In the wee hours of Friday, shortly after midnight, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new surprise album entitled 'untitled unmastered.' Along with this enigmatic title came an enigmatic title image:
Early commentary on this album has pointed out that it may be closer to a series of sketches than a completed product; certainly the choice of the word 'unmastered' in the album's name suggests this interpretation. However, in thinking over what this album presents, I am struck by the complexities that Kendrick has incorporated into it solely based on these naming conventions alone. An untitled piece of art is not necessarily an incomplete one.
Wassily Kandinsky's 1916 untitled painting
What an unmastered work is remains unclear, at least in this context.
The track names are equally nebulous. Rather than providing specific titles, there are only dates, suggesting that these are works that were abandoned at some point. But what point? What do these dates represent? Start dates, end dates, abandoned dates, studio session dates? This question of dates is not trivial. For example, some of the material in these songs has been heard before on late-night appearances and in other contexts and these dates don't match those in the title for the track. Instead of a specific date, as most the tracks have, 'untitled 7' dates from 2014-2016 and incorporates a range of different recordings that are abruptly connected. Thus this track spans a broad swath of time, beginning with a 'song' that might otherwise be called 'Levitate' (in the vein of 'Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe' from Kendrick's first major album, 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City') and ending with what sounds like an improvised jam session with friends. Abrupt shifts during a track are not unusual for Kendrick as they abound on 'To Pimp A Butterfly,' but here they reveal that while what we're hearing may be 'unmastered,' it is not unedited. At one point during the start of the jam session, Kendrick states, 'This is a fifteen-minute song!' The whole track is only 8:16, and at that point we are already five minutes in. Consequently, the listener is made acutely aware that either there were cuts or that this was not really a fifteen-minute song. Either way, what is presented to us on 'untitled unmastered' should not be accepted necessarily at face value.
I have two possible interpretations of 'unmastered' for this album. The first is that these are tracks that predate 'To Pimp A Butterfly' and he is suggesting that it is that album which is masterful. Indeed, the tone and language here is somewhat out of place with that on 'To Pimp A Butterfly,' whose trajectory explores many different nuances of controversial terms (and almost entirely eschews the word 'bitch'). So perhaps Kendrick did undergo a change in his artistic outlook between 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City' and we are seeing its evolution here; these tracks, then, are from before he 'mastered' his art. Alternatively, perhaps these songs simply didn't fit the overall narrative. The albums that bookend these tracks (if the dates on 'untitled unmastered' are accurate) both, ostensibly, had a plot--the plot of 'Good Kid, M.A.A.D City' is outlined more clearly, but there is definitely one on 'To Pimp A Butterfly' as well. These tracks could be leftovers that were not quite right for those albums and didn't fit with the overall structure.
And yet, even on 'untitled unmastered,' Kendrick has a linking device with a rallying cry 'Pimp pimp, hooray' that appears between various songs and is the last sound on the album. So although these may be 'unfinished' or 'unmastered' tracks, in the end, Kendrick presents a 'master' copy that links together what has come before, and what was originally a simple title proves to be far more complex.
In the wake of David Bowie's recent passing,
Schenkerian Gang Signs has declared 2016 to be the Year of Bowie. To
commemorate, we will be exploring all twenty-seven of Bowie's studio
albums at a rate of one every two weeks or so. Along the way, we will
explore the gamut of Bowie's achievements, from granular musical
analysis to broader notions of artistic trajectories.
This post is, by my estimation, approximately three weeks overdue, in that I intended to sit down and write it, but never found the time. Now some pretty major events did take place during those three weeks, so we could chalk it up to a busy schedule and not enough hours in the day. But I think the real reason that I hadn't made the time to write up this album is that I wasn't quite ready to let this album go. I'm still not. But the Year of Bowie must move forward, or it will be the More Than A Year of Bowie! So I offer my thoughts, even though they may still be incomplete.
Unlike the previous posts in this series, this was an album that I had heard before. About a year ago, I went through a phase of listening to (the song) 'The Man Who Sold the World' approximately a dozen or more times a day, usually on repeat. In this vein, I decided to listen to the album with what were impossibly high hopes--I think I wanted an entire album of songs like 'The Man Who Sold the World', which is kind of like saying that you're annoyed not every movement of a Beethoven symphony is as good as your favorite. Needless to say, I was disappointed. A bunch of it sounded vaguely Spinal-Tap-esque, what with the flutes and everything, and in general it had the ambiance of Led Zeppelin. This is an unfair criticism to level as it appeared right around the same time, so unsurprisingly it sounded of that time. In my initial re-listening, I wasn't quite so disappointed in it (I guess now I knew what was coming). In fact, I found that it had gradually seeped into my mind and reassessed my initial position.
The way I discovered it had seeped in my head was that I woke up one Saturday morning with the sound of two guitars playing through a chord progression on downbeats of some song and was unable to place it. Turns out, it was 'All the Madmen,' which upon re-listening is a great song, even in spite of its Spinal-Tap-esque flutes. That guitar bit right after the chorus is fantastic. The chords aren't particularly complex (iii - V7 - I - vi), except that they don't really resolve the way you think they will--the third of the chord in the V7 is left hanging, descending down to the 5 in the tonic chord that follows--and also those chord numbers are not really how the chords relate to the rest of the song as we have modulated. This is great, as we think for a minute that we have reached some kind of stability, but really the entire harmonic structure is off the whole time. The topic of this song was Bowie's half-brother Terry Burns, who was institutionalized at the time for mental health problems; Bowie spoke about this at some length in later interviews. But if you didn't know that, you would likely interpret this song as referring to some kind of alter-Bowie, one who felt he belonged more to the madmen than the sad men who are free.
This theme of the split personality is a crucial one on this album and one that drives (the song) 'The Man Who Sold the World.' The lyrics make the divide perfectly clear, as Bowie meets his doppelgänger on the stair and the dialogue shifts back and forth between them. Even the song reflects this dual personality, starting unquestionably in a minor key, then seemingly resolving it in the chorus, only to bring in a deceptive cadence and resume right back in the minor (similar trick to 'All the Madmen'). What is most haunting is the ostinato that starts the song and which returns at numerous points, the simple guitar riff that is inescapable. There were moments where it disappeared, only to return, much like the Man Who Sold the World. But he can never die, and the song ends by acknowledging the eternity of this duality: we hear the ostinato in the guitar and Bowie singing a wordless vocal line, which grows into four separate vocal lines by the end, layered over top of each other. As the song fades out, it gives the impression that it could go on forever, as the chords never fully resolve--there is mostly the minor in which the song opened, but for a brief two-chord progression, there was almost a landing in major. Both 'men' are still there. Perhaps the growing number of vocal lines suggests there are even more 'men' waiting. The many personas that Bowie would take on later seem foreshadowed here, as though they would eventually split into alter egos and not just facets of one person.
Sidenote: the Nirvana cover is all well and good, but by omitting the layering of the voices in the same way during the final bit, it misses out on this crucial facet of the song. Sure, it's live, but there could have been a way. For that reason, I feel that it is inferior. And that is where I am leaving this discussion. Feel free to join the holy wars on YouTube about this topic. The fact that the band initially messes up the start is a testament to the fact that the behavior of the chords in this song is unexpected.
'The Man Who Sold the World' (the album) was unexpectedly with me over the past month or so, as I listened to it in the car, at work, and even when I didn't need to in preparing this post. Other songs got my attention too, like 'Savior Machine,' with that great opening. I am not ready to be done with it, and perhaps I won't ever quite get there. This post ventures more closely to the types of traditional music analysis found in musical scholarship, and I think this parallel reflects the fact that Bowie's songs are constructed in the same tradition with the same interplay between text and music. Just as I could never quite grasp all that is in a Schumann Lied, I will never be quite done with some of those by Bowie.
Like the rest of America, I've been following some of the biggest stories to affect us all during this super-intense month of February.
No, no: my hysteria and histrionics have nothing to do with the primaries. Like my fellow Americans, I've tuned that mess out. Instead, I've been obsessing over the live performances of Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar.
There's been so much good coverage on these two figures, so I feel almost silly adding my two cents to this public conversation on their music. But something that I've been wondering about lately is if people are freaking out about Beyoncé and Lamar so much because they're producing high art.
High art rests on the premise that the cultural product being produced somehow surpasses or supersedes our aesthetic expectations. We believe its content contains moral, spiritual, cultural, aesthetic values that go beyond commercialism. High art is not here to entertain us. It demands more from us. The more beautifully rendered the work of art, the more it has the ability to mess with our heads.
We admire high art for its beauty, yes, but also for its sophistication. Works of high art often unapologetically demand that the viewer or listener experience the cultural product more than once before it will be comprehensible to them. And high art often simply resists comprehensibility at all. I'm sure we could all come up with a list together of works of music, poetry, or visual art that people have struggled with and written about for decades.
Moreover, there's an unapologetic nature to high art. By the early 20th century we came to accept that Art is Art, and it's not the artist's fault that you can't understand it (see: Milton Babbitt's polemic, "Who Cares If You Listen?"; Duchamp's "The Fountain," et. al). I also blame Richard Wagner for this (but I blame him for everything, soooo....).
Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain (1917)
So I wonder if high art's refusal to apologize for its incomprehensibility is why people are freaking the eff out about Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. Beyonce's music video, Formation, and Kendrick Lamar's latest Grammy performance felt incomprehensible to people. Both artists presented works that were not immediately accessible, and they have refused to apologize for that.
For a variety of reasons (none of them good), American culture (both "highbrow" and "lowbrow") has a really hard time seeing black artists as creators of high art. Their musical works, iconography, and texts are supposed to always be accessible because their main purpose is to entertain. People have also identified that this is a problem of commercial music (pop/hip hop/etc), too: we don't think of it as worthy of the label "high art." Hence, Zoe's posts earlier on Lady Gaga and Britney Spears and Sia.
But there's also something more specific here in how we understand black artists and what they are capable of/who they should be speaking to. The poet Harryette Mullen articulated this point back in the 90s in her analysis of contemporary American poetry:
Harryette Mullen
She writes: “The assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” Black creativity, high art, and the avant-garde cannot mix.
Kehinde Wiley's paintings of black subjects in highly-stylized 18th century European art forms also point to this fact, too:
Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars (2008)
His work initially shocks and stuns the viewer. Using huge canvases that hang on the wall like medieval tapestries, Kehinde Wiley creates portraits of black figures who are comfortably nestled into a baroque, ornamental setting. His work appears to us as a contradiction. And his message is clear: we're not used to associating black figures with high art.
I think Beyoncé's video, Formation, functions in a similar manner. We see a mixture of aesthetic historicism in her representation of 19th century New Orleans that requires the viewer to be able to make historical/cultural references:
But we also catch a glimpse of her politics when she uses graffiti to write "Stop Shooting Us."
Kendrick Lamar's Grammy performance was equally astounding in part because of its reverse teleology. Beginning in a prison and ending in Africa, his Grammy performance narrated a different story of black history that we haven't quite unpacked.
But I think my point is that it's ok if we haven't figured out what they're doing with their art yet. It's okay if their works feel incomprehensible. Even better than that: it's a good thing. Recognizing black artists as multidimensional beings who use their amazing brains and talent to creatively share their experiences with us is wonderful.
But it's also precisely because their works are high art that people are uncomfortable with them. Their unapologetic incomprehensibility is audacious to those who are terrified of black creative agency and its power. People don't want to take their art seriously because of the assumptions about blackness, creativity, and entertainment that their work threatens to undo. I think that's why people are having meltdowns. It's not just because their works are politically charged that people are becoming hysterical. It's because they're aesthetic masterpieces, too.
High art is immensely powerful. Aesthetics have so much power. And it's really interesting to reflect on who's found ways to tap into that power and how people have responded to them. The more we recognize that, the more we can see the importance of supporting black artists in whatever field they're in. One can be black and create high art. That is not a contradiction. It's a cause for celebration. Let's figure out how to applaud them louder.
Over the past weekend, while you were going about your business, Beyoncé managed to drop a song pretty much out of nowhere on an unsuspecting public, then take over the Superbowl halftime show like she was the headliner. Also she reinvented her role in contemporary culture, overpowering the limitations frequently imposed on female pop stars to engage directly with an escalating civil rights movement. Lastly, she almost fell down while performing but recovered without even missing a beat because when she isn't busy with all the rest of this, she evidently takes the time to do some squats. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's go back to the song that launched a thousand--or perhaps even more--think pieces.
'Formation' is, as many commentators have pointed out, a song that indisputably engages with blackness, both in its video's imagery and its sound by drawing on tropes associated with black culture, particularly that of New Orleans. Not surprisingly given the subject matter, the video incorporates images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, culminating in Beyoncé on top of a police car sinking into a lake. 'Formation' conjures up similar imagery to Kendrick Lamar's most poignant contribution to the new civil rights movement, the song 'Alright' and its video. Indeed, it would surprise me if Beyoncé had not had aspects of Lamar's video in mind when preparing hers. But that doesn't diminish from Beyoncé's achievement in any way. The issues that are raised by both--the neglect of black communities, the terror state imposed on them by the police--are the crucial issues at the core of this civil rights movement and their importance should be central to this new Black Art.
Due to the subject matter, the polarizing nature of this song may not be a surprise. Yet there is more here than a debate about civil rights; instead, there is a larger shift in our understanding of what Beyoncé means. As Danielle C. Belton points out at The Root, Beyoncé has been, for many, 'some ethereal, race-less, colorless transformative nymph who could doo-wop pop whatever you projected upon her,' but that this image was always, to some extent, a façade. Belton continues:
What if I told you Beyoncé was always political? Even when she was
doo-wop popping in Destiny’s Child. What if I told you that to be black
in a public space, with all eyes on you and choosing carefully how to
handle that spotlight is a form of politics, a negotiation between the
self and the world that all black people must make?
I want to build on Belton's idea by expanding on just how significant it is that this 'transformative nymph' chose to make this video. For it is not only Beyoncé asserting her identity (i.e., her formation) that is key, but particularly that she did so without shying away from the core tenets of today's civil rights.
Prior to 'Formation,' I would argue, Beyoncé was a pop star first, and all other identities second--with this moniker comes certain constraints, particularly for female artists. Acting in a sexually provocative way is virtually mandated; perhaps it is for this reason that many of these women tackle the issue of gay rights, as they are subject to critiques for performing their gender in such a public way, a tradition that extends back to at least Madonna and continues to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus today. Yet on other issues, female pop stars wield virtually no power. One prominent example is Britney Spears, whose mental health problems were little more than fodder for the paparazzi surrounding her. Female pop stars are expected to sing and act their parts, but otherwise to remain silent.
Even more so in the realm of hip hop, where the lack of women's voices is a critique often leveled against it. This lacuna becomes even more apparent when considering many of the songs that espouse the values of this new civil rights movement. Take, for instance, the opening to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, when Rosie Perez violently dances to Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power.' She may be the one fighting, but there is no indication that this is her fight; instead, she is silence as we hear the lyrics of Chuck D. (in the song's video, women are notably underrepresented).
Beyoncé's music has always resided comfortably in the realm of pop, although she is not wholly disengaged with hip hop, particularly since her husband is Jay-Z. Indeed, the vast majority of her songs would fail whatever the pop song equivalent is of the Bechdel Test, in that men are integral to their narratives. She may be crazy in love, she may be drunk in love, he may be a baby boy, he may have left and is now realizing she is irreplaceable, but there was always a he. Even when he is absent, she is singing to her single ladies about the man who should have put a ring on it. Occasionally, Beyoncé also brings in a girl power song, a pop trope that goes back to at least the Spice Girls' Zig-Ah-Zig-Ahs, but without too much power and far more emphasis on girl. Indeed, the terms found in Beyoncé's career are youthful: child of destiny, girls running the world.
In an age where Disney stars frequently need to throw off the shackles of their childhood careers, we are used to the idea of Lady Pop Stars Growing Up In The Public Eye, a move that can be signaled by a song (Miley's 'Party in the USA' turns into a 'Wrecking Ball') or, in the case of Brit Brit, a song about the ambivalence of growing old ('I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman'), combined with a movie (Crossroads), and one extremely notorious VMA Award kiss from Madonna. Just as their provocations must be sexual, their coming of age is as well--there is nothing particularly controversial about 'Wrecking Ball' as a song, but there certainly is about the video. In terms of age, Beyoncé is fully grown, but it is with 'Formation' that she finally matures in terms of her music. Rather than court sexual provocation, she has focused her energy instead toward the more crucial issues of our day: on black identity and why black identity is in peril. In this, she is unique (so far) among her contemporaries (the vast majority of whom are white).
Beyoncé slays at Superbowl 50
Not only this, but she unveiled this new image at the most public venue imaginable: during the halftime show of the most watched television program of the year. That this song and its subject courted controversy is not surprising; after all, as Bey herself states, 'You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation.' But unlike the female pop stars before her, this is the look of power, not the look of provocation. Welcome to Queen Bey and her Formation.
In the wake of David Bowie's recent passing,
Schenkerian Gang Signs has declared 2016 to be the Year of Bowie. To
commemorate, we will be exploring all twenty-seven of Bowie's studio
albums at a rate of one every two weeks or so. Along the way, we will
explore the gamut of Bowie's achievements, from granular musical
analysis to broader notions of artistic trajectories.
Not the original album cover, but still of interest
One of the neat visualizations that is made available when you purchase a digital album through Amazon shows the popularity of certain tracks with an orange bar next to the title (popularity, I assume, that is derived from how often that track is selected by those who have purchased the album digitally). For example, when I bought the remastered version of David Bowie's 1969 album (originally titled David Bowie, later rereleased as Space Oddity), I learned that one track is pretty clearly the winner:
Now I am not currently planning to buy all of the albums in Bowie's discography, only those that I find have tracks that I really enjoy and that I would choose to listen to outside of this tribute oeuvre review that I am doing. However, one track on this album really caught my attention and contrary to pretty much everyone who has bought this one digitally, it was not 'Space Oddity.' This is not to say that 'Space Oddity' is subpar or anything. It was Bowie's first hit, it's a classic song, it brings up the theme of space and what the concept of space beings (Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, whoever is living on Mars) symbolize within the context of Bowie's works. But it wasn't my favorite this time around while listening to this album. Maybe I've heard it too much--it is one of the very few tracks of Bowie's that gets general play at places like your local Whole Foods (not a random example, this is based on my personal experience). Who knows.
I will ardently defend my choice of best track on this album, which is 'Cygnet Committee' (and also what I would call my early David Bowie cover band, were I to create one). 'Cygnet Committee' is a nine-minute ode to the kind of passionate anger that I associate with youth, a track that ends with Bowie in a near-scream declaring 'I WANT TO LIVE' over a martial rhythm in the band. It is glorious. It is the song that you wanted that night when you were in your early 20s and you were all mad at your friends about something and maybe you were somewhere between tipsy and fully drunk and you just didn't know what to do and you were just angry and frustrated you wanted to express your feelings and possibly Drama Ensued. Bowie did that for you. Bowie wrote your early 20s tipsy anger anthem. If it had a disco beat, it would rival Donna Summers' 'Macarthur Park' in its grandiloquence.
'Cygnet Committee' is ostensibly about Bowie's disillusionment with an attempt he made to reach the youth through an organization called the Arts Lab and how that didn't work, and his reaction about feeling drained and used and abused by these youth. But that actually doesn't matter, not even one iota. This is a song about sentiment, not about a situation (in my head, I made up a credible interpretation of this song as a representation of Charles Manson which does not even make sense in terms of chronology). Because everyone, at some point, feels put out by someone or something in life that is draining and uses you and to some extent, abuses you. And that is what this song is. It sounds like the prototype for the final track on Ziggy Stardust, 'Rock and Roll Suicide,' which captures an equally dramatic sentiment, but in one third of the time.
Bowie accomplishes this through the most traditional of means: his harmonies are almost major, but never quite. There are even hints of a descending tetrachord, a favorite device of Baroque composers (composers who also sought to capture sentiment above all). Dominant sevenths prevail in the vocal line and are not always resolved, adding to the feeling of melancholy throughout (around 6:11, there is a whole bunch of vocal line singing the flattened seventh of a dominant chord, but it never quite reaches the resolution). The opening veers between a major/dominant chord and its minor resolution, but it doesn't sit on either one long enough to firmly establish where we are. But juxtaposed with this are sections that sound like traditional rock, such as the one at 2:05 starting with 'Who praised their efforts to be free,' with the guitar hits as the section goes on, only go to back to the more stark major/minor opening. When we finally think we have reached a major key at the end, as Bowie repeats the line 'I want to believe' in various transformations, we suddenly shift over to the martial minor conclusion as he switches unflinchingly to 'I WANT TO LIVE.'
If you have never heard 'Cygnet Committee'--and unless you are a die-hard Bowie fan, it's likely you haven't--I would very much encourage you to give it a shot. This song is quite a contrast to the album's most popular track 'Space Oddity' and its faux-calm sentiment (belying the dramatic subject of its text). There is nothing calm, faux or otherwise, about 'Cygnet Committee.' Instead, it is a delightfully dramatic venture.
In the wake of David Bowie's recent passing, Schenkerian Gang Signs has declared 2016 to be the Year of Bowie. To commemorate, we will be exploring all twenty-seven of Bowie's studio albums at a rate of one every two weeks or so. Along the way, we will explore the gamut of Bowie's achievements, from granular musical analysis to broader notions of artistic trajectories.
David Bowie (1967)
Before I begin my discussion of David Bowie's debut album, I should probably state my credentials for conducting this evaluation of Bowie's entire output. They are relatively paltry. I was not a person who grew up enamored of his music; in fact, it wasn't until the past year or so that Bowie really attracted my attention. But attract my attention he suddenly did, with an entire month spent listening to Ziggy Stardust almost every day and stretches where I couldn't hear enough of 'The Man Who Sold the World.' So I am excited to embark on this endeavor because I am looking forward to filling in my own knowledge gaps about Bowie and the vast scope of the music that he produced.
That being said, on my first couple of listens to his debut album, I found myself quite underwhelmed by it. It's a hard one to characterize today as it does not quite fit standard tropes. Instead, it was viewed as a 'novelty album' (at least according to a BBC documentary that I recently watched), at a time when Bowie was dabbling in all kinds of novelties, including a tour across Britain in a show called 'Pierrot in Turquoise.'
Pierrot in Turquoise with David Bowie as Cloud
'Pierrot in Turquoise' is pretty much everything that you think a late 60s mimed commedia dell'arte tribute would be, including the climax, which occurs when a mannequin, serving as a proxy for Colombine, is beheaded. Bowie, in the role of Cloud, provides the songs and sits up on a ladder for a while (Bowie and the actor playing Pierrot have some pretty Ziggy-ish hair, as seen above). One of the songs that he wrote for the show, 'When I Live My Dream', would appear on his debut album. The fact that a song from a mimed commedia dell'arte show is on this album gives you a sense of its overall ambiance.
I was about to write this post in the vein of 'Not much here,' but then I started to wonder what I thought I would find on here. A proto-Ziggy? The early seeds of 'Let's Dance'? There is a bit of Ziggy, perhaps, in songs like 'She's Got Medals,' but you have to listen pretty carefully. Then I reminded myself that history is not a teleological endeavor; indeed, if any one artist reminds us to eschew the notion that an artist's biography should be structured around progressively improving stages, it is Bowie. Instead of improving, he transformed time and time again.
Until this morning, this post would have been a short one talking about the experimental nature of this album and how it was more of a curiosity than a masterwork. But I woke up with the melody to 'Little Bombadier' in my head (of course I would remember the waltz!) and realized that, improbably, these songs had taken a light hold in my mind. They still have the inventive melodies that will inform Bowie's subsequent works, a point that I will undoubtedly raise often. These songs are not quite what you think and certainly not quite what you would imagine. David Bowie served as a good start to this project because it reminded me that the goal is not to uncover a trajectory throughout Bowie's career, but instead to pay tribute to his works in their widely varying and engaging forms.
So I saw the indie rock band, San Fermin, last night in Ann Arbor.
Their concert was one of the first live indie rock concerts I've attended in a looooong time. In fact, it had been so long since I'd gone to hear an indie band play that two thoughts entered my mind as I stepped into the venue last night to hear San Fermin perform:
1. Would attending this concert garner me some pretty intense street cred among hipsters?
2. Am I, in the words of Lethal Weapon character Roger Murtaugh (forever immortalized by Danny Glover), officially too old for this shit?
Time will tell on point number one. I'm pretty sure my 19-year-old brother thinks I lack all street cred of any kind. I'm probably irredeemable. A hopeless case. It's time to place my lifeless corpse on a pyre, push it out into the floating waters, and set it on fire.
But I didn't *feel* too old at the concert. Living isn't just for the young, after all! I can actually leave my house on a weekday evening and do something other than watch Netflix. AMAZING REVELATION.
But the most fascinating part about attending the concert was realizing that all of the critical questions that I think about when I write about classical music - questions that excellent musicologists have trained me to ask, questions that strike right at the heart of contemporary debates about authenticity and performance - were firing off in my brain when I heard this octet perform.
A little background on San Fermin before I go any further:
A motley octet of musicians (trumpet, strings, saxophone, guitars, keyboard percussion) that started performing together in 2013, San Fermin sounds like a mix of Sufjan Stevens, the National (seriously: the male vocalists sound indistinguishable from one another sometimes. It's kinda crazy), and Grizzly Bear. One of their most popular songs is "Sonsick:"
But my favorite by far is "Parasites" (listen with headphones on! You need to get into that bass line!):
They're an indie rock band, yes. But I think that the reason I started questioning what I was hearing so much stemmed from the publicity surrounding the band. People describe San Fermin as a classical music/indie rock hybrid. The term "baroque pop band" gets tossed around pretty fast and loose in descriptions of them and their music. Moreover, much of the band's "classical music" cred centers on the main person who writes their music, Brooklynite Ellis Ludwig-Leone:
Composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone
A graduate from Yale's School of Music where he majored in composition, Ludwig-Leone is the brainchild of San Fermin, and earns praise as the band's "composer."
It's that "composer" label here that I want to start picking at. It's what led me to listen more critically to what I was hearing last night. Why do people use it in their descriptions of him? Why don't we apply the term to all songwriters? Because what's the difference, really, between Ludwig-Leone and other famous songwriters of rock/pop/r&b/rap music (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Kanye - yes, even him)?
Obviously, his classical music training or, rather, his sense of belonging to the classical music world empowers Ludwig-Leone and others to call him a "composer" rather than simply a "songwriter." Indeed, part of his big revelation that he could be a "composer" in an indie rock world came during college, when he decided to try writing music for rock instruments: "It was like a big step forward when I realized that those two things [rock music and classical music] could be in same room together," he said in an interview with the Washington Post. Inspired in part by the grand, orchestral scale of Sufjan Stevens's album, Illinois, Ludwig-Leone uses a mix of instruments (violin, mandolin, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, and so on) to create indie rock, like many other musicians (Andrew Bird comes to mind).
But unlike Andrew Bird or Sufjan Stevens, Ludwig-Leone doesn't sing on his records. He is entirely dependent on his octet (of which he is the keyboardist) to perform his music. In fact, if one were to listen to the album without knowing about Ludwig-Leone, one might assume that the two singers in it - Allen Tate and now Charlene Key - were the original generators of the music. Because that's how a lot of rock and pop music has functioned, hasn't it? The singer is usually the main songwriter!
Which leads me back to thinking about the role of the composer in contemporary indie rock music. What role does the composer here serve? What challenges or problems arise in the relationship between the composer and the performer in a contemporary indie rock band? Who should get credit for these live performances?
Musicologists offer much insight here. Through their research on the history of performance practice in classical music, we've come to learn that by the early 20th century, performers and listeners were invested in performing a piece of music "as the composer intended." The sense that one should try to divine the composer's intentions has greatly shaped the history of classical music performance in the 20th century, too. There was (and remains for many) a real sense that one could perform a Bach invention or a Mozart symphony authentically through close musical analysis and historical investigation. One could, in other words, reconstruct a musical event or recreate the musical object.
And here's the kicker: we've tended to see the performer's role in the recreation of a musical work as a servant to the music, an obedient musical worshipper whose sole job is to dogmatically pursue the composer's orthodoxy and implement the composer's musical design. The performer daren't think about wavering from the piece of music, about steering off course, about creatively altering the piece in any way. To alter Beethoven's music would simply be heresy!
But (and many of you see this coming)! Musicologists have taught us to push back against this. In the 1980s and 90s, Richard Taruskin and others came to criticize the Early Music movement, for example, for their attempts to create an authentic early modern musical performance. The more that Early Music folks tried to painstakingly recreate a musical work, the more they revealed their own ideologies and subjectivities in our contemporary world. What are we doing here in trying to honor a composer's wishes, Taruskin and others started to ask. What does it say about us and how we understand classical music today? To many people, these musical orthodoxies were proof that a strict canon of music had been set in place, and that the concert hall had become what Lydia Goehr calls "an imaginary museum of musical works." We go to the concert to admire these sacred musical works but not really to experience them, to be moved by them.
But to take things further - and to get back to thinking about San Fermin - some musicologists began arguing something even more controversial in the 90s: there is no such thing as a musical work. Not really. The only thing that exists at all is the performer! It is the performer entirely who determines what a musical moment will sound like. So why do we spend so much time obsessing over the composer when really all of the power lies in the performer's hands?
Freeing yourself from the composer's intentions is all well and good when the composer's dead. Do whatever you want. You want to make a Mozart sonata slightly more atonal? Go for it. Do your thang, girlfriend.
But what if the composer is alive? And is your friend? And you're in a band together?
Allen Tate, the lead male singer of San Fermin and BFF of composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone
At last night's concert, I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable/fascinated by two things:
1. For the first 45 minutes of the show, the composer never revealed himself. He never said that he was Ellis Ludwig-Leone, the composer of all of this music that the band was performing. If he hadn't said anything, one would have (rightly) assumed that the two singers were the leaders of the group.
2. After Ludwig-Leone did out himself as the composer, all of the performers praised him repeatedly as the sole creator of this music. They called him "the creator of all of this music," as if they had no say in it.
But that's not true, is it? The performers are the creators, too. Through moments of musical improvisation and good old-fashioned jamming, they made the music sound like it did and brought it to life. I doubt, for example, that Ludwig-Leone told singer Charlene Kaye to perform that specific vocal melisma at that specific time in one of the songs. I wonder who first suggested that saxophonist Stephen Chen create that basso ostinato in one of their closing numbers: Ludwig-Leone, who as far as I know doesn't play the saxophone (or not nearly as well as Chen), or Chen, who might have been fiddling around on the instrument during a jam session and came up with a cool musical pattern? Who is the originator here? And even if Ludwig-Leone had suggested that Chen play that ostinato bass line, it's Chen's act of performing it that brought it alive during the concert, and who made it fun by bouncing around on stage while performing it.
I really wish I could ask the performers at what point are they in control of their own music-making? At what point are you all pursuing Ludwig-Leone's wishes?
On the other hand, different performers have left the group over the years. The band is now on the third female lead singer:
Charlene Kaye (a University of Michigan alum! Go Blue!)
Clearly the composer's music has continued to resonate with his audience in spite of who might be singing it.
Musicologists studying Western art music have taught us for some time now that the relationship between the performer and the composer is way more complicated, messy, and blurry than we might think. Who is the agent of a musical experience?
I found myself asking the same question last night when I heard San Fermin perform, a band steeped in the world (and perhaps rules!) of classical music while also supposedly being free from many of these debates surrounding authenticity, performance practice, and musical orthodoxy as an indie rock band.
The band has embraced the composer label pretty fiercely. But how do they live with its power?
