by liberal japonicus
The word ‘band’, for many people, brings to mind school buses and high school students. This image has groups that are bands call themselves ‘wind orchestras’ or ‘wind ensembles’ in order plug into the prestige of high culture. This first recording here by the North Texas Wind Symphony, which is the ‘band’ of the University of North Texas State, a university renowned for their jazz program.
John Mackey is the composer and has a fascinating back story, in that he is a composer who does not play any musical instruments. The page has an interview with him, which is fascinating and worth a listen, but it is the Weekend music thread, not the Weekend interview thread.
This is one of my favorite Mackey pieces, a two movement work entitled Kingfishers catch fire. There are several youtube videos of this piece, I chose the one with the score for those who might want to follow along. (note: you can tell he doesn’t play an instrument by the way he asks to horns to sit on a high C at the end) The first movement is Following falls and falls of rain and the second movement is Kingfishers catch fire. He doesn’t mention if the second movement was inspired by the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, but it is a good excuse to give you the poem:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Because I’m a sucker for Homer, this second piece, Wine dark sea, a tone poem based on the Odyssey, is next. Here are the program notes. The original piece is 30 minutes long, but here is a adapted version that is done by a Japanese girls high school. (yes, you read that right). In fact, the first piece was commissioned for a Japanese high school band festival. Anyway, if you like this, search out the 30 minute version.
A last piece, Sheltering Sky, forgoes the rhythmic fireworks of the previous two pieces, concentrating on a harmonic fullness. While the title may have you think of the Paul Bowles novel, it isn’t that.
If you have a composer/instrument/genre/anything that could be a handle for a weekend music thread, mention it in the comments! And if you want to do a guestpost about music, let me know!
I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like “excellence is a habit”, “if we all succeed, I’ve succeeded”, and an understated “we’re just that damned good”. When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.
The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka”. The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70’s. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I’m grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” aspect to them. They require a lot of time – hours and hours and hours – of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing – if you don’t really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It’s a challenge.
Kile is my age – 69 and counting – and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an “iron butt” – he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He’s an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He’s also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, “The Waking Sun”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
“The stars shine”, from his “Consolation of Apollo”, a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
“Three Spirituals for Piano Trio”, an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He’s doing better – still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn’t having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
I’m prepping and making changes to my syllabus for the writing class I teach that centers around college music – writing reviews of “college radio” albums from the ’80s and ’90s, and then taking what they have learned from doing that to comment on the music that is a part of their college lives today.
I had been having them write an essay exploring the question “Does College Music Still Exist?,” and digging into the social side of what defines the music of that moment and that community. Sadly, I’ve never been satisfied with the depth of their engagement with the topic and have been wanting to change it up for a few terms now in the hopes of finding something that gets them thinking more deeply and feeling like they have something that the want to say.
My current idea is to get them thinking more deeply about the ecology of their music media. If the music you listen to is chosen for you by an algorithm, what makes it yours? Should Spotify allow the uploading and monetizing of music produced by AI? Can an AI generated pop star understand your broken heart? Do you really listen to songs you don’t buy and music you don’t own, or is it just something to consume like fast food?
I keep making stabs at how to turn all that into a philosophical question that can provoke reflection and inspire many different responses – something like “What’s Wrong With Listening To Spotify?” or the like, but I haven’t found one with the right mojo and moxie. Any ideas?
Can an AI generated pop star understand your broken heart?
I read that, and my first thought was The Monkeys. A totally made-up-for-television group. In other words, about as authentic as an AI generated pop star.
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.** If one person writes the music, another person writes the lyrics, and a third performs the song? Which, if any, have to understand your broken heart?
** There are exceptions. People who write and perform their own stuff, at least mostly. But they are just that: exceptions.
wj – you can have AI generate the name of your star and generate genre appropriate “photos” of them. You can then use Claude to generate all the lyrics for your song from a simple, one sentence prompt. You can then feed those lyrics into Suno and have it generate a genre-appropriate song based on the lyrics complete with a vocalist.
It’s all just a stew of algorithmically generated near-plagiarism.
You can watch Rick Beato do just that here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKxNGFjyRv0
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.
Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.
If either of you want to brainstorm a thesis, I’ve got office hours on Zoom.
the Monkeys
the Monkees were a made-for-TV group but the songs were written by some of the best pop song writers of the day, and the music was performed by real live A list studio cats.
plus, at least one of the guys (Mike Nesmith) was actually a competent musician and songwriter.
net/net, not at all like AI generated music.
A lot of musical styles, especially commercial pop styles, are highly formulaic, so it wouldn’t be that hard to have AI crank it out.
And what you would get would be highly formulaic pop music. Which a lot of people really like, and would be a perfectly fine commodity and lifestyle accessory. It may sound like I’m being dismissive when I say that, but I’m not – that is what a lot of music is made for, and how a lot of music is used.
It’s like the art prints at your doctor’s office waiting room. They aren’t Rembrandt, or even Andy Warhol. But they are pleasant to look at, and don’t clash with the color scheme.
Again, not being dismissive. It’s nice to have pleasant, undemanding stuff to look at (and even ignore) when you’re waiting for an appointment.
What you will not get from AI is a Leonard Cohen, or a Tom Waits, or a David Bowie, or a Paul Simon. To cite some better-known examples. You might get a Beatles of the quality of “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, but not an “Eleanor Rigby”.
If you fed an AI music generator a diet of any or all of those guys, you might get a simulacrum of their work. But it will be missing the special ingredient that actually makes you sit up and take notice when you hear their stuff – the human insight, the unusual chord change, the frisson that comes from the unexpected use of language in the lyric.
AI is inherently derivative. Derivative work can be useful, and has its place, but it isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know.
What makes the folks I named here artists, rather than simply entertainers, is the way in which they subvert the stylistic formulas they work in to discover meaning beneath the surface of the style.
Maybe someday some kind of AGI gizmo will be capable of that. If so, it probably will not be in a direction that resonates with humans.
But I am skeptical that AGI will ever actually be a thing.
Shorter me – show me the AI music generator that will come up with a line like “Looks a lot like Che Guevara / he drove a diesel van”.
It’s simultaneously tongue-in-cheek hip and hilarious and ironic and allusive in about 10 different directions. Totally obvious and common place chord changes, but the snarkiest lyric ever.
I don’t think AI is capable of that. In fact, I’m curious to know if AI can make a good joke, at all.
russell is well on his way with this prompt.
And I don’t think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
And I’m not talking about a CGI/animated puppet for real performers (a la Gorillaz or Dethklok). That’s just human musicians cosplaying something else. What Spotify, Sony, Warner, etc. are after is on-trend content generated by trained expert systems in response to prompts or to the other content listened to by users of their services.
And I don’t think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
Perfect example: Johnny Cash singing Hurt. The video’s pretty amazing too.
And I don’t think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
I’m not so sure about that. Certainly it can help. But actors can play parts, with authentic appearing emotions, even about experiences they have never personally had — all it takes is having seen someone else experiencing it. Or showing how it looked when a third party did. Great actors do it most convincingly, but even journeyman level actors can do a pretty convincing job.
Are singers any different from actors in that regard? I’m willing to be convinced, but it may take some doing.
What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
I’m not so sure about that. Certainly it can help. But actors can play parts, with authentic appearing emotions, even about experiences they have never personally had
What is required is empathy. Which machines do not have.
They can imitate. They cannot empathize. Those are different things.
What is required is empathy. Which machines do not have.
They can imitate. They cannot empathize. Those are different things.
Certainly they are different. The question is, are they distinguishable? I’m not sure that they necessarily are? Sure, a bad imitation is distinguishable. But a good one?
Put another way, is real empathy required? Or can it be simulated convincingly?
wj – …actors can play parts, with authentic appearing emotions, even about experiences they have never personally had — all it takes is having seen someone else experiencing it.
Agreed, but look at what I said: What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with. Note that I did not say that they need to have that precise experience, just enough to act as a bridge between their own experience and others’. As russell says, it takes empathy, or as they used to say “fellow feelings.” An AI has no experiences, and isn’t a person, so can have no personal perspective and cannot reflect. It has to be trained to extrapolate within very narrow ranges and cannot imagine or improvise or project. Even a sociopath has a better perspective for understanding. At least the sociopath is embodied and sensate and conscious. An AI is a database with a good costuming department.
Sure, a bad imitation is distinguishable. But a good one?
A really good simulacrum of a highly formulaic or stylistically mannered performance could be convincing. Because the “real thing” is already sort of artificial.
Beyond that, I don’t think so.
I spend a lot of time in Spotify, average 4 hours a day, many days 12 hours I have a few 50 hour playlists but they aren’t really curated, I have 20 or more 1 to 12 hour playlists carefully curated to the mood I wanted.
With that context, my Spotify listening has become a challenge as the algorithm is so trainable that almost any way I let Spotify pick songs it quickly just duplicates playlists I already have created with a different song here and there.
So, it trained me to be more imaginative in my seed requests. Song radio is my favorite way to listen, so I very carefully consider the seed song if I want a certain genre/era of music. It has become really fun to pick more obscure songs by lesser known artists to see how long it takes for that trail to lead back to my choices.
All to say that Spotify can be a fun pastime if you recognize its limitations and try to get around them. If you pick Willie Nelsons On the Road Again or Willis Alan Ramsey’s Ballad of Spider John you eventually get to Jerry Jeff Walker but the road there is quite different.