Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2024

55 Years

It's getting to be a very long time ago.

On Danish TV, March 17, 1969.

Saturday, February 03, 2024

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Today's Nerdy Thing

Sometimes knowing too much about how something is done kinda spoils the magic. For me, it just makes the magic more amazing. Especially when it's about the magic of music.

I can sing a little, and I've been banging around on my guitar for a good long time, and while I can usually play &/or sing the right notes at the right time, it only occasionally results in what I can reasonably call "real music".

So when I get a chance to see how that "real music" is made, I'm at once tickled by the beauty and the spectacle of it all - plus it's always good to learn something new - and I can see a very good excuse for not being better at it myself. Taken together, that's actually pretty comforting for me.

Aimee Nolte explains:




Sunday, December 31, 2023

Tom Waits

San Diego Serenade


I never saw the morning 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed a song

I never saw the white line, 'til I was leaving you behind
I never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind
I never spoke "I love you" 'til I cursed you in vain
I never felt my heartstrings until I nearly went insane

I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west
I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast
I never saw your heart until someone tried to steal, tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears until they rolled down your face

I never saw the morning 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out your love light, baby
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song

Sunday, December 24, 2023

A Carol

The Atheist Christmas Carol --Vienna Teng


It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
It's the season of possible miracle cures
Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
Where time begins to fade
And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you know

Don't forget
Don't forget I love, I love
I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

Don't forget
Don't forget I love, I love
I love you

Don't forget
Don't forget I love, I love
I love you

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Today's Tune


Allison Young - Writing, vocals
Joshua Lee Turner - Vocals, guitar
Josh Harmon - Drums 
Sebastian Rios - Bass  
Damon Smith - Piano
Mike Davis - Trumpet 
Kelly Oden - Video and color

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Taking A Little Soul Break

Allison Young has been making some pretty good music for a while now.

This one really got me.



And then I found this.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

A Beautiful Song

Someone on Twixter asked, "What's a beautiful song?"

There are, of course, many. This one may be something of an old chestnut, but I don't care - it rips me every time.

The Flower Duet, from Lakmé, by Delibes

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Tiny Desk


How do you turn Hip Hop into real music?

Action Bronson


Tunes
Dmtri
Live from the Moon
Latin Grammys
Terry
Baby Blue

Players
Action Bronson: vocals, effects
Matt "Yung Mehico" Carrillo: keys, saxophone
Nicholas Coleman: bass
Wahkiba "9Ether" Julion: drums
Red Walrus: percussion
Julian Love: guitar

Friday, July 14, 2023

Friday's Tune


Joshua Turner and Carson McKee

I'll Be Here In The Mornin' --Townes Van Zandt

Friday, June 30, 2023

Friday Tunes


Monica Martin.

Cruel
God pray you don't want this
More than I do
You said you didn't think of it
But I knew
The tears run down your face
In lines that I drew

and...
Pillowcase
Hard To Explain
Go Easy, Kid


Monica Martin with Lake Street Dive - I Can't Help Falling In Love With You

Monday, May 22, 2023

Today's Lyric

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away


Friday, May 19, 2023

The Music Thing

Diana Krall - Almost Blue


About a thousand years ago, I got to sit at the bar with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, in the Cruise Room at the old Oxford Hotel in lower downtown Denver. I asked him what got him started, and how he handled the uncertainties of life as an itinerant balladeer.

He told me, "If you can pick a little guitar, and you know enough sad songs, you'll never have a problem getting people to buy you a sandwich and a cup of coffee."


Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs?

Not because it makes us sad, but because it connects us to other people, some researchers suggest.

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”

This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it. Maybe we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Maybe there’s an evolutionary advantage in it, or maybe we’re socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Maybe our bodies produce hormones in response to the fragmentary malaise of the music, creating a feeling of consolation.

Dr. Knobe is now an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University — and is married to that indie rock musician who sang those heart-wrenching songs. In a new study, published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, he and some colleagues sought to tackle this paradox by asking what sad music is all about.

Over the years, Dr. Knobe’s research has found that people often form two conceptions of the same thing, one concrete and one abstract. For example, people could be considered artists if they display a concrete set of features, like being technically gifted with a brush. But if they do not exhibit certain abstract values — if, say, they lack creativity, curiosity or passion and simply recreate old masterpieces for quick profit — one could say that, in another sense, they are not artists. Maybe sad songs have a similarly dual nature, thought Dr. Knobe and his former student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic soprano.

Certainly, research has found that our emotional response to music is multidimensional; you’re not just happy when you listen to a beautiful song, nor simply made sad by a sad one. In 2016, a survey of 363 listeners found that emotional responses to sad songs fell roughly into three categories: grief, including powerful negative feelings like anger, terror and despair; melancholia, a gentle sadness, longing or self-pity; and sweet sorrow, a pleasant pang of consolation or appreciation. Many respondents described a mix of the three. (The researchers called their study “Fifty Shades of Blue.”)

Given the layers of emotion and the imprecision of language, it’s perhaps no wonder that sad music lands as a paradox. But it still doesn’t really explain why it can feel pleasurable or meaningful.

Some psychologists have examined how certain aspects of music — mode, tempo, rhythm, timbre — relate to the emotions listeners feel. Studies have found that certain forms of song serve nearly universal functions: Across countries and cultures, for instance, lullabies tend to share similar acoustic features that imbue infants and adults alike with a sense of safety.

“All our lives we’ve learned to map the relationships between our emotions and what we sound like,” said Tuomas Eerola, a musicologist at Durham University in England and a researcher on the “Fifty Shades” study. “We recognize emotional expression in speech, and most of the cues are used similarly in music.”

Other scientists, including Patrik Juslin, a music psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, argue that such findings clarify little about the value of sad music. He wrote in a paper, “They simply move the burden of explanation from one level, ‘Why does the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony arouse sadness?’, to another level, ‘Why does a slow tempo arouse sadness?’”

Instead, Dr. Juslin and others have proposed that there are cognitive mechanisms through which sadness can be induced in listeners. Unconscious reflexes in the brain stem; the synchronization of rhythm to some internal cadence, such as a heartbeat; conditioned responses to particular sounds; triggered memories; emotional contagion; a reflective evaluation of the music — all seem to play some role. Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.

“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Dr. Knobe said. “And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”

To test that hypothesis, he, Dr. Venkatesan and George Newman, a psychologist at the Rotman School of Management, set up a two-part experiment. In the first part, they gave one of four song descriptions to more than 400 subjects. One description was of a song that “conveys deep and complex emotions” but was also “technically very flawed.” Another described a “technically flawless” song that “does not convey deep or complex emotions.” The third song was described as deeply emotional and technically flawless, and the fourth as technically flawed and unemotional.

The subjects were asked to indicate, on a seven-point scale, whether their song “embodies what music is all about.” The goal was to clarify how important emotional expression in general — of joy, sadness, hatred or whatever — was to music on an intuitive level. On the whole, subjects reported that deeply emotional but technically flawed songs best reflected the essence of music; emotional expression was a more salient value than technical proficiency.

In the second part of the experiment, involving 450 new subjects, the researchers gave each participant 72 descriptions of emotional songs, which expressed feelings including “contempt,” “narcissism,” “inspiration” and “lustfulness.” For comparison, they also gave participants prompts that described a conversational interaction in which someone expressed their feelings. (For example: “An acquaintance is talking to you about their week and expresses feelings of wistfulness.”) On the whole, the emotions that subjects felt were deeply rooted to “what music is all about” were also those that made people feel more connected to one another in conversation: love, joy, loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, calmness, sorrow.

Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University Chicago who helped lead the research, found the results compelling. After considering the data, he proposed a relatively simple idea: Maybe we listen to music not for an emotional reaction — many subjects reported that sad music, albeit artistic, was not particularly enjoyable — but for the sense of connection to others. Applied to the paradox of sad music: Our love of the music is not a direct appreciation of sadness, it’s an appreciation of connection. Dr. Knobe and Dr. Venkatesan were quickly on board.

“I’m a believer already,” Dr. Eerola said when he was alerted to the study. In his own research, he has found that particularly empathetic people are more likely to be moved by unfamiliar sad music. “They’re willing to engage in this kind of fictional sadness that the music is bringing them,” he said. These people also display more significant hormonal changes in response to sad music.

But sad music is layered — it’s an onion — and this explanation prompts more questions. With whom are we connecting? The artist? Our past selves? An imaginary person? And how can sad music be “all about” anything? Doesn’t the power of art derive, in part, from its ability to transcend summary, to expand experience?

One by one, the researchers acknowledged the complexity of their subject, and the limitations of existing work. And then Dr. Attie-Picker offered a less philosophical argument for their results: “It just feels right,” he said.

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

New Music


Sid Sriram

SET LIST
"Blue Spaces"
"Do The Dance"
"Dear Sahana"
"Came Along"

MUSICIANS
Sid Sriram: vocals
Aaron Baum: keys
Evan Slack: guitar
Gregory Fox: drums
Adam Hurlburt: bass
Alex Nutter: modular synth 
Chris Egan: drums
Devin Velez: vocals
Mike Noyce: vocals

Friday, April 21, 2023

Believing In Spring


Faith In Spring --Schubert - Lara Downes

When things seem dark and cold, there's a springtime always coming.


Serenade --Schubert - waldteufel78


Etude in E Major --Chopin - waldteufel78

A song sounds inside me.

Saturday, February 25, 2023

те ж саме

Very reminiscent of a similar speech, under similar circumstances, a long time ago.

"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
--JFK 06-10-1963


Brad Paisley with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Same Here - те ж саме



Saturday, February 11, 2023

Today's Fuddy Duddy

... from way back in the day - when kids were getting a little pop-crazy and parents were getting a little worried about all this change that's happening so fast ... 

Which, I think, is normal. Isn't that how this shit's supposed to work?

"These kids today" always worry their parents - what with their ukuleles and their ragtime music, and their boogie woogie and their bobby socks, and their halter tops and their peace signs - it's just too much for good and sensible folks who've managed either to forget about all the weird shit they did as teenagers, or remember all too well, so they feel really bad about having been so recklessly rebellious and are now terrified that their kids might be doing some of things they did back in the day.

A little selective amnesia mixed in with a kind of self-righteous pearl-clutching (ie: "We just don't want our kids making the same mistakes we made"), makes for some pretty strange-sounding rhetoric and unnecessary conflict.

The kids are alright.


The more things change - y'know?

Australia 1964: