Music
Just added to Music Guide:
Historic American Sheet Musi - Archive at Duke University 1850-1920; includes notables like Scott Joplin, Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa.
Calling Trains. NPR’s All Things Considered observed that Clothesline Revival’s first cd, Of My Native Land was “on to something special by re-inventing the roots genre known as Americana”. The group’s second release, Long Gone, continues with that re-invention, working entirely with archival field recordings collected throughout the US in the middle of the last century. Arranger and producer, Conrad Praetzel, combines previously recorded a cappella vocals, from blues tunes, ballads, spirituals, skipping rhymes and work songs, with maverick musical treatments, beats and live roots instrumentation. Joined again by his long time musical partner and guitarist, Robert Powell, the results are captivating, untamed, off-beat and deeply moving.
Over the last two months, Nature has published essays about the nature of music and the brain. Want a free pdf? How about listening to a podcast?
Bach’ Cello suite number 1, a la Yo Yo Ma.
Bill Evans, improvisational genius, on the creative process and self teaching.
The Shape of Music (Seed) For a thousand years, Western musicians have endeavored to satisfy two fundamental constraints in their compositions. The first is that melodies should, in general, move by short distances. When played on a piano, melodies typically move to nearby keys rather than take large jumps across the keyboard. The second is that music should use chords (collections of simultaneously sounded notes) that are audibly similar. Rather than leap willy-nilly between completely unrelated sonorities, musicians typically restrict themselves to small portions of the musical universe, for instance by using only major and minor chords. While the melodic constraint is nearly universal, the harmonic constraint is more particularly Western: Many non-Western styles either reject chords altogether, using only one note at a time or build entire pieces around a single unchanging harmony.
Together these constraints ensure a two-dimensional coherence in Western music analogous to that of a woven cloth. Music is a collection of simultaneously occurring melodies, parallel horizontal threads that are held together tightly by short-distance motion. But Western music also has a vertical, or harmonic, coherence. If we consider only the notes sounding at any one instant, we find that they form familiar chords related to those that sound at other instants of time. These basic requirements impose nontrivial constraints on composers–not just any sequence of chords we imagine can generate a collection of short-distance melodies. We might therefore ask, how do we combine harmony and melody to make music? In other words, what makes music sound good?
Recently uncovered musical track from Delia Derbyshire (Dr. Who fame)