Why I do this

Today I was at a lunch for all of the Honor Scholars preparing their final theses, and the faculty who are on their defense committees. The faculty member in charge of the Honor Scholar program gave a wonderfully funny and passionate description of the process, reminding all of us that the defense is an opportunity for a well-informed group of people to sit and talk for 2 hours about a subject that they care about. This is what I want all my classes to be like, a conversation that helps everyone involved to learn more about subjects we love. Unfortunately enough of my students don't like the subject, or haven't prepared enough to contribute in a meaningful way, that I don't often get that rush. I suppose that is the true joy of teaching graduate students. After all, I had many deep conversations with fellow students and with my professors when I was in graduate school. We had the time to study the one discipline that we cared about. We had the broader knowledge base from our undergraduate studies to apply to the conversation. And we all loved academia. I'm looking forward to this intense conversation about creative writing as an analytic response to music, learning at least as much as I teach during the process. That is why I do this.

Bracketology meets musicology

Inspired by Chad, I've created my first-ever tournament bracket. I know nothing about basketball, so I picked those schools with the best ranked graduate music programs. To be honest, I'm a little shocked at some of these rankings, but I'll use them. Using the same rules as Chad, a school with a ranked grad program beats an unranked school. If both schools don't have a ranked music program, I picked the higher seed (I know that much about basketball). Here are my results, click on the picture to make it bigger: (I just noticed an error, California should really be beating UNC by the ranking system. I must have clicked the wrong school at some point in the process.)


Let's see how I do, especially against my brother-in-law and nephew (I'm looking at you, Hugh!)
I should point out that one of my alma maters is actually in the tournament this year, the University of Akron. While I will cheer for the Zips, I doubt they will fare any better through basketball skills than my bracket predicts. I do have some fond memories of playing in the pep band, particularly because I got paid to do so.

Can you feel it?

ClapClap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap ClapClap Clap Clap Clap.

He just couldn’t keep the beat, unlike everyone around him. Did they clap on the beat or off the beat? He couldn’t remember. Not that that would make a difference. It was supposed to be natural, not something to be analyzed. Heck, babies prefer bouncing on the beat, and can even recognize things off the beat when they are newborns. He was a baby once, surely he preferred bouncing on the beat back then. So why was he unable to find the beat now? Had he lost something, repressed something, damaged something? Maybe his brain didn’t work right. But he had just read that therapists were using musical rhythms to retrain stroke victims how to walk. These people are brain-damaged, and yet they can feel the beat! And he had always been healthy, no brain traumas or drug use. Maybe he was born defective, he thought the term was congenital amusia. Like being tone deaf. Che Guevera couldn’t tell the difference between fast dances and slow dances. He had read a story about Guevera telling a friend to signal him when the band played a tango, so he could dance with the girls. A miscommunication made Guevera start tangoing to a fast shora, and he didn’t realize until everyone else started laughing. Isn’t that just another case of not finding the beat? But that wasn’t at all the same as his problem. He knew that he wasn’t on the beat. He could recognize when the music was fast or slow. So why couldn’t he clap along with it? He was told to relax, to let the music wash over him. Let his body move to the music, don’t make the body move to the music. But he had never been encouraged to lose control when growing up. “Act your age.” “Don’t cry about it.” “Keep your hands to yourself.” “Stop fidgeting.” “I don’t want to hear about it.” “Don’t be such a weenie.” “Aww, are you going to cry?” His parents, teachers, and friends had expected him to be controlled, rigid, manly. Boys who didn’t control their bodies were goofballs, spazzes, emos, or jerks. Never once was he encouraged to get in touch with his emotions, except for some girlfriends, and they definitely wanted him to keep his body under control. He wasn’t sure whether the root problem was that he kept his body from expressing his emotions, or if he prevented the music from sparking emotion within him. He wasn’t even sure if there was a difference between the two. Did the emotion create the motion, or did the motion create the emotion? Hey, that was kind of like a poem. Something with a rhythm and flow. Maybe it wasn’t too late to let go. Maybe he could react like a baby. Maybe he could find himself.

Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap.

A Draft

ClapClap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap ClapClap Clap Clap Clap.

He just couldn’t keep the beat, unlike everyone around him. Did they clap on the beat or off the beat? He couldn’t remember. Not that that would make a difference. It is supposed to be natural. Heck, babies prefer bouncing on the beat, and can even be trained to distinguish different rhythms. He was a baby once, surely he preferred bouncing on the beat when he was seven months old. So why was he unable to find the beat now? He had just read that therapists were using musical rhythms to retrain stroke victims how to walk. These people are brain-damaged, and yet they can feel something he can’t! He was told to relax, to let the music wash over him. Let his body move to the music, don’t make the body move to the music. But he had never been encouraged to lose control like that. His parents told him to act his age. His teachers told him to stop fidgeting at his desk. His girlfriend… well, he was highly encouraged to maintain strict control of his hands. Society expected him to be manly, rigid and emotionless. Was it too late to learn how to let go, how to let his body react to the music the way it used to when he was a baby?

Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap.

Movie help

Yes, this is an official bleg. One of my colleagues is running an Oscar pool (no money, just bragging rights). Despite having seen almost none of the nominated movies, I feel very confident about my picks in all the main categories. After all, I listen to NPR's Fresh Air regularly. But, ironically, the categories I feel I have no clue in are the soundtracks. Perhaps it is because I care most about these categories, and don't want to make a rash decision based on no information (I've only seen one of the movies). I don't feel the same way about acting, so I'm willing to go out on a limb with no reasoning whatsoever. Anyway, here are the categories and the nominees. Tell me who you think will win the Oscar, and why.

ORIGINAL SCORE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Alexandre Despiat)
Defiance (James Newton Howard)
Milk (Danny Elfman)
Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman)
WALL-E (Thomas Newman)

ORIGINAL SONG
“Down to Earth” from WALL-E (Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman)
“Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman and Gutzar)
“O Saya” from Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam)

As a related bleg, I'm also not certain about the short films (documentary short subject, Animated short film, and Live Action short film). Any advice on those also appreciated, but I won't clutter the blog with those more unrelated topics.

SunPod: Top 12

Since I had furloughed myself during the end-of-year time when everyone lists things from the year, I missed naming the top tracks I'd listened to on iTunes.  So I'll do it now, as a very late FriPod.

1.  "Creep" by Thom Yorke, performed by the Edmund Welles Quartet.  Play count = 38.

2.  "God Only Knows" by Brian Wilson, performed by Petra Haden.  Play count = 38.

3.  "Down to the River to Pray" performed by Alison Kraus on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack.  Play count = 34.

4.  "Luna" from Ayre by Osvaldo Golijov, performed by Dawn Upshaw.  Play count = 34.

5.  "Hope and Memory" by Howard Shore on the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King soundtrack.  Play count = 34.

6.  "The End of All Things" by Howard Shore on the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King soundtrack.  Play count = 33.

7.  "I am a man of constant sorrow" performed by the Soggy Bottom Boys on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack.  Play count = 33.

8.  "The Grey Havens" by Howard SHore on the LOTR: ROK soundtrack.  Play count = 31.

9.  Saltarello detto del Naldi by Giralamo Fantini, performed by the Parley of Instrument / Stephen Keavy / Crispian Steele-Perkins.  Play count = 31.

10. "O magnum mysterium" by Morten Lauridsen, performed by the Robert Shaw Festival and Chamber Singers.  Play count = 31.

11.  Sonata no. 13 from Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage.  Play count = 31.

12.  "Ich Klag Mein Not, O Herr Mein Gott" a 6, by Paul Kugelmann, performed by the Copenhagen Cornetts & Sackbuts.  Play count = 31.

Hierarchic asymmetry

Back when I was teaching my first music theory class as a graduate student, I was caught completely off guard by a student's complaint. We were talking about the difference between simple meter and compound meter, which I regarded as a very basic topic. In one the beat is divided into two equal parts, and in the other the beat is divided into three equal parts. The exemplars for each of these would be 4/4 and 6/8. The quarter note beat in 4/4 is divided into two eighth notes, and the dotted-quarter beat in 6/8 is divided into three eighth notes. Easy, right? Well, this student, who was quite bright, said that 6/8 wasn't really a compound meter, because the eighth notes themselves didn't divide into three equal parts. I thought he was making a common mistake of assuming that eighth notes were the beat in 6/8, but he wasn't . He expected that if the beat is divided into three equal parts, then each subsequent lower level in the metric hierarchy would also divide by threes. This is actually a very rare phenomenon, not even covered by normal metric notation. There is no time signature that indicates a beat that will be divided into 9 equal parts, much less 27 or 81 parts. The basic assumption in Western notated music is for beats to be grouped by 2's or 3's (or some combination thereof) and to be divided by 2 or 3, but that all lower levels of subdivision are by 2.

I never really thought about this lack of symmetry, until I was recalling an argument about chord and key relationships. Petr Janata and his colleagues have done some interesting work on brain imaging and tonal sensitivity. But at one conference he presented a torus mapping of key relations, playing along a chord sequence that modulated from one key to the next. This mapping was meant to represent brain activity, showing how the brain interprets different modulations as close or far. As expected, the modulations followed a circle of fifths pattern, but what I found quite disturbing was that mode was not taken into account. At one point the progression went from C minor to G major. I pointed out to him that this was a very distant key relationship in music theory, which he found surprising. After all, C minor chords go to G major chords all the time. We then started a debate about the difference between chord relationships and key relationships, with Carol Krumhansl coming up to keep us from punching each other. (Not really, but it was an interesting and sprited debate, including the aforementioned Dr. Krumhansl). Carol did the seminal work on tonal hierarchies, using probe tones to determine the closest cognitive notes to a given tonic, and helped develop a key-finding algorithm that might mimic how our brains determine what key we are in. What I realized that I knew to be false, but that these scientists had assumed to be true, was that the hierarchy of relationships between notes and chords would extend to keys without change.

Why is it that Western music* does not encourage complete symmetry among all levels of a given feature? Could it be like the asymmetric design of the diatonic scale, working as a signpost to help us identify where we are? The assymmetry between keys and chords could help distinguish the scope of relations we are perceiving, so we don't get the two mixed up. Likewise with meter, to help identify the beat more clearly.

*If anyone knows about any other music traditions that do include non-binary metric symmetry or note/harmony/tonality symmetry, let me know.