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This is another gem I picked up at St. Vinny’s in Madison. The cover alone, with its stereotypical Wagnerian Valkyrie with an old-style conga, was worth the purchase. But the record turns out to be pretty good (read: delightfully cheesy), too. Edmundo Ros ( who I hadn’t heard of before picking up this record) was born in Trinidad to Venezuelan and Scottish parents, and has spent the bulk of his career in Britain. From 1940 to the mid 90s, he led a variety of Latin jazz bands based in London, toured the world, and recorded extensively. He retired to Spain in 1994, was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and just turned 100 a couple of weeks ago.

Having not heard any of his other albums, I’m not sure whether this level of cheese is representative of or anomalous within his output. In any case, it’s pretty fun. Ros and his Orchestra tackle Carmen, Rigoletto, La Traviata, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and even Lohengrin, among others. My favorite cut is their treatment of the “Toreador’s Song” from Carmen:

Listen to Edmundo Ros and His Orchestra — The Toreador’s Song

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I happened upon this record at a thrift shop in Madison. It was in the Easy Listening (slash things-that-defy-categorization) bin. The photo of Civil War brass players on the front caught my eye. Then, I noticed the track list: “Hey Jude,” “Spinning Wheel,” “Light My Fire,” “Michelle,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” etc. Those tunes in combination with the photo and the name of the group convinced me to add the record to my stack. I don’t think I really looked at the back of the album until I got home. The back has a picture of some Union officers, and a couple of paragraphs of complete B.S. that doesn’t give much of any real information about the disc’s contents or the musicians who appear on it.

The one bit of real information — which would itself have been enough for me to buy the disc — is that one member of the group plays a contrabass saxophone. This beast of the sax family (photos here, here, and here) is pitched in E-flat, one octave below the baritone saxophone (and two octaves below the familiar alto). Here, the contra is part of an mix of instruments — trumpet, clarinet, banjo, trombone, string bass, Hammond organ, accordion, and drums that create sort of a psuedo-neo-Dixieland band. The whole record is quite strange, but most of it falls squarely into the good/funny-weird category. Here’s my favorite track from the disc, one that prominently features the massive contrabass sax:

Listen to The Burbank Philharmonic — These Boots Were Made for Walking

We grad bassoonists were asked to assemble a quartet to play on the evening concert. As it turned out, only 3 of us (out of 5) were going to be around the week before DRD, so we asked our prof., Marc Vallon, to join us. For the occasion, Brian and I spent a few afternoons creating a bassoon quartet arrangement of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Our performance was very well received, and a number of audience members approached us later to say, “that should be on YouTube!” We liked that idea, and so here it is:

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I picked up Saturday Night Fiedler about three years ago in the small classical section at The Great Escape in Nashville. It was still sealed, so I didn’t listen to it there. But, how could I pass up an album with Arthur Fiedler, long-time conductor of the Boston Pops, awkwardly posed in a white leisure suit on the cover? I kept the record sealed for awhile (partly because I didn’t yet really have a stereo), and finally cut the plastic for one of the Audio Oddities parties that the staff of Mills Music Library hold from time to time.

Side 1 (each side consists of a single long track) is a medley of tunes from the movie Saturday Night Fever: “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” “Manhattan Skyline,” “Night on Disco Mountain,” and “Disco Inferno” (for some reason, they don’t include “A Fifth of Beethoven”). On Side 2 is an eleven-an-a-half minute piece called “Bachamania,” which is a disco treatment of well-known themes by J.S. Bach, including both his “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” and “Air on a G String.”

The playing on both sides of the disc is lackluster, and in places painfully out of tune. It’s pretty apparent that the orchestra just wanted to get through the recording session, and get on to more ‘serious’ music. Who can blame them? I feel particularly bad for the poor percussionist (whoever s/he was) who had to crank out a disco beat for nineteen minutes on one side and almost twelve on the other. Plus, according to Harry Ellis Dickson’s Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops: An Irreverent Memoir, Fiedler was too ill to conduct at the recording sessions for this album. It was Dickson himself who wielded the baton.

I plan to usually post a single track from each weird record. But, since the tracks on this one are so long, I’ve just put up the first 6 minutes or so of the Saturday Night Fever medley.

Listen to Saturday Night Fiedler

And for something to look at while you listen, here’s the Fiedler Triptych from the back cover:

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Bonus points if you can find the second thing wrong with the picture. Westminster Gold strikes again…

The many varied forms of sound recording and playback technologies, beginning with Edison’s invention of the phonograph in the 1870s, have undoubtedly changed the ways in which we listen to and disseminate music. Mark Katz argues that beyond this, recording has in many ways altered music itself: it has changed performers’ approach to playing music, composers’ approach to writing music, and has has even spawned completely new musical genres. In Capturing Sound, Katz provides a number of case studies, each exploring one of these “phonograph effecs,” as he calls them. His discussions encompass a variety of musics, ranging from classical and jazz to hip-hop and techno.

Katz begins by outlining what he sees as the seven most important characteristics of sound recording technology (e.g. tangibility, repeatability, and manipulability). It is these traits, singly and in combination, that give rise to the various phonograph effects Katz addresses in the remainder of the book. He then proceeds to give a short history of not of early recording technology, but of the various ways in which early recording and (especially) playback equipment found its way into American culture.

The first real phonograph effect Katz tackles is the dissemination and rapidly growing popularity of jazz in the 1910s and 1920s. Jazz was really the first genre to benefit during its formative years from the portability and repeatability of sound recordings. Katz provides a pretty good summary of this phenomenon, but I’m not sure he really adds anything to what previous writers have done. With his next topic, though, Katz enters what seems to be new ground.

Violinists, on the whole, increased their use of vibrato around the beginning of the twentieth century. This fact seems to be widely recognized, but little time has been devoted to determining the impetus for the change. Katz, as you might guess, makes a case for recording technology being responsible: violinists discovered that using more vibrato could compensate for some of the limitations of early acoustic recordings. The recordings they produced were then emulated by aspiring players, leading to a stylistic shift. This seems a good place to mention the CD that accompanies the book. It contains thirteen musical examples, of which five serve to illustrate the change in vibrato aesthetic. It’s quite helpful to have these; prose descriptions of sound are often insufficient.

Katz next discusses the relatively short-lived idea of Grammophonmusik — music in which the phonograph was used as a tool for composition. This might be done by altering existing recordings, or by actually attempting to engrave sound forms by hand onto a blank phonograph disc. The genre was mostly speculative, but a few examples created by Paul Hindemith survive.

The remaining chapters of Capturing Sound deal with popular music, and mainly with electronic and/or digital sound technologies. Katz gives a short history of DJing and turntablism, and then outlines his own fieldwork in the study of DJ battles or competitions. He devotes a chapter to the “art and politics” of sampling, looking at examples drawn from hip-hop, pop, rock, techno, and art music. Katz’s last chapter explores how MP3s (and other digital audio files) and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are changing the experiences of listening to, discovering, and consuming music. While these various subjects have been treated elsewhere, they have generally not been done so with a scholarly approach.

Overall, I enjoyed Capturing Sound. Katz’s topics are interesting, and his writing style is clear and engaging. I found the book as a whole to be a little uneven, though. Some chapters (like those about violin vibrato and DJ battles) involve a great deal of Katz’s own original research, while others (such as those about Grammophonmusik and the rise of jazz) do not. Katz acknowledges that his various topics are “connected perhaps by nothing save recording.” Thus it is perhaps better to approach Capturing Sound as a collection of essays rather than as a cohesive book. I hope, as does Katz, that his writing will inspire others to produce work in a similar vein — I imagine there’s a lot more to be said about technology’s influence on music.

In this book, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin elucidates the various neurobiological processes involved in listening to music. He details the ways in which the human brain accomplishes tasks, such as meter extraction, that seem straightforward (especially to trained musicians) but in actuality demand very sophisticated neural processing. He also demonstrates how adept our brains are, even those of people with no musical training, at doing things like memorizing pitches and tempos, identifying wrong notes, and hearing and predicting musical forms.

Although some of this is certainly a product of the structure and function of the brain, Levitin also attributes much of it to experience. He makes a convincing argument that because of the ubiquity of music, most people qualify as expert listeners, whether or not they can discuss music in a technical manner. Levitin spends much of his time on these processes of listening, but he also addresses the ways the brain is involved in the performance of music, neurobiological foundations of musical taste, and various ideas about how and why humans evolved to be innately musical.

Levitin is now a scientist at McGill University, but he began his career as a rock musician and record producer. Perhaps because of this breadth of experience, he does a pretty good job of writing for a wide audience — he discusses many complex concepts, but always explains them in relatively simple terms. This isn’t to say his writing is simplistic; I found the chapter on musical fundamentals fairly interesting, even though it’s stuff in which I am well versed.

Throughout the book, Levitin provides a good balance between scientific studies and anecdotal evidence, while also including a good bit of historical and scientific context. I’d recommend This Is Your Brain on Music to musicians and music lovers alike. It provides a fascinating look at what’s going on inside our heads when we play or listen to music.

Chris and Veronica

Friday evening was Veronica’s performance at the guitar festival. She and Chris, the guitarist from UW, played first on the festival’s opening concert. I glanced through the program booklet, and I’m pretty sure that Veronica was the only non-guitarist performing all weekend. The two of them did an excellent job — they played two movements of Mauro Giuliani’s Grand Duo Concertant. I’m looking forward to hearing the whole piece on Chris’s recital in a couple of weeks.

Sue the T-Rex

On Saturday, we got up relatively early and checked out of the hotel. We were able to leave our bags there while we headed off to the Field Museum. Our main objective at the Field was to see their temporary Real Pirates exhibit. We arrived fairly early, so we were able to breeze right in to both the museum and the pirate exhibit. The exhibit follows the history of the Whydah, a slave ship turned pirate ship. So, it starts out detailing the ship’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade of the early 18th century, then picks up with the story of Sam Bellamy, the pirate captain who captured her in the Caribbean. The exhibit does a good job of explaining the various sorts of lives at sea — those of a slave, a pirate, and a sailor in the King’s navy. The exhibit is peppered with artifacts from the Whydah — cannon, pistols, pieces of eight, etc. The ship sank off Cape Cod in a storm in 1717 and was found by a team led by Barry Clifford in 1984. Partway through the exhibit, I was a little disappointed at the artifact to diorama ratio, but a whole section about the recovery of the ship and conservation of its artifacts set that straight.

We visited the Field a couple of years ago, so many of the exhibits were fresh in our minds. We did go through the dinosaur hall again, though (I’ve always been a dinophile). We also spent some time in a couple of small temporary exhibits, one featuring ancient jewelry from around the Middle East, and another of photographs of the massive Hindu Kumbha Mela pilgrimage. Sadly, we didn’t have the time or energy to see the other big temporary exhibit, The Aztec World.

A Colorful Wall Across the Street From Our Hotel

We made some great food choices throughout our visit, thanks in no small part to the Yelp.com iPhone application. Yelp lets you search for businesses near your current location and provides user-supplied ratings and reviews for them. Aside from the deep-dish pizza we had the first night, we had a delicious breakfast at the Bongo Room, great very fresh sushi at Oysy, and delectable Cuban sandwiches at Cafecito. We even found an impressively stocked independent liquor store where we were able to buy a bottle of Goats Do Roam red and a bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate, thus bypassing the allure of our hotel room mini-bar.

The only snag in our trip came at the end. When we attempted to purchase our return trip Metra tickets at Union Station, the agent informed us that on the weekend, trains don’t go as far as the station where we’d parked the car. Whoops. We got on the train anyway, figuring we’d find a cab to take us the rest of the way. But, we remembered that our friends Lesley (of Le Triangle d’Or) and Keith were in Elgin that weekend visiting Keith’s family. They agreed to pick us up and ferry us to the other station. Even better than that, they invited us to stay for a delicious dinner with Keith’s parents and sister. So, what appeared to be a snag turned out to be serendipitous!

As usual, click any of the photos above to see the whole gallery.

Museum of Science and Industry

Last week was our much-needed spring break. Veronica was slated to play at the Mid-America Guitar Ensemble Festival (at Roosevelt University) with a guitarist from UW, so we used that as an excuse to spend a few days in Chicago. We landed a great hotel deal via Hotwire.com and stayed at the Chicago Hilton, which overlooks Grant Park and is walking distance from the Art Institute of Chicago‎, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and lots of other cool stuff. The only downside of our ritzy downtown digs was that parking was $43 bucks a night. So, we parked in Elgin (at a rate of $1.50/night) and took the Metra commuter rail into town.

We rolled into town on Thursday afternoon, hoofed it from Union Station to our hotel, and settled in. For dinner, we hit Lou Malnati’s — a local pizza chain. I have to say that I’ve never been a fan of Chicago-style deep-dish, but this place changed my mind. Our main event for the evening was going to a taping of the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” We listen to the show religiously, and had been talking for awhile about seeing it live. We showed up about twenty minutes before the doors opened, and it was already packed. Luckily we’d already bought tickets, so we just joined the throng waiting to enter the auditorium.

The show itself was a blast! The panelists (for this show: Tom Bodett, Kyrie O’Connor, and Paul Provenza), host Peter Sagal, and scorekeeper Carl Kassel came onstage to a darkened room, flashing lights, and the Chicago Bulls’ entrance music. Carl even ran out, waving his arms and high-fiving the panel. The show itself took somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours to record. Quite a bit gets cut before the show airs, but it was all funny. Perhaps the funniest moment was something not written for laughs at all. The bulk of the show’s material was about the current economic crisis, with lots of talk about failing banks and shady deals made by said banks. At the end of one of the show’s segments, Peter started doing his little spiel about the show’s sponsors — one of which is LendingTree.com. When he got to the line “When banks compete, you win,” everyone erupted in laughter. He had to re-do that bit twice to get a laugh-free version.

U-505

We spent most of Friday at the Museum of Science and Industry, which occupies one of the only remaining buildings from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The museum has lots of cool stuff, and strikes a pretty good balance between activities and exhibits for kids and things for adults. I spent a lot of time marveling at how they got various things into the building: the entire Pioneer Zephyr streamlined train, a Boeing 727, and a German submarine U-505. I especially enjoyed the Transportation Gallery, the U-505, and the exhibit of Ships Through the Ages. The museum was packed with school groups, so we didn’t get to see everything we would have liked to. But, that means we should have plenty of things to see the next time we visit.

A Goose in a Tree!

After exiting the museum, we walked all the way around it to see the rest of the building and to look at it across the remnants of the lagoon from the World’s Fair. The building itself is quite cool, with lots of columns, statues, pre-distressed friezes, and domes. See the gallery for more exterior shots and close-ups of some of the architectural detail. As I was taking pictures across the lagoon, Veronica pointed up at a tree — there was a large goose sitting in it! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goose in a tree before, and one of its companions walking around on the ground seemed confused by it as well.

I’ll continue the story soon. Meanwhile, click any of the photos above to view the rest of the photos from our weekend.

The photo was even taken during one of my solos! There wasn’t a story attached, and the pic doesn’t seem to be online anywhere. But, The Cardinal publishes a PDF version of their paper. I grabbed today’s copy (since there doesn’t seem to be an archive) — you can find it here.

P.S. — I hope to have audio from this concert as well as our last one posted soon.