Music

More thoughts on the blues

/ rachelhartman / 1 Comment

So my father-in-law, who is a big fan of the blues, apparently read my confused gibbering on the subject a few weeks ago and decided to help me out by getting me a nice introductory book. Thanks, Mike!

I’m enjoying it so far; I love reading about music, and the early bluesmen and -women were a colourful crew. The one fly in the ointment, as you can probably guess – and as I discovered while writing Seraphina – is that words can only approach music obliquely. I still needed to hear it for myself.

So I went to YouTube and poked around, starting with Robert Johnson and proceeding in a haphazard manner through Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly and I can’t even remember who. I can’t remember because none of it was sticking with me, alas. This is usually the case with me and new (to me) music: it slides right off my Teflon brain.

Then all of a sudden I hit one that made some kind of sense to me: Robert Petway’s Catfish Blues. Go listen. I’ll wait.

Now listen in close succession: Rolling Stone by Muddy Waters, which was supposedly inspired by Catfish Blues. I can hear it, but it’s subtle

OK, you’ve got those? Well then, ta-daa! The piece de resistance: Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix. Don’t quite hear the lineage? Go back and listen to that Petway again.

Aha! I say. AHA! I have successfully connected dots in my brain.

So what was different in “Catfish Blues” that let me connect with it where I was having trouble with the earlier stuff? I have to say it was the livelier guitar line. (My husband was making fun of me just a little bit because I was like, “Oh, this one’s kind of jolly!”  There’s a reason it’s called The Blues, he claims, and I suppose he has a point.)

That said, my favourite of the Robert Johnson songs – “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” – had some pretty impressive guitar. Maybe that’s a way in. Tune in, uh, next time to find out!

Viking metal!

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We had a grand time last night at the Viking Metal concert. Here’s the band we specifically went to see, the Faroese group Tyr, playing my favourite of their songs:

We also really enjoyed the band that played first, Metsatöll. They had a guy who played Baltic bagpipes, baybeh, as well as two different kinds of Estonian zyther, one of them (the moldpill, if I’m not mistaken) played with a bow. I was in obscure-instrument heaven! Now I want to find a way for someone to play a moldpill in the sequel, because I’m like that!

Anyway, a good time was had by all!

Writing RUSH

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If you know me at all, you know I love the band RUSH. I didn’t always; they put something in the water here to make you impress upon the first Canadian music you hear. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Bieber.

Anyway, I got their latest album, Clockwork Angels, for my birthday and have found it completely impenetrable. Now, I’m used to a certain amount of this from RUSH. All their songs sound like noise to me at first. This album, though, is requiring more stubbornness than usual.

So when I heard Clockwork Angels was also going to be a novel, I had mixed feelings. I couldn’t decide whether it sounded awesome or vaguely embarrassing. Or, y’know, utterly impenetrable.

Well, having read Anderson’s guest post over at Scalzi’s, I’m feeling somewhat reassured. The author really likes RUSH, anyway — in fact he seems to like a lot of the same prog rock as me. (Now I am vaguely embarrassed, because I actually had dinner with him in San Diego, and I didn’t talk to him at all. In my defense, I was at the other end of a long table, and I was exhausted, but still. I wish I’d made more effort). In fact, I only realized who he was (the writer of all those latter-day Dune novels) as I was leaving (before dessert, because I was exhausted). So: my apologies, Kevin Anderson. I hope we run into each other again sometime; I shall have more to say to you.

I’ll take a look at the book, certainly, but I reckon I should come to better grips with the music first. Still, super fun to read about the role music plays in someone else’s process! And it will be interesting to look for the music in the book.

ETA: thanks to Paige for the link!

ETA2: As my friend Dave astutely points out in the comments, before this album or its novelization, there was a wonderful graphic novel called Clockwork Angels by Lea Hernandez.

I have things to tell you

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Except I can’t until it’s officially official. Alas, that’s how it is sometimes.

So you know what I’m going to do instead? That’s right. I’m going to hit you with some Pink Floyd. Well, David Gilmour, technically.

No, I don’t know where that saxophone player came from. He just kind of materialized, didn’t he. Well, maybe that’s not so surprising after all. I’ve had days like that, just strumming along and then all of a sudden BAM. Saxophone.

I love this song, though. It’s a good one for when you’re working and working and wondering whether you aren’t the biggest fool ever spawned in the great fool pool. But see,  you’re still a diamond, whatever else is true, and the people who know and love you see that, even when you can’t.

Shine on, darlings.

Who wants crepes?

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Well you’re in luck! Tri Yann have a great recipe for you, if you speak French:

Even if you don’t speak French, have a listen. You won’t hear a more charmingly sung recipe anywhere.

No one’s likely to care about this but me

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But here is the first of a five-article series on prog rock that went up recently at Slate. If you’re interested in the history of the genre (particularly the “excessive” performances), it’s pretty interesting. If you actually like the music, it’s a little bit irritating. The writer professes to like prog but mostly seems embarrassed by that fact.

As someone who only discovered prog rock twenty years after it “died”, and is still discovering it even now, I enjoy getting context. That’s all new to me, and he provides some insights into why the genre is generally reviled (something I never quite understood). But I dunno. I thought it was too much emphasis on ELP and “Tales From Topographic Oceans” and very little discussion of what was actually good in the music.

Then again, I suspect I am one of the few people in the world who actually likes “Tales From Topographic Oceans” — even the boring parts — so what do I know?

One lovely review, and some thoughts on the blues

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It has gotten to the point where I can’t read all the reviews, let alone keep them remotely separate in my mind. I’ve mostly given up looking — it’s just too much information! — but one at Fantasy Literature did catch my eye today. Thank you for that, Bill.

In other news: I’ve been thinking about the blues. Not because I have the blues, particularly, but because my son has just started learning to play “Wish You Were Here” on guitar, and it has a very bluesy start. I say that as one who doesn’t know much about the blues, so if anyone wants to leap in and educate me at any time, I’d be more than happy.

What interests me, particularly, is the use of the pentatonic scale in blues. Growing up with classical music, the pentatonic scale was a little bit ignored (although there are certainly classical pieces that employ it; it was never particularly pointed out to me). Pentatonic scales, insofar as I knew anything about them, supposedly sounded East Asian — and, to be fair, are found in a number of different musics (but not all of them, and in several variants) from that part of the world.

I knew about the modes of hepatonic scales, of course. For those who are unfamiliar with modes: if you only play the white keys of the piano, you can play a major scale or a minor scale, depending which note you start on. Those are just two of the seven possible modes, though; there’s one for each possible starting note. Similarly — but I’d never really thought about it — there are five possible pentatonic modes, a couple of which sound minor, and can be used for the blues.

I love sitting in on my son’s guitar lesson because I often learn something new. It turns out the guitar, in its standard tuning, is optimized for pentatonic scales: you can play a very easy one involving all the open strings. In fact, that seems to be why there’s that weird B string, tuned to a third when everything else is tuned in fourths. I believe that tuning pre-dates the blues (note to self: look up history of guitar tuning), but I’m not sure about that. Certainly it makes the pentatonic scale so easy as to seem almost inevitable in hindsight.

I hasten to add that not all blues is pentatonic. In fact, a lot of it (I have read) involves a special hexatonic scale – a modified pentatonic with an extra note.

Still, B has been playing a variety of riffs on the pentatonic scale, and it’s super exciting (yes I have an odd idea of excitement) to hear it in Pink Floyd as well. I’m thinking the blues are something I ought to dig a bit deeper into; my listening base is mostly classical, prog rock, and Celtic (which employs some interesting modes itself!). Anyone have some good recommendations for an old dog who loves new tricks?

I’m trying not to waste time

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But that doesn’t mean I can’t waste your time, right? You’re dying to procrastinate, I can tell. Well, I’m here to help, because I’m thoughtful like that!

At my son’s guitar lesson last week, his teacher showed him something called a “step sequencer”. Here’s a website with one you can use. Click on the squares and listen to the interesting results.

This keeps my boy busy for… well, for as long as I’m willing to let him play with it. Which is sometimes, I confess, probably longer than I should. But it’s fascinating, right? No matter what you do, it comes out sounding like music, and that gets one thinking about music. What is music, exactly? Why is this randomness (or not, depending how you approach your note selection) so musical?

Part of the answer is the regular rhythm. Part of it is the fact that they’re using a pentatonic scale, so none of the notes really clash. But part of it is, I think, the tendency of our brains to want to make sense of things, to gravitate toward patterns and find meaning in them.

My son enjoys drawing pictures and writing words with the squares. The result is the Smiley-Face Song, or the Sound of Hello. As intently as he listens, I sometimes wonder whether he’s trying to see if he can tell what the word or picture must be by listening, extrapolating backwards from the sound. I wonder whether that’s even possible.

Did I say I’m trying not to waste time? Apparently I can waste time without even trying!

Thinking about listening

/ rachelhartman / 14 Comments

I have a guest post up at Suvudu.com — The Top 10 Songs I Listened to While Writing Seraphina. It details my odd tendency to put songs on endless repeat and suck all the goodness out of them, like some sort of musical vampire.

I’m not sure how it’s possible, but I still love all those songs, even after the repetitions. You’d think they’d get old. Maybe they DO get old, and that’s what I like, treading those well-worn paths again and again. The familiarity. I have no idea. There is music I used to love that I’ve outgrown – most Beatles songs, for example, I get impatient with now – so that can happen. Other things I love even better with age. Is there rhyme or reason to any of it?

It bears thinking about. Can you use a specific piece of music to light up a specific part of your brain, and how is your written output different while under that influence? Because I’m sure I stop consciously listening to the music after a while; I have to, or I couldn’t be thinking about the words I need to write. It can be hard to maintain a strong feeling while thinking. Is music a way to keep that gate open, somehow, so there’s access to the feeling while I’m doing the problem-solving work writing requires?

No idea. But seriously, neurologists of the world, maybe y’all should get on that! I’ll be interested in knowing the results.

 

Musical interlude

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The closer we get to Seraphina‘s release date, the more reviews are popping up all over the internet. They’re like pea shoots, curling out of the soil. There are actually more than I can easily link to anymore.

I will link to some of my favourites, I promise, but today I’d like to hare off in a different direction for a bit. Surely it gets tedious to hear about me all the time? Right?

So okay, last fall my favourite Irish singer… no, no, why qualify that? My favourite singer period, the inimitable Iarla Ó Lionáird, put out a new album called Foxlight. For some reason it took us an absurdly long time to obtain it, but now we have and I’m finding it delightful. It contains more of his own compositions and less traditional sean-nós than his previous albums, but that’s all right with me. I love sean-nós, but he brings that sensibility with him no matter what he does. My husband is a bit disappointed that some of the songs are as Béarla (in English), and I agree that I prefer hearing him sing in Irish. But. Even in English, I love that voice.

Here’s a short video I found about the making of Foxlight:

And here’s one of the songs (in Irish):

Goats! Singing! What else could you possibly want?

All right, back to the usual tomorrow.