When Robots Write Songs: Computers That Compose

The Atlantic
When Robots Write Songs
Bach, Coltrane, McCartney: New algorithms can produce original compositions in the style of the greats. But are those works actually art?

William Hochberg Aug 7 2014, 8:01 AM ET

When Pharrell Williams accepted five Grammy Awards this year on behalf of the French group Daft Punk, the duo were dressed as robots. This may have foreshadowed a coming invasion by real music robots from France.

Computer scientists in Paris and the U.S. are working on algorithms enabling computers to make up original fugues in the style of Bach, improvise jazz solos a la John Coltrane, or mash up the two into a hybrid never heard before.

“We are quite close now to [programming computers to] generate nice melodies in the style of pop composers such as Legrand or McCartney,” says Francois Pachet, who heads Sony’s Computer Science Lab in Paris.

The commercial applications of such efforts may include endless streams of original music in shopping malls that can respond to crying babies with soothing harmonies, as well as time-saving tools for busy composers. But the questions raised by computerized composition are more abstract—touching on the nature of music, art, emotion, and, well, humanity.

The music-bots analyze works by flesh-and-blood composers and then synthesize original output with many of the same distinguishing characteristics. “Every work of music contains a set of instructions for creating different but highly related replications of itself,” says David Cope, a computer scientist, composer, and author who began his “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” in 1981 as the result of a composer's block.

“It’s truly impressive,” says jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, commenting on a track by a jazz-bot programmed by Pachet’s team to sound like sax legend Charlie “Bird” Parker blended with French composer Pierre Boulez. “I sent it to Chris Potter, the saxophone player in the band I am touring with right now, and asked him who the player was. He immediately started guessing people.”

The French robot that mashes up Parker and Boulez is a lot more advanced than most efforts at computer-penned music. For instance, another jazz-bot emulates Bill Evans with mixed results. Known for his heavenly flights of pianistic virtuosity, often while doped up on heroin, the classically trained Evans defined Cool Jazz on Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” outing, the most popular jazz album ever. Sony’s Evans-bot sounds more like it’s doped up on a cocktail of Thorazine and Windows 8. The lush chordings and rush of arpeggios are trademark Evans, but the ham-fisted dynamics and pointless melodies reveal no one human is home.

In 1950, World War II code-breaker and forefather of artificial intelligence Alan Turing introduced a blindfold test to see whether computers could fool humans into believing they were communicating with other humans (“humans” who were actually computers). The test would determine, essentially, whether computers can “think.”

But can they swing? “I would submit that you can certainly make a computer swing,” says Brooklyn-based musician and technologist Eric Singer. “You can kind of jitter that swing a bit to make it sound more human. “

Singer helped devise a computerized band called the “Orchestrion” that Metheny recorded and toured with in lieu of live musicians in 2010. The Orchestrion (also called a Panharmonica) was reportedly invented in 1805 by musician (and, some said, swindler) Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. Beethoven, a fan of early music tech, featured Maelzel’s musical automatons—powered by a bellows—in between symphonies at concerts in 1813.

David Cope has designed EMMY, an emulator named for the acronym of Cope’s “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” project at UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere. EMMY spools out miles of convincing music: from Bach chorale to Mozart sonata to Chopin mazurka, Joplin Rag, and even a work in the style of her creator, Cope.

.....
Read the full article with multimedia examples HERE in the Atlantic.

2013 Steely Dan Interviews

Steely Dan on Making New Music: 'We've Been Talking'
Band kick off 53-date Mood Swings tour this weekend


By Andy Greene
July 18, 2013 11:40 AM ET

Interviewing Steely Dan is no easy task. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen turned messing with journalists into an art form back in the Seventies. Rolling Stone checked in with Becker and Fagen during the final days of rehearsal for their upcoming 53-date Mood Swings American tour. It kicks off on July 19th in Atlantic City and runs through October 8th in New York. Select shows will include complete performances of Aja, Gaucho and The Royal Scam.

We spoke with Fagen first, and he lulled us into a false sense of security by casually answering our questions in a relatively straightforward manner. A couple of hours later, Becker called. He was a little less cooperative, though equally sardonic. The pair talked about choosing songs for this tour, the possibility of a new Steely Dan record, their aging fan base, what songs they're sick of playing and many other topics.
.....

Read the full interview HERE in Rolling Stone.

And here's one from Scene HERE.

Awesome Donald Fagen Interview from 2006 about His Bard Days

Back to Annadale
The origins of Steely Dan -- Donald Fagen returns to campus and revisits the origin of his old grudge
By Rob Brunner on Mar 17, 2006

On Halloween 1967, a party is raging inside Ward Manor, an Elizabethan-style mansion-turned-dorm at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. On a small stage set up in the corner of the common room, a band called the Leather Canary tears through the Rolling Stones' ''Dandelion,'' Moby Grape's ''Hey Grandma,'' and Willie Dixon's ''Spoonful,'' along with a few recently penned originals. It's a typical late-'60s student shindig — most of the audience is tripping on acid — but it's hardly an ordinary band. Behind the drums is Chevy Chase, familiar around campus as a gifted musician and good-natured goofball who's been known to drop his pants after losing late-night games of ''dare'' poker. Just in front of him is a long-haired muso named Walter Becker, one of the school's most accomplished guitarists. And the shy singer behind the electric piano? That's Don Fagen, decked out in a leather jacket with feathers attached to it (hence the band's name). Just a few years later, Chase will find fame as one of the greatest comedians of his generation. Fagen and Becker, meanwhile, will evolve into Steely Dan, score huge hits with songs like ''Rikki Don't Lose That Number'' and ''Reelin' in the Years,'' and create several of the most beloved and enduring albums of the 1970s. And in 1973, on their second LP, they will record ''My Old School,'' an angry kiss-off that, for reasons that have never been entirely clear, takes a very public swipe at Bard. ''California tumbles into the sea/That'll be the day I go back to Annandale,'' Fagen famously sings. ''I'm never going back to my old school.'' You can practically hear him sneer.

Almost four decades after that Halloween gig, Donald Fagen is back at Ward Manor, gazing around the very same common room. In many ways, this quiet lounge — its ornate wood-paneled walls and elaborately plastered ceiling unchanged after all these years — is where Steely Dan sputtered to life. Fagen and Becker both lived here, and they wrote their first, now-forgotten songs together on an old piano that disappeared from the corner years ago.
....
Read the whole interview in Entertainment Weekly HERE.

Bonnie Raitt's Cover of Randall Bramlett's "Used To Rule the World"

A great blues ode to the fall of aged winners:

Then listen to his intro anecdote about her request to change one line:

I heard Raitt's cover first. Interestingly, the line I think is best is the one Bonnie Raitt changed. Original: Miss Cocktail Dress, looking in the bathroom sink, did anybody find the ring? Raitt's: Miss Cocktail Dress, standing at the bathroom sink, looking for a back way out. The new line is so much more pathetic and desperate, the difference between misplacing something (first version and a theme in the song) and an unfortunate/bad choice (the second), a potent image that suggests a hope gone wrong set within an implied bigger failure. Subtle, but some serious lyric chops there.

Donald Fagan talks about Steely Dan's "Peg"

Angie Dickinson Performs Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" While Beating Up Lee Marvin

Great editing (nerds only)!

Burt Bacharach Story and Interview

SD-UT

Burt Bacharach's non-stop musical journey
Written by
George Varga
6 a.m., July 30, 2011
Updated 9:06 a.m.

Burt Bacharach is very likely the hippest and most eclectic 83-year-old legend in pop music, as befits a pioneering maverick whose collaborators in recent years include Elvis Costello, Jamie Cullum and Dr. Dre. Bacharach, who performs a Summer Pops concert here next Sunday with the San Diego Symphony, is likely also the most active 83-year-old legend in pop.

After completing a concert tour of Italy in July, he flew to Aspen to do two concerts. From there, he jetted to New York to resume work on “Some Lovers,” a Broadway-bound musical that teams him with Steven Sater (who in 2007 won two Tony Awards for writing the score and the book for “Spring Awakening”). “Some Lovers,” based on the O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi,” will make its world debut here as part the Old Globe Theatre’s 2011-2012 winter season.

Following his Summer Pops show, Bacharach will vacation with his family in Del Mar, where he used to own a home on the beach and still likes to spend at least part of his summer. Then it’s back to work on “Some Lovers” for this eight-time Grammy Award-winner, who has also won three Oscars.

“It may seem like I’m a workaholic, but I’m not,” said Bacharach from a tour stop in Catania, Sicily.

“I really benefit from working, and there’s a great pleasure in doing concerts. I don’t overlook what got me on stage in the first place, and it was the music I wrote. It wasn’t that I played (piano) very well, it’s what I wrote. So it’s important to keep writing, and I’m very excited about this new musical.”

Time allowing, he hopes to include one song from "Some Lovers" at his Summer Pops concert here next Sunday.

"It's always a race against the clock," he said, citing most American orchestra's two-halves-with-an-intermission concert format.

"I've come to realize a certain momentum gets lost when you do a first half, and then there's an intermission and people eat, talk and mingle. You have to regenerate (momentum) and re-start again. But I do hope we will get a song in (from 'Some Lovers'), that I'll tell you, from the show, absolutely.

"It's just about how much material you can get in (a concert). You compromise either way; you have to do some songs in medley form. Otherwise, you've done your program and left out a lot of songs that people might want to hear, even if its only 16 bars. It's not the best way. In Australia, they are not so stringent with symphony rules and you can stay out for two hours (on stage). That's fine for me. I think we probably did two hours at the Belly Up (in Solana Beach) for Valentine's Day, and that was a kick"

A lifelong jazz fan who played in a big band as a teenager, Bacharach studied music with such groundbreaking contemporary classical composers as Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. His love of bebop and classical music later helped him to craft some of the most intricate and original hits in pop, full of uniquely shifting melodies and harmonies, deft polyrhythms and impeccably textured nuances.

"I was torn," he recalled of his decision to move away from contemporary classical to pop-music. "I'd go to John Cage and Lou Harris concerts, and I thought that was the direction I wanted to go in. I went to Tanglewood, but there was also the draw for me of jazz. Once I heard what was going on at 52nd Street (in Manhattan) -- even though I was under age -- and listened to the (Count) Basie band at Birdland and Dizzy (Gillespie) at the Royal Roost, that music just blew me away.

“Was I really good enough to be a classical composer? I wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my life teaching at some university, to supplement my income as a composer.”

So pop music it was for Bacharach. Alas, he was fired after only three weeks from his first prominent job as the pianist and conductor for Vic Damone.

"I don't know why Vic fired me -- he fired a lot of people -- but maybe I wasn't good enough," Bacharach recalled of his short, bumpy tenure with Damone.

"I'd never conducted an orchestra before I'd gone to Las Vegas (with Damone). I didn't quite know what I was doing. But it's a good way to make a living. I got fired by Vic, then went with the Ames Brothers and then Polly Bergen. I ended up with Marlene Dietrich and traveled the world. I was never good at chasing my desire... I wasn't like one of these 'I'm going to get there at any cost' people. I was so far from that."

In 1962, working with the great lyricist Hal David, Bacharach’s career began to ignite. That year alone saw the pair co-write three major hits, Jerry Butler’s “Make It Easy on Yourself” and Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

The songwriting team also collaborated on "Waiting for Charlie to Come Home," the B-side of Etta James' combustible "Something's Got a Hold On Me." An urbane, intensely melancholic ballad with unexpected musical twists (albeit subtle ones), it sounded like nothing James had ever recorded. It still does.

"Thanks," Bacharach said. "I like the song and we do it in performance now. I like it a lot, or I wouldn't be doing it."

By the time “Alfie” came out in 1966, Bacharach and David had co-written classics for such diverse artists as Dionne Warwick, The Shirelles, Chuck Jackson, Lena Horne, Etta James, Manfred Mann and Tom Jones. Warwick scored a staggering 20 Top 10 hits with Bacharach/David-penned songs, including “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

But it wasn’t until “Alfie,” the title track to a 1966 film with Michael Caine and Shelley Winters, that Bacharach felt he was really on the right track.

“You write and write (songs), and have hits, and you still maybe have some doubts,” he said. “You wonder: ‘Are you shucking and jiving, and fooling people with what you are writing?’ Or are you — not stealing (from other songwriters) — but being in that proximity?

“Miles Davis said to me: ‘ “Alfie” — that’s a really good song.’ If Miles said that to me, well, that drove my self-esteem way up.”

Jazz artists have long been drawn to Bacharach and David's songs, even if they often dispense with David's lyrics to focus on Bacharach's ingenious melodies and challenging harmonic and rhythmic nooks and crannies.

As a lifelong fan of jazz, did he take particular pride when such greats as saxophonist Stan Getz and pianist McCoy Tyner recorded entire albums devoted to all-instrumental versions of his songs?

"I love McCoy Tyner and Stan Getz," Bacharach replied. "Do I think they were great albums? No. Tommy LiPuma’s production just restricted McCoy; it should have been more free (musically). You are always flattered when you hear a major artist is doing your material. I heard Stan Getz's recording of my music and it felt, to me, like they were just going through the motions. It could have been a great record, so it really dispirited me, because Stan was a great, great player."

Could the problem have been that, given how Bacharach's intricate songs are so carefully and meticulously crafted, they leave little room for the improvisational fervor that fuels great jazz?

"That's a very good observation. Maybe they are not ideal for jazz artists," he said. "I've heard some great renditions by other jazz artists, like (Art Blakey and) The Jazz Messengers. But I do think it's a little more restricting (to do my songs) and you've got to give them freedom. On McCoy’s album, he was strangled with the orchestrations. They choked him.

"I wanted those two albums to be heard and successful, because those are two artists I have huge respect for -- you can't do better than McCoy Tyner, and then you've got Stan Getz."

Bacharach’s songs have also been covered by a slew of rock artists from the Los Angeles band Love to White Stripes. His career ebbed in the late 1970s and ’80s, then surged anew in the 1990s, when he made an acclaimed album with Elvis Costello and appeared in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (and both its sequels). He was feted at a 1998 TNT TV tribute concert, which featured such admirers as Warwick, Costello, Luther Vandross, Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow.

.........

read the full story HERE.

Jay Swafford on Contemporary Music: Spectralism, Aesthetic Brutalism, and the New Niceness

A Grand Tour of Contemporary Music
All the new noise explained.
By Jan Swafford
Posted Monday, July 11, 2011, at 6:55 AM ET

........
There's nothing new under the sun, and that's as true in the arts as everywhere else. It has been opined that due to modern media that indiscriminately preserve everything, contemporary culture is stuck on an endless round of recycling ideas, fashions, and just about everything else. We can no longer forget history or forge ahead properly in it, because the media keep history in our face all the time. Still, younger artists are often oblivious to the history behind what they do. Around 1999, I went to a program of new semi-improvised electronic "noise music." What it sounded like was Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1960s: squawk, snort, rumble, gleep. I wouldn't be surprised if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. (The Beatles did, however, which is why they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. The main piece they knew was his electronics-and-voice piece Gesang der Jünglinge.)

In music as in all the arts the struggle for the new is eternal, even if at times the "new" is some sort of take on the past, whether fresh or just oblivious. Bartók, to name one, could be so old, so primeval, that he was new. In any case, if you're a serious artist you're not interested in spending your life redoing something somebody else did better than you can. At the same time you also would prefer not to starve, prefer to have people like your stuff and pay you well for it, prefer for people to admire you and want to jump your bones. The tension among these forces is also eternal in the arts.

Through it all you're never entirely immune to the subtle and not so subtle pressures of fashion. The trouble is that these days, much of fashion is also recycled. On college campuses the styles of hair and clothes form a spectrum from about 1955 to the present, with a major contribution from the '60s. In the arts and academe, we have cycles and cycles within cycles, and trends and shibboleths and pendulums.

It can be tricky to separate out the truly new from the second-hand or shallowly trendy. Years ago a Manhattan friend and I went on a gallery tour of SoHo. The first place we went into featured an artist who did strangely juxtaposed triptychs: two colorful abstractions flanking a monochrome view of undulating hills. I thought that was reasonably interesting. Among the next dozen galleries we visited, roughly 10 of them featured strangely juxtaposed triptychs. It turned out to be The Year of the Triptych. In other words, there are vital trends and there are clichés, old and new. In an interview, filmmaker Sofia Coppola describes herself as having a "punk sensibility." That presumably makes her cool and current. As a pop-music movement, punk started in the mid-'70s. How many productions of Mozart operas or Shakespeare plays have we seen lately that are not set in the streets of Harlem, a bar in L.A., a fleabag hotel in the Third World? Updating is the king of theatrical clichés, and it's reigned for decades.

That's the context for a look at contemporary "classical" music, or whatever you want to call it. Here again, history doesn't advance so much as ooze, leaving a sheen behind. I heard my first minimalist piece, Terry Riley's In C, as a student in the '60s. I remember every bit of that moment, including the sensation of my jaw dropping. After years of most new music being of the cabalistic, chinscratching, "interesting" sort, here was a piece that started dringdringdring babblebabblebabble and kept going that way for about 45 minutes. It didn't sound like "classical" music, it didn't sound like pop music, it sounded like a Vermont hillside with a pretty girl and a joint. I thought it was about the coolest thing ever, and today In C still has a nostalgic residue of coolness for me—and for my students. Half a century later, there's still a lot of minimalism going around and around, the media tending to the techno now. There are also postminimalists and, for all I know, post-postminimalists. Nearly a century after Arnold Schoenberg invented the 12-tone method of composing, there are still 12-tone composers lining up their dozen notes and collecting checks from universities. Neoromanticism, named by my teacher Jacob Druckman in the '70s, is still used as a blanket term for pieces that are overtly emotional in some form or other.

To be sure, many artists despise labels, or anyway labels applied by other people. Debussy hated being called "impressionist," and presumably so did the painters he was grouped with. Schoenberg pointed out that "atonal" literally means "without tone" and is therefore absurd for any music. He preferred people to call his music "pantonal," but hardly anybody ever did. Beethoven didn't name the Moonlight Sonata and would have loathed the title. (My music has been called neoromantic and I don't answer to it. Here's a sample, my memorial to 9/11, They That Mourn.)

All that said, I think there are more- and less-accurate labels. It's inevitable that we associate Debussy with his contemporary impressionist painters: Monet painted cathedrals; Debussy wrote a piano piece called The Sunken Cathedral. He also wrote La Mer and Iberia. "Atonal" may be ungrammatical, but it does imply something relevant about a wide swath of music.

So: Noting that in the modern world hot new trends tend to linger on over the decades, what are the newer directions in contemporary music these days, and what shall we call them? I'll nominate three leading trends. The first has a generally agreed upon title that is technical rather than descriptive: spectralism.

What is spectralism? Um, wow, it's …

OK, imagine this....

read the full article, with sound clips and links HERE.

NPR on the cost of making Rhianna's hit song

NPR

How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song?

03:58 pm
June 30, 2011
by Zoe Chace

Getting a song on the pop charts takes big money.

Def Jam started paying for Rihanna's recent single, "Man Down," more than a year ago. In March of 2010, the label held a writing camp in L.A. to create the songs for Rihanna's album, Loud.

At a writing camp, a record label hires the best music writers in the country and drops them into the nicest recording studios in town for about two weeks. It's a temporary version of the old music-industry hit factories, where writers and producers cranked out pop songs.

"It's like an all-star game," says Ray Daniels, who was at the writing camp for Rihanna.

Daniels manages a songwriting team of two brothers, Timothy and Theron Thomas, who work under the name Rock City. "You got all the best people, you're gonna make the best records," he says.

The Cost of Rihanna's Man Down

Here's who shows up at a writing camp: songwriters with no music, and producers toting music tracks with no words.

The Thomas brothers knew producer Shama "Sham" Joseph, but they had never heard his Caribbean-flavored track that became "Man Down."

According to Daniels, the brothers listened to the track and said, "Let's give Rihanna a one-drop! Like, a response to 'I shot the sheriff!"

They wrote the lyrics to "Man Down" in about 12 minutes, Daniels says.

To get that twelve minutes of inspiration from a top songwriting team is expensive — even before you take into account the fee for the songwriters.

At a typical writing camp, the label might rent out 10 studios, at a total cost of about $25,000 a day, Daniels says.

The writing camp for Rihanna's album "had to cost at least 200 grand," Daniels says. "It was at least forty guys out there. I was shocked at how much money they were spending! But, guess what? They got the whole album out of that one camp."

A writing camp is like a reality show, where top chefs who have never met are forced to cook together. At the end, Rihanna shows up like the celebrity judge and picks her favorites.

>>>>

Listen to the story or read it HERE.

David Fanshawe (1942-2010)

The Washington Post was one of many outlets that ran an obituary of composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe.

David Fanshawe, 68, dies; ethnomusicologist who composed 'African Sanctus'

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; B06

David Fanshawe, 68, a British musician and explorer best known for composing "African Sanctus," a controversial interpretation of the Latin Mass set against a backdrop of tribal music he recorded on a three-year journey up the Nile River, died July 5 at a hospital in Swindon, England. He had complications from a stroke.

Beginning in the 1960s, long before the craze for world music took hold in the Western world, Mr. Fanshawe traveled thousands of miles in Africa and the South Pacific -- largely on foot, but also by camel, canoe, barge and sailboat -- to record traditional songs and sounds of the world's indigenous peoples.

He weaved those recordings with live performances by singers and instrumentalists to create original compositions that were performed at venues including Washington's Kennedy Center.

The most famous of his compositions was "African Sanctus," an hour-long choral Mass in 13 movements first performed as "African Revelations" in 1972. The piece pairs the Lord's Prayer with war drums from eastern Sudan and couples a traditional dance from Uganda with Sanctus, a hymn from Christian liturgy.

Mr. Fanshawe estimated that "African Sanctus" was performed more than 1,000 times but acknowledged that the work's interpretation of the Lord's Prayer had a polarizing effect on critics.

"Mr. Fanshawe's idea of fusing the ominous sound of Sudanese war drums with the choir's gentle prayer for peace was a masterful touch," music critic Robert Sherman wrote in the New York Times in 1982. "It was a thrilling experience."

However, music reviewer Richard Carter wrote in The Washington Post that the combination of traditional and classical music "simply does not add up to anything more than a work of banal, dreary, jejune, prosaic vapidity."

The composer's efforts raised ethical questions from those who questioned whether his recordings were an aural sort of imperialism that exploited indigenous musicians.

"It's an extraordinary collection of music and images," said Carol A. Muller, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania. But "there is an edge to everything he did," she said. "There is a level of complete arrogance, a kind of colonial mind-set, that you can go to Africa and make these recordings and use them at your own will."

He brushed off such criticism, saying that his recordings help the world remember songs that otherwise would be forgotten.

"I've tried to make recordings in remote places that preserve the music honestly. I've paid the musicians what I can," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000. "All I can say is that if I hadn't recorded this music, or taken these photographs, nobody else would have."

David Fanshawe was born in a seaside town in Devon, England, during an air raid on April 9, 1942. "My father was born in India, four generations of my family were born in India, all the stories I heard were from India and I was born in bloody Devon," he once said.

His family's history kindled in him a desire to explore the world -- and he did it through music. After working for several years as an apprentice sound engineer in the British film industry, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.

He said his inspiration for melding the world's musical traditions came from an epiphany he had while hitchhiking around the Middle East in the late 1960s. As he listened to a Latin Mass in a church in Old Jerusalem, he heard from outside the sound of imams calling the Muslim faithful to prayer.

"I heard that cacophony, and I heard that as harmony -- harmony between East and West, harmony between Christian and Muslim, harmony between Christ and Muhammad," Mr. Fanshawe told a Vermont newspaper in 2008. "I heard in my head the duality of both religions singing to the glory of one God."

In 1969, Mr. Fanshawe set out from Cairo on a journey that traced the shape of a cross: south on the Nile to Lake Victoria, then west to the mountains of Sudan and east to the Red Sea. Armed only with a simple rucksack, a tape recorder and a few British pounds, Mr. Fanshawe endured the sort of exotic travails that later made him the subject of BBC documentaries.

Read the full story HERE.

Fanshawe's website is HERE.

Donald Fagan interview

At the Gothamist.

an excerpt from the middle of the interview with Steely Dan member and solo artist Donald Fagan:

.....

Do you have any theories about what’s made your collaboration with Walter [Becker] so fruitful? We share a lot of the same interests. We met at Bard College in the late ‘60s and we were both jazz and blues fans as kids, which was kind of unusual at the time; I guess it still is. At the time there were a lot of different kinds of music and it was all novel at the time; soul music was basically invented when we were in high school and that grabbed our attention. And we just combined all those things into the kind of music that we like.

On the other hand, we were both also interested in literature. At the time, I guess we were of the generation that began what they used to call black humor, which they now just call humor. It was a kind of dark humor that was typical of the upcoming writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Bruce Jay Friedman and, on a more sophisticated level, Vladimir Nabokov, who was a big influence. We were both fans of those people and I guess our world view was kind of shaped by the subculture which we were a part of. Now the whole world sees everything the way we did back then, but at the time, coming out of the conformist ‘50s and so on, it was sort of unusual, I guess. But it’s not anymore.

There was a long period where Steely Dan existed as just a studio band and the impression was that you didn’t like playing live. I guess that’s changed? For a long time we had been trying to get a band together. And we finally got a record contract still without having a band, really. So we got together a bunch of guys we knew who were competent but we had never spent any time together. And when we went out on the road various problems developed. They were all very enthusiastic and had a lot of energy and all that and the band had all that going for it, but it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind when we dreamed of starting a band. So after a couple albums we decided to let everyone go and employ studio musicians to try to realize what we had in mind. And that made it difficult to tour because studio musicians for the most part didn’t want to go out on the road. And we ended up just making records.

The first couple nights at the Beacon will be opened by Bill Charlap. Yeah, rather than get someone we don’t really know – especially since we don’t know too much about popular music anymore anyway – we’re taking it as a great opportunity to have some jazz musicians come on and open. Bill played with us in the studio a couple times and he’s going to open. And we have the Sam Yahel Organ Trio opening for us in the south and a few other places. There are some other jazz artists opening on the west coast too. I think it’s good; a lot of people over the years told me they started listening to jazz because they starting hearing some jazz artists soloing on our records. So I think it’s a good thing to do.

My older brother is one of the many fans always hoping to hear Dr. Wu live. Why has that become such a rarity? We tried it out in sound check a couple times last year and it sounded okay. It’s mainly that I don’t like the way it feels on stage. I think a lot of those songs have aged really well and aren’t dated at all. And if the words still seem relevant in some way or can be recast to make some kind of sense, we rearrange it – if the music seems dated. That tune feels dated to me and it’s difficult for me to sing if I feel, you know, that it’s not… There’s something about the curve of the song that doesn’t work dramatically on stage for me.

...........

Read the full interview HERE.

EBTG's Tracy Thorn's new album

New Yorker

Pop Music
Everything but the Tour
Tracey Thorn turns semi-pro.
by Sasha Frere-Jones

May 17, 2010
The widely reported demise of the music business isn’t necessarily going to be bad for music. The forty-seven-year-old British singer Tracey Thorn, who has removed herself from a race she once ran—and ran well—has added a fantastic album, “Love and Its Opposite,” to her solo catalogue. Both the album’s themes and how it was made suggest a model that may become increasingly popular: the semi-professional musician. Making music as a pastime has appealed to talents as diverse as the modernist composer Charles Ives and the post-punk engineer and guitarist Steve Albini. If hits are to be had by only the very few, perhaps more musicians will feel free to stop worrying about making them.

Thorn will not tour for “Love and Its Opposite,” and she didn’t tour for “Out of the Woods” (2007), her second solo release. (Her first was a 1982 EP called “A Distant Shore.”) With the collapse of album sales, touring is one of the few dependable sources of income for artists; Thorn’s decision not to do it suggests that she is taking a hobbyist’s approach. “I just want to make it and then get back to my other life,” she told me.

Thorn is best known as the singer of Everything But the Girl, a duo she has maintained with her husband, Ben Watt, since 1982. Though the couple is still together, the band hasn’t released an album since 1999, which she attributes largely to the demands of raising three children in London.

Read the full review HERE.

Composer Jennifer Higdon's Huge Year

Jennifer Higdon's huge year (and really it has only been four months). She's won a Grammy for one classical composition and a Pulitzer for another. She's in high demand, people enjoy her music, and actually want to hear it. As you can tell by the story, there is a little defensive posture about this accessibility. The NYT has a profile:

April 22, 2010
Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

PHILADELPHIA — Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.

“Starting a piece is the worst,” she said, “and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.”

Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.”

Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon’s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. “The Singing Rooms,” for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.

Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon’s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland can be heard in works like “Blue Cathedral,” the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon’s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired “Concerto 4-3.”

Her scores are “very strong rhythmically,” Ms. Alsop said, “with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.” She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.”

“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”

Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter’s living room.

When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.

Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,” said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as “expressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.”

She is “very representative of something that’s happened in American music with composers of her generation,” Mr. Spano said, “a palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.”

Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master’s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo “String Poetic” Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).

But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.

One of Ms. Higdon’s biggest obstacles has been her own success.

.....
Read the entire post HERE.

The Story of The Flamingoes' "I Only Have Eyes for You"

This month's issue of Sound on Sound has a great detailed telling of how the Flamingos' signature tune "I Only Have Eyes For You" was made. Check out the story HERE. Sound on Sound is full of stories about how classic tracks were recorded, though perhaps a bit too technical for some.

My favorite remake of that version is by Martina Topley-Bird, but it is a little tough to find as it was only released on a Starbuck's compilation.

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer (David Cope's Computer)

From Miller-McCune [original has Quicktime files and images]

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?

By: Ryan Blitstein
0:00 / 0:00DownloadRight-click and save as to download.
| February 22, 2010 | 05:00 AM (PDT)

The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles. A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek out from the intellectual rubble. Above, something like 200 sets of wind chimes from around the world hang, ringing oddly congruent melodies.

And in the center, the old University of California, Santa Cruz, emeritus professor reclines in his desk chair, black socks pulled up over his pants cuffs, a thin mustache and thick beard lending him the look of an Amish grandfather. It was here, half a dozen years ago, that Cope put Emmy to sleep. She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not to anthropomorphize her — he speaks of Emmy wistfully, as if she were a deceased child.

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.

With Emily Howell, Cope is, once again, challenging the assumptions of artists and philosophers, exposing revered composers as unknowing plagiarists and opening the door to a world of creative machines good enough to compete with human artists. But even Cope still wonders whether his decades of innovative, thought-provoking research have brought him any closer to his ultimate goal: composing an immortal, life-changing piece of music.

Read the full article and listen to sound files HERE.

Story on Jazz Arranger/Composer Sammy Nestico

SD-UT

Musician’s talent takes him places
Superstars and presidents are part of his adventures

By Michael Burge, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 12:01 a.m.

What do you say to the president after he insults your life’s work?

Absolutely nothing.

That was one lesson no one had to teach Sammy Nestico, who was working as the White House chief music arranger when then-President Lyndon Johnson said, “You call this music?”

“I didn’t answer, although I didn’t think his concept of music was worth a damn,” Nestico said.

Nestico, 85, a jazz musician and La Costa resident, was recently nominated for a Grammy in the Best Large Ensemble category, for his album “Fun Time,” which he recorded with the SWR Big Band of Germany.

He composed 11 of the album’s 15 tracks and arranged all 15.

“I’m going to conduct it in March in Germany,” he said.

His living room is occupied by a large composing console. A Yamaha keyboard is plugged into his Macintosh. As he plays chords, the corresponding notes pop onto the screen.

He’s been arranging jazz and big-band pieces on a computer since 1999. He also has drawers full of handwritten music that he produced for some familiar musicians: Barbra Streisand, Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra.

The names are so numerous they would fill a book, so Nestico wrote one “The Gift of Music,” his memoir.

“The Library of Congress came and took 600 of my publications,” Nestico said, standing in the middle of a room full of mementos. It’s the only place in his home where he shows off his achievements. He and his wife, Shirley, call it the “brag room.”

He considers his collaboration with jazz pianist and band leader Count Basie the pinnacle of his musical sojourn.

“Count Basie and I did 10 albums, and four of them won Grammys,” Nestico said. “Count Basie was my favorite person in the world.”

He recalled a recording session when they had to stop to fix an error in the music charts.

After correcting it, “I said (to the sound engineer), ‘Play that back, I want to hear the tempo,’ ” Nestico recalled. But Basie waved him off and started tapping his foot.

“He had radar in his shoes,” Nestico said, marveling at the memory.

The two worked together from 1968 until Basie died in 1984.

Dressed in a cream-colored argyle sweater, brown slacks and white tennis shoes, Nestico looks much younger than his age.

He said he tried to retire, but couldn’t.

His collaboration with SWR Big Band started in 2003, when he and the band were nominated for Grammys separately and met at the awards ceremony.

“Europe still loves big bands,” Nestico said.

Nestico discovered music at age 13, as a high school freshman in Pittsburgh.

“After two years I knew what I wanted to do the rest of my life,” he said.

When he joined the Army in 1941, the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Count Basie and Duke Ellington ruled the music world.

“When I came home (in 1946) the swing era was still in bloom, then it all ended,” Nestico said.

So what was a trombonist with dreams of conducting to do?

Re-enlist, this time with the Air Force as arranger for its concert band and jazz ensemble. The Air Force still gives an annual award, The Sammy Nestico Arranging Award, in his honor.

In 1963 he became arranger and leader of the Marine Band in the White House, serving Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

He liked Kennedy and was arranging something for him when the president was assassinated.

“I started in May and with Nov. 22 it was over,” he said.

Asked what music Johnson liked, Nestico grimaced. “Hello, Lyndon,” he said, sung to the tune of “Hello, Dolly.” It was Johnson’s campaign song.

After his White House stint ended, Nestico came to California. “I wanted to make my way in Hollywood.”

He said he got his big break with Capitol Records, but added, “A break is when preparation meets opportunity.”

He recalled recording with some of the great musicians, including Crosby, whom he admired. But he said recording with Crosby was a disappointment.

“Bing came in, sat in a booth and overdubbed,” rather than standing in front of the band and singing. “He lost that spontaneity.”

Sinatra, on the other hand, “stood in front of the orchestra, his hand cupped over his ear,” and let it rip.

“It was electric,” Nestico said. “I thought he was the greatest singer of the 20th century.”

Before his guests left, Nestico logged onto his iTunes library and queued up Michael Bublé singing Nestico’s arrangement of “Mack the Knife.”

As the song played, Nestico’s hands waved in the air as he conducted the virtual musicians from his chair. His face glowed.

“It humbles me, that people like my music,” Nestico said after the song ended.

But, he said, “The more I give the more I get back.”

Jim O'Rourke's new recording and ideas regarding context

NYT

Music
Once Insider, Now Outsider, and Liking It
by Ben Ratliff
Published: September 2, 2009

Singer, composer, producer Jim O'Rourke, now living in Japan. Most interesting part of the story:

That, and working on “The Visitor,” released this week by Drag City. It’s a nearly orchestral, fully instrumental album, his first in eight years. He made it alone in his home studio — except for the piano tracks, which he recorded in a rented rehearsal space — so it takes its place alongside the small number of other high-level pop records made completely or mostly by one person, including Todd Rundgren’s “Something/Anything?” and Stevie Wonder’s “Music of My Mind.” Mr. O’Rourke gives the sense that its gingerly dynamics were dictated by thin walls and respect for his neighbors.

“The Visitor” is so easy on the ears that it disguises its density. “There are parts where there are almost 200 tracks of instruments, but I didn’t want it to sound difficult,” he said. “I didn’t want itto be virtuosic.”

Consisting of one 32-minute track, “The Visitor” took three years to make, including a year to mix. Mr. O’Rourke had exhausted his savings, and for one of those years, he said, he was prevented from earning an income in Japan because he didn’t have a work visa. (It finally came through early last year.) He lived off royalties from his past albums, some of which have sold upward of 50,000 copies in America.

“The Visitor” runs through chapters of folk, chamber-pop, progressive rock and jazz bucolia, and it’s crazily broad: a Leo Kottke fan might like it, a Pat Metheny fan might like it, a Morton Feldman fan might like it. As the piece moves along, holding together with its long-form logic, it can be difficult to discern that most of the music relates back to the album’s simple opening chords and theme. That theme develops through different rhythms and arrangements for an array of instruments — piano, pedal-steel guitar, organ, cello, banjo, clarinet — some of which he learned how to play for the purposes of this record.

The trombone, for example, which comes in after about 20 minutes, took six months of practice before Mr. O’Rourke could play the lines he’d written for it in a perfect take. (He kept a no-edit rule.) The trombone is mixed low, but it’s the loudest instrument he used; when he was ready to record it, he waited until his next-door neighbor left for her grocery run.

Mr. O’Rourke’s production style is precise and dry; he creates a sound picture in which tiny sonic details matter. But where his Drag City records are concerned, everything matters: the pacing, the length, the sound, the cover images. For this reason he won’t allow “The Visitor,” or any of his albums, to be sold as downloads, on iTunes or anywhere else. He’s taking a stand against the sound quality of MP3s; he’s also taking a stand in favor of artists being able to control the medium and reception of their work.

“You can no longer use context as part of your work,” he said, glumly, “because it doesn’t matter what you do, somebody’s going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization ...” he trailed off, disgusted. “It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it’s disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.”

His record company approves, perhaps a reflection of his being one of Drag City’s best-selling artists. “Frankly I’m really pleased about it,” said Rian Murphy, the label’s director of sales. “It may affect the way we’re able to promote it, and it may affect the wider range of listeners that come to get the record — if they can’t point and click to it — but it’s good to have someone standing up for that.”
...

Read the full story HERE.

NYT Review of Trey Anastasio and NY Phil

Love the last two sentences...

NYT

September 14, 2009
Music Review
Classical and Rock, Blended Pleasingly
By STEVE SMITH

If there was a single moment that best illustrated the difference between a routine concert by the New York Philharmonic and the one it presented at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night, that moment came when Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, returned to the stage after intermission. Ms. Staples was greeted with warm applause, as tradition mandates. Just before it faded, a coyotelike howl of approval sounded from a balcony. Ms. Staples gamely acknowledged her admirer with a smile that was surely as incredulous as it was appreciative.

The occasion was a concert with Trey Anastasio, the singer and guitarist for the rock band Phish, benefiting a foundation named for his sister, Kristine Anastasio Manning, an environmentalist and author who died of cancer in April. Mr. Anastasio enjoys a rabidly devoted following among jam-band devotees. But curiosity seekers anticipating a blissed-out legion in henna and hemp would have been disappointed by an uncommonly diverse, entirelywell-behaved throng of listeners, some of whom could be overheard marveling at their first sight of Carnegie Hall.

Playing with an orchestra is nothing new for Mr. Anastasio, who studied composition and arranging in college and has made several recordings with classical players. The most recent, “Time Turns Elastic” (Rubber Jungle), features a 29-minute work of the same name that Mr. Anastasio wrote with Don Hart, a commercial arranger and orchestrator who is also the composer in residence for Orchestra Nashville.

A shortened “Time Turns Elastic” has found a place in Phish’s live sets and appears on the group’s new album, “Joy” (JEMP). Heard in its original form at Carnegie, the piece was both an electric-guitar concerto and a song cycle, its three movements broken into nine sections, in which the languorous eloquence of Mr. Anastasio’s guitar playing alternated with his gentle, plain-spoken singing. (The dreamily impressionistic lyrics were Mr. Anastasio’s as well.)

Mr. Hart’s appealing orchestration touched on cinematic lushness and musical-theater dazzle, with episodes of Disneyesque twinkle and “Classical Gas”-style kitsch. In that context the brief fugue that opened “Splinters of Hail” (the second part of the last movement) felt almost jarring, like a plea to be taken seriously.

No such pleading was necessary: what Mr. Anastasio and Mr. Hart have created is that rarest of rarities, a classical-rock hybrid that might please partisans from both constituencies. Set amid a generous group of popular Phish songs — gentle, string-cushioned ballads like “Brian and Robert” and “Let Me Lie,” as well as the audacious, intricate instrumentals “Guyute Orchestral” and “You Enjoy Myself” — the new piece could hardly have gone wrong.

The orchestra, conducted by Asher Fisch, played brilliantly throughout the evening, with the trombones dipping into deep reserves of raucousness for “You Enjoy Myself.” The concert was liberally punctuated with whoops and cheers; the final ovation for the orchestra before the encore — another Phish song, “If I Could” — was the loudest, wildest response I have ever heard for anything at Carnegie. That so many of the players could remain stone-faced during the tumult is a phenomenon beyond my comprehension.

André Michelle's Addictive Tone Matrix

A simple graphic interface to create your own sound loops. amazing, fun, beautiful: check it out.

The YouTube Internet Symphony

"Internet Symphony, Eroica" by Tan Dun: