Wild World
Love this song, love this guy’s energy and his discussion of the song. It is indeed a “rather peculiar” melody, but it sure does work: [ADDENDUM: Here’s an older post of mine about Cat Stevens.]
Continue reading →Category Archives: Music
Open thread 3/3/21
I’m baaaack! Yesterday’s shot took much longer than I thought it would – not the shot itself, but waiting in line in the car. By the time I got back I felt like chilling out rather than writing, and even … Continue reading →
Close harmony: Part IIB (the Bee Gees – how do they make that sound?)
[NOTE: Part I can be found here and Part IIA here.] As I’ve written before, until recently all I knew about the Bee Gees were a few of their disco-era songs and a vague recollection of longish hair, and I … Continue reading →
Remove that blindfold: a metaphor for “equity”
[Hat tip: commenter “huxley”.] It strikes me that this is a good metaphor for what’s been happening to the idea of justice at the hands of the campaign for “equity” [emphasis mine]: For decades leading symphony orchestras have used “blind … Continue reading →
Songs that just arrive – if you’re right there waiting
I’ve gotten fascinated by the process of songwriting, something I don’t understand. I think I can safely say I will never write a song. But there are people who do it from childhood on, over and over. Sometimes they never … Continue reading →
And now to answer that burning question you’ve all been asking: is it vibrato or is it tremolo?
In my recent explorations in the field of popular music, I was reading an article in which a certain person’s singing voice was described as having vibrato, and I immediately thought, “No, it was tremolo.” Then I suddenly realized that, … Continue reading →
Only love can break a heart
Here’s a little residual post-Valentine’s Day angst. I am struck by the similarity of the theme of both of these songs. I guess there are only a finite number of things you can say about heartbreak: Neil Young’s voice shouldn’t … Continue reading →
On Beethoven’s deafness
ADDENDUM: Here’s a description of the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th: …[T]he Ninth Symphony was premiered on 7 May 1824 in the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna…This was the composer’s first onstage appearance in 12 years; the hall was packed with … Continue reading →
There’s no harmony like close harmony: Part IIA (the Bee Gees)
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.] The Bee Gees came briefly onto my radar screen in the late 70s through the extraordinary popularity of their “Saturday Night Fever” score. Then for me they faded out of sight and hearing, … Continue reading →
Everybody Knows
Leonard Cohen songs keep coming to mind – and not just any Leonard Cohen songs, but the ones he wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during an especially dark period in his musical oeuvre. Cohen had a lot … Continue reading →
There’s no harmony like close harmony: Part I
And the best of all is sibling close harmony. That’s where nature and nurture can combine to make different-yet-somehow-similar voices blend in a special way that creates a full and resonant whole that is far more than the sum of … Continue reading →
The perfect versus the human
This is about music. But I think it’s about a lot more, too: When the human element goes out of art, the art suffers greatly. We perceive it, even if we’re not necessarily conscious of why things sound different. I … Continue reading →