About the Composer

This weekend, while going through some poorly tagged items in my music library, I came across a recording I’d dug up on the internet years ago of a trio of men singing a traditional Georgian folk song. This song, called Mival Guriashi, is something I first encountered in 1998 when I had a brief stint as vocal director for a folk ensemble. At that time, I had the surreal opportunity to prepare this fascinating music based on some unknown person’s (mostly accurate) transcription, and sing one of the parts.

This particular song is what’s known as a “table song”, characterized by three vocal lines, mostly homophonic. In this tradition, the melodic direction of the independent vocal lines has no concern for their resulting harmonies, flying in the face of everything we learned from our counterpoint books. So, what we have is impeccable voice leading with a harmonic mixed bag: sometimes they’re swooningly gorgeous, and sometimes they clash like crazy. You never know what you’re going to get from beat to beat.

Go on, give a listen ….(mp3. 1.1mb. 1:04)

Meanwhile, in reading up on Georgian music, I came across this page on the web site of Village Harmony , where more examples of this amazing music can be sampled. The site explains it best:

This project was inspired by recordings made in the 1980s, when singers of advanced age were invited to Tbilisi from different regions of Georgia and the Melodiya Company recorded their songs with microphones set up individually for each singer, enabling each song to be recorded both as a whole and with the voice parts in isolation.

If you only have time for one, I recommend the one called Khasanbegura: a feast of surprises for your Western-trained ears. Also, poke around on the Village Harmony site for more examples of wonderful stuff.

Georgian Voices, by the Rustavi Choir, is perhaps one of the best known (and perhaps best) recordings of Georgian choral music. You can hear a lot more excerpts on the Amazon.com page for this recording (including another version of Mival Guriashi).

Lately I’ve been listening to this Burt Bacharach compilation I bought several years ago (now that I have a car with a CD player). This three-disc Look Of Love compilation spans from the earliest part of his career in the ’50’s (theme song from The Blob anyone?) up to the mid-Seventies, when he produced some truly cloying and awful stuff (”Living Together, Growing Together” …ugh… deliver me!).

For my taste, Bacharach was in his prime in the Brill Building days of the early Sixties, when he helped to pioneer the use of orchestral instruments in pop music. These songs are really worth studying, as there’s a lot of hidden sophistication buried in them.

It’s been pointed out many times that he was a bit of an odd duck in those days, with the occasional use of changing meters, etc, but for me, what really makes him stand out as a songwriter is a rare contrapuntal depth heard in those early songs. Bacharach studied with the likes of Martinu and Milhaud, and certainly knew what he was doing. Since he did his own arrangements, the vocal lines and instrumental lines interact and inform each other in ways not achieved in most pop music. Melodic lines in the orchestration share equal space with the vocal line, and are in some cases more interesting. In fact, I usually sing along with the countermelodies, but then, I’m pretty weird. (Can you listen to “Walk on By” without singing that staccato “answer” in the trumpet?)

I thought it would be fun to take a little-known song from this compilation, “It’s Love That Really Counts”, as recorded by the Shirelles, and try to explain what I think is so cool about it. Well several things, actually. For one thing, I’m not positive, but I believe the melody is entirely pentatonic. We like that. But, it’s mostly orchestration and counterpoint. The arrangement is in impeccable taste — a lesson in self-restraint. For the first verse it’s just bass, guitar and very sparse percussion (mostly vibraslap!). The piano comes in only to lightly parallel the title line “it’s love that really counts”, and otherwise is left out. He’s consistent about that too: the piano only comes in for that line throughout the song.

As is typical with Burt, violins come in for the second verse, but they don’t do too much — just sustained chords. The next “love that really counts’ refrain is where the arrangement is truly inspired: whereas a typical arrangement would probably have the violins parallel the vocal line with lush chords, Burt has them holding tremolo chords sul ponticello with a dramatic swell.

Now, as the song winds up toward a close, the violins take on a contrapuntal role. The vocal line is relatively bland, but the violins upstage it with a magical leap of a minor 10th. It’s too hard to describe….

Listen to the Excerpt (click the “play” triangle icon below)

(requires Flash plugin)

First, it’s the refrain with the tremolo violins. Then, around “so take me in your arms”, listen to what the violins are doing. Listen a few times.

I haven’t heard Burt’s new album At This Time yet. Perhaps I’ll mention it here if I ever do. I did enjoy his collaboration with Elvis Costello, Painted from Memory, at first, but then I got really sick of it.

Still… can’t get enough of this 60’s stuff.

Wow. I’m not sure I can remember how I stumbled upon this, but a few days ago I discovered one of the few truly useful things on the web. Meet Writely. This is a web-based word processor that not only stores all of your revisions, and lets you roll back to any version, but you can collaborate on documents with any number of other people.

You can…

• Import a Word document
• Export to a Word document
• Export to PDF
• Publish directly to your blog
• Make snow cones

I’m now collaborating with a playwright on a musical theater something-or-other, and so this is going to make that much easier. (I’m not quite sure how we were going to do it otherwise.)

Anyway, check it out.

For a long time Philo was obsessed with Yiddish folk and theater music. I could not convince him to listen to anything else. (My own fault, I admit.)

Today it was Ravel’s Bolero. Yup, my almost-three-year-old sat through it twice in one sitting. Don’t get me wrong; I adore the piece, but I believe there are many adults who would rather drink their own bath water than sit through it once. (Their problem.)

But twice! Twice, and he was riveted, although disappointed with the sparing use of the bass drum.

I sure do like bass drum, dad!

(Did I mention he’s not three yet?)

Garbage Man Crying. 10/05

Philo’s interest in orchestral music has skyrocketed since we took him to see a puppet theater version of The Nutcracker back in D.C. Thanksgiving weekend. True, he needed to be removed from the theater in tears, along with several other two-year-olds (you know… Mouse King), but the experience made a deep impression on him. He frequently dances around to no music, and insists that he’s a scary puppet, and that one of us has to be the Nutcracker.

I don’t own a recording of The Nutcracker, but a few weeks ago I had an idea. “Hey Philo”, I announced, “Wanna hear some puppet music?” His eyes lit up. I put on Petrouchka , and he danced around, and acted out every character change in the music (and of course there are dozens). On this particular recording, The Rite of Spring follows, and he enjoyed that with a mixture of fear and fascination. (He did finally start freaking out a little near the very end, and I had to turn it off.)

I’ve since discovered that just about anything lively and orchestral works for Philo as puppet music, even if there’s no bass drum. (I was asked to turn off the Ravel Piano Trio — sigh.) Holst’s The Planets was a big hit, and if you have any doubt that I’m a sick, sick individual, I’ll mention that we also listened to Var�se’s Arcana, which follows on that particular recording. He actually didn’t mind it, which I think is great.

Here’s a partial Philo’s Thumbs-up list, based on lots of random trial-and-error:

• Bernard Herrmann, North By Northwest Overture
• Prokofiev, Classical Symphony
• John Adams, “Wild Nights!” section of Harmonium (and the preceding wind-up)
• Stravinsky, Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (despite the lack of bass drum)