning:

Quote

Now what is rap music? Well, in a sense we cannot use that particular item, because 'what' has nothing to do with music. 'What' is a unit of measure used to determine the necessary current to excite an incandescent lamp to its proper candle power. Many people thought that eh eh em... rap began in Hollywood one day when a child was born, and he called it the [Theandalsistis??]. It was a child of a bayou woman. Not by-you. [?] A bayou woman, oh with her beautiful diamond rings and her store-bought hair—this is the development where we find that it is written in 'fugical' form. Now what is a fugue? A fugue is like rap! Only a...a fugue starts where, in its 'contrapuntical' form, where we find that the melody is coming in, and your audience is going out.

A fun commentary on people like me, I suppose, but I still don't really like the song. I remember when Run DMC entered the scene because I was a preteen who watched MTV obsessively and they were among the first rap artists to make mainstream. This was my introduction to rap, and I did not like it (with the notable exception of "Walk This Way"). DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were somewhat more tolerable to my preteen self. How could you not like this cheezy shit at that age?



...and then Vanilla Ice popularized whiteboy rap for like a year or something and everyone knew some approximation of the words to "Ice, Ice Baby" and then one day everyone decided that it was dumb. As a preteen I just kind of went with the flow on these things...

That Run DMC nonsense rant also reminds me of a lecture given by one of my music theory profs on the first day of 20th Century Harmony. He basically implied that he had been teaching this class long enough to know that most music majors don't get into the elevation of dissonance common to 20th century academic music. He further implied that the study of classical music was dying and our concerts were attended mostly by bluehairs, and either we needed to learn to like "new music"...or perhaps that we needed to make something better of our own before our careers evaporated. But as I implied before, academic music went off the rails when it refused to embrace jazz, and it has now diverged so far from popular music that recovery requires a revolution of sorts.

That was one of my big dreams when I was at school: that schools would find a way to support talented local acts in popular genres (it really doesn't matter which). Because in the end, our definition of good music often does well in popular genres, even if the average listener doesn't distinguish much between what we like and don't like within their favorite genres. They like music for other reasons. But there are lots of musically talented people out there who don't consider themselves to be musicians, and they do have an influence over what gets heard and what survives. The only reason I backed off that idea is because it was elitist.

In other words, I like the concept of individuals and more-or-less democratic institutions being curators of art, but I don't like the idea of the curators of more-or-less authoritarian institutions as having any real say-so in what survives. I don't think it's often that way; we have been finding ways to democratize the celebration of art since the printing press roundabouts.

This post has been edited by Terez: 26 July 2015 - 12:17 AM