Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus 1, J. S. Bach

J. S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue is often avoided as a listening experience by many listeners, fearing that this work--and any works with the term 'fugue' attached--will be too academic for the ears of laymen.  Bach would probably agree with me when I say that, if a fugue doesn't grab the listener as simply a piece of music, it should be considered a failure even as a fugue.

This first fugue: Contrapunctus 1, is probably one of the most approachable fugues ever written.  As with all the fugues in The Art of the Fugue, there is no indication as to what instruments are to play each line of music.  Some scholars consider that such pieces are meant to be played on the harpsichord or the organ; more modern scholars consider that a string ensemble is best suited for the job.  In this video, the parts have been assigned to--top to bottom--a flute, an English horn, a viola, and a bassoon, respectively.  (The tenor is doubled very softly by a marimba, to give it a little crunch.)


Archie

Max Parallax!

Max Parallax, a fabulous band that has been rocking the Tucson scene for several years, are on the brink of releasing their first commercial EP (an Extended Play CD of just 6 tracks).  These tracks were recorded more than a year ago, but the group was so insistent on perfection that the tracks were only finalized this month!  With my privileges as a special Web personality, I had access to the tracks already, for several minutes.

Unfortunately, because I also know most of the band members personally, I have to be tactful.  I cannot say that the tunes are, well, fine.  I have to say that they are BRILLIANT!  But get them on Spotify, and Itunes, and Amazon, and wherever else good music is sold, and listen for yourself!

[01] Bugs Away.  This rocking track has a solid beat, and features the lead vocalist Uma, backed with the entire group singing backing harmonies.  There are hidden political messages, with a lot of humor!

[02] Swell.  The initial theme for this album, I was told, was the movie Interstellar.  The lyrics of this track refer to being submerged in the swell of a huge wave.  There is an undercurrent of danger throughout the song, and a feeling that you might be knocked off your feet at any moment.

[03] Out of Body, No Experience. You might get the impression that these people love puns; I certainly did.  The music is another story completely; this highly atmospheric track, again using heavy multi-tracked vocals, evoke a scene out of a frightening dream.  The long introduction with harmonics on the guitar set the tone for the unreal feeling of the tune, accented by the dance rhythm of the piece.

[04]  No Time for Caution.  This is the title track.  This song has a heavy beat, and in addition, the lyrics create a mood fraught with anxiety, or at least a parody of anxiety.  The vocal line is relatively uncluttered, and we can appreciate the sound of Uma's voice without overlays.

[05]  Amoebas.  The whole album has a theme of eerie science and experiment, and this song carries it further with its subject of bio-luminescence.  The opening bars have a descending motif on the guitar, which is supported by a descending bass line, which seems to descend even further than its range should allow.  (Troy owns a special five-string bass, but in this track I'm not sure that he uses that instrument with the extended range.)  It seems to me that all the little extra touches have been perfectly calculated, not least the accents in the percussion.  This track, too, ends abruptly, which is sort of a hallmark at this point in the development of the Max Parallax unique sound, but unlike some of the other songs, the last chord is allowed to resonate until it fades out.

[06] What Happens In the Future Stays in the Future. This last track is a lighthearted commentary on time travel.  The group accentuates the frolicsome mood by having Uma sing scat vocalizations in a jazz style in an interlude.  Many Max Parallax fans have declared that this is their favorite track (while others have voted for Amoebas).

The lighthearted mood of some of the tracks, and the savage puns in the lyrics belie the efforts gone into the production of this initial CD.  This is a great CD, and we hope that Max Parallax keeps up the quality of their recordings!

Arch

My Top Ten Albums!

I have some wonderful, interesting friends on FaceBook, almost all of them students or family members, or former colleagues.  They put in a lot of effort into keeping themselves cheerful and occupied at home (and keeping their kids from wrecking their homes), and cheering up their other friends on Fb; a laudable task.

One thing I'm seeing often is this sort of Chain Letter:

Day [n]: Xxxx [the name of the poster's buddy] has challenged me to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste, one record a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the cover. And each day I am to nominate someone to do the same. Today I nominate Arch!

Well, this sort of thing is easier for those whose musical tastes tend towards pop and rock, but for a classical music aficionado, this is not easy.  Furthermore, I could not think of 10 people who would be interested in responding to such a challenge.  So I came back with:

Day 1: [xxxx] has challenged me to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste, one record a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the cover.
Well, I'm changing the rules.
Post at least 5, and if you must, give a _brief_ intro in the comments. (Most of my friends are academics, and cannot just post covers.)
And each day I am to nominate someone to do the same. Today I nominate [name of my first victim]!
(Post in as Hi-Res as possible, so we can read the text.)

Well, this is a blog, so I'm going to post all ten (or however many) all at once.  I may go on to blog on each album on subsequent days, but I'm going to put the list up right away.

The Brandenburg Concertos

I had a friend, Mano Singham, who had been hired to spend a few hours a week to talk English with a Japanese Buddhist monk who was spending a year in Sri Lanka. I joined him for one of these meetings, and we had a great old time! This monk later sent me an LP, and it was the very first in my collection.

I had already been introduced to the Brandenburgs, and I'm struggling to recall where.  One of my episodes on Archie's Archives on the actual radio show had a little sub-episode about the Brandenburgs.

The Bach Orchestral Suites

When I was in graduate school, I spent a lot of time at the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh, and one of my favorite LPs to listen to was this one: The Bach Orchestral Suites, performed by Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra.  The first two suites were the ones I listened to the most, but over time, I got interested in all four of them.

There are stories to tell about these suites, and particular dances in the suites, which I will put in a different post!

I have to say Menuhin was a handsome man!  And by all accounts, an excellent conductor.

The Bach Trio Sonatas

These, too, I discovered in the Hillman Library.

I can honestly say only that I remember all the tunes of the very first Trio Sonata in E Flat; the other ones will be familiar if I play them, but I don't know them as well as I should!!

Now, all this makes it looks as though I like nothing except Bach.  That isn't strictly true, but it strikes uncomfortably close to the mark, unfortunately.  Heh-heh.

Violin Concertos

I learned a lot about classical music via the wonderful Book Of The Month Club series on Music Appreciation, and one of the best chapters was on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, played on the Music Appreciation record by Fredell Lack, who has sadly passed from being in the eye of the public for several decades.

This album cover is from an entirely different set
This is not a real album cover; it is a fake that I made out of the portraits of the composers, because I did not want to dedicate a different one of these bullets to each concerto.  When it comes to the so-called 'Great' violin concertos, most teams do them justice, so it doesn't greatly matter which performance you buy.

The concertos that influenced my tastes early on are:

Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bach (3), Mozart (5), Sibelius, Bruch.

Pete Seeger

This is a little out of sequence.  But I'm going to put this here; after all, COVID, you know.  I can't be perfect.

I didn't really get to know and love Pete Seeger until I had learned to play the guitar.  That road was long and hard, but I got there in the end!

Now we have to go look at some of the pop and rock music that I learned to love.  If we talk about albums, specifically then we must talk about The Beatles.

The Beatles

The Beatles did not really influence me via an album except somewhat later.  The first songs I sat up and paid attention came from A Hard Day's Night.  The first album I got hooked on was Help.  I went on to Rubber Soul, and then to Sgt Pepper's, though it was many years later that I could actually afford these.

Soon after I started grad school, and began to earn a stipend, I began to acquire Beatles recordings with a vengeance.  The first two were the Blue Album, and the Red Album.  Those only contained remastered versions from the Beatles existing discography.

Then, one amazing day, I saw the movie Let It Be, which was amazing, and I was in love yet again!  I won't include that one, though it was arguably as great an influence as the others, or almost as great.

The New Whiffenpoofs

My dad picked up one of the Whiffenpoofs annual albums while he was at Yale.  (The Whiffenpoofs are the Yale men's glee club; I don't know whether they still exist, or whether they have morphed into a mixed glee club, which is perfectly reasonable.)

The 1962 recording was just absolutely perfect, and we played it repeatedly.  Unfortunately, we lost this record---or rather, one of our friends stole it!---but apparently they're available second-hand, and I must buy one, or I shall be very sad.

10 Years Together: Peter, Paul and Mary

I love this album to pieces.  It was discovered just about the time that I had gotten moderately skilled at the guitar, and these songs were just the best ones to try out on the new 12-string guitar that I bought a few years later.

There's barely a dud among them; they constitute a sort of greatest hits for PP&M, whose arrangements of many amazing songs from many amazing songwriters were---unbelievably---often more commercial than the originals, and actually just plain better.  Cases in point: Leaving on a Jet Plane, by John Denver; I suspect that not many even know that John Denver wrote that one, and Don't Think Twice, it's alright, by Bob Dylan.  And let's not forget Early Morning Rain, written by Gordon Lightfoot, a total winner!

Sounds of Silence: Simon and Garfunkel

This album influenced me strongly in my college days, but it was owned by someone else.  The one I bought was Greatest Hits; I strongly advise buying greatest hits whenever possible.

The songs were perfect for a rebellious 19-year-old, but very soon after I got familiar with this album, I began to think that the poetry was a little overwrought.  And furthermore, Mrs. Robinson wasn't in this album, and Bridge over Troubled Water.

OK, I must rest now; this post is taking over my life.

Well, dragged myself back, I have.  Continue I must; the force, pushes me, it does.

Messiah

This one is a good all-round recording; two others there are, which I will also find and put here.

It is done.

Peter Schickele, A Musicologist For All Of Us

Peter Schickele

(Cross-posted in Archimedes--I Could Be Wrong . . .)

Peter Schickele is principally a composer.  For various reasons, he invented an extra, mythical son of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, named P. D. Q. Bach, which allowed Schickele to vent all his instincts to parody everything from Handel to Gershwin and Cole Porter through the prolific pen of P. D. Q. Bach.  In addition, as the 'discoverer' and tame musicologist whose obsession was this son of J.S.Bach, Schickele had free rein to first create numerous musical works, and then proceed to analyze them into the ground, first, of course, having performed them for everyone's coarse entertainment.

In the nineties, Schickele began a regular feature--principally on public radio--called Schickele Mix, which made musicology accessible to typical music-lovers, especially those whose tastes were on the broader side, because there were fewer opportunities for these folks to explore their instinctive feeling that phenomena that were attractive and interesting to them were to be found in most kinds of western music.  Today, popular musicologists spring up like mushrooms, and YouTube provides a ready forum for them, but Schickele was a pioneer.  The musicological connections between classical music and popular music was not the characteristic tool in Schickele's conceptual arsenal; it was rather just one approach, which was particularly powerful.  I don't remember details, but in a post (forgive me for talking about Schickele Mix as if it were a blog) about The Circle of Fifths--or rather, the sequence of fifths, since the circle was rarely completed--there were a number of references to popular songs that used the sequence.

P.D.Q. Bach

As P.D.Q. Bach, Schickele was revealed to be a parody composer second to none.  The compilation The Wurst of P.D.Q. Bach is a veritable Pandora's Box of Schickele's parody compositions, ranging from opera, to overtures, to suites, duets, and even a deplorably bad parody of a play-by-play of the Allegro of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, in the style of a football commentary.  Though that opus makes me cringe (and keep looking for a remote control which I keep forgetting I do not actually have, since it was a cheap CD player) and skip to the next track, some Schickele fans undoubtedly regard it as a classic.

The level of musical performance on Schickele's records is exceptional, featuring numerous legitimate talents, which cross over beautifully into comedy.

For anyone who has the patience and the energy, perusing the archives of Schickele Mix is going to be extremely rewarding.  If there are bootleg tapes or any sorts of recordings of these episodes--there, I used the correct word; they're not posts, they're episodes--they would make interesting listening for long, cross-country rides.

Schickele's main stream compositions are less familiar to this writer.  He has written for movies and for the Walt Disney production of Fantasia 2000.  One of these days, I'll get around to listening carefully to some of these works, and make an addendum to this post.

Arch

Sgt. Pepper meets 2017

The Beatles’s historic album of 1967: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has its fiftieth anniversary this year.  This is the album for which they dressed up in satin outfits and looked ridiculous.  (Ever since that time, they did occasionally dress up in goofy clothes, though I’m fairly sure at least a couple of them hated to do it.)

As you know, there are a good number of pop music expert critics out there who feel obliged to make sure that their audience knows good pop from bad pop, especially on magazines such as Rolling Stone.  It's pretty funny to read articles by these guys about Pepper, tripping over themselves to write the most insightful critique concerning the place of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the eighth album by The Beatles (meaning the eighth in order of release in Britain), in the Constellation of Iconic Albums of All Time.

There are many unique characteristics of this album, but most of them are relative to the Beatles: Sgt Pepper was a milestone in the development of the Beatles as a group.  One characteristic is absolute, namely that this is arguably the first concept album released by a popular group, where the cuts were loosely tied together by some thread; in this case, a music hall performance by a fictitious band.  Another important distinction is that most Beatles albums, up to that point, featured songs the majority of which could be performed live, on stage.  Pepper, in contrast, had orchestral sounds almost from beginning to end, and would have sounded terrible performed live.

At least one writer criticized the songs of the album as being substandard, an opinion to which this fellow is welcome though he might be all alone in his opinion.  (For instance, he criticizes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as being too repetitive.  Well, ok.  The Beatles were on drugs, at least a few of them, and we must take the lows with the highs.)  I think most of the songs in Sgt. Pepper were outstanding, and to me, more memorable than a lot of the songs from earlier albums, most definitely helped along by the music-hall Sgt. Pepper theme.  (That was quite a clever idea, and it raised the quality of the album, from the point of view of its saleability, very high.  To this day, Sgt. Pepper is considered to be one of the greatest albums ever, by some because of its historical significance, by others because they're fans.)

I'm not convinced that it is absolutely necessary to run out and buy the 50^th anniversary $125 Sgt Pepper package, unless you're a maniacal die-hard Beatles fan and an audiophile combined.  It does have some nice things in it, e.g. a totally remastered CD with material from the original tapes, a Blu Ray disk with 5.1 stereo, a CD of the original Mono mix, and lots of souvenir type stuff.  But you owe it to yourself to buy at least a CD of the basic album.  In a few months, we are sure to find for sale the new remastered album offered by itself, for maybe $20, and it is bound to be offered for even less presently.

Annotated list of the songs on the album, with comments by Arch

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band	This is a very hard metal introduction (lead vocals by Paul McCartney) to “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” in music-hall style, and the "One and only Billy Shears," singing the first actual song, which is Ringo singing “With a little help” (below).
With A Little Help From My Friends	Ringo sings this innovative song.  It features an interesting bass line and sound, and extra brass instruments above and beyond the usual Beatles guitars.  Three years later, Joe Cocker performed a triple-time version of this song at Woodstock.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds	John Lennon performs this song (inspired by a drawing by a kid: Julian Lennon, I believe) with the new harmonic sequences that Paul and John were experimenting with.  It has a psychedelic feel, both the performance and the lyrics. Since high school, John Lennon had been writing a certain avant-garde sort of nonsense poetry, and here you get a good, psychedelic blast of it.  "Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes." This album features the boys playing something called a Mellotron.  This was a keyboard connected to an array of tape loops.  You could play any note into a microphone on the mellotron, and it would make a full keyboard's worth of tape loops of this sound, and you could play it like an organ.  ("Full keyboard" is probably an exaggeration; it might have had just a few octaves' range.)  This instrument, I believe, adds fullness to this song.  It certainly gives the introduction to "Fixing a hole", see below.
Getting Better	A John Lennon / Paul McCartney duet, which is the song that could most easily have been performed live on stage.  There is an interesting drum sound, with an Indian feel to it.  Again, there are a few great lines in the lyrics, e.g. "I used to be cruel to my woman, and beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.  Man, I was mean, but I'm changing my scene, and I'm doing the best that I can."  I'd love to have written that.
Fixing A Hole	Most definitely a McCartney song, performed by Paul McCartney, with an interesting bass line.
She’s Leaving Home	There was a lot of excitement about this cut (sung by McCartney) because it featured a string quartet.  It was the late sixties, and the theme of alienation was treated by a lot of the popular poetry (and song lyrics) of the time.
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!	John Lennon sings this circus-themed song, essentially the exact contents of an actual poster.  (The poster is reproduced in the Anniversary Package.)
Within You Without You	George Harrison had already begun experimenting with Indian music and instruments, and the Beatles invited several Indian musicians to contribute to this song.  It ends with a horse-laugh, which might indicate a certain ambivalence about it.
When I’m Sixty-Four	A very clever song (Paul McCartney) in the whimsical style of his parodies of songs of the thirties and forties.  It is so well written, it is very likely to continue being played occasionally for decades to come.  It is scored for a wind ensemble (I can hear a clarinet or two in the sound mix).
Lovely Rita	Another Paul McCartney song (though it does sound like a Lennon-McCartney collaboration) that comes across as a throw-away, but is nonetheless very memorable.  The lyrics are delightful, for example: Lovely Rita meter maid May I inquire discreetly When are you free to take some tea with me?
Good Morning Good Morning	Now, this one is the one that comes closest to being a filler.  It is John Lennon, not at his best.
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)	A sort of outro, essentially a different version of the first cut.
A Day In The Life	A poignant song by John Lennon, continued with Paul McCartney, ending with John Lennon, and the famous “forever chord,” which is a big chord, mostly on the piano, extended artificially to fade out after several minutes. There are many references to items in the news at the time: holes in Blackburn, Lancashire; someone blowing his mind in a car at a traffic light, etc.

The implications of the rise of plastic waste due to carelessness and littering

A recent article in the Huffington Post brings to our attention the fact that an enormous amount of plastic waste is finding its way into the ocean.

Most of us know that in many ways the ocean is the starting point of the food chain.  (You could trace the chain of food to the energy from the Sun, but fish is an important source of food, and endangering the source of fish is a terrible thing for many countries.)  You could read the article for yourself, and gross yourself out with the disgusting visuals presented there.

Any visitor to a Third Word country in the past twenty years or so would have certainly seen multi-colored plastic bags flying in the breeze.  Even in the US, young people (and probably mature adults as well) sometimes just toss used plastic bags on the street.  Littering is a consequence of lack of education.  Unfortunately, I suspect that college kids are a major contributor to littering, but we know very well that being enrolled in college is no guarantee that someone is educated.  (It would be interesting to see whether littering on campuses is correlated with the perceived quality of the education in that campus.  I have no idea.)

People on the Alt Right, I suspect, would be quick to point out that foreigners and minorities are probably the biggest sources of plastic pollution in the world, extrapolating from the fact that China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand (in no particular order) are the biggest contributors to ocean pollution via mismanaged landfills (or mismanaged waste).

Part of the problem is that these are poor countries, and they have other priorities than careful waste management; because of the limited resources of each poverty-stricken family, an immediate goal for every person is probably that of getting rid of any piece of useless plastic onto the street.  Of course we know that these very people are going to have this same plastic impacting their food supply, but we can easily see that this information is not going to make a difference in their waste-disposal habits.

As I see it, people and organizations in the First World, that is we, will have to take action to mitigate this problem.  In other words, we will have to actually organize to take garbage out of the oceans, especially plastic garbage.  Many of our compatriots will be indignant, because we are not causing the problem, or at least, not the major contributors to it.  We recycle our grocery bags, with which various manufacturers make outdoor furniture, and, I suspect, things like composite patio floors, etc.  But we will soon have to make heroic efforts to ensure that we keep the lungs of whales and other marine mammals, and the gills of all sorts of fish, whether we eat them or not, clear of plastic, because everybody eats somebody, and everybody is eaten by somebody else, sooner or later, and we have to keep sidelining waste plastic until such time as the casual use of plastics for all sorts of inessential purposes declines substantially, or, ideally, entirely.

The answer to "Paper or plastic?" must be "Paper, please," without exception.  I wish our grocer, Wegman's, offers us a choice.  (Maybe they do, and we just never realized it.)  We must organize our friends and acquaintances to reduce plastic use.  We must avoid selecting synthetic-fiber clothes, and pay a little more for cotton and silk and linen.  We must keep our eyes and ears open for any news that the natural fiber industries are using polluting chemicals, and jump all over them if we hear that they do.

The planet we received from our parents was a far healthier place than the one we're leaving for our grandchildren.  Some of us have gotten into the habit of ignoring this sort of bad news; we think of ourselves as fragile, and unable to tolerate too much bad news on any given day.  Ignoring these warning signs is no longer an option.  If we have influence among our friends and acquaintances, we must begin to wield that influence now.  Political action is good, but direct action, and support of green initiatives is beginning to look like a no-brainer.

Perhaps we should take the Green Party more seriously, and address head-on any weaknesses in its leadership.  There wasn't anything very green in their party platform in the last election; perhaps it is time to take it over, and make it have a more explicitly environment-friendly set of policies and objectives than it has had in the past.

Arch

An Index into Archie's Archives

I'm not really sure how many visitors there are to this Archie's Archives website, but I for one use it heavily when I want to hear some of the old stuff from the radio days, when WXPI was still on the air for reals, as we say.

The way the links are structured, you have a continuous mp3 of each quarter of the show, but no way to get each individual cut.  In fact, it might not be legal to serve up the material divided up into individual pieces.  But I'm seriously considering providing an index into the website in show order, that is, roughly chronological order, so that anyone interested can go directly to the item of interest.  (Of course, they will have to sit through a large fraction of a half-hour long "podcast" to get to it, and listen to all my comments.)

So here it is, starting with the first program, and I will add to this as I have time and energy:

Show 101 July 5, 2014	Trios (and triple counterpoint) Part 1;  Part 2
Introduction to Archie’s Archives	Bach:  Organ fugue in A minor, BWV 543
	Beatles:  You’re going to lose that girl
	Bach:  Trio Sonata in E Flat, BWV 525, Movt. i
	Hopes for this show.  (We did not stick to these objectives!)
	Bach:  Ach, wenn wird die Zeit erscheinen?
	Episodes:  Train Wreck
	Bach:  Trio Sonata from Musical Offering, Movt. ii  (from Music at Menlo)
	Peter, Paul & Mary (Gordon Lightfoot):  In the early morning rain
	Haydn:  Trio
	Wagner:  Prelude to Die Meistersinger—ending.
	Bach - Walton:  See what his love can do  (Seht was die Liebe tut)
	Tom Lehrer:  Alma Mahler
	Signoff:  Tune (adapted from Starlight Serenade, by Jonny Heykens)