As part of a performance art display at MOMA, actress Tilda Swinton is periodically appearing in a glass case, sleeping. Story HERE.
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Actress Tilda Swinton on Display at MOMA
As part of a performance art display at MOMA, actress Tilda Swinton is periodically appearing in a glass case, sleeping. Story HERE.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Study on Drumming Error Patterns
From the Harvard Gazette.
Rhythm pulses inside the brain of a Ghanaian drummer, sitting in a physics laboratory in Gottingen, Germany. His hands caress the skin of a bongo drum, guided by the metronome’s tick through his headphones. He plays for five minutes, filling the sterile lab environment with staccato sounds, as a team of physicists records him, searching for a pattern.
But the researchers aren’t interested in what he does correctly — they are listening for his errors. Though the drummer is a professional, like all humans, his rhythm is imperfect. Each time his hand hits the drum, his beat falls ahead or behind the metronome by 10 to 20 milliseconds. On average, he anticipates the beat, and plays ahead of it, 16 milliseconds ahead — less than the time it takes a person to blink, or a dragonfly to flap its wings. What the physicists want to know is: Are these errors random, or correlated in a way that can be expressed by a mathematical law?
...
Check it out HERE.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
David Bowie performs "Young Americans" in 1974
His voice is pretty hoarse, the microphones are poor and the the levels out of balance in places, but he kills it live on the Dick Cavett Show in 1974. The chorus is fantastic, and if I'm not mistaken that's Luther Vandross singing in the chorus.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Japanese Syncronized Walking Performance Team
I don't know what to call it. If you're short of time, jump to 1:35 for the most impressive part.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
NYT story on understanding the cognition involved in hearing musical expressiveness
NYT
April 18, 2011
To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons
By PAM BELLUCK
The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies.
“The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview.
“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”
An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.
The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.
Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians.
And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.
Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27.
“It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?”
Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan, Blue Öyster Cult, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting, and guitar with David Byrne. (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.)
After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way.
He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.”
To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer.
The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note.
They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer.
Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional.
But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional.
“I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.”
And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression.
All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon.
“I find it fascinating that people recognize what the point of the original version is, that that’s their peak,” he said. “People like to feel the human element, but if it becomes excessive then I guess they edit it back. It’s gilding the lily, it’s too Rococo.”
The Element of Surprise
Say the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is playing a 12-minute sonata featuring a four-note melody that recurs several times. On the final repetition, the melody expands, to six notes.
“If I set it up right,” Mr. Ma said in an interview, “that is when the sun comes out. It’s like you’ve been under a cloud, and then you are looking once again at the vista and then the light is shining on the whole valley.”
But that happens, he said, only if he is restrained enough to save some exuberance and emphasis for that moment, so that by the time listeners see that musical sun they have not already “been to a disco and its light show” and been “blinded by cars driving at night with the headlights in your eyes.”
Dr. Levitin’s results suggest that the more surprising moments in a piece, the more emotion listeners perceive — if those moments seem logical in context.
“It’s deviation from a pattern,” Mr. Ma said. “A surprise is only a surprise when you know it departs from something.”
......
Read the full story, with media, HERE.
April 18, 2011
To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons
By PAM BELLUCK
The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies.
“The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview.
“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”
An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.
The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.
Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians.
And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.
Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27.
“It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?”
Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan, Blue Öyster Cult, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting, and guitar with David Byrne. (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.)
After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way.
He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.”
To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer.
The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note.
They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer.
Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional.
But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional.
“I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.”
And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression.
All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon.
“I find it fascinating that people recognize what the point of the original version is, that that’s their peak,” he said. “People like to feel the human element, but if it becomes excessive then I guess they edit it back. It’s gilding the lily, it’s too Rococo.”
The Element of Surprise
Say the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is playing a 12-minute sonata featuring a four-note melody that recurs several times. On the final repetition, the melody expands, to six notes.
“If I set it up right,” Mr. Ma said in an interview, “that is when the sun comes out. It’s like you’ve been under a cloud, and then you are looking once again at the vista and then the light is shining on the whole valley.”
But that happens, he said, only if he is restrained enough to save some exuberance and emphasis for that moment, so that by the time listeners see that musical sun they have not already “been to a disco and its light show” and been “blinded by cars driving at night with the headlights in your eyes.”
Dr. Levitin’s results suggest that the more surprising moments in a piece, the more emotion listeners perceive — if those moments seem logical in context.
“It’s deviation from a pattern,” Mr. Ma said. “A surprise is only a surprise when you know it departs from something.”
......
Read the full story, with media, HERE.
Monday, January 03, 2011
How the Dave Matthews Band Makes a Lot of Money
SLATE
moneybox
Concerted Effort
The Dave Matthews Band shows how to make money in the music industry.
By Annie Lowrey
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 4:50 PM ET
As usual, the list of North America's top-grossing music tours of 2010 was heavy on AARP-eligible best-selling rockers: Bon Jovi, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Paul McCartney all figured in the top 10. But tucked among them, taking in $72.9 million, was the Dave Matthews Band, the '90s-era jam-loving college-town rockers known affectionately as DMB (and less affectionately as "the Dave Matthews Bland").
The band is nothing to sneeze at, of course. It has won a Grammy. Six of its seven studio albums have hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Still, compared with the other big touring acts of 2010, DMB is a featherweight—"Stay" is no "Livin' on a Prayer." Bon Jovi (who, to be fair, will not be eligible for AARP membership until 2012), Roger Waters, and Paul McCartney have helped sell 130 million, 200 million, and north of 1.3 billion records, respectively. In the course of its two-decade-long career, DMB has moved a more modest 30 million.
But in an industry busy having its foundations rocked, in a matter of speaking, it hardly matters. Analysts and executives have long lamented that the music industry is dying. That is not quite true—it is the record business that is clearly done for, and in its place, touring stands as the top moneymaker for many industry participants. DMB lives to tour, making them not just popular, but very, very profitable.
When I say DMB lives to tour, I do not jest: Every summer for the past two decades, the band has hit the road. In 2010, that meant playing 62 shows in 50 cities to 1,270,477 fans—more than any other artist touring in North America. The group also took trips to Europe and South America, and there was a Dave Matthews and guitarist Tim Reynolds mini-tour. And the year was hardly unusual. Since 1992, Dave Matthews Band in its various iterations has played a whopping 1,692 shows.
So the precipitous decline in record sales in the past decade has hardly hurt DMB's profitability: The band makes the bulk of its money touring anyway. And it makes a lot of money doing it. According to Billboard Boxscore, between 2000 and 2009, DMB sold more tickets to its shows than any other band on the planet, moving a staggering 11,230,696 tickets. (No other band sold more than 10 million tickets in the same time period.) In the aughts, DMB grossed more than $500 million from touring alone.
On top of that, of course, there are profits from merchandise, records, and other revenue streams. As long ago as 1998, DMB reportedly pulled in $200,000 a day in merchandise sales on tour. Plus, DMB has a reported 80,000 fans paying $35 a year for fan-club membership. And it benefits from a large catalog of cheap-to-produce live-show discs and DVDs. "Without any marketing or promotion, Live at Red Rocks debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart and was instantly certified platinum," the band itself boasts of a 1998 album. "[It] provided fans with a high quality and reasonably priced alternative to the over-priced, ill produced, and illegal live DMB CDs."
Part of DMB's success undoubtedly comes from managing its tour so well—because gross ticket sales do not always translate into profitability. Lady Gaga, for instance, was also in the Top 10 for 2010, grossing $51 million in North America, charging legions of fans about $100 a pop. But the shows proved enormously expensive to put on, what with the army of scantily clad backup dancers and dozens of fancy costumes—including a bra that shoots sparks, a feathered bird get-up, and an enormous wearable gyroscope nicknamed "the Orbit." Add in the fountain of fake blood and the price of flying such nonsense around the world, and extravagance cut into the bottom line. The tour actually lost money at first.
In contrast, DMB's tour seems downright humble. There is food. There is merchandise. There are video portions. But mostly, there are just the jams and the fans—and that's how DMB obsessives like it. Indeed, the band cultivates enthusiasts particularly well, a main secret of its success. It keeps ticket prices low in comparison with other big shows, an average of $58.79 compared with, say, $91.56 for arena-rockers Aerosmith. It offers a high proportion of plum tickets to fan-club members and offers them tons of freebies and special deals online. It also plays a stable roster of songs, but jams or improvises at each gig—meaning DMB fans tend to hit up the tour every year, often more than once. Thus, while even the biggest-selling artists front the occasional flopped tour, DMB never does.
read the full post HERE.
moneybox
Concerted Effort
The Dave Matthews Band shows how to make money in the music industry.
By Annie Lowrey
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 4:50 PM ET
As usual, the list of North America's top-grossing music tours of 2010 was heavy on AARP-eligible best-selling rockers: Bon Jovi, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Paul McCartney all figured in the top 10. But tucked among them, taking in $72.9 million, was the Dave Matthews Band, the '90s-era jam-loving college-town rockers known affectionately as DMB (and less affectionately as "the Dave Matthews Bland").
The band is nothing to sneeze at, of course. It has won a Grammy. Six of its seven studio albums have hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Still, compared with the other big touring acts of 2010, DMB is a featherweight—"Stay" is no "Livin' on a Prayer." Bon Jovi (who, to be fair, will not be eligible for AARP membership until 2012), Roger Waters, and Paul McCartney have helped sell 130 million, 200 million, and north of 1.3 billion records, respectively. In the course of its two-decade-long career, DMB has moved a more modest 30 million.
But in an industry busy having its foundations rocked, in a matter of speaking, it hardly matters. Analysts and executives have long lamented that the music industry is dying. That is not quite true—it is the record business that is clearly done for, and in its place, touring stands as the top moneymaker for many industry participants. DMB lives to tour, making them not just popular, but very, very profitable.
When I say DMB lives to tour, I do not jest: Every summer for the past two decades, the band has hit the road. In 2010, that meant playing 62 shows in 50 cities to 1,270,477 fans—more than any other artist touring in North America. The group also took trips to Europe and South America, and there was a Dave Matthews and guitarist Tim Reynolds mini-tour. And the year was hardly unusual. Since 1992, Dave Matthews Band in its various iterations has played a whopping 1,692 shows.
So the precipitous decline in record sales in the past decade has hardly hurt DMB's profitability: The band makes the bulk of its money touring anyway. And it makes a lot of money doing it. According to Billboard Boxscore, between 2000 and 2009, DMB sold more tickets to its shows than any other band on the planet, moving a staggering 11,230,696 tickets. (No other band sold more than 10 million tickets in the same time period.) In the aughts, DMB grossed more than $500 million from touring alone.
On top of that, of course, there are profits from merchandise, records, and other revenue streams. As long ago as 1998, DMB reportedly pulled in $200,000 a day in merchandise sales on tour. Plus, DMB has a reported 80,000 fans paying $35 a year for fan-club membership. And it benefits from a large catalog of cheap-to-produce live-show discs and DVDs. "Without any marketing or promotion, Live at Red Rocks debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart and was instantly certified platinum," the band itself boasts of a 1998 album. "[It] provided fans with a high quality and reasonably priced alternative to the over-priced, ill produced, and illegal live DMB CDs."
Part of DMB's success undoubtedly comes from managing its tour so well—because gross ticket sales do not always translate into profitability. Lady Gaga, for instance, was also in the Top 10 for 2010, grossing $51 million in North America, charging legions of fans about $100 a pop. But the shows proved enormously expensive to put on, what with the army of scantily clad backup dancers and dozens of fancy costumes—including a bra that shoots sparks, a feathered bird get-up, and an enormous wearable gyroscope nicknamed "the Orbit." Add in the fountain of fake blood and the price of flying such nonsense around the world, and extravagance cut into the bottom line. The tour actually lost money at first.
In contrast, DMB's tour seems downright humble. There is food. There is merchandise. There are video portions. But mostly, there are just the jams and the fans—and that's how DMB obsessives like it. Indeed, the band cultivates enthusiasts particularly well, a main secret of its success. It keeps ticket prices low in comparison with other big shows, an average of $58.79 compared with, say, $91.56 for arena-rockers Aerosmith. It offers a high proportion of plum tickets to fan-club members and offers them tons of freebies and special deals online. It also plays a stable roster of songs, but jams or improvises at each gig—meaning DMB fans tend to hit up the tour every year, often more than once. Thus, while even the biggest-selling artists front the occasional flopped tour, DMB never does.
read the full post HERE.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Vocaloid Holograph Anime Pop Singer Miku Hatsune
Voice is electronically generated (hence the vocaloid), performance is mix of extremely sophisticated holographic imagery and a slamming live band. The technology is pretty amazing; I've watched a couple of times just to watch how the necktie tracks or how they step out of the spotlight or in front of each other. Some comments here and there are grumbling about preferring music made by humans, but really, it's all made by humans; it's not like the hologram wrote her own stuff! The possibilities reel the mind. I find the anime body incarnate troubling. Still, age of wonders...
Check out the instant costume changes in this medley:
Check out the instant costume changes in this medley:
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Singers tell Congress: Money (That's What I Want)
AP
Singers tell Congress: Money (That's What I Want)
By RYAN NAKASHIMA, AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima, Ap Business Writer – Sun May 3, 1:18 pm ET
Jack Ely, the singer whose 1963 version of "Louie Louie" still makes the rounds on oldies radio, lives with his wife in a mobile home on a horse ranch in Oregon. Ely says they share $30,000 a year from her teacher's pension and his Social Security checks. They are paying down a mortgage.
So sometimes it bothers Ely, 65, when he hears his voice singing "Louie Louie" on the radio or in sports arenas, knowing he's not getting paid.
"It gets played twice a day by every oldies radio station everywhere in the world. And I get nothing," said Ely, who recorded the song with The Kingsmen before getting drafted by the Army and leaving the band. "I got one check for $5,000. That's all I ever saw from the sale of `Louie Louie.'"
Since the advent of radio in the 1920s, songwriters have made a little money every time their tunes are played on stations in most industrialized countries. The six children of "Louie Louie" songwriter Richard Berry today share more than $100,000 in royalties every year.
But performers like Ely don't get a dime.
A bill moving through Congress aims to change that. It would let performers and the recording labels get a share of the ad revenue that radio stations collect from playing their songs. This pool of royalties could be hundreds of millions a year — which would be crucial for the record industry, as compact disc sales plummet and digital song sales aren't making up the difference.
It could also unlock an estimated $70 million to $100 million per year that is collected by radio stations abroad for U.S. artists, but never paid out because U.S. stations don't pay foreign artists in return. France, for example, takes the U.S. artists' portion and puts it into French cultural funds.
There have been more than half a dozen attempts since the 1970s to enact a performers' royalty on Capitol Hill. All have faltered to a powerful radio station lobby headed by the National Association of Broadcasters. The association says performers and record labels are already compensated — they sell songs and concert tickets because of the radio airplay they get. The NAB says the long history of record labels paying disc jockeys for extra rotations helps prove the point.
This time, however, the music industry thinks it can win. In the last two decades, recording companies have secured royalties from other formats: Internet radio, satellite radio and music channels on cable TV services. Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, says he's prepared for a "multiyear" fight.
The bill has the support of the Judiciary Committee Chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and is set for final revisions this month before possibly being sent to the House floor for debate.
Radio stations say the renewed push couldn't have come at a worse time.
The recession has pushed ad revenue at radio stations down by double-digit percentages from a year ago, and thousands of jobs have been lost.
Randy Gravley, the co-owner of five small radio stations in northern Georgia, says he can't afford even the special rate of $5,000 per station per year allowed under the bill for stations with less than $1.25 million in annual revenue.
His 20 employees cover everything from high school basketball and football to the student of the week in the towns of Hiawassee, Jasper and Ellijay. Salespeople set up equipment in the field and some reporters double as live commentators at games.
Gravley says a $25,000 hit would mean one of three reporters would have to be let go or his stations would start to lose money. While more than half of his stations' air time is devoted to music — oldies, classic hits and southern gospel — he says can't afford to pay the performers who recorded the songs, at least not now.
"We're not trying to take away from anybody, but we're trying to stay in business," Gravley said.
He argues that unlike songwriters and their sales and collection agents, the publishers — whom his stations pay about $32,000 a year — performers can sell albums and go on tours to raise money. Without radio airplay, he said, performers would never have that ability at all.
It's unclear how much radio airplay entices listeners to buy music. But if the "payola" scandals from the 1950s to this decade are any indication, major recording labels have long valued radio airplay, and sometimes paid cash for it. Some regulators have considered such payments bribes, and the federal government in the 1960s forced radio stations to disclose when they are paid for song play. Several years ago, then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer forced three major labels into multimillion-dollar settlements for having independent promoters act as payola intermediaries.
Yet economists disagree on the promotional benefit of music on the radio.
The NAB commissioned a study by Rand Corp. economist James Dertouzos, who concluded last June that radio airplay helps boost music sales by $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion annually. NAB-made radio ad spots running now accuse the "fat cat" recording industry of "biting the hand that feeds him."
In its defense, the recording industry found its own expert, University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz, who told the House Judiciary Committee in March that airplay may boost individual song sales, but doesn't increase music sales overall. "Is radio making the pie bigger or not? The evidence is that it's not," he said.
It's also unclear how much performers might make if the bill passes. Many lawmakers have pressed the radio and recording industries to negotiate. But NAB president David Rehr has said he would rather "cut my throat than negotiate on this," according to trade magazine Radio & Records. It's a comment he has never denied making.
Without negotiations, if the bill passes, the final royalty rate would likely be set by the federal Copyright Royalty Board.
As a benchmark for what performers might demand, two of the three U.S. bodies that collect fees for songwriters and publishers took in a combined $473 million from radio stations in fiscal 2008. (The third group is private.) Experts peg the total sum at about 3 percent of music U.S. radio station revenues.
The bill prevents songwriting and publishing royalties from being reduced to make room for the new fees. On a given song, half the new fee would go to the copyright holder of the master recording, typically the record label; 45 percent would go to featured performers; and 5 percent would go to background performers and backup singers.
The recording labels have already made inroads. In the late 1990s, they won the right to collect royalties for performers when songs are played on satellite, Internet and cable radio. A body called SoundExchange collected $151 million for performers from those formats in 2008.
"All the other platforms in the U.S. make payments," said Bainwol, the head of the Recording Industry Association. Traditional radio, he said, "sticks out like a sore thumb."
___
Ely met songwriter Berry for the first time in 1983, at a 63-hour "Louie Louie" marathon at a college radio station in California where more than 800 versions of the song were played or performed.
Ely borrowed money to make the trip. Berry, having long before sold the song rights for $750 to buy a wedding ring, was on welfare, said Eric Predoehl, a student who helped organize the gathering and is now making a documentary about "Louie Louie." Ely later urged Berry to regain his rights to the music, and he did so, with the help of Chuck Rubin, the president of Artist Rights Enforcement Corp.
Later that decade, the publishing rights sold for millions of dollars, of which Berry got half, Rubin said. Berry died in 1997, but his heirs will continue to collect the royalties until the copyright expires 75 years after his death.
Although he died in the house where he grew up, in south central Los Angeles, Berry managed to cash in. He bought a sport utility vehicle, took trips, helped pay off his mother's mortgage and sent money to his children. He took his family out for lavish dinners.
Ely doesn't begrudge Berry's wealth, but rues what might have been for himself. He admits to squandering the money he made in the short period he toured after his version of "Louie Louie" became a hit. He said a performer's royalty would have made a big difference.
"I would have had a nice bank account when I got out of the Army," he said. "As it was I ended up being a musician playing in bars for 35 years."
Singers tell Congress: Money (That's What I Want)
By RYAN NAKASHIMA, AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima, Ap Business Writer – Sun May 3, 1:18 pm ET
Jack Ely, the singer whose 1963 version of "Louie Louie" still makes the rounds on oldies radio, lives with his wife in a mobile home on a horse ranch in Oregon. Ely says they share $30,000 a year from her teacher's pension and his Social Security checks. They are paying down a mortgage.
So sometimes it bothers Ely, 65, when he hears his voice singing "Louie Louie" on the radio or in sports arenas, knowing he's not getting paid.
"It gets played twice a day by every oldies radio station everywhere in the world. And I get nothing," said Ely, who recorded the song with The Kingsmen before getting drafted by the Army and leaving the band. "I got one check for $5,000. That's all I ever saw from the sale of `Louie Louie.'"
Since the advent of radio in the 1920s, songwriters have made a little money every time their tunes are played on stations in most industrialized countries. The six children of "Louie Louie" songwriter Richard Berry today share more than $100,000 in royalties every year.
But performers like Ely don't get a dime.
A bill moving through Congress aims to change that. It would let performers and the recording labels get a share of the ad revenue that radio stations collect from playing their songs. This pool of royalties could be hundreds of millions a year — which would be crucial for the record industry, as compact disc sales plummet and digital song sales aren't making up the difference.
It could also unlock an estimated $70 million to $100 million per year that is collected by radio stations abroad for U.S. artists, but never paid out because U.S. stations don't pay foreign artists in return. France, for example, takes the U.S. artists' portion and puts it into French cultural funds.
There have been more than half a dozen attempts since the 1970s to enact a performers' royalty on Capitol Hill. All have faltered to a powerful radio station lobby headed by the National Association of Broadcasters. The association says performers and record labels are already compensated — they sell songs and concert tickets because of the radio airplay they get. The NAB says the long history of record labels paying disc jockeys for extra rotations helps prove the point.
This time, however, the music industry thinks it can win. In the last two decades, recording companies have secured royalties from other formats: Internet radio, satellite radio and music channels on cable TV services. Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, says he's prepared for a "multiyear" fight.
The bill has the support of the Judiciary Committee Chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and is set for final revisions this month before possibly being sent to the House floor for debate.
Radio stations say the renewed push couldn't have come at a worse time.
The recession has pushed ad revenue at radio stations down by double-digit percentages from a year ago, and thousands of jobs have been lost.
Randy Gravley, the co-owner of five small radio stations in northern Georgia, says he can't afford even the special rate of $5,000 per station per year allowed under the bill for stations with less than $1.25 million in annual revenue.
His 20 employees cover everything from high school basketball and football to the student of the week in the towns of Hiawassee, Jasper and Ellijay. Salespeople set up equipment in the field and some reporters double as live commentators at games.
Gravley says a $25,000 hit would mean one of three reporters would have to be let go or his stations would start to lose money. While more than half of his stations' air time is devoted to music — oldies, classic hits and southern gospel — he says can't afford to pay the performers who recorded the songs, at least not now.
"We're not trying to take away from anybody, but we're trying to stay in business," Gravley said.
He argues that unlike songwriters and their sales and collection agents, the publishers — whom his stations pay about $32,000 a year — performers can sell albums and go on tours to raise money. Without radio airplay, he said, performers would never have that ability at all.
It's unclear how much radio airplay entices listeners to buy music. But if the "payola" scandals from the 1950s to this decade are any indication, major recording labels have long valued radio airplay, and sometimes paid cash for it. Some regulators have considered such payments bribes, and the federal government in the 1960s forced radio stations to disclose when they are paid for song play. Several years ago, then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer forced three major labels into multimillion-dollar settlements for having independent promoters act as payola intermediaries.
Yet economists disagree on the promotional benefit of music on the radio.
The NAB commissioned a study by Rand Corp. economist James Dertouzos, who concluded last June that radio airplay helps boost music sales by $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion annually. NAB-made radio ad spots running now accuse the "fat cat" recording industry of "biting the hand that feeds him."
In its defense, the recording industry found its own expert, University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz, who told the House Judiciary Committee in March that airplay may boost individual song sales, but doesn't increase music sales overall. "Is radio making the pie bigger or not? The evidence is that it's not," he said.
It's also unclear how much performers might make if the bill passes. Many lawmakers have pressed the radio and recording industries to negotiate. But NAB president David Rehr has said he would rather "cut my throat than negotiate on this," according to trade magazine Radio & Records. It's a comment he has never denied making.
Without negotiations, if the bill passes, the final royalty rate would likely be set by the federal Copyright Royalty Board.
As a benchmark for what performers might demand, two of the three U.S. bodies that collect fees for songwriters and publishers took in a combined $473 million from radio stations in fiscal 2008. (The third group is private.) Experts peg the total sum at about 3 percent of music U.S. radio station revenues.
The bill prevents songwriting and publishing royalties from being reduced to make room for the new fees. On a given song, half the new fee would go to the copyright holder of the master recording, typically the record label; 45 percent would go to featured performers; and 5 percent would go to background performers and backup singers.
The recording labels have already made inroads. In the late 1990s, they won the right to collect royalties for performers when songs are played on satellite, Internet and cable radio. A body called SoundExchange collected $151 million for performers from those formats in 2008.
"All the other platforms in the U.S. make payments," said Bainwol, the head of the Recording Industry Association. Traditional radio, he said, "sticks out like a sore thumb."
___
Ely met songwriter Berry for the first time in 1983, at a 63-hour "Louie Louie" marathon at a college radio station in California where more than 800 versions of the song were played or performed.
Ely borrowed money to make the trip. Berry, having long before sold the song rights for $750 to buy a wedding ring, was on welfare, said Eric Predoehl, a student who helped organize the gathering and is now making a documentary about "Louie Louie." Ely later urged Berry to regain his rights to the music, and he did so, with the help of Chuck Rubin, the president of Artist Rights Enforcement Corp.
Later that decade, the publishing rights sold for millions of dollars, of which Berry got half, Rubin said. Berry died in 1997, but his heirs will continue to collect the royalties until the copyright expires 75 years after his death.
Although he died in the house where he grew up, in south central Los Angeles, Berry managed to cash in. He bought a sport utility vehicle, took trips, helped pay off his mother's mortgage and sent money to his children. He took his family out for lavish dinners.
Ely doesn't begrudge Berry's wealth, but rues what might have been for himself. He admits to squandering the money he made in the short period he toured after his version of "Louie Louie" became a hit. He said a performer's royalty would have made a big difference.
"I would have had a nice bank account when I got out of the Army," he said. "As it was I ended up being a musician playing in bars for 35 years."
Monday, March 03, 2008
Sign Language Concerts
San Diego Union Tribune
Singing with signing
Cuyamaca teachers, students treat sign language concerts as art form
By Leonel Sanchez
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
March 3, 2008
JOHN R. McCUTCHEN / Union-Tribune
Jennifer Smith and other members of the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir performed "When You Wish Upon a Star."
When this choir is on stage, the performers are silent.
Instead of singing, they listen to a song playing softly in the background and interpret the lyrics and emotions with their hands and facial expressions. Their movements are choreographed, like a dance.
Every motion means something – in sign language.
They are the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir, which is made up of hearing teachers and students who consider the visual language an art form.
“The choir allows us to express the beauty of sign language to a hearing audience as well as the beauty of music to a deaf audience,” said Kathy Nielsen, the choir's director and a sign language instructor at Cuyamaca College. Among the other sign language choirs in the region are the church-based Hands of Praise in Imperial Beach and the Signing Choir of San Diego, which performs at funerals, weddings, debutante balls, workshops and other events.
“I wouldn't say they're commonplace, but you're seeing it more just as the interest in learning sign language is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Pam Espalin, a client advocate at Deaf Community Services of San Diego.
Nationwide, American Sign Language is the fourth most studied language on college campuses, according to a survey by the New York-based Modern Language Association. The survey showed enrollment had increased nearly 30 percent since 2002.
Nearly 80,000 students were taking classes in 2006, including more than 20,000 in California, mainly at community colleges.
Most students who take sign language classes do it for one of two reasons: they expect to work with the deaf, or they are fulfilling a foreign language requirement. In the process, they learn about deaf culture and sign language as an artistic expression.
Signing as an art form “is not a new phenomenon,” said UC San Diego professor and poet Michael Davidson, who has written about deaf performers.
He said it goes back to when sign language came to the United States from Europe in the 18th century. There has been a resurgence of interest since the 1960s, when a distinct deaf culture began to emerge, Davidson said.
The Cuyamaca College choir was formed 10 years ago to perform at a graduation ceremony. Therese Botz, who founded the choir, said she was influenced by local sign language performers as well as the performances she had seen when she worked at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C.
“The idea was to get students who signed very well together,” said Botz, American Sign Language coordinator.
The choir was supposed to be a “one-time thing,” Botz said. But, then requests for performances kept coming in. They now perform regularly at campus events.
The number of sign language classes has increased from two to 16 since the early 1990s. The courses cover everything from finger spelling to deaf culture and signing for infants and toddlers. There is also an active American Sign Language club.
Many students enroll in the classes after watching the choir perform. “It's a huge recruitment tool,” Nielsen said.
Though none of the choir members are deaf and their audiences are mostly hearing, their routines are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to understand and appreciate.
“I love to watch the ASL choir perform. It is beautiful. They are awesome,” Angela Gorges, a deaf student at Cuyamaca College wrote in an e-mail.
At January's opening of the college's Communication Arts Center, five choir members performed a medley of songs from famous movies, including “Grease,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Titanic” and “Dirty Dancing.”
Members extended their arms and pointed to the stars while performing a soulful 1990s version of the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon a Star” before a full house at the 360-seat assembly hall.
Members spent months translating lyrics into sign language and selecting the right signs to convey English concepts and practicing. Signs must be “on the beat so that a deaf audience can match it to the rhythm of the music,” Botz said.
“It is a challenge for one person to do this correctly. It is incredible to have a group practice to the point of unity. Think about synchronized swimming,” she said.
Jack Robertson III, 19, the choir's newest member, said he was nervous performing for the first time last month at the grand opening. Fellow choir members, though, reassured him he did just fine.
“I'm really a visual learner,” he said. “This makes sense to me.”
Singing with signing
Cuyamaca teachers, students treat sign language concerts as art form
By Leonel Sanchez
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
March 3, 2008
JOHN R. McCUTCHEN / Union-Tribune
Jennifer Smith and other members of the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir performed "When You Wish Upon a Star."
When this choir is on stage, the performers are silent.
Instead of singing, they listen to a song playing softly in the background and interpret the lyrics and emotions with their hands and facial expressions. Their movements are choreographed, like a dance.
Every motion means something – in sign language.
They are the Cuyamaca College American Sign Language Choir, which is made up of hearing teachers and students who consider the visual language an art form.
“The choir allows us to express the beauty of sign language to a hearing audience as well as the beauty of music to a deaf audience,” said Kathy Nielsen, the choir's director and a sign language instructor at Cuyamaca College. Among the other sign language choirs in the region are the church-based Hands of Praise in Imperial Beach and the Signing Choir of San Diego, which performs at funerals, weddings, debutante balls, workshops and other events.
“I wouldn't say they're commonplace, but you're seeing it more just as the interest in learning sign language is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Pam Espalin, a client advocate at Deaf Community Services of San Diego.
Nationwide, American Sign Language is the fourth most studied language on college campuses, according to a survey by the New York-based Modern Language Association. The survey showed enrollment had increased nearly 30 percent since 2002.
Nearly 80,000 students were taking classes in 2006, including more than 20,000 in California, mainly at community colleges.
Most students who take sign language classes do it for one of two reasons: they expect to work with the deaf, or they are fulfilling a foreign language requirement. In the process, they learn about deaf culture and sign language as an artistic expression.
Signing as an art form “is not a new phenomenon,” said UC San Diego professor and poet Michael Davidson, who has written about deaf performers.
He said it goes back to when sign language came to the United States from Europe in the 18th century. There has been a resurgence of interest since the 1960s, when a distinct deaf culture began to emerge, Davidson said.
The Cuyamaca College choir was formed 10 years ago to perform at a graduation ceremony. Therese Botz, who founded the choir, said she was influenced by local sign language performers as well as the performances she had seen when she worked at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C.
“The idea was to get students who signed very well together,” said Botz, American Sign Language coordinator.
The choir was supposed to be a “one-time thing,” Botz said. But, then requests for performances kept coming in. They now perform regularly at campus events.
The number of sign language classes has increased from two to 16 since the early 1990s. The courses cover everything from finger spelling to deaf culture and signing for infants and toddlers. There is also an active American Sign Language club.
Many students enroll in the classes after watching the choir perform. “It's a huge recruitment tool,” Nielsen said.
Though none of the choir members are deaf and their audiences are mostly hearing, their routines are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to understand and appreciate.
“I love to watch the ASL choir perform. It is beautiful. They are awesome,” Angela Gorges, a deaf student at Cuyamaca College wrote in an e-mail.
At January's opening of the college's Communication Arts Center, five choir members performed a medley of songs from famous movies, including “Grease,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Titanic” and “Dirty Dancing.”
Members extended their arms and pointed to the stars while performing a soulful 1990s version of the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon a Star” before a full house at the 360-seat assembly hall.
Members spent months translating lyrics into sign language and selecting the right signs to convey English concepts and practicing. Signs must be “on the beat so that a deaf audience can match it to the rhythm of the music,” Botz said.
“It is a challenge for one person to do this correctly. It is incredible to have a group practice to the point of unity. Think about synchronized swimming,” she said.
Jack Robertson III, 19, the choir's newest member, said he was nervous performing for the first time last month at the grand opening. Fellow choir members, though, reassured him he did just fine.
“I'm really a visual learner,” he said. “This makes sense to me.”
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Public singing in America
NYT
February 10, 2008
Music
Shared Song, Communal Memory
By BEN RATLIFF
EAST LANSING, Mich.
THEY meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or a banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called “Rise Up Singing.” They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.
From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory.
If there is a natural opposite to gold-plated pop irony and faceless file sharing — music as the American majority knows it in 2008 — this is it. These meetings are earnest, participant directed and person to person: a slow-going, folkish appreciation of American vernacular culture.
Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ”
Amateur group-singing has been around forever, of course, at bars, churches, schools, camps and stadiums. Community sings like the one in East Lansing are pitched halfway between the ritual of the campfire singalong and the self-conscious American folk-music movement of the 20th century.
In 1945 Mr. Seeger founded the People’s Song collective, which disseminated its own songbooks, thereby helping to popularize songs like “We Shall Overcome.” The folk revival of the late 1950s and the subsequent rise of folk festivals, some of which included song-circles as special events, furthered the idea that singing together could reseed a homegrown culture and empower the ordinary citizen to change society.
In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.
A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each.
It’s hard to gauge the size of the community-sing movement because by its essentially casual nature it resists documenting. There is no central organization, no comprehensive Web site of regular events. Groups of the kind that use “Rise Up Singing” are not registered with the American Choral Directors Association and have no academic or institutional affiliation.
But Mr. Blood, who now lives in Amherst, Mass., said that by a conservative estimate at least 100 regular singalongs around the country use the book, in cities including Santa Cruz, Calif.; both Portlands; Rochester; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Atlanta. Some of these are easy to find in an online search; some are publicized through regional folk-music society newsletters, church bulletins or strictly by word of mouth.
In East Lansing, Sally Potter, 47, a frank, energetic presence, leads the monthly sing. In early December the event drew about 80 people. Everyone gathered in the rear of the chapel, where the ceiling is low, “so you can get the chills more easily,” as Ms. Potter explained.
The chairs were arranged around an open square, the better to hear the blend of voices. The singers ranged from teenagers to the elderly; some had strong, penetrating voices, some murmured with wobbly pitch. They sang about 20 songs, including “Star of the County Down” (18th-century traditional Irish), “The M.T.A. Song” (a 1948 update of the early 20th-century American ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97”) and “The Rose” (1979, soft-rock radio).
The force of their voices grew during 90 minutes, with harmony occurring in unexpected places. In between numbers Ms. Potter waited for people to raise hands and politely make suggestions.
“Page 117, ‘Julian of Norwich’?” someone offered, referring to a selection from “Rise Up Singing.”
“Great!” Ms. Potter responded quickly. “One of my favorite songs.”
“Is it ‘Nor-witch,’ ” another voice asked, “or ‘Nor-rich’?”
“I don’t know,” Ms. Potter said, shrugging, though she did. “It’s your song.”
Some sang the word one way, some the other. But Ms. Potter does have a few guidelines, including this: If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go. There were no nonstarters on this particular Monday. In general, Ms. Potter said, she believes that people should get to sing what they came to sing.
The combined area of Lansing and East Lansing, which has a population of about 165,000 and is home to Michigan State University, has a perfect sense of scale for community projects: it’s not too small, not too big, and despite a perpetually slumped economy, it has a great deal of civic pride. It also has a famous guitar store, Elderly Instruments, a folk-music locus open since 1972; the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a folk-concert producer that has put on events for almost that long; and a popular local folk-music radio show on the NPR-affiliated WKAR.
Ms. Potter teaches high school history and economics in nearby Williamston. She has lived in Lansing for the last 23 years, during which time she has owned a restaurant, run the local farmers’ market and a used-sporting-goods store, and toured the Midwest in a folk trio, Second Opinion. Her interest in community sings goes back to the Hudson River Clearwater Festival in 1994, where Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, led a singalong group in a tent. Ms. Potter saw the same people returning day after day to sit cross-legged and sing, and she realized that participation was folk music’s core pleasure.
In 2003 she helped found the annual Mid Winter Singing Festival, a two-day event featuring community sings that tend to draw 400 to 500 people each night. This year’s festival, the sixth, was last weekend. There was a blizzard the first night, yet 340 people fought their way to the Hannah Community Center, a large building across the street from the Unitarian church.
In the evening events the singers sat in an auditorium and faced the stage, referring to set lists and lyric sheets. The song leaders were folk singers with longstanding local reputations: Claudia Schmidt, Joel Mabus and Frank Youngman.
“I’ve watched so many concerts, and I know what works,” Ms. Potter said. “When people are singing, you’re giving them the power, you’re giving them the music.”
Peter Blood agrees. “A lot of the experience of music in our culture is listening to someone else sing,” he said. “What I find exciting about community sings is that people feel they own the music.”
“Rise Up Singing” includes rudimentary chord notations but otherwise gives no indication how to sing a particular song; it is essentially used as a book of lyrics. It is not the only book used for participatory singalongs (shape-note singers tend toward “The Sacred Harp,” originally published in 1844), and some singalong groups bring their own songs. But it is the breakaway hit of its kind in recent decades.
Dan Zanes, the singer and popular children’s entertainer, used to sell “Rise Up Singing,” which he called “the ultimate songbook,” at his shows. “We don’t have that many songs rattling around in our heads anymore," he said, "so we need a guide of sorts.”
BookScan, which tracks sales back to 2000 through traditional bookstores, registers about 12,000 copies sold. But Mr. Moss said that most sales of the book have not come from bookstores. Song leaders order it by the boxful, directly from the publisher, or from the authors at quakersong.org.
Mr. Moss said that although Sing Out! magazine did not map or facilitate the movement, he believed that it is “much broader than ‘Rise Up Singing.’ ”
“Often I hear from people that they hate the book for use in those settings because people keep their noses in it,” he said.
Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson organized the songs in it by theme, including “Ecology,” “Sea,” “Faith,” “Hard Times & Blues,” “Men” and “Women.” (While the “Women” section is full of feminist vigor, the “Men” section is introspective, with songs like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” and “Let the Woman in You Come Through.”) The book includes traditional black American hymns; Cuban, Mexican, Irish and Hebrew songs; Stephen Foster; Jacques Brel; the Beatles; Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder. There are songs for specific holidays and songs from musicals.
With groovy spot-illustrations and hand-lettered calligraphy, “Rise Up Singing” has a 1970s liberal-progressive feel and an obvious bias toward group-singability, although Mr. Blood admitted that some of the songs were included more for lyrical content than for their significance or popularity. (The couple are at work on compiling a 1,200-song sequel that will include more selections from jazz, blues and rock.)
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.
“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”
At 88 Mr. Seeger is still a song leader, helping to run a singalong at the monthly meeting of a volunteer environmental organization near his home in Beacon, N.Y. “I like the sound of average voices more than trained voices,” he said. “Especially kids singing a little off pitch. They have a nice, rascally sound.”
After “Edelweiss,” and a beautiful run-through of “Song of Peace,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the session at the Universalist Unitarian Church wrapped up. It was almost 9 p.m., but nobody seemed in a rush to get home. A scattering of regulars stayed, packing up the cider and cookies.
One of them was Marcus Cheatham, 51, who works in public health. Earlier in the evening he introduced one of his own songs, picking a mandolin to teach the melody. Mr. Cheatham started singing about six years ago, when he joined a church choir and later a “diversity choir” at work, performing on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and other holidays. The next step, he reasoned, was attending a community sing.
Asked if his knowledge of songs had grown since then, he corrected the question. “My enjoyment of songs has grown,” he said. “I’m not much of a musician at all. If you enjoy it, you can jump in and do it.”
“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”
Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”
Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”
February 10, 2008
Music
Shared Song, Communal Memory
By BEN RATLIFF
EAST LANSING, Mich.
THEY meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or a banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called “Rise Up Singing.” They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.
From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory.
If there is a natural opposite to gold-plated pop irony and faceless file sharing — music as the American majority knows it in 2008 — this is it. These meetings are earnest, participant directed and person to person: a slow-going, folkish appreciation of American vernacular culture.
Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ”
Amateur group-singing has been around forever, of course, at bars, churches, schools, camps and stadiums. Community sings like the one in East Lansing are pitched halfway between the ritual of the campfire singalong and the self-conscious American folk-music movement of the 20th century.
In 1945 Mr. Seeger founded the People’s Song collective, which disseminated its own songbooks, thereby helping to popularize songs like “We Shall Overcome.” The folk revival of the late 1950s and the subsequent rise of folk festivals, some of which included song-circles as special events, furthered the idea that singing together could reseed a homegrown culture and empower the ordinary citizen to change society.
In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.
A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each.
It’s hard to gauge the size of the community-sing movement because by its essentially casual nature it resists documenting. There is no central organization, no comprehensive Web site of regular events. Groups of the kind that use “Rise Up Singing” are not registered with the American Choral Directors Association and have no academic or institutional affiliation.
But Mr. Blood, who now lives in Amherst, Mass., said that by a conservative estimate at least 100 regular singalongs around the country use the book, in cities including Santa Cruz, Calif.; both Portlands; Rochester; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Atlanta. Some of these are easy to find in an online search; some are publicized through regional folk-music society newsletters, church bulletins or strictly by word of mouth.
In East Lansing, Sally Potter, 47, a frank, energetic presence, leads the monthly sing. In early December the event drew about 80 people. Everyone gathered in the rear of the chapel, where the ceiling is low, “so you can get the chills more easily,” as Ms. Potter explained.
The chairs were arranged around an open square, the better to hear the blend of voices. The singers ranged from teenagers to the elderly; some had strong, penetrating voices, some murmured with wobbly pitch. They sang about 20 songs, including “Star of the County Down” (18th-century traditional Irish), “The M.T.A. Song” (a 1948 update of the early 20th-century American ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97”) and “The Rose” (1979, soft-rock radio).
The force of their voices grew during 90 minutes, with harmony occurring in unexpected places. In between numbers Ms. Potter waited for people to raise hands and politely make suggestions.
“Page 117, ‘Julian of Norwich’?” someone offered, referring to a selection from “Rise Up Singing.”
“Great!” Ms. Potter responded quickly. “One of my favorite songs.”
“Is it ‘Nor-witch,’ ” another voice asked, “or ‘Nor-rich’?”
“I don’t know,” Ms. Potter said, shrugging, though she did. “It’s your song.”
Some sang the word one way, some the other. But Ms. Potter does have a few guidelines, including this: If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go. There were no nonstarters on this particular Monday. In general, Ms. Potter said, she believes that people should get to sing what they came to sing.
The combined area of Lansing and East Lansing, which has a population of about 165,000 and is home to Michigan State University, has a perfect sense of scale for community projects: it’s not too small, not too big, and despite a perpetually slumped economy, it has a great deal of civic pride. It also has a famous guitar store, Elderly Instruments, a folk-music locus open since 1972; the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a folk-concert producer that has put on events for almost that long; and a popular local folk-music radio show on the NPR-affiliated WKAR.
Ms. Potter teaches high school history and economics in nearby Williamston. She has lived in Lansing for the last 23 years, during which time she has owned a restaurant, run the local farmers’ market and a used-sporting-goods store, and toured the Midwest in a folk trio, Second Opinion. Her interest in community sings goes back to the Hudson River Clearwater Festival in 1994, where Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, led a singalong group in a tent. Ms. Potter saw the same people returning day after day to sit cross-legged and sing, and she realized that participation was folk music’s core pleasure.
In 2003 she helped found the annual Mid Winter Singing Festival, a two-day event featuring community sings that tend to draw 400 to 500 people each night. This year’s festival, the sixth, was last weekend. There was a blizzard the first night, yet 340 people fought their way to the Hannah Community Center, a large building across the street from the Unitarian church.
In the evening events the singers sat in an auditorium and faced the stage, referring to set lists and lyric sheets. The song leaders were folk singers with longstanding local reputations: Claudia Schmidt, Joel Mabus and Frank Youngman.
“I’ve watched so many concerts, and I know what works,” Ms. Potter said. “When people are singing, you’re giving them the power, you’re giving them the music.”
Peter Blood agrees. “A lot of the experience of music in our culture is listening to someone else sing,” he said. “What I find exciting about community sings is that people feel they own the music.”
“Rise Up Singing” includes rudimentary chord notations but otherwise gives no indication how to sing a particular song; it is essentially used as a book of lyrics. It is not the only book used for participatory singalongs (shape-note singers tend toward “The Sacred Harp,” originally published in 1844), and some singalong groups bring their own songs. But it is the breakaway hit of its kind in recent decades.
Dan Zanes, the singer and popular children’s entertainer, used to sell “Rise Up Singing,” which he called “the ultimate songbook,” at his shows. “We don’t have that many songs rattling around in our heads anymore," he said, "so we need a guide of sorts.”
BookScan, which tracks sales back to 2000 through traditional bookstores, registers about 12,000 copies sold. But Mr. Moss said that most sales of the book have not come from bookstores. Song leaders order it by the boxful, directly from the publisher, or from the authors at quakersong.org.
Mr. Moss said that although Sing Out! magazine did not map or facilitate the movement, he believed that it is “much broader than ‘Rise Up Singing.’ ”
“Often I hear from people that they hate the book for use in those settings because people keep their noses in it,” he said.
Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson organized the songs in it by theme, including “Ecology,” “Sea,” “Faith,” “Hard Times & Blues,” “Men” and “Women.” (While the “Women” section is full of feminist vigor, the “Men” section is introspective, with songs like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” and “Let the Woman in You Come Through.”) The book includes traditional black American hymns; Cuban, Mexican, Irish and Hebrew songs; Stephen Foster; Jacques Brel; the Beatles; Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder. There are songs for specific holidays and songs from musicals.
With groovy spot-illustrations and hand-lettered calligraphy, “Rise Up Singing” has a 1970s liberal-progressive feel and an obvious bias toward group-singability, although Mr. Blood admitted that some of the songs were included more for lyrical content than for their significance or popularity. (The couple are at work on compiling a 1,200-song sequel that will include more selections from jazz, blues and rock.)
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.
“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”
At 88 Mr. Seeger is still a song leader, helping to run a singalong at the monthly meeting of a volunteer environmental organization near his home in Beacon, N.Y. “I like the sound of average voices more than trained voices,” he said. “Especially kids singing a little off pitch. They have a nice, rascally sound.”
After “Edelweiss,” and a beautiful run-through of “Song of Peace,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the session at the Universalist Unitarian Church wrapped up. It was almost 9 p.m., but nobody seemed in a rush to get home. A scattering of regulars stayed, packing up the cider and cookies.
One of them was Marcus Cheatham, 51, who works in public health. Earlier in the evening he introduced one of his own songs, picking a mandolin to teach the melody. Mr. Cheatham started singing about six years ago, when he joined a church choir and later a “diversity choir” at work, performing on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and other holidays. The next step, he reasoned, was attending a community sing.
Asked if his knowledge of songs had grown since then, he corrected the question. “My enjoyment of songs has grown,” he said. “I’m not much of a musician at all. If you enjoy it, you can jump in and do it.”
“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”
Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”
Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”
Monday, January 07, 2008
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
NYT
January 8, 2008
Music
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How serious we look, and how absurd we are.
“Silence is not what we artists want,” Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in “After the Golden Age,” a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press. “We want applause.”
George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic’s hat, wrote that the silence at a London performance of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony represented not rapt attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements, although in Beethoven’s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.
I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr. Hamilton’s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of “La Campanella.”
Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age, yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the first-movement cadenza of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto regularly brought down the house, no matter that the movement wasn’t over.
In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout approval without making a sound.
In describing the hypocrisies of “golden age” pursuers and other nostalgia freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to original instruments and original performance practices, it has to acknowledge original audiences too.
Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power” offers the best metaphor for modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to do with Germanic art’s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata is like Wagner’s “Parsifal,” and listeners should get down on their knees.
Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes. Today’s listeners, still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the final cadences in Donizetti doesn’t make much difference. In “Parsifal” it is a disaster, and a frequent one.
Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical idea of “one man, one recital,” but musical events were usually variety shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players, quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.
Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his violin upside down and on one string.
Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein become lost in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” simply diddling idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.
No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of “Werktreue,” or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the 19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed audiences how hard the piece at hand was.
My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms’s playing his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play the right notes,” he wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.”
There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing the interpretation blow by blow.
Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing, and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It was the most profound concert experience of my life.
January 8, 2008
Music
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How serious we look, and how absurd we are.
“Silence is not what we artists want,” Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in “After the Golden Age,” a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press. “We want applause.”
George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic’s hat, wrote that the silence at a London performance of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony represented not rapt attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements, although in Beethoven’s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.
I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr. Hamilton’s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of “La Campanella.”
Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age, yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the first-movement cadenza of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto regularly brought down the house, no matter that the movement wasn’t over.
In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout approval without making a sound.
In describing the hypocrisies of “golden age” pursuers and other nostalgia freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to original instruments and original performance practices, it has to acknowledge original audiences too.
Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power” offers the best metaphor for modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to do with Germanic art’s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata is like Wagner’s “Parsifal,” and listeners should get down on their knees.
Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes. Today’s listeners, still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the final cadences in Donizetti doesn’t make much difference. In “Parsifal” it is a disaster, and a frequent one.
Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical idea of “one man, one recital,” but musical events were usually variety shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players, quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.
Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his violin upside down and on one string.
Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein become lost in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” simply diddling idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.
No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of “Werktreue,” or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the 19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed audiences how hard the piece at hand was.
My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms’s playing his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play the right notes,” he wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.”
There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing the interpretation blow by blow.
Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing, and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It was the most profound concert experience of my life.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Cellphones and Concerts
NYT August 15, 2007
They’ve Just Got to Get a Message to You
By JEFF LEEDS
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 — As a teenage rock fan, all Dennis Vorreyer really expected of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago two weekends ago was the chance to see his favorite bands perform live.
But he and his father, Jeffrey, who accompanied him to the festival, signed up for Lollapalooza’s text-message network, and thus learned about a guitar-playing contest taking place there. Dennis, 14, entered and won a new Gibson guitar. Tad Kubler, the lead guitarist for the Hold Steady, who was involved in the contest, then invited Dennis to perform with the band as it closed its set.
“Having your cellphone everywhere is important for everybody now,” Dennis said. “I never dreamed of playing Lollapalooza.”
The modern mobile phone — equipped with camera, Internet access and more — has proved to be a liability for some performers, like Akon and Beyoncé, whose regrettable moments were captured by fans and then immortalized on YouTube and similar sites. But for the fans themselves, mobile phones are becoming as important an accessory as an all-access wristband. Beyond using them to record a short souvenir, they are becoming a ticket to everything from free ringtones to V.I.P. treatment.
On Gwen Stefani’s recent tour, as many as 20 percent of the audience at some shows agreed to pay 99 cents for text messages and the chance to win better seats, according to the mobile marketing company Impact Mobile. At festivals like Lollapalooza, thousands of fans sign up to receive continuous updates from concert organizers about promotions and special events.
Even when there is no fee, the service comes at a price: fans must give their phone numbers to marketers. And purists — and some artists — disapprove of fans pecking out text messages or snapping pictures during performances. Still, the arrival of a new generation of phone-based activities could add a new twist to live events at a time when rising ticket prices have discouraged many concertgoers.
Prince recently invited fans at a Minneapolis show to send text messages to his Web site so that everyone else could read about what they were missing. (“show just ended. I have never sweat more in my entire life,” read one message posted at 4:03 a.m.)
On the Family Values hard-rock package tour, the band Korn has allowed concertgoers to vote by phone on which song should end the show. For $1.99, they can also enter a contest to win an expense-paid trip to a coming show in California. Fergie devotees who attended her recent shows could dance against a special-effects “green screen” to create a video in which they appeared with her. The resulting clip was sent to their cellphones.
The introduction of more interactive features highlights how musicians — and the marketers who surround them — are trying to establish connections that continue long after a fan leaves a concert. Mathew Knowles, the manager (and father) of Beyoncé, said he expected to use the thousands of phone numbers collected on her current tour to pitch a variety of products, including a Beyoncé-themed phone.
“It allows us to have that continuing dialogue and communication via the cellphone. That’s the bigger piece of the puzzle,” Mr. Knowles said. “I love the fact that all of those phones are up in the air. They want to be able to experience it after they leave. That’s a beautiful thing to me.”
Some warn that concerts could quickly open a new channel for marketers to send junk mail to cellphones. “You can see this getting out of hand,” said Les Borsai, an artist manager and co-owner of Modern Mobile Marketing, one of the companies that run text promotions. But the phone information “is the most sacred piece we have. I don’t want to go and get this data and sell it to Kmart. What you want to do is build trust with the consumer.”
So far, the money generated from paid, or “premium,” text-messaging events represents a fraction of a tour’s overall revenue. Marketers say that even popular music acts might ring up only $100,000 a tour. But the possibility of a new revenue stream has already touched off squabbles among concert promoters, sponsors and artists over who keeps most of the money — and the phone-number registries — that these promotions generate. Spread over several tours, the dollars could make a difference.
Perry Farrell, the former Jane’s Addiction singer who was a founder of Lollapalooza, said he had heard the complaint that armies of phone-toting fans are spoiling live performances. But he said musicians who gripe about that were missing the point.
“The cellphone is here,” he said. “You can choose to ignore it, you can grump at it, or you can say, ‘How can I take this amazing invention, how can I apply this and make my festival, and my life, more exciting?’ ”
They’ve Just Got to Get a Message to You
By JEFF LEEDS
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 — As a teenage rock fan, all Dennis Vorreyer really expected of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago two weekends ago was the chance to see his favorite bands perform live.
But he and his father, Jeffrey, who accompanied him to the festival, signed up for Lollapalooza’s text-message network, and thus learned about a guitar-playing contest taking place there. Dennis, 14, entered and won a new Gibson guitar. Tad Kubler, the lead guitarist for the Hold Steady, who was involved in the contest, then invited Dennis to perform with the band as it closed its set.
“Having your cellphone everywhere is important for everybody now,” Dennis said. “I never dreamed of playing Lollapalooza.”
The modern mobile phone — equipped with camera, Internet access and more — has proved to be a liability for some performers, like Akon and Beyoncé, whose regrettable moments were captured by fans and then immortalized on YouTube and similar sites. But for the fans themselves, mobile phones are becoming as important an accessory as an all-access wristband. Beyond using them to record a short souvenir, they are becoming a ticket to everything from free ringtones to V.I.P. treatment.
On Gwen Stefani’s recent tour, as many as 20 percent of the audience at some shows agreed to pay 99 cents for text messages and the chance to win better seats, according to the mobile marketing company Impact Mobile. At festivals like Lollapalooza, thousands of fans sign up to receive continuous updates from concert organizers about promotions and special events.
Even when there is no fee, the service comes at a price: fans must give their phone numbers to marketers. And purists — and some artists — disapprove of fans pecking out text messages or snapping pictures during performances. Still, the arrival of a new generation of phone-based activities could add a new twist to live events at a time when rising ticket prices have discouraged many concertgoers.
Prince recently invited fans at a Minneapolis show to send text messages to his Web site so that everyone else could read about what they were missing. (“show just ended. I have never sweat more in my entire life,” read one message posted at 4:03 a.m.)
On the Family Values hard-rock package tour, the band Korn has allowed concertgoers to vote by phone on which song should end the show. For $1.99, they can also enter a contest to win an expense-paid trip to a coming show in California. Fergie devotees who attended her recent shows could dance against a special-effects “green screen” to create a video in which they appeared with her. The resulting clip was sent to their cellphones.
The introduction of more interactive features highlights how musicians — and the marketers who surround them — are trying to establish connections that continue long after a fan leaves a concert. Mathew Knowles, the manager (and father) of Beyoncé, said he expected to use the thousands of phone numbers collected on her current tour to pitch a variety of products, including a Beyoncé-themed phone.
“It allows us to have that continuing dialogue and communication via the cellphone. That’s the bigger piece of the puzzle,” Mr. Knowles said. “I love the fact that all of those phones are up in the air. They want to be able to experience it after they leave. That’s a beautiful thing to me.”
Some warn that concerts could quickly open a new channel for marketers to send junk mail to cellphones. “You can see this getting out of hand,” said Les Borsai, an artist manager and co-owner of Modern Mobile Marketing, one of the companies that run text promotions. But the phone information “is the most sacred piece we have. I don’t want to go and get this data and sell it to Kmart. What you want to do is build trust with the consumer.”
So far, the money generated from paid, or “premium,” text-messaging events represents a fraction of a tour’s overall revenue. Marketers say that even popular music acts might ring up only $100,000 a tour. But the possibility of a new revenue stream has already touched off squabbles among concert promoters, sponsors and artists over who keeps most of the money — and the phone-number registries — that these promotions generate. Spread over several tours, the dollars could make a difference.
Perry Farrell, the former Jane’s Addiction singer who was a founder of Lollapalooza, said he had heard the complaint that armies of phone-toting fans are spoiling live performances. But he said musicians who gripe about that were missing the point.
“The cellphone is here,” he said. “You can choose to ignore it, you can grump at it, or you can say, ‘How can I take this amazing invention, how can I apply this and make my festival, and my life, more exciting?’ ”
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Evelyn Glennie's Hearing Essay
This essay can be found at the website of the extraordinary percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is profoundly deaf but nonetheless has created for herself a remarkable career as a concert percussionist, composer, and teacher.
Hearing Essay.
Music represents life. A particular piece of music may describe a real, fictional or abstract scene from almost any area of human experience or imagination. It is the musicians job to paint a picture which communicates to the audience the scene the composer is trying to describe. I hope that the audience will be stimulated by what I have to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the concert hall feeling entertained. If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. For this reason my deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by my office to the press or concert promoters. Unfortunately, my deafness makes good headlines. I have learnt from childhood that if I refuse to discuss my deafness with the media they will just make it up. The several hundred articles and reviews written about me every year add up to a total of many thousands, only a handful accurately describe my hearing impairment. More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician. This web page is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by an ever evolving musician rather than some freak or miracle of nature.
Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.
Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body's sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb 'sentire' means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form 'sentirsi' means to feel. Deafness does not mean that you can't hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.
Photo by James Wilson(C)/EG ImagesIf we can all feel low frequency vibrations why can't we feel higher vibrations? It is my belief that we can, it's just that as the frequency gets higher and our ears become more efficient they drown out the more subtle sense of 'feeling' the vibrations. I spent a lot of time in my youth (with the help of my school Percussion teacher Ron Forbes) refining my ability to detect vibrations. I would stand with my hands against the classroom wall while Ron played notes on the timpani (timpani produce a lot of vibrations). Eventually I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing. The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck and chest.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that I am not totally deaf, I am profoundly deaf. Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone. With no other sound interfering, I can usually hear someone speaking although I cannot understand them without the additional input of lip-reading. In my case the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing but more importantly the quality of the sound is very poor. For instance when a phone rings I hear a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that I associate with a phone so I know when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone. I can in fact communicate over the phone. I do most of the talking whilst the other person can say a few words by striking the transmitter with a pen, I hear this as clicks. I have a code that depends on the number of strikes or the rhythm that I can use to communicate a handful of words.
So far we have the hearing of sounds and the feeling of vibrations. There is one other element to the equation, sight. We can also see items move and vibrate. If I see a drum head or cymbal vibrate or even see the leaves of a tree moving in the wind then subconsciously my brain creates a corresponding sound. A common and ill informed question from interviewers is 'How can you be a musician when you can't hear what you are doing?' The answer is of course that I couldn't be a musician if I were not able to hear. Another often asked question is 'How do you hear what you are playing?' The logical answer to this is; how does anyone hear?. An electrical signal is generated in the ear and various bits of other information from our other senses all get sent to the brain which then processes the data to create a sound picture. The various processes involved in hearing a sound are very complex but we all do it subconsciously so we group all these processes together and call it simply listening. The same is true for me. Some of the processes or original information may be different but to hear sound all I do is to listen. I have no more idea of how I hear than you do.
You will notice that more and more the answers are heading towards areas of philosophy. Who can say that when two normally hearing people hear a sound they hear the same sound? I would suggest that everyone's hearing is different. All we can say is that the sound picture built up by their brain is the same, so that outwardly there is no difference. For me, as for all of us, I am better at certain things with my hearing than others. I need to lip-read to understand speech but my awareness of the acoustics in a concert venue is excellent. For instance, I will sometimes describe an acoustic in terms of how thick the air feels.
To summarize, my hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me. There are a couple of inconveniences but in general it doesn't affect my life much. For me, my deafness is no more important than the fact I am female with brown eyes. Sure, I sometimes have to find solutions to problems related to my hearing and music but so do all musicians. Most of us know very little about hearing, even though we do it all the time. Likewise, I don't know very much about deafness, what's more I'm not particularly interested. I remember one occasion when uncharacteristically I became upset with a reporter for constantly asking questions only about my deafness. I said: 'If you want to know about deafness, you should interview an audiologist. My speciality is music".
In this web page I have tried to explain something which I find very difficult to explain. Even so, no one really understands how I do what I do. Please enjoy the music and forget the rest.
This essay can be quoted by journalists and writers but please credit Evelyn and the website.
Hearing Essay.
Music represents life. A particular piece of music may describe a real, fictional or abstract scene from almost any area of human experience or imagination. It is the musicians job to paint a picture which communicates to the audience the scene the composer is trying to describe. I hope that the audience will be stimulated by what I have to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the concert hall feeling entertained. If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. For this reason my deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by my office to the press or concert promoters. Unfortunately, my deafness makes good headlines. I have learnt from childhood that if I refuse to discuss my deafness with the media they will just make it up. The several hundred articles and reviews written about me every year add up to a total of many thousands, only a handful accurately describe my hearing impairment. More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician. This web page is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by an ever evolving musician rather than some freak or miracle of nature.
Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.
Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body's sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb 'sentire' means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form 'sentirsi' means to feel. Deafness does not mean that you can't hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.
Photo by James Wilson(C)/EG ImagesIf we can all feel low frequency vibrations why can't we feel higher vibrations? It is my belief that we can, it's just that as the frequency gets higher and our ears become more efficient they drown out the more subtle sense of 'feeling' the vibrations. I spent a lot of time in my youth (with the help of my school Percussion teacher Ron Forbes) refining my ability to detect vibrations. I would stand with my hands against the classroom wall while Ron played notes on the timpani (timpani produce a lot of vibrations). Eventually I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing. The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck and chest.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that I am not totally deaf, I am profoundly deaf. Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone. With no other sound interfering, I can usually hear someone speaking although I cannot understand them without the additional input of lip-reading. In my case the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing but more importantly the quality of the sound is very poor. For instance when a phone rings I hear a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that I associate with a phone so I know when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone. I can in fact communicate over the phone. I do most of the talking whilst the other person can say a few words by striking the transmitter with a pen, I hear this as clicks. I have a code that depends on the number of strikes or the rhythm that I can use to communicate a handful of words.
So far we have the hearing of sounds and the feeling of vibrations. There is one other element to the equation, sight. We can also see items move and vibrate. If I see a drum head or cymbal vibrate or even see the leaves of a tree moving in the wind then subconsciously my brain creates a corresponding sound. A common and ill informed question from interviewers is 'How can you be a musician when you can't hear what you are doing?' The answer is of course that I couldn't be a musician if I were not able to hear. Another often asked question is 'How do you hear what you are playing?' The logical answer to this is; how does anyone hear?. An electrical signal is generated in the ear and various bits of other information from our other senses all get sent to the brain which then processes the data to create a sound picture. The various processes involved in hearing a sound are very complex but we all do it subconsciously so we group all these processes together and call it simply listening. The same is true for me. Some of the processes or original information may be different but to hear sound all I do is to listen. I have no more idea of how I hear than you do.
You will notice that more and more the answers are heading towards areas of philosophy. Who can say that when two normally hearing people hear a sound they hear the same sound? I would suggest that everyone's hearing is different. All we can say is that the sound picture built up by their brain is the same, so that outwardly there is no difference. For me, as for all of us, I am better at certain things with my hearing than others. I need to lip-read to understand speech but my awareness of the acoustics in a concert venue is excellent. For instance, I will sometimes describe an acoustic in terms of how thick the air feels.
To summarize, my hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me. There are a couple of inconveniences but in general it doesn't affect my life much. For me, my deafness is no more important than the fact I am female with brown eyes. Sure, I sometimes have to find solutions to problems related to my hearing and music but so do all musicians. Most of us know very little about hearing, even though we do it all the time. Likewise, I don't know very much about deafness, what's more I'm not particularly interested. I remember one occasion when uncharacteristically I became upset with a reporter for constantly asking questions only about my deafness. I said: 'If you want to know about deafness, you should interview an audiologist. My speciality is music".
In this web page I have tried to explain something which I find very difficult to explain. Even so, no one really understands how I do what I do. Please enjoy the music and forget the rest.
This essay can be quoted by journalists and writers but please credit Evelyn and the website.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Daft Punk Review in New York Times
Read it here.Cool photo of their pyramid control council and standard issue robot helmets (photos Michael Falco for The New York Times):
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
The New Live Album
From the Los Angeles Times
MUSIC
The new live album
Many beloved full-lengths are getting played start to finish onstage. Quite a throwback idea, in this era of iPod shuffling.
By Steve Hochman
Special to The Times
August 5, 2007
The album is dead. Long live the album?
"People more and more are just downloading singles and individual songs, putting their iPods on shuffle," says music impresario Barry Hogan. "The whole idea of the album as an art form is kind of forgotten."
But not in concert. In the last few weeks alone, Los Angeles has seen a rash of acts performing complete albums: Sonic Youth doing its 1988 noise-rock breakthrough "Daydream Nation" start to finish at the Greek Theatre (and opening act Redd Kross presenting its 1981 teen release "Born Innocent"), D.C. rockers Girls Against Boys doing 1994's "Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby" at El Rey Theatre and Louisville, Ky.'s Slint offering its influential 1991 indie opus "Spiderland" at the Henry Fonda Theatre.
In early September, Lucinda Williams goes for the concept crown by performing five shows at the El Rey, a different one of her albums performed each night -- topping a three-night version of the same idea Sept. 5, 6 and 7 at the Echo by singer-songwriter Ben Kweller -- and on Sept. 15, a Fonda show will feature Seattle grunge pioneers the Melvins and Mudhoney doing their '80s groundbreakers "Houdini" and the "Superfuzz BigMuff" EP, respectively. In Las Vegas, Iggy Pop & the Stooges will reprise the 1969 proto-punk big bang "Funhouse" at the Vegoose Festival in late October.
And this Friday and Saturday, the work that 40 years ago arguably galvanized the notion of an album as an artistic statement, the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," will get a Hollywood Bowl performance by Cheap Trick, accompanied by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and an Indian-music ensemble. (A first-act segment features Beatles songs sung by Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne and others.)
"We want to present amazing records, as we see them, saying people should go back and listen to them as whole albums as intended, rather than just hearing a couple of songs," says Hogan. The English promoter put together the Sonic Youth/Redd Kross, Girls Against Boys, Slint and Melvins/Mudhoney nights as part of the Don't Look Back series, which he started in London as a spinoff from his annual All Tomorrow's Parties festivals.
Reformatting the rock concert
HOGAN readily admits that this wasn't a new idea when he first had the Stooges do "Funhouse" to start Don't Look Back in 2005. Cheap Trick, in fact, had done a short tour in 1998 performing its first three albums in three nights at each stop. In the early '90s, Roger Waters oversaw an all-star version of his Pink Floyd set "The Wall" at the former site of the fallen Berlin Wall. In recent years, Brian Wilson has led concerts of his 1966 Beach Boys landmark "Pet Sounds" and the reconstructed "lost" album "Smile." Phish used to hold annual Halloween shows performing other artists' classic albums. A regular series of club shows in New York, billed as the Loser's Lounge, has featured revolving lineups doing the same thing, as have Susan Cowsill's monthly Covered in Vinyl shows in New Orleans.
And the phenomenon isn't only about old music. Melissa Etheridge is planning a Sept. 25 New York concert of her new album, "The Awakening," in its entirety and will likely do an online performance as well, and Sum 41 has a complete performance of its new "Underclass Hero" streaming on its website.
"There seem to be a lot more opportunities for fans to hear the classic albums, in many cases by the artists who originated them," says Arvind Manocha, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., who is behind the "Sgt. Pepper's" event. "As bands started doing it and fans responded, the artists could break free of the standard concert format of playing their greatest hits and a few new songs."
Hogan stresses that in the case of the old albums, this is music that changed a lot of lives, including his -- a notion that causes Mudhoney singer Mark Arm to cringe a bit, given the historic association of grunge with slackerdom.
"Yeah, which is a horrifying thought," Arm says. "I would hope it's for the better, but you never know: 'After listening to you guys, I thought I'd quit my job and smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot.' Great. I'm sorry."
Jokes aside, the musicians involved also relate to the fans' attachment to full albums. Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos remembers that as a teen he and some friends in a basement band tried to play the Who's whole rock opera "Tommy" themselves.
"When I was going to concerts when I was young, it would have been the coolest thing in the world to see a whole album from start to finish," he says.
"When we did the Cheap Trick albums, it was just trying to put a new spin on something vintage," he says, recalling the tour on which the Illinois band tried out the album-per-night format. "Great way to keep the fan base energized."
But it's also a way to keep the artists energized. Williams is excited about having an excuse to play songs she's neglected over the years. She's eager to see how the old material transforms through the lens of her own growth and changes, as well as in the playing of her current band, musicians who were not involved in the recordings. But mostly she sees this exercise, which she'll repeat in New York late September through early October, as a chance to reexamine an arc of her life, with the albums running from 1988's "Lucinda Williams" through 2003's "World Without Tears."
"When I look at my albums, I can see for myself a progression in terms of being an artist and a singer," she says. "For one thing, it will be interesting to do these songs with a more mature voice."
She almost thinks the series presents more of a challenge for the fans.
"If it was someone I was a fan of, I would want to go every night, like if Bob Dylan was doing this," she says. "You don't want to miss a chapter. But there's the money part. People can't afford to go to all the shows, so for some it will be frustrating to decide."
Reinventing the classics
WHETHER it's the artists' own work or an icon's classic, none of the people involved with these shows seems interested in merely re-creating the recorded versions. Manocha says he could easily have recruited a Beatles tribute band to do "Sgt. Pepper's."
"We didn't want it to be a Beatles impersonation," he says. "But I remembered that Cheap Trick and [Beatles producer] George Martin had worked together in the past and thought maybe they'd be interested."
Ironically, Carlos notes that he rarely listened to "Sgt. Pepper's" as a whole album and that preparing for the concert has given him new appreciation.
"There are songs I'd skip over as a kid, 'For the Benefit of Mr. Kite' or 'When I'm Sixty-Four,' " he says. "And now as an adult, I think they're great. 'She's Leaving Home' had no band on it, and it was a McCartney song. So I'd flip the album over right there. And now, suddenly, I'm going to be performing it!"
Of course, with the crush of such events, something like this can turn from cool trend to stale cliché pretty quickly. Arm isn't too worried, though.
"It could very well," he says. "But I guess the 'classic albums' are classic for a reason."
MUSIC
The new live album
Many beloved full-lengths are getting played start to finish onstage. Quite a throwback idea, in this era of iPod shuffling.
By Steve Hochman
Special to The Times
August 5, 2007
The album is dead. Long live the album?
"People more and more are just downloading singles and individual songs, putting their iPods on shuffle," says music impresario Barry Hogan. "The whole idea of the album as an art form is kind of forgotten."
But not in concert. In the last few weeks alone, Los Angeles has seen a rash of acts performing complete albums: Sonic Youth doing its 1988 noise-rock breakthrough "Daydream Nation" start to finish at the Greek Theatre (and opening act Redd Kross presenting its 1981 teen release "Born Innocent"), D.C. rockers Girls Against Boys doing 1994's "Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby" at El Rey Theatre and Louisville, Ky.'s Slint offering its influential 1991 indie opus "Spiderland" at the Henry Fonda Theatre.
In early September, Lucinda Williams goes for the concept crown by performing five shows at the El Rey, a different one of her albums performed each night -- topping a three-night version of the same idea Sept. 5, 6 and 7 at the Echo by singer-songwriter Ben Kweller -- and on Sept. 15, a Fonda show will feature Seattle grunge pioneers the Melvins and Mudhoney doing their '80s groundbreakers "Houdini" and the "Superfuzz BigMuff" EP, respectively. In Las Vegas, Iggy Pop & the Stooges will reprise the 1969 proto-punk big bang "Funhouse" at the Vegoose Festival in late October.
And this Friday and Saturday, the work that 40 years ago arguably galvanized the notion of an album as an artistic statement, the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," will get a Hollywood Bowl performance by Cheap Trick, accompanied by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and an Indian-music ensemble. (A first-act segment features Beatles songs sung by Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne and others.)
"We want to present amazing records, as we see them, saying people should go back and listen to them as whole albums as intended, rather than just hearing a couple of songs," says Hogan. The English promoter put together the Sonic Youth/Redd Kross, Girls Against Boys, Slint and Melvins/Mudhoney nights as part of the Don't Look Back series, which he started in London as a spinoff from his annual All Tomorrow's Parties festivals.
Reformatting the rock concert
HOGAN readily admits that this wasn't a new idea when he first had the Stooges do "Funhouse" to start Don't Look Back in 2005. Cheap Trick, in fact, had done a short tour in 1998 performing its first three albums in three nights at each stop. In the early '90s, Roger Waters oversaw an all-star version of his Pink Floyd set "The Wall" at the former site of the fallen Berlin Wall. In recent years, Brian Wilson has led concerts of his 1966 Beach Boys landmark "Pet Sounds" and the reconstructed "lost" album "Smile." Phish used to hold annual Halloween shows performing other artists' classic albums. A regular series of club shows in New York, billed as the Loser's Lounge, has featured revolving lineups doing the same thing, as have Susan Cowsill's monthly Covered in Vinyl shows in New Orleans.
And the phenomenon isn't only about old music. Melissa Etheridge is planning a Sept. 25 New York concert of her new album, "The Awakening," in its entirety and will likely do an online performance as well, and Sum 41 has a complete performance of its new "Underclass Hero" streaming on its website.
"There seem to be a lot more opportunities for fans to hear the classic albums, in many cases by the artists who originated them," says Arvind Manocha, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., who is behind the "Sgt. Pepper's" event. "As bands started doing it and fans responded, the artists could break free of the standard concert format of playing their greatest hits and a few new songs."
Hogan stresses that in the case of the old albums, this is music that changed a lot of lives, including his -- a notion that causes Mudhoney singer Mark Arm to cringe a bit, given the historic association of grunge with slackerdom.
"Yeah, which is a horrifying thought," Arm says. "I would hope it's for the better, but you never know: 'After listening to you guys, I thought I'd quit my job and smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot.' Great. I'm sorry."
Jokes aside, the musicians involved also relate to the fans' attachment to full albums. Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos remembers that as a teen he and some friends in a basement band tried to play the Who's whole rock opera "Tommy" themselves.
"When I was going to concerts when I was young, it would have been the coolest thing in the world to see a whole album from start to finish," he says.
"When we did the Cheap Trick albums, it was just trying to put a new spin on something vintage," he says, recalling the tour on which the Illinois band tried out the album-per-night format. "Great way to keep the fan base energized."
But it's also a way to keep the artists energized. Williams is excited about having an excuse to play songs she's neglected over the years. She's eager to see how the old material transforms through the lens of her own growth and changes, as well as in the playing of her current band, musicians who were not involved in the recordings. But mostly she sees this exercise, which she'll repeat in New York late September through early October, as a chance to reexamine an arc of her life, with the albums running from 1988's "Lucinda Williams" through 2003's "World Without Tears."
"When I look at my albums, I can see for myself a progression in terms of being an artist and a singer," she says. "For one thing, it will be interesting to do these songs with a more mature voice."
She almost thinks the series presents more of a challenge for the fans.
"If it was someone I was a fan of, I would want to go every night, like if Bob Dylan was doing this," she says. "You don't want to miss a chapter. But there's the money part. People can't afford to go to all the shows, so for some it will be frustrating to decide."
Reinventing the classics
WHETHER it's the artists' own work or an icon's classic, none of the people involved with these shows seems interested in merely re-creating the recorded versions. Manocha says he could easily have recruited a Beatles tribute band to do "Sgt. Pepper's."
"We didn't want it to be a Beatles impersonation," he says. "But I remembered that Cheap Trick and [Beatles producer] George Martin had worked together in the past and thought maybe they'd be interested."
Ironically, Carlos notes that he rarely listened to "Sgt. Pepper's" as a whole album and that preparing for the concert has given him new appreciation.
"There are songs I'd skip over as a kid, 'For the Benefit of Mr. Kite' or 'When I'm Sixty-Four,' " he says. "And now as an adult, I think they're great. 'She's Leaving Home' had no band on it, and it was a McCartney song. So I'd flip the album over right there. And now, suddenly, I'm going to be performing it!"
Of course, with the crush of such events, something like this can turn from cool trend to stale cliché pretty quickly. Arm isn't too worried, though.
"It could very well," he says. "But I guess the 'classic albums' are classic for a reason."
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Does Context Affect Music Reception?
NYT
March 18, 2007
Can What You Know Affect What You Hear?
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
THE soprano Joan Sutherland has never been convinced that much can be accomplished in a “so-called master class,” as she explained in a 1998 interview. What can a visiting master say in just a half-hour or so of working with a young musician?
Still, that year, at the behest of the foundation run by her friend and colleague Marilyn Horne, Ms. Sutherland offered a master class to several young singers at the Juilliard Theater.
Naturally, before hearing each vocalist, she wanted to learn something of their backgrounds and training. Only with that personal and professional context could she know how to evaluate their work.
So Ms. Sutherland was miffed when she asked the age of an Asian soprano who was up next, and the young woman demurred, laughing nervously and explaining that she preferred not to reveal it.
“But you know my age,” Ms. Sutherland replied. She muttered that this was quite strange but allowed the soprano to sing.
Ms. Sutherland was right. Fledgling sopranos typically keep acquiring technique and making vocal adjustments right through their 20s. Whether this student was 21 or 27 was significant information.
I would add that whether a young soprano was trained in Tokyo or Boston, whether she studied singing throughout her childhood or discovered her voice in a college choir, whether she is big-bodied or petite, loose-limbed or stiff: all of these factors are crucial to assessing an individual’s gifts and needs.
In other words, whether you are a master teacher, an opera buff, a concertgoer or a critic, knowing something of the background of the artist you are hearing will inevitably affect your perceptions.
The question of context surfaced recently in the scandalous story of Joyce Hatto, an English pianist who was born in 1928 and enjoyed a modestly successful career until a cancer diagnosis in 1970 forced her to retire from the concert stage. She died last year.
As has been widely reported, a series of recordings identified as Ms. Hatto’s were released by a small CD label run by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, starting in 1989. There were an astonishing 120 releases in all, including complete cycles of the Mozart, Beethoven and Prokofiev sonatas. But last month her husband, caught in an act of fraud, confessed that these CDs were stolen goods, performances he took from recordings by other pianists and marketed as Ms. Hatto’s.
Critics who were fooled by this plagiarism have come in for ridicule, which is not entirely fair. (For the record, I had never, to my knowledge, heard of or reviewed Ms. Hatto before this news broke.) The recorded performances fobbed off as Ms. Hatto’s, whether by little-known artists or major pianists, were of high quality.
The critics and piano buffs who prized them were sold a false context: They thought they were hearing an overlooked and ailing artist who was enjoying a miraculous rebirth in the safety of the recording studio. Of course more skeptical sorts would argue that the trumped-up story seemed too good to be true.
In any event context should theoretically not matter, especially in instrumental music. A singer’s voice is unique to that singer’s body. But for all the strikingly different characteristics of various pianists, there is arguably a smaller number of variables involved, at least in certain repertory. Schumann’s C major Fantasy is open to myriad interpretive approaches, but Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto tends to go a certain way and requires a more specific kind of virtuosity and flair.
Obviously the context of a performance can completely surprise you. A recording of a Schubert piano sonata that shows a mature sensitivity to high Viennese Classical style might be coming from a master like Artur Schnabel, a leading artist of the new generation like Leif Ove Andsnes or a student at the University of Wisconsin. The actual playing should be what matters. There is an appealing purity about this argument.
Still, the personal context and the particular circumstances of a performance can profoundly affect the performance itself. This point was well put last month in an op-ed article in The New York Times by Denis Dutton, who teaches aesthetics at the University of Cambridge, analyzing the Hatto affair. “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense,” Mr. Dutton wrote.
I recently heard the young Chinese virtuoso Yundi Li play Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Li played with white-hot energy, sizzling passagework and rhapsodic expressivity. But there was a little too much youthful abandon and wild impetuosity in his playing. He let tempos shift into overdrive and sometimes could not contain his enthusiasm.
Knowing that he was only 24, hugely gifted and aiming to please, I found it easy to overlook these lapses. Mr. Li should mature in time. I would like to think that if I had heard only a recording of this performance without knowing the pianist, I would have pegged it as the playing of a young hot-shot. Maybe not. Still, I think that knowing who Mr. Li was and how much this occasion meant to him helped me and his many enthusiastic listeners at Carnegie Hall appreciate what was special about his work. I would argue that we heard it better. We excused the occasional hormonal excess of the playing and concentrated on its incisiveness and vigor.
Long ago orchestra audition committees started the practice of hearing instrumentalists from behind a screen. A worthy goal is at stake here: to eliminate prejudice and ensure that the committee’s judgment is not influenced by a musician’s age, sex or ethnicity.
But this policy has a down side. An orchestra is hiring a person as well as a player. Does that person suit the job? Most orchestras take the screen away at least for the final round. Savvy music directors get personally involved at this stage and sit down with the finalists to find out who they are as musicians and people, and how they think. The enthusiasm that a dynamic young violinist would bring to the job or the maturity that would come with a veteran professional should matter just as much as objectively measurable factors like a candidate’s technique and tone quality.
For all music lovers the danger of letting context affect your perception of an artist is that it is terribly easy to pigeonhole people. Artists are always capable of transcending themselves and surprising us, something critics in particular must remember.
I sometimes envy the freshness a classical music neophyte experiences when hearing something for the first time. My first exposure to Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” came at the Metropolitan Opera, with Ms. Sutherland in the title role. For a teenager who hardly knew the work, this was quite an introduction.
Some critics maintain that overpreparing for a review assignment will lessen the freshness of their reactions, especially for a new piece. This tabula-rasa approach is perfectly valid. For me, if I have access to a score before hearing the premiere of a new work, I find it valuable to read through the music at the piano. And anything I can learn about the creative artist may enrich my perception.
But the lies that were perpetrated about Ms. Hatto were criminal acts. There is a big difference between taking someone’s background and context into account and falling for a hoax.
March 18, 2007
Can What You Know Affect What You Hear?
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
THE soprano Joan Sutherland has never been convinced that much can be accomplished in a “so-called master class,” as she explained in a 1998 interview. What can a visiting master say in just a half-hour or so of working with a young musician?
Still, that year, at the behest of the foundation run by her friend and colleague Marilyn Horne, Ms. Sutherland offered a master class to several young singers at the Juilliard Theater.
Naturally, before hearing each vocalist, she wanted to learn something of their backgrounds and training. Only with that personal and professional context could she know how to evaluate their work.
So Ms. Sutherland was miffed when she asked the age of an Asian soprano who was up next, and the young woman demurred, laughing nervously and explaining that she preferred not to reveal it.
“But you know my age,” Ms. Sutherland replied. She muttered that this was quite strange but allowed the soprano to sing.
Ms. Sutherland was right. Fledgling sopranos typically keep acquiring technique and making vocal adjustments right through their 20s. Whether this student was 21 or 27 was significant information.
I would add that whether a young soprano was trained in Tokyo or Boston, whether she studied singing throughout her childhood or discovered her voice in a college choir, whether she is big-bodied or petite, loose-limbed or stiff: all of these factors are crucial to assessing an individual’s gifts and needs.
In other words, whether you are a master teacher, an opera buff, a concertgoer or a critic, knowing something of the background of the artist you are hearing will inevitably affect your perceptions.
The question of context surfaced recently in the scandalous story of Joyce Hatto, an English pianist who was born in 1928 and enjoyed a modestly successful career until a cancer diagnosis in 1970 forced her to retire from the concert stage. She died last year.
As has been widely reported, a series of recordings identified as Ms. Hatto’s were released by a small CD label run by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, starting in 1989. There were an astonishing 120 releases in all, including complete cycles of the Mozart, Beethoven and Prokofiev sonatas. But last month her husband, caught in an act of fraud, confessed that these CDs were stolen goods, performances he took from recordings by other pianists and marketed as Ms. Hatto’s.
Critics who were fooled by this plagiarism have come in for ridicule, which is not entirely fair. (For the record, I had never, to my knowledge, heard of or reviewed Ms. Hatto before this news broke.) The recorded performances fobbed off as Ms. Hatto’s, whether by little-known artists or major pianists, were of high quality.
The critics and piano buffs who prized them were sold a false context: They thought they were hearing an overlooked and ailing artist who was enjoying a miraculous rebirth in the safety of the recording studio. Of course more skeptical sorts would argue that the trumped-up story seemed too good to be true.
In any event context should theoretically not matter, especially in instrumental music. A singer’s voice is unique to that singer’s body. But for all the strikingly different characteristics of various pianists, there is arguably a smaller number of variables involved, at least in certain repertory. Schumann’s C major Fantasy is open to myriad interpretive approaches, but Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto tends to go a certain way and requires a more specific kind of virtuosity and flair.
Obviously the context of a performance can completely surprise you. A recording of a Schubert piano sonata that shows a mature sensitivity to high Viennese Classical style might be coming from a master like Artur Schnabel, a leading artist of the new generation like Leif Ove Andsnes or a student at the University of Wisconsin. The actual playing should be what matters. There is an appealing purity about this argument.
Still, the personal context and the particular circumstances of a performance can profoundly affect the performance itself. This point was well put last month in an op-ed article in The New York Times by Denis Dutton, who teaches aesthetics at the University of Cambridge, analyzing the Hatto affair. “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense,” Mr. Dutton wrote.
I recently heard the young Chinese virtuoso Yundi Li play Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Li played with white-hot energy, sizzling passagework and rhapsodic expressivity. But there was a little too much youthful abandon and wild impetuosity in his playing. He let tempos shift into overdrive and sometimes could not contain his enthusiasm.
Knowing that he was only 24, hugely gifted and aiming to please, I found it easy to overlook these lapses. Mr. Li should mature in time. I would like to think that if I had heard only a recording of this performance without knowing the pianist, I would have pegged it as the playing of a young hot-shot. Maybe not. Still, I think that knowing who Mr. Li was and how much this occasion meant to him helped me and his many enthusiastic listeners at Carnegie Hall appreciate what was special about his work. I would argue that we heard it better. We excused the occasional hormonal excess of the playing and concentrated on its incisiveness and vigor.
Long ago orchestra audition committees started the practice of hearing instrumentalists from behind a screen. A worthy goal is at stake here: to eliminate prejudice and ensure that the committee’s judgment is not influenced by a musician’s age, sex or ethnicity.
But this policy has a down side. An orchestra is hiring a person as well as a player. Does that person suit the job? Most orchestras take the screen away at least for the final round. Savvy music directors get personally involved at this stage and sit down with the finalists to find out who they are as musicians and people, and how they think. The enthusiasm that a dynamic young violinist would bring to the job or the maturity that would come with a veteran professional should matter just as much as objectively measurable factors like a candidate’s technique and tone quality.
For all music lovers the danger of letting context affect your perception of an artist is that it is terribly easy to pigeonhole people. Artists are always capable of transcending themselves and surprising us, something critics in particular must remember.
I sometimes envy the freshness a classical music neophyte experiences when hearing something for the first time. My first exposure to Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” came at the Metropolitan Opera, with Ms. Sutherland in the title role. For a teenager who hardly knew the work, this was quite an introduction.
Some critics maintain that overpreparing for a review assignment will lessen the freshness of their reactions, especially for a new piece. This tabula-rasa approach is perfectly valid. For me, if I have access to a score before hearing the premiere of a new work, I find it valuable to read through the music at the piano. And anything I can learn about the creative artist may enrich my perception.
But the lies that were perpetrated about Ms. Hatto were criminal acts. There is a big difference between taking someone’s background and context into account and falling for a hoax.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Specific Secrets of Geezer Rock
The Times UK
September 02, 2006
Jagger keeps on rocking as the lyrics roll up his auto-prompter
By Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent
IT’S hard not to feel sympathy for the old devil. Sir Mick Jagger has succumbed to an on-stage Autocue in the battle against rock’n’roll amnesia.
A screen secreted among the 63-year-old rocker’s onstage monitors scrolls through the lyrics to the Rolling Stones’ classic songs in time with Jagger’s delivery. The prompt, used during the band’s £250 million-grossing tour, even tells him the name of the city where he is performing, and cues his between-song ad-libs.
Representatives of the band said that the screen was simply a prompt, allowing him to keep up the high-energy performances for which he is famed.
“He’s running all over the stage but if he gets a memory blank he can get back to the screen quickly,” a Stones source said. “He rarely needs it but it’s a back-up.”
A technician keeps pace with Jagger’s delivery, but after 40 years on the road, the screen may require close reading. He sang the same verse of Ruby Tuesday twice at last week’s concert in Glasgow during a show broadcast across the world by BBC Radio 2.
The Autocue allows Sir Mick to greet overseas crowds in their own language at prearranged breaks. The script suggested “Good evening London” at last month’s Twickenham shows.
The revelation cast new light on the lengths required to keep ageing rockers on the road. Oxygen masks are on permanent standby for Ozzy Osbourne, while the Beach Boys require backstage deep muscle massage from a licensed practitioner.
Autocues are a guilty secret. “Everyone uses them, from Macca to Elton,” said Brian Larter, managing director of Autoscript UK, which provides prompts for BBC newsreaders and rock stars. But discretion is vital. “Singers like to hide them in a front-of-stage monitor,” Mr Larter said. “You don’t want cameras to pick them up or let the audience see them or the gig can turn into karaoke.”
Like Jagger, most frontmen use the cue to cover for a brief mental blank or to prompt them to announce the next song on the set list. Reliance on a prompt, however, would seem to rise in proportion to career intake of drink and drugs. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boy who suffered mental illness through his experimentation with LSD, can perform only by sitting at a piano and reading the lyrics from a screen.
Axl Rose, of Guns N’Roses, has three cues placed strategically along the stage, alongside the band’s flame-throwers and explosives. Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays also requires onstage assistance.
Frank Sinatra pioneered the onstage teleprompter, continuing to perform until he was 80, despite a fading memory. Divas such as Barbra Streisand use a cue for their script and lyrics.
Some stars can turn failing memories into an artistic statement. David Bowie has an onstage lectern containing the lyrics to his most recent songs. Michael Stipe, of R.E.M, adopted the lectern, screwing up the paper lyrics and throwing them into the crowd at the end of each song.
But a spokesman for The Who, the latest 60-plus rock legends returning to the stage, said that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend needed no onstage prompting to help them to perform their back catalogue.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON . . . BUT FIRST A MASSAGE
Ozzy Osbourne An eye, ear, nose and throat doctor must be on site when Ozzy arrives at the venue. The doctor must be able to administer a B12 shot and Decadron (anti-inflammatory) shot. The venue must provide two oxygen tanks, two masks and two regulators
The Beach Boys A licensed masseur/masseuse, qualified in either Swedish or Oriental deep muscle massage, must be available on day of engagement or any day off the artists have in the city. No form of advertising shall contain the word “oldies” in conjunction with the artists’ logo.
Meat Loaf A mask and one small tank of oxygen, which needs to be charged and ready
Aerosmith The venue must provide names and phone numbers of a throat specialist, a physician fully qualified in internal medicine, an osteo-podiatrist and a licensed chiropractor
David Bowie The venue must ensure a dressing room temperature of between 14C and 18C
Paul McCartney One large arrangement of white Casablanca lilies with lots of foliage for a dressing room containing off-white furniture
Metallica Four oxygen tanks. These shall be portable and equipped with masks and regulators if not inclusive of tank. Very important that bacon be available at every meal and during the day
September 02, 2006
Jagger keeps on rocking as the lyrics roll up his auto-prompter
By Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent
IT’S hard not to feel sympathy for the old devil. Sir Mick Jagger has succumbed to an on-stage Autocue in the battle against rock’n’roll amnesia.
A screen secreted among the 63-year-old rocker’s onstage monitors scrolls through the lyrics to the Rolling Stones’ classic songs in time with Jagger’s delivery. The prompt, used during the band’s £250 million-grossing tour, even tells him the name of the city where he is performing, and cues his between-song ad-libs.
Representatives of the band said that the screen was simply a prompt, allowing him to keep up the high-energy performances for which he is famed.
“He’s running all over the stage but if he gets a memory blank he can get back to the screen quickly,” a Stones source said. “He rarely needs it but it’s a back-up.”
A technician keeps pace with Jagger’s delivery, but after 40 years on the road, the screen may require close reading. He sang the same verse of Ruby Tuesday twice at last week’s concert in Glasgow during a show broadcast across the world by BBC Radio 2.
The Autocue allows Sir Mick to greet overseas crowds in their own language at prearranged breaks. The script suggested “Good evening London” at last month’s Twickenham shows.
The revelation cast new light on the lengths required to keep ageing rockers on the road. Oxygen masks are on permanent standby for Ozzy Osbourne, while the Beach Boys require backstage deep muscle massage from a licensed practitioner.
Autocues are a guilty secret. “Everyone uses them, from Macca to Elton,” said Brian Larter, managing director of Autoscript UK, which provides prompts for BBC newsreaders and rock stars. But discretion is vital. “Singers like to hide them in a front-of-stage monitor,” Mr Larter said. “You don’t want cameras to pick them up or let the audience see them or the gig can turn into karaoke.”
Like Jagger, most frontmen use the cue to cover for a brief mental blank or to prompt them to announce the next song on the set list. Reliance on a prompt, however, would seem to rise in proportion to career intake of drink and drugs. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boy who suffered mental illness through his experimentation with LSD, can perform only by sitting at a piano and reading the lyrics from a screen.
Axl Rose, of Guns N’Roses, has three cues placed strategically along the stage, alongside the band’s flame-throwers and explosives. Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays also requires onstage assistance.
Frank Sinatra pioneered the onstage teleprompter, continuing to perform until he was 80, despite a fading memory. Divas such as Barbra Streisand use a cue for their script and lyrics.
Some stars can turn failing memories into an artistic statement. David Bowie has an onstage lectern containing the lyrics to his most recent songs. Michael Stipe, of R.E.M, adopted the lectern, screwing up the paper lyrics and throwing them into the crowd at the end of each song.
But a spokesman for The Who, the latest 60-plus rock legends returning to the stage, said that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend needed no onstage prompting to help them to perform their back catalogue.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON . . . BUT FIRST A MASSAGE
Ozzy Osbourne An eye, ear, nose and throat doctor must be on site when Ozzy arrives at the venue. The doctor must be able to administer a B12 shot and Decadron (anti-inflammatory) shot. The venue must provide two oxygen tanks, two masks and two regulators
The Beach Boys A licensed masseur/masseuse, qualified in either Swedish or Oriental deep muscle massage, must be available on day of engagement or any day off the artists have in the city. No form of advertising shall contain the word “oldies” in conjunction with the artists’ logo.
Meat Loaf A mask and one small tank of oxygen, which needs to be charged and ready
Aerosmith The venue must provide names and phone numbers of a throat specialist, a physician fully qualified in internal medicine, an osteo-podiatrist and a licensed chiropractor
David Bowie The venue must ensure a dressing room temperature of between 14C and 18C
Paul McCartney One large arrangement of white Casablanca lilies with lots of foliage for a dressing room containing off-white furniture
Metallica Four oxygen tanks. These shall be portable and equipped with masks and regulators if not inclusive of tank. Very important that bacon be available at every meal and during the day
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Air guitarists’ rock dreams come true
Air guitarists’ rock dreams come true
* 18:02 28 November 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Will Knight
Computer vision software recognises a player’s hands and adds riffs and fret board tricks to match (Image: Helsinki University of Technology)
The Virtual Air Guitar project gives wannabe guitarists the chance to rock out (Image: Helsinki University of Technology)
Aspiring rock gods can at last create their own guitar solos - without ever having to pick up a real instrument, thanks to a group of Finnish computer science students.
The Virtual Air Guitar project, developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, adds genuine electric guitar sounds to the passionately played air guitar.
Using a computer to monitor the hand movements of a "player", the system adds riffs and licks to match frantic mid-air finger work. By responding instantly to a wide variety of gestures it promises to turn even the least musically gifted air guitarist to a virtual fret board virtuoso.
Aki Kanerva, Juha Laitinen and Teemu Mäki-Patola came up with the idea after being invited to develop a virtual instrument as part of their coursework. "The first thing that came to mind was an air guitar," Kanerva told New Scientist.
The resulting system consists of a video camera and a computer hooked up to an appropriately loud set of speakers.
A player then needs only to don a pair of brightly coloured gloves in order to rock out. Computer vision software automatically keeps track of their hands and detects different gestures, as a video of the system in action demonstrates (22MB, requires Windows Media Player and DivX codec for the visual aspect of the footage).
Frenetic strumming
The Finnish team created a library of guitar sounds based around the pentatonic minor scale – a progression commonly used for rock guitar solos – in order to create the right sound for their virtual instrument.
As a player moves their left hand along the neck of their virtual guitar, the computer will run through the scale. Holding it one place while strumming frenetically produces fret board tricks such as hammer-ons – where slapping a finger onto an already vibrating string produces a higher note – and blues bends, which give a distinctive rock twang. And a floor pedal can also be used to switch the system into mode that plays several different chords.
Kanerva says players can easily create unique air guitar style. "No two playing experiences are quite the same," he says. "When you're playing really hard you get a really nasty distortion sound which is great – but you have to work for it."
The project is currently being demonstrated at the Heureka Science Centre in Finland where it has been played more than 5000 times over the last month, Kanerva says. As a follow-up, the researchers are working on a version that will be compatible with a normal webcam and computer, thus giving wannabe rock stars the opportunity to practise their art in the privacy of their bedroom.
For Kanerva, who had to research different guitar playing tricks, the project has had another benefit. "I wasn't a guitarist before I started the project," he says. "But I am now."
* 18:02 28 November 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Will Knight
Computer vision software recognises a player’s hands and adds riffs and fret board tricks to match (Image: Helsinki University of Technology)
The Virtual Air Guitar project gives wannabe guitarists the chance to rock out (Image: Helsinki University of Technology)
Aspiring rock gods can at last create their own guitar solos - without ever having to pick up a real instrument, thanks to a group of Finnish computer science students.
The Virtual Air Guitar project, developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, adds genuine electric guitar sounds to the passionately played air guitar.
Using a computer to monitor the hand movements of a "player", the system adds riffs and licks to match frantic mid-air finger work. By responding instantly to a wide variety of gestures it promises to turn even the least musically gifted air guitarist to a virtual fret board virtuoso.
Aki Kanerva, Juha Laitinen and Teemu Mäki-Patola came up with the idea after being invited to develop a virtual instrument as part of their coursework. "The first thing that came to mind was an air guitar," Kanerva told New Scientist.
The resulting system consists of a video camera and a computer hooked up to an appropriately loud set of speakers.
A player then needs only to don a pair of brightly coloured gloves in order to rock out. Computer vision software automatically keeps track of their hands and detects different gestures, as a video of the system in action demonstrates (22MB, requires Windows Media Player and DivX codec for the visual aspect of the footage).
Frenetic strumming
The Finnish team created a library of guitar sounds based around the pentatonic minor scale – a progression commonly used for rock guitar solos – in order to create the right sound for their virtual instrument.
As a player moves their left hand along the neck of their virtual guitar, the computer will run through the scale. Holding it one place while strumming frenetically produces fret board tricks such as hammer-ons – where slapping a finger onto an already vibrating string produces a higher note – and blues bends, which give a distinctive rock twang. And a floor pedal can also be used to switch the system into mode that plays several different chords.
Kanerva says players can easily create unique air guitar style. "No two playing experiences are quite the same," he says. "When you're playing really hard you get a really nasty distortion sound which is great – but you have to work for it."
The project is currently being demonstrated at the Heureka Science Centre in Finland where it has been played more than 5000 times over the last month, Kanerva says. As a follow-up, the researchers are working on a version that will be compatible with a normal webcam and computer, thus giving wannabe rock stars the opportunity to practise their art in the privacy of their bedroom.
For Kanerva, who had to research different guitar playing tricks, the project has had another benefit. "I wasn't a guitarist before I started the project," he says. "But I am now."
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