Chris Thile's "Alright"

I don’t have much to say post-Grammys. Awards-wise, it went about as expected (except for Ed Sheeran, which was weird…). I didn’t get to watch it live, but based on chatter afterward, the best performances were from the cast of Hamilton and Kendrick Lamar, who performed pretty much one after the other.

But I want to point out something that happened on Prairie Home Companion about a week before the Grammys. Chris Thile, who with his band the Punch Brothers had been nominated for several Grammys this year (none of which they won), was guest hosting the radio show. He started talking about what amounted to a lullaby for his baby boy and then dived into an amazing one-person cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” a song that won two Grammys last Monday. You can listen to the cover on the Prairie Home Companion archives here (you’ll have to jump down to the “Alright; Song for a Young Queen” segment, which is just after intermission). Update 2019: Here is the new link: https://www.prairiehome.org/shows/51405.html

Some comments:

1) I think this performance shows a lot about Thile and the diversity of music that influences him. I’ve seen him cover the Beatles, the Cars, Radiohead, Of Montreal, and many others, all with his own take, all unironically and incredibly well. But this is even more far afield from bluegrass than those others (though considerably more PG-rated than the original).

2) You can tell from the performance that Thile isn’t just throwing this song off; he is genuinely in love with the music and spent hours learning the words and figuring out the best way to perform it (he did mention later on Twitter than he had flubbed a few of the words). He throws himself into the song. He later tweeted this after the Grammys, which got a lot of reactions:

3) This song is so not Prairie Home Companion. I don’t think the audience even knows how to take it, besides acknowledging the virtuosity that the performance took. Can you imagine them having the real Kendrick Lamar on this show? Yet Thile does it anyway. I think it shows guts, conviction, and firm cosmopolitan musical sensibility.

After you listen to “Alright,” take a listen to the opening number for that Prairie Home Companion show on February 6, 2016, Thile’s cheeky “Omahallelujah,” a great conflation of sports and religion, with Peyton Manning as the center of worship. Gold.

OK Go: Does the music matter anymore?

If you are like me, you can’t stop watching OK Go’s new music video. You know which one—the one with zero gravity, ehh…I mean bursts of microgravity from being on a plane flying in parabolas. What the name of the song again? Oh, you don’t remember, either?

This may just be me, but it isn't possible for me to watch this elaborate and amazing video and pay attention to the music. I spend the whole time marveling and just trying to figure out how they did it. In fact, the music hardly registers at all; I just get too distracted.

I was tempted to write a similar blog post about Ok Go’s 2014 video, “I Won’t Let You Down”
The blog’s tag line would have been something like“—Or Do They?”, meaning that even though the video was amazing, the music was unremarkable. Or perhaps the music was okay, but I couldn’t actually listen to it because there was too much going on in the video. To get back to “Upside Down & Inside Out” (which is the name of the new song and music video, by the way), I think the music is not bad, or at least has a lot of potential. The song has ups and downs, climaxes and calms, that match well with the plane’s parabolic periods. It is emotionally explosive, which is matched in the choreography. But the music production suffers from too much extraneous noise, unclear pitches, and superfluous echo that takes away from the emotion that it could show. Maybe that was the point of the production—but to me, the song sounds overproduced and lacks nuance.

Should OK Go just concentrate on making videos, then? Well, no, music does add something important to the genre, besides just the first word in the genre’s name; it wouldn’t be a music video without music. Why is the music important? Well, first, I think it is important to make clear that music videos are mainly a performance, more particularly a dance performance. Movement and music go together. The music gives the video structure in time, pacing, and often emotional impetus, often with some input from the words.

Having agreed that in general music is important, is this particular song replaceable? I would say that in the case of the last two OK Go music videos, another song with similar tempo and structure could be substituted just fine. In my opinion, the songs were not really emotional powerful on their own. But that is not always the case with music videos—I think the best music videos complement the song, bring out themes in the song, and even extend the song's meaning, while not distracting from it. You could say the same about ballet; what is ballet but an early form of music video? I think the closest OK Go got to this ideal was “A Million Ways”. The choreography is subtle, winningly awkward, and at least didn't get in the way of the message (mostly). Or maybe the song was just more interesting and stood out over the video, or I was actually able to pay attention to the music, unlike the next one (you know, treadmills…or whatever the song was called…) or their subsequent string of videos.

I don’t think this emphasis on video at expense of music is a problem exclusive to OK Go (though their videos are an extreme example). Actually, I encounter this problem with most music videos, for example most recently with Beyoncé’s highly-acclaimed "Formation". I’ve watched the video a few times, but in order to pay attention to the music, I have to ignore the video. This NPR’s article got it right—it’s a visual anthem, foremost. Musically, I’m not sure it’s her best work. Does that matter? Probably not; but I do wonder if emphasis on videos—especially visually overstimulating videos—drives down the quality of music.

Do any of you ignore or hide videos to focus on the music?

This is Your Brain on Music

If you are interested in the science of music cognition, you should definitely read this article from NPR's Bret Stetka. We don’t really understand why humans make music or how the brain processes it, but many scientists are trying to find out. This article focuses on two recent studies in music, the first on entrainment (or how our brain waves oscillate in time with speech and music) and the second on the sensitivity of the brain to lower pitches and tempo.

I’ll let you read the article, but basically: 

1. Your brain waves sync up with the music you are listening to;
2. Musicians' brains are better at entraining to music—they can make sense of slower tempos better than non-musicians; and
3. Your unconscious brain cares more if low notes are off tempo than high ones.

It’s a score for the nurture camp, in which I count myself; I think much of what we consider musical aptitude can be taught. I do take issue with Stetka equating boring music and slow music—I think there is a lot of uptempo music that is boring, and that non-musicians might agree with me.

Of course, the entrainment study only used classical music; I wonder how it would be different with other types of music?

Albums I didn't buy in 2015, plus some I still might

I took a good look back at my posts this past year, and after noting I had failed in my new year’s resolution to have and do more guest posts, I also noted that I had done only one album review this entire year. This is not a review blog, but just one review seems too few. I found this particularly strange because I tried out Apple’s streaming service for 3 months, so I was listening to more new music than I usually do. This year, as in the past several years, I also listened regularly to NPR’s Sound Opinions and All Songs Considered programs to get a handle on new music, so you might think that I would have responded to some of that music here on the blog, also.

In the end, though, I guess I didn’t have much to say about a lot of music that came out this year. I do try and set the bar high for myself, meaning that if I have something to say, I better say it well. Also, with some styles of music (such as hip-hop), I don’t feel like I have the expertise to really comment on it well.

In this post, I want to make some amends, and a mention is probably better than nothing. Instead of doing a top 10 albums or my biggest disappointments (like the Sounds Opinions annual Turkey Shoot), I’m just going to list some albums I listened to this year, divided into two groups: 1) albums I’m thinking about buying because I mostly enjoyed them, but didn’t have a lot to say about them (and obviously weren't so strong that I bought them right away) and 2) albums I’m not thinking about buying, meaning I seriously considered buying them, but ended up taking them off my wishlist after I listened to them. For the second group, I don’t think any of them are bad necessarily, but I didn’t think they were worth buying, either.

Albums I’m still thinking about buying:

• Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and And Sometimes I Just Sit
• Wilco: Star Wars (note: this was free, and I don’t regret downloading it)
• Sufjan Stevens: Carrie and Lowell
• Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love

Albums I’m not buying:

• Churches: Every Open Eye - I loved their first album; I was excited by the first single for this album, too, but it was mostly a letdown. I may still buy that single.
• The Decemberists: What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World - I mean, it was okay, but none of the tracks really grabbed me.
• Watkins Family Hour - I got excited about this when I saw their tiny desk concert (link), but the songs they did for that turned out to to be the only one good tracks on the album.
• Joanna Newsom: Divers - I probably needed more time to get into it, but am not willing to put in that time.
  
• Björk: Vulnicura - ditto.
• Passion Pit: Kindred
• Glen Hansard: Didn’t He Ramble
• Rhiannon Giddens: Tomorrow is My Turn - My one #TweetReview for the year, which was not a positive one.
• Joy Williams: VENUS - Definitely some good tracks, but not as strong as her Civil Wars records.

The best I album I discovered this year was actually Sarah Jarosz’s Build Me Up From Bones, which came out in 2013. It was actually an album that Amazon had repeatedly suggested to me until I gave up and listened to it and loved it.

What albums did you buy this year, or were thinking of buying but changed your mind later? Should I rethink any of my album decisions?

G.F. Handel, the German who wrote Italian opera and English oratorio

I sing with the Oahu Choral Society, and we are performing an all-Handel concert this Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7:30pm at the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Honolulu. I volunteered to write the program notes and decided to post them here on the blog, too.

One of the first life-sized marble statues of a living person who wasn't a noble or a military leader, you can learn more about this sculpture of Handel at the V&A website.

When modern concertgoers hear the name George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), chances are they think of his Messiah, the English-language oratorio that has become a staple of holiday celebrations not only in the United Kingdom and the United States, but across the world. Fewer people, however, know that Handel was born in Germany and even fewer that he rose to international prominence writing Italian opera in Italy. In the early 18th century, Italian opera—a term that indicates style as well as language—was like today’s Broadway musicals: it was theater exported and performed in its original language in many different countries, regardless of those countries’ main spoken languages. In Handel’s day, however, musicians could rarely work without a regular sponsor (often royalty or the church), so despite finding fame in Italy, he soon became connected to the prince-elector Hanover and was appointed court Kapellmeister (that’s connected to both church and royalty, for those who are counting) at the age of 25.

Almost immediately after his appointment, Handel used the Hanover family connections to travel to England and write Italian opera there; Rinaldo, the first Italian opera to premier in London, opened in 1711. Handel was obviously enchanted by London, and he continued to travel frequently to England. He was actually under Queen Anne of England’s pay when she died in 1714 and the German prince-elector of Hanover became George I, King of England, thanks to a 1701 act which forbade Catholics to sit on the throne combined with the fact that most of Queen Anne’s relatives were Catholic.

While Handel was not officially connected with King George I’s court anymore (in fact, as a German, Handel could not hold an official royal appointment), the king did hold a substantial stake in the Royal Academy of Music, which was not a school but an Italian opera company cofounded by Handel in 1719. Handel continued to write Italian opera for the London stage, as well as occasional contributions to the royal court, for the next twenty years. Following Serse (1738), however, Handel’s Italian opera company lost its financial backing and he turned to the oratorio, a form of music often described as partially staged opera without costumes and sets.

Why oratorio? Well, the English—and the Hanover monarchy—liked it. They enjoyed the English-language texts, the complex choruses (Italian opera was dominated by soloists), and the religious subjects. Oratorio was also easier to finance. While Serse was not Handel’s last opera, nor Messiah (1741) his first oratorio, Messiah’s success in public concerts in Dublin shifted Handel’s focus and led to a deluge of oratorios including Semele (1744), Judas Maccabaeus (1746), and Solomon (1748).

Besides Messiah, Handel’s most enduring success is probably Zadok the Priest, the first of four anthems composed for the coronation of George II in October 1727. Handel had known George II since the prince was a child, so the commission probably came as no surprise; coincidentally, however, Handel had become a naturalized British subject earlier that year, and it may have seemed as if the commission was a way to prove his new nationality. Prove it he did—Zadok has been performed at every British coronation since. But there is more to the coronation anthems than Zadok; the other anthems, based on a hodgepodge of royalty-themed biblical texts used for previous coronations, were a taste of what British audiences would come to love about Handel’s oratorios: full, religious, dramatic, and exciting choral music.

This Saturday's program showcases selections from the operas and oratorios mentioned above, bringing together the coronation anthems, three iconic arias, a famous chorus from Judas Maccabaeus, and an instrumental excerpt from Solomon. If you come, we hope you enjoy the many different sides of Handel: Italian opera and English oratorio, vocal showcase and instrumental entr’acte, complex chorus and virtuosic aria.