Lieder Ohne Worte

Just this morning when attending the weekly school recital hour, I recalled that every bit of Weather on Welcome to Night Vale that I had analyzed was text-based.  I wondered if an instrumental work would be coming up, I couldn't remember from my binge-listening last fall.  And Night Vale delivers, with a piece by the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra.  A 2007 article on About.com describes this group as around 60 musicians, including rappers, DJs, and singers.  The piece on Welcome to Night Vale, "Movement 1: Invocation of the Duke," sets up a latin beat with low saxophones, percussion, and some subtle record scratching.  The repeating eight-bar bass line hovers around scale degree 5 of a harmonic minor scale, occasionally jumping around to grab some additional notes, but never resting on tonic.  Over this beat, two violins trade eight-bar solos.  The first entrance is rough, the rhythms don't quite fit the 4+4 phrase that the bass line has established, but after this rushed entrance the rest of the solos continue the latin beat on the harmonic minor scale.  The augmented seconds give an exotic feel to the solos, along with the continued avoidance of tonic as a resting point.  Right at the Golden Ratio of the chronological duration (63 out of 102 seconds), the violin solos stop and the brass starts playing a riff that slowly gets louder and more ornate, with high trumpet shakes and sustained string chords.  By the end, I wasn't sure whether I should be hearing the E major chord as the dominant of A minor, or as its own tonic.  That rotation of the A harmonic minor scale results in the E "arabic" scale, also called the Phrygian Natural 3 scale, or the Dominant b2 scale.  One live performance by the Orchestra does pair this song with "Reap What You Sow," which is in the key of A minor, so that reinforces the feeling of "Invocation of the Duke" as an introduction.

Presumably the Duke that is being invoked is Duke Ellington.  Another track invokes The Clown, probably a reference to Charles Mingus.  The podcast episode is "The Man in the Tan Jacket," who is a character that no one can clearly recall or describe.  This haziness fits with the tonal ambiguity of "Invocation of the Duke," unclear whether it is an introduction or a stand-alone piece.

Busker Power

Mount Moon is the busking name of Wesley Bryon, in honor of the Pokémon location.  Despite what Welcome to Night Vale claims, he is not the New Jersey-based indie rock band with the same name on Band Camp.  However, he has renamed himself as Jazz Casual.  Bryon's voice is captivating, using rough vibrato during the chorus to portray his frustration and passion.  He hugs his small guitar, and grimaces as he sings in an androgynous register over the tinny strings.   The form is straightforward, with some interesting chord choices while staying diatonic and functional.  Each verse  has two stanzas set as periods, and the chorus is also set as a period. 

Some of the words are hard to make out from his singing, I wouldn't have caught all of them without help. That is a shame, as there are both interesting poetic devices and neat juxtapositions at play.  One that does come out clearly is the "know/no" homophone pair in the chorus.  This song fits well both for a busker playing in the subways, and as the Weather for "The Story of You" in Welcome to Night Vale.  That episode tells the story of a day in the life of a person (not Cecil), who doesn't really know himself, having been removed from his previous life.  The narrator in this song is disconnected from his mother, is not proud of his accomplishments, and is feeling the weight of mortality.  The chorus has a defensive element, which fits with the shaky voice and high-strung guitar, as he realizes that he won't succeed in life, and is feeling judged by all the people around him.  The person in the episode rebels by taking something from the desert.  Perhaps Bryon's character will also rebel.

Verse:  There once was a time that we knew damn well we’d be wise beyond our years


now we’re old and it seems we’re getting dumber.


There once was a rhyme that would bring peacefulness to both of our ears


but this music lets us know that we’re not getting any younger
.

My mother would not be proud of my mouth


but I can get a sense out that is sacrilegious without sounding like a sailor.


Every time i go home for the holiday and tell her how it’s been.

I
 see the hurt, it’s obvious I have failed her
.

Chorus:  But you don’t know, 
no you can’t go where I’ve been.

And I don’t know
, no I’ll never get where I’m going
.

Verse:  ‘Cause ever day I hear somebody saying something like "Yeah, I just got back from China, backpacking and feeding food to children."


I have never strayed too far away from this east coast where I remain
,

in my heart I am so envious I could kill them.

And I am running out of time to do the things that I said I was put on this earth to do by God and His heaven.

Seems that I believed in something then. Dear Lord what happened to my head. Now the days go by so fast that I lose time because I don’t sync it
.

Chorus (2x)

Pretty dissonance

I'm struggling right now with how to teach my Popular Music class about dissonant and consonant harmonies.  They already have problems with identifying the tonic of a piece, and this is really pushing them.  The Weather for episode 12 of Welcome to Night Vale has a very clear example of dissonant harmonies in Anais Mitchell's "Of a Friday Night."  This would have been a great blog post to publish last Friday, but I didn't even start listening carefully to the piece until Saturday morning, so that serendipity was already lost.  I instead did a bunch of biking and decided to wait for Monday to post this.



The stark piano introduction sets up a cluster of notes against oscillating B and E bass notes, sounding like an homage to Erik Satie:



But this is both simpler, and more complex.  The right hand doesn't move, filling different roles against the two bass notes.  The first chord is a B minor triad with an added ninth, that half-step clash in the top two notes.  When the left hand moves to an E, the right hand creates an E13, a seventh chord with extensions of the ninth and thirteenth.  But this chord is missing the third, so it is ambiguous in quality.  Given the context of the minor tonic chord, and the remaining half-step clash in the upper voices, it is likely to hear this second chord as an E minor seventh chord with the added ninth and thirteenth, so a iadd9 - iv13 progression. This is denied by the melody, which uses a B Dorian collection of notes, so the E chord gets an implied major quality.  This is important, because that E major chord takes over as tonic in the chorus, providing a bright contrast for the good old days against the darkness of the ghost town.

The bass line gets embellished, and the meter changes from a weak 3/4 to a clear 4/4, yet with the same progression as the voice enters.  This shift in meter is odd, and doesn't happen again in the song.  Is the introduction the real ghost town, and the 4/4 beat the remembrance of a remembrance?  This gets a little Inception-y, but as I interpret the lyrics, there are at least four time periods referenced:  1) when the poet is a young man; 2) when the poet is old, but there are young men filling the streets; 3) the present time when the town is empty; 4) the future for which the narrator is waiting.  So the introduction represents time period 3, the B Dorian verses represent time period 2, and the E major chorus and bridge represents time period 1 and the potential of time period 4, suggesting a cyclic nature to time.  Hence the two oscillating chords, with the static upper notes, the dissonances that change without changing.

I love the pause and drop of Mitchell's voice to a low G# on "midnight writer" in the chorus and the little chromatic notes on "young men" and "those" in the first two verses.  I'm not positive what midnight writer means, the pause could suggest that the narrator is censoring herself, or to emphasize that it is important that the night life was filled with writers/creators/memorialists.  The chromatic bends portrays the old poet's aching memory of his own youth, and the narrator's aching desire for joy to fill her own life.

What the hell?

What is this?  The weather in episode 11 of Welcome to Night Vale is "Cigarette Burns Forever" by Adam Green.  After looking at pictures of him, you would think a song with this title would be tortured, gritty, perhaps emo.  Instead, we get lounge singer stylings of lyrics that at first listen seem very trivial. The rhyme schemes are very basic, aaaa for each stanza, and aabb for the pseudo bridge.  Many of the rhymes use the same word - her and her, or other and other.  The chord pattern also seems basic:  I - iii - IV - I repeated for the first stanza, followed by another I - iii - IV - I and I - iii - IV - V for the second stanza.  This seems like the verse, though interestingly the normal pattern of having interior phrases ending on V and ending phrases ending on I is reversed.  The third stanza ("The sidewinder drinks and gambles") is the beginning of the next verse, but this verse is only one stanza long, ending again with the V chord.  The fourth stanza uses the same set of progressions as the third stanza, but has a slightly different melody, so I call it a pseudo bridge.  This is followed by the last stanza as the last verse, with the same paired progressions.  This means the first stanza stands alone as an introduction.  The rest of the song establishes the idea of one stanza per verse (or bridge), with the chord pattern I - iii - IV - I, I - iii - IV - V.  And yet it is the beginning of a song that normally establishes patterns and expectations, so which verse is the normal one?  That is confusing enough, but the lyrics also baffle me: 

Cigarette burns forever
The message is spliced together
Now I would never let her
But where did people go to get her

You took me to the private party
And swore that they would not card me
Drive careful less they hear ye
When all the time they learnt to fear you.

The sidewinder drinks and gambles
The gold digger strikes his damsels
But when I lost the magic sandals
I said some things I could not handle.

Going 90 off my star
So is flashing by as the flame retards
Don't you wanna be some other
And all the people have to drug each other.

I fell into a life of leisure
I saw to a path of pleasure
Don't it make it that much better
To find a cigarette burns forever

 What does this mean?  The first stanza feels like an interruption, or the continuation of a previous conversation/idea.  The second stanza has more narrative sense, except the tense is messed up in the third line.  And what in the world are the magic sandals of the third stanza?   Drugs?  Sanity?  Seven-league boots? Each stanza has some element of non sequitur or absurdism, and there is no continuity from one stanza to the next.

Is this a work of staggering genius, a hipster Finnegan's Wake? I listened to another of Adam Green's works and it has the same lounge singer vibe.  Is he being ironic?  Or is this pretentious crap?  I feel the latter right now, but the words are still digging at me, making me try to figure out what they mean.  I think the music itself is lame, even when considering the slightly interesting formal design. 

That's poetry, man!

A woman's voice is finally heard again on Welcome to Night Vale, in the Weather to Episode 10.  Poet Rachel Kann lays down the beat with reversed drum sounds and the devil's interval for the bass line.  This isn't exactly a rap, closer to beat poetry in the style of Mike Myers:



Except it is better.  Kann's voice is shared by other women (I think her own voice overdubbed), but she is being authentic in her beliefs and in her art, unlike Myers' deliberate veil of hip indifference.  The beat underneath Kann's poetry is cool, and her speaking voice stays level, but her words are enthusiastic about her thoughts, about her art, about her life.  She genuinely wants to find true love, and believes she will find it.  She finds the glory in the moments in her life, like earl grey tea and Otis Redding.  I wouldn't call these small things, and she doesn't either.

Kann's poem is about balance, which allows polar opposite categories to exist.  The bass line is ominous, and the reversed drum beats create a disturbing soundscape.  But the beat is predictable, and fits well with the horn line.  The rhythm of the words avoids sing-song predictability, but still stays within the meter of the beat.  Right before Kann starts talking about succeeding in her love (3:25), the backwards drum sounds stop.  First the beat is kept by bongos and wood clicks, and then the drum beats are presented in regular direction (3:41).  The clarity balances the disruption of the starting drum sounds, just as the poem ends in a cyclic repeat of the opening lines. The doubled voices almost sound song-like, without presenting actual sustained pitch.  The bass line also drops the tritone, keeping only the lower note.  Perhaps the "fixing" of the drum beat and the loss of the devil's interval shows a journey of Kann's narrator/poet.  Maybe at the beginning she was intimidated by her knowledge/lack of knowledge, but in reminding herself of all the beauty she knows she turns around to a joy in her knowledge.

UPDATE:  Rachel Kann tweeted me to let me know that the producer of this track is Tack-Fu. Props to him.

Accordions! With Clapping!

I just noticed that the wiki dedicated to Welcome to Night Vale claims that the music on the show is not the weather, but rather Cecil's own personal music collection that he plays during the Weather.  But this doesn't make sense, as the radio station doesn't broadcast anything else along with the music.  Plus, it appeals to my sense of the absurd that the weather is indicated by the music played, just like the news in Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music. The Weather in episode 9, "PYRAMID", is stormy but with an accordion-shaped rainbow at the end.  Jason Webley is a gravel-voiced sailor, preaching the end of the world with a hopeful rebirth.  The accordion plods through regle du octave progressions over bass drum and hand claps, giving this sailor a sea shanty as his "Last Song."  He gasps along through the chorus: "And we say that the world isn't dying / And we pray that the world isn't dying / and just maybe the world isn't dying / Maybe she's heavy with child." as if he can barely get through the prayer.  He's joined in the outro by his drunken buddies on those lovely nonsense Irish syllables, but they also die out, leaving the accordion to wheeze through to a final cadence.

Ted Gioia is right!

About three weeks ago, Ted Gioia wrote a blistering critique of music criticism.  In it he complained, correctly, that music critics have stopped writing about the music itself, instead writing about the social underpinnings of music in a very trivial manner.  In response to this complaint, composer Owen Pallett has written three articles for Slate, supposedly using theory to explain the music of Katy Perry, Daft Punk, and Lady Gaga.  While I appreciate Pallett's musicianship, he has a very limited view of music theory which resulted in purposefully stilted analyses.  In Tweets he admitted that these articles (or at least the first one) were meant to be ironic, proving Ted Gioia wrong. 




This is unfortunate, as there are many analytical tools available to make meaningful statements about pop music, without exploding in jargon or losing respect for the genre.  Pallett failed in both these regards, doing the worlds of music criticism, music theory, and popular music a disservice.  In my series of analyses of music from Welcome to Night Vale, I hope I have been showing appropriate ways of analyzing popular music.

I'll continue now with the Weather from episode eight, "This Too Shall Pass" by Danny Schmidt.  While this song shares a title with one by OK Go, it is very different.  Danny Schmidt is a singer-songwriter, whose song starts with a distinctive Spanish vibe before shifting to a more country/folk feel from the jingle bells, fiddle playing, and banjo-like guitar picking.  The minor mode with continual shifts to the relative major and the haunting violins remind me of the theme song from Firefly.  The rhythm is interesting, sudden little rushes at the beginning of each stanza followed by a pause before the rest of the lyrics arrive in a quick stream.  Schmidt's twangy voice gives humbleness to his lofty ideas about the hugeness of the universe and the smallness of mankind within it.  He touches on religion, the biology of self-interest, and mythology, all in service of showing how time keeps going with or without us. The melody has moments of static monotony, followed by sudden shifts in contour, keeping it from becoming too predictable while obeying many of the tropes of the genre.  The song fades out, which is both appropriate to the subject matter, giving a sense of eternity yet dying away to nothing.