Baby Music

I read an article at work last night on my break that was very interesting. Now, it was in some magazine that I don't remember the name of... Paste maybe? No, that wasn't it... Anyway, it started with an interview with this guy named Doug Schulkind. He's a "self described music obsessive DJ" and when his wife went into labor with their child, he brought his boom box and a stack of CDs with him to the hospital. After a long and stressful labor (and what labor isn't?) a baby girl was born, and the first music this little baby heard upon entering this world was John Coltrain's A Love Supreme. Doug says this was no accident. As one who is passionate about music, the first music his child heard was just as important as important as picking out a name or buying the right car seat.
The Boston Globe's classical music critic, Jeremy Eichler had a similar decision to make when he brought his newborn child home. "It did actually feel like there was a lot of pressure as I was standing in front of our CD library," he says. "It was fairly paralyzing to think what would be the appropriate music to play for someone's very first-ever taste of music. And I ended up choosing Bach's Art of Fugue, in an arrangement for string quartet. I thought, 'Why not begin at the summit?' Bach's Art of Fugue is one of the pinnacles of his art. He's taking a single subject and manipulating it in many different ways. I just thought it would be like honey for the infant mind."
(By the way, if you're wondering how I can quote it without even knowing the magazine it came from, I took notes. Yes, I'm a dork)
I've never really thought about what the first music I heard was. This article kind of got me wondering. It also got me thinking about all the claims out there that say that you can make your baby smarter by playing the right kind of music. I've no doubt there's something to this. Studies show that babies can recognize complex rhythms and are surprisingly sensitive to the differences between consonant and dissonant music. It stands to reason, if you play the right kind of complex music, you can get your baby's mind working pretty early on. Kind of like jump starting the baby brain :)

John Cage and Freedom

I started a painting yesterday, and it got me thinking about the approach to one's artwork in general. To preface this, let me explain that there are two types of painters: broad brush painters and fine brush painters (okay, so if you count Jackson Pollack and preschoolers everywhere, I guess there can be "no brush" painters as well). Me, I'm a fine brush painter, meaning that my paintbrush never gets bigger than a half-inch wide. Preferably, my brush is so small that one can hardly tell it's a paintbrush and rather sees a stick with three tiny bristles poking out of it. Why do I like such a small brush on even a 30''x40'' canvas? It's all about control, my friends. When my brush is that small, I have maximum control and can make everything look exactly the way I want it to with my nose one inch from the canvas (no kidding. really, I've gotten paint on the end of my nose before).
So what does this have to do with Cage? Well, Cage has come to represent everything that makes me uncomfortable as an artist. Definitely not a fine brush painter. Beethoven was a fine brush painter. The fine brush gives the power of manipulation, a power that Cage was eager to relinquish. But I don't think that Cage was even a broad brush person. Maybe a "no brush" person with a blindfold, or maybe a "no paint" person that makes people really think about his painting. What I'm trying to point out is that Cage didn't work within conventional confines of music, and as he did so, he relinquished all control over his medium. For many artists, that's scary. Whether you want it to be or not, artwork is a reflection of the artist. Even Cage, as he stove to remove himself as much as possible from his music, is reflected in his work. His choice to take himself out of it is directly related to how people see him in it. So to relinquish all control one has over it is a big step, or rather a ludicrous one. Then again, it is also the most liberating...
I think one of the reasons that so many people are intimidated by Cage's work, that so many people just "don't get it" is because they can't bring themselves to understand a person to relinquish that kind of control. Or rather, perhaps these people are themselves afraid of the kind of freedom that comes with that. I, for one, don't think that I could do a painting with a larger brush -let alone do it blindfolded. That lack of control, that sort of freedom, really scares me. It's uncomfortable. And I think that's the response many people have toward avant guard music, in general -especially that of a composer who so heavily relies on chance and indeterminacy. To throw all caution to the wind and just see what happens, to allow the world to see you in your art without having exercised control over its finer points, is scary.
For that, I have to admire Cage as an artist. He's braver in this respect than I could ever be. And more free as well.

I've been singing about Cage for years and never noticed...

So it's past midnight, I have a ton of work to do, and can't think of a better thing to do than procrastinate. Figures, right? A friend of mine just sent me the entire soundtrack to the fantastic rock opera RENT, and I've spent the last half hour putting it in order and listening to the whole thing for the first time in two years. In high school, every single girl in my class (and a few of the guys, too) knew all the words to this one song, La Vie Boheme. It's a tribute to anything and everything, the most random and sporadic toasting of life in general put to song. We spent freshman, sophomore, and part of junior year bursting into song at various points throughout the day, carrying out the seven-minute song in its very fast-paced entirety and somehow hardly missing a single word.

Here I am, listening to La Vie Boheme, somehow remembering all the words and belting out the song in the middle of the night all by my lonesome when I should be doing something constructive, and I find myself thinking, "This song is kind of Cagean." It is, really. You should listen to it, if you don't mind the very strong and abundant innuendos. It's a toast to freedom of expression, art, randomness, chance, rebellion, conformity, and contradiction. And as soon as this thought occurs to me, I find myself singing, "To Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage....oh."

Merce Cunningham and John Cage have been a part of my formative years without my even knowing it. I choose to take this as a message from the universe, though in all likelihood it is just a coincidence.

Rappers and Rock n' Roll (Two For One Special)

This may be simply ignorance on my part, but was anyone else aware that there are rappers in the rock n' roll hall of fame? I heard on the radio this morning that the group RunDMC (I hope that's how you spell it) was recently inducted and they aren't the first either. Grandmaster Flash was actually the first rap artist "allowed" in. The station was also emphasizing RunDMC's collaboration with the group Aerosmith, creating a mesh of rap and rock, which was deemed an ultimate success by about 90% of fans, and total blasphemy by the other 10% of die hard rock fans. I can't say I'd ever before heard rap or hip hop done with electric guitars, but then again, I don't make it a common practice to encounter much rap to begin with. :)

Cage a Birdwatcher?

So we've been talking about birdwatching in my environmental ethics class, and I've concluded that if Cage wasn't a mushroomer, he'd definitely be a birdwatcher. In fact, a birdwatcher seems even more fitting for cage, because they make noise -or music. I'm sure if he'd turned more of his attention to birds, they would have worked their way into his compositions. He'd be like a Messienne, only a bajillion times better, because he's Cage. Or maybe not. I mean, birds like to learn new songs and are copying off of one another all the time and they inevitably incorporate some sort of pattern into their music. Definitely not indeterminate enough for Cage. Yeah, they're probably real egotistical too, like Beethoven. I can just imagine a robin or something tweeting out it's' hallelujah chorus, forcing its emotions upon you. Yeah, it's better that Cage was a mushroomer. Mushroom s have a much more limited influence over one's compositions.
I did hear an interesting piece on the radio a few days ago. They were talking about these birds who incorporate song into their mating rituals, and how it functions throughout their entire relationship. Apparently, the male birds have commitment issues and try to cheat on their wives be singing to other girl birds. When this happens, the wife actually interrupts his courtship song to keep him from hitting on the other girl birds! Ha! I thought it was funny...
Oh, and just as a side note, I bought my dad a book on mushroom identification for his birthday. He wants to go out mushroom hunting just like Cage (he just doesn't know it yet).

Harlem Renaissance Meets John Cage ( "nice to meet you")

So I found out this morning exactly why they were interviewing the drummer from Roots the other day. Roots is playing in an upcoming Cincinnati festival and it sounds really Cagean to me. Langston Hughes once wrote a poem called Ask Your Momma, and wrote it to be performed to music. Well, there's this opera singer (I think) who's going to sing the poem and Roots, as well as an entire orchestra, and a couple of guys on laptops will be providing the music. The laptops are for sampling, and they're even going to play recordings of Langston Hughes reading the poem and singing. They're combining, classical, and hip hop and jazz, and blues, and -well, you get the picture. It's sure to be reminiscent of Variations VII (without the blender and turtle tank)!

Science Nerd Relates to Hip Hop Artist!

So, I was listening to NPR yesterday (a radio station chosen intentionally, not by chance operations, I'm afraid) and they were interviewing Ahmir Thompson (aka Questlove), the drummer from Roots. Now, I'd never heard of this guy, or of Roots, but he was talking about sampling and mixing and hip hop, and I never would have thought that I would be one to understand a word of what this guy was talking about... but I did :) Oh, and when he started rattling off names of other artists like, DJ Spooky, I got really excited (I'm a dork, I know). Anyway, he said that when he first got started in high school, his friends would ask him to ply mixes that had already been done by other DJs. I thought that was funny. If you copy someone who used other people's work in the first place, is it any more illegal than the former copyright infringement? I suppose it is. I mean, if you copy a copier, you're doing it verbatim, rather than making a collage out of others' work.
But one must ask... what would Cage say? If a disc jockey plays something using other people's work to make something different -that is not quite the same as the original- then why can't people play something note for note that resembles something else, but sounds slightly different. But where does one draw the line? Just how different does it have to be? I mean, if I sing a song, and then you sing the same song, it's not going to sound the same. And if I sing the song, and then sing it again, it won't sound exactly the same. Inevitably, there will be some sort of variation, however slight. One performance in one moment in time can never be recreated unless it's been recorded (and then it's a recording, not a performance). So, technically, I should be able to sing Dolly Pardon's I Will Always Love You and be able to call it my own, because Dolly couldn't''t possibly make her performance sound just like mine ( not that she would want to, but that's beside the point). Whitney Houston's version is very different from Dolly's -so much so that I would prefer Whitney's over Dolly's. If I can like one more than the other, then why does Dolly hold the copyright? I would definitely buy Whitney's version before I'd buy Dolly's (nothing against Dolly, but like I mentioned, that's just my preference). It's like trying to own a joke. Maybe I wrote it, but tell it horribly, and someone else tells it better. Naturally, it will become their joke, because no one wants to hear it from me and everyone loves to hear this other individual tell it. But I digress... (wonder what Cage would think about ownership rights of jokes...)