RockOm

"The water tastes funny when you're far from your home, but it's only the thirsty, that hunger to roam" [John Prine]

Once upon a time I had the unique and awesome opportunity of swapping songs on guitar while in Negril, Jamaica with Alan Jackson. No, not THE Alan Jackson but a humble Jamaican who also shared the same name and who was so shocked that we would ask him to pull up a chair and share a beer with us. Negril’s own Alan Jackson would play a Bob Marley tune and sing his heart out for us and then I would answer him back with a song by James Taylor or The Eagles. I couldn’t say who was more enthralled - our little group listening to this shy man playing his music on a worn and badly tuned guitar or our new friend, with the sheer astonishment that we would be interested enough in him and his music to ask him over to our table. I’ll have this memory with me forever of our group singing songs on the cliffs of Negril, the light of the full moon shining above, and two cultures coming together through music and song.

If you could choose to escape all that’s familiar and comfortable to explore the music, culture and diversity of a favorite exotic locale- where would that be? Where is that place far from home you’ve always dreamed of visiting, specifically to take in the music? Is it India or Tibet? Or perhaps the Four Corners region of the States to experience Native American music first-hand? What about Jamaica, Ireland, Austria, China or South Africa? The possibilities and places are endless!

We become so accustomed and familiar, complacent with our surroundings that we sometimes forget there’s a whole world of music waiting for us to directly experience. Sure, we can download most any song available on the internet but if you could choose one country or region to take in the music in person, immerse yourself in the tastes and tunes or perhaps even take part in the festivities, where would that be?

Tell Us:

1. Where in the world have you traveled in your journeys and what have you discovered about the amazing ability of music to bridge languages and cultural divides?
2. Where would you like to travel and experience the music and diversity?

By Tom Crenshaw, Vice-President of RockOm.net

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Newswise — Silence in music is not really silent. Research by a University of Arkansas music theorist, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, reveals how context affects listeners’ experience of silence in music.

“The same acoustic silence, embedded in two different excerpts, can be perceived dramatically differently,” Margulis wrote in an article in the current issue of Music Perception that explores the transformation from acoustic silence to perceived silence.

Silence offers “an opportunity to study the active participatory nature of musical engagement,” Margulis wrote. There has been little experimental study of musical silence up to now.

“Silent periods could provide a unique chance to study the way that past musical events shape expectations about future ones, and the way that under acknowledged, often taken for granted musical elements (such as rests) are actually suffused with the full extent of ‘musical’ listening,” she wrote.

Silence in music communicates in a similar manner to silence in speaking, Margulis said. Sometimes the duration of the pause indicates the importance of the segment. In written language, a pause at the end of a paragraph is longer than the pause at the end of a sentence. Pauses in language are also used for expressive effect, Margulis explained:

“For example, I could say ‘You know what happened?’ Pause. ‘He called her.’ And that pause in the right context is really tense, and you get everyone leaning forward. Music can do something similar.”

When a listener encounters silence in a musical work, Margulis wrote, “Impressions of the music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations about what may follow.”

Listeners’ impressions and expectations can have a powerful effect on how they hear a silence, to the extent that identical acoustical silences may come to “sound” quite different. For example, Margulis found that musical context can cause two silences of the same duration “to seem like they occupy different lengths of time or carry different amounts of musical tension.”

Margulis’ research involved two experiments, one using musical excerpts from commercially available recordings. The second experiment used simpler musical excerpts produced specifically for the study with carefully measured and controlled silences.

Participants without musical training were selected for both experiments, so that their responses would reflect reactions to the music they were hearing rather than assessments based on formal musical training. They proved to be “highly sensitive” to the subtleties of silence in its musical context.

“I’m interested in showing how listeners without any special training know more than they think they know,” Margulis said, “You don’t need courses and lectures to understand music; it’s meant to naturally speak to you.”

Margulis is an assistant professor of music in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Her article “Silences in Music Are Musical Not Silent: An Exploratory Study of Context Effects on the Experience of Musical Pauses” appears in the June 2007 issue of Music Perception.

Your Turn: We'd love to hear your responses in one of several ways:

1. What stood out to you in this article? (or other such general responses)
2. Have you ever noticed this before?  Where a silent pause in a song or a piece of music serves a greater purpose than just a time of "no sounds"?
3. The essence of silence and stillness are the basis for mediation and centered prayer. If indeed we, "don't need courses and lectures to understand music; it's meant to naturally speak to [us]," can we say the same for either listening to or performing music AS meditation and prayer?

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Since I started to write about DJing one's own going away party, the bark has peeled back from the tree to reveal a world much more fascinated with this subject than I knew. My first clue came casually: "Oh, like in High Fidelity!" I saw High Fidelity, and loved it - but that was a few years ago, long enough to totally forget that Rob Gordon, Nick Hornsby's playlist-obsessed protagonist, had already popularized the funeral mixtape game. Then, I discovered that a mysterious British organization, the Bereavement Register, polled U.K. citizens about this very question, as well - to discover that 79 percent of them were already thinking about it. Apparently James Blunt is well-regarded as a deliverer of dirges; he topped the pre-funeral charts (which is funny, because Brits also voted him one of the most annoying things about their country - insert bagpipe analogy here):

01. "Goodbye My Lover" - James Blunt
02. "Angels" - Robbie Williams
03. "I've Had the Time of My Life" - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
04. "Wind Beneath My Wings" - Bette Midler
05. "Pie Jesu" - Requiem
06. "Candle in the Wind" - Elton John
07. "With or Without You" - U2
08. "Tears in Heaven" - Eric Clapton
09. "Every Breath You Take" - The Police
10. "Unchained Melody" - Righteous Brothers

Wow. "Unchained Melody" is only number ten? What an outrage. Actually, I'm pretty aghast at most of these. (Speaking of aghast: Interestingly but trivially, both Hornsby and this poll came from the U.K., a decidedly morbid patch of land.)

People have been playing music for as long as they've been burying their dead, and so I'm sure that people - for as long as we have understood our mortality and could be called people - have been requesting certain songs be played at their graveside. While I can't find any recorded history of the funeral mix, I think it's safe to assume that we started requesting recorded music at our funerals as soon as it was available. Compared to the modesty of flowers and dirt that they used to be, most modern funerals are technological spectacles. We take every opportunity to upgrade even our most ancient ceremonies. We are accomplices to a universal current of crystallizing self-reflexion, embracing every novelty, jumping on every chance to compensate for Death by replicating and disseminating our favorite ideas.

We make a religion of anything that will outlive us. Since there are no carry-ons or checked luggage allowed on that particular flight (the weight limit is zero), we have to cash in at the gates of eternity by ceding eternal life to the living. We hand down the right to endure to someone or something else - our children and our stories, an ideal, or a joke, or a song. We finally find immortality by investing our living and dying breaths in the worship of those things we consider to be beautiful, or good, or true.

To put it another way, we know we end, and so we are obsessed with legacy. And whenever something increases our capacity to leave our legacy - when we invent writing, or the printing press, or genetic engineering, or the internet - we feed it as much as it can eat. Even ourselves.

And so we began investing in fossils, identifying with particular recordings, and not the living music to which they referred - the abstract and elusive, nimble and ephemeral music that characterized being human before the Age of Recording, never the same twice, mischievous and seductive. In a way, we have paved the way for Death by even agreeing to recorded music, by unemploying the spontaneous expression of grief we find only in the music of the bereaved. Postmodern composer John Cage:

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."

If playing recorded music at a funeral does in fact squelch some balance of living response, then we end up not just dead but having managed to pull the funeral down with us, as well. What, then, is the point of coming up with a funeral mix? I think so many people delight at the prospect because making playlists is the fashionable modern way for us to to contain the tremendous, terrifying mystery of the unknown.

A UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman recently concluded that identifying emotions allows people a degree of immunity from them. By even recognizing and naming our anger, sadness, or fear, we move ourselves to a safe and impassive distance. (Of course, the same is true for pleasurable emotions, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched a joke die by dissection.) Not only did they finally find a physiological basis for the benefits of mindfulness meditation - evidence that learning to watch the mind does actually lift people over the thunder and lightning of the limbic system - but they also unwittingly explained why it's so useful for us to write or sing or paint out our troubling experiences.

The emerging model is one of subject-object relations, where describing grief allows us to loosen our identification with it. By speaking about "the" grief, or even "my" grief, we move our pain into the third person - where we have it, rather than it having us. By codifying our lives and deaths, we remove ourselves from them, and no longer suffer total immersion in an unconquerable wash of feeling.

We benefit from funeral playlists because they pin down the most salient metaphors so we can study them, because "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Like good naturalists, we capture our experiences and embalm them behind a glass case, the boundless fury of Nature Red In Tooth And Claw miniaturized and mediated by a guided audio-tour. Our playlists reflect the edges of a giant, hidden shape. They allow us to tame Death by conceiving of it, by relating to it in a way our minds can manage (although, looking through the cage bars into this tiger exhibit, we forget that the tiger is actually still loose in the zoo).

It is precisely because having a funeral playlist somehow kills the living expression of grief - because recorded music offers, in its death, the illusion of persistence and of fathomability - that it is so popular. And the luxury of capturing our whole holographic experience in a single posthumous album is that we can close the books on a truth more grand and intricate than any of us can bear.

But that may also be why, as consoling as they may be, funeral mixes offer no ultimate solace - because keeping Death at arm's length doesn't allow the intimacy of direct experience. Sooner or later, each of us will have to move into Death, instead of away from it, and practicing one won't ready us for the other.

On the other hand, all technology seems capable of supporting both our desperate illusions of security and enabling our unflinching self-transcendence. Could a funeral playlist prepare people for Death, rather than merely offering us distractions and false promises? I certainly think so. In the next installment, I'll discuss the funeral playlist as not just a coping mechanism, but a tool for skillful compassion, and I'll continue to explore the songs on the soundtrack to my funeral.

In the meantime, here's an hors d'ouevre, Stuart Davis' spectacularly irreverent and lucid song, "Practice Dying." If any song can capture the subtlest essence of why to make a funeral playlist, this is it:

Stuart Davis - "Practice Dying"

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
That's just rehearsal, but it's comforting somehow
To practice dying now

Hang out in funeral homes and make an honest bid
Lay in your casket, let them close the lid
Abra cadaver, roll your eyes back in your head
Practice being dead

Don't feel stupid; we're all scared
No one wants to go to hell
There's still time to get prepared
Start out now and finish well

Try painting tunnels on the ceiling in your room
Imagine your birth backwards with a bigger, better womb
Take little trips out of your body now and then
And if the rapture comes, maybe you'll ascend
You know the saying, "Once you learn to ride a bike..."
Well, that's what dying's like

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
It's just rehearsal, 'cause that's all that life allows
So practice dying
Cuz you're almost dead
Practice dying now

Previous articles in this series:
PART I: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, I: Playing DJ To The Bereaved

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

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As Berthold Auerbach said, "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."  We hope your interactions with RockOm are a quick respite from the stresses of "everyday life" and give your day a quick boost, if even just a little.

Keep your eyes peeled later this week or early next as RockOm will be announcing the release of our very first compilation album. You can see a teaser page right now but watch for the full details and ordering information very, very soon.

Finally, this week's Featured Track of the Week (on the homepage) is from a Boston-based, "transcendental hip-hop" group known as Govinda Sky. If you’re a fan of hip-hop music – especially that with a positive message – you’ll want to give these guys a spin.  Be sure to also listen in on this week's podcast, an interview with the band's lyricist, percussionist and creative director, James Cennamo.

by Govinda Sky

@ Myspace
@ CDBaby

"Look 2 the East"

"'Look 2 the East' says what we're about! We always start with this song live. Govinda Sky's main theme is Hinduism... we play Yoga Centers as opposed to bars. When we can, we play a Kirtan before our shows with guest musicians and a classical Indian dancer (Gayathri) interprets our songs. We are vegetarian and our new single "Let the Animals Keep Their Coats" is a favorite with Animal Rights groups including PETA, The Anti-Fur Society, and The Humane Society." (James Cennamo)

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Transcription:

In Western musical scales, there are generally 12 half steps and therefore 12 different interval possibilities, not counting the octave (intervals are the distance between pitches). When two of these intervals are played at the same time, some of them are pleasant sounding and/or bright, such as the major third and perfect fourth and fifth. Others are darker, with a minor, strange or "sad" sound, such as the second or the minor third. There's one interval, however, that's the darkest and most dissonant of them all.

According to the V. Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary, a tritone is...

The interval of an augmented fourth. This interval was known as the "devil in music" in the Medieval era because it is the most dissonant sound in the scale.

If you're familiar with the piano and its notes, play a C and then play the F# directly above it at the same time. Or if you're a guitarist, play your second string (B string) open while playing the first fret on the first string (high E string) at the same time. This is the tritone, the "devil's interval."

Why is it known the "devil's interval"? In the middle ages this interval was often avoided in composition because of its dissonant, or clashing, quality. The very sound of it suggests discord, opposition or even evil.

[With that said, this isn't a history lesson on the tritone. If you'd like more information, check out this Wikipedia article or Google search "tritone."]

Interestingly enough, what we consider music today wouldn't exist without it. The dissonance created by this interval introduces drama into the tonality.  As a piece of music moves along (if you listen closely enough), notes clash and then resolve, bite at your ear and then become pleasant, make you cringe and then make you smile.  Without it, music would be without life and would become boring very quickly.

Many of us want to sanitize our lives: pushing that which is dissonant far away, living a sheltered and safe life, avoiding the drama and fearing the darkness both in ourselves and in the world.  During those times when we want life's weird twists and turns to end or for everything to be safe and manageable, let us never forget that the end of drama is the introduction of boredom, of lifelessness. Yes, there are crappy days and terrorists, jock itch and natural disasters, but at least in this plane - in this life - everything that we know and experience couldn't exist without them.

Let's transform the paragraph above:

As life moves along (if you watch closely enough), it clashes and then resolves, bites at you and then become pleasant, makes you cringe and then makes you smile.  Without the drama, life wouldn't be life and would become boring very quickly.

When we learn to accept that the dance of harmony and dissonance, the clash of good and evil, is exactly the very thing that makes the world go 'round, we're free to participate in it with joy.  We're happy to roll with the punches and navigate a complicated and tricky existence without frustration, but rather with the acceptance that it has to be this way.  This isn't to say we have to be tolerant of the various kinds of evil or injustice we experience - let us fight them with vigor when we need to - but all the while knowing that in some grand, metanarrative, it is all - ALL - good.

[By Trevor Harden, president of RockOm.net]

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I remember coming to a concert where they had a big catered meal set out for everyone... I went and said, "Miles, man you gotta see all this food they got here." And Miles said, "I didn't come here to eat." [Gary Bartz, on Miles Davis]

Today allow Miles' words to call to question what YOU came here for. Why are you alive today? How can you be used for the greatest good? What would happen if you lived intentionally and on purpose instead of allowing life's circumstances and distractions to call the shots?

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As drummer Futureman once shared with RockOm, spirituality and mathematics are very closely related.  Also related to spirituality are both mystery as well as the uncovering / discovery process. So when we heard that a Dalhousie Department of Mathematics professor dove into the frequencies and applied mathematics to (finally) figure out the make-up of the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night, " we wanted to share it with you.

It’s the most famous chord in rock 'n' roll, an instantly recognizable twang rolling through the open strings on George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker. It evokes a Pavlovian response from music fans as they sing along to the refrain that follows:

"It’s been a hard day’s night
And I’ve been working like a dog"

The opening chord to A Hard Day’s Night is also famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. “I started playing guitar because I heard a Beatles record—that was it for my piano lessons,” says Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics with a good laugh. “I had tried to play the first chord of the song many takes over the years. It sounds outlandish that someone could create a mystery around a chord from a time where artists used such simple recording techniques. It’s quite remarkable.”

Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Dr. Brown decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record. It worked, up until a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”

Dr. Brown deduces that another George—George Martin, the Beatles producer—also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine.

“Music and math are not really that far apart,” he says. “They’ve found that children that listen to music do better at math, because math and music both use the brain in similar ways. The best music is analytical and pattern-filled and mathematics has a lot of aesthetics to it. They complement each other well.”

[by Ryan McNutt and Newswise.com]

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...and you will get a big surprise. Today RockOm has two exciting things for you to check out!

To begin, we're very proud to introduce "The Offering: A RockOm.net Compilation, Vol. 1." As this "teaser page" does a great job explaining the project to you, we'll let it do the talking. Click over and find out more about this great new album which will be available later this month!

Secondly, it's a couple of days late but this week's podcast features an interview with David Stukenberg, the singer, instrumentalist and songwriter behind this week's Featured Track of the Week. David shares with RockOm about the spirituality in his album Mountain of Pieces as well as a new very exciting project he's working on entitled The Silo Project.

A preview of Stukenberg's The Silo Project...

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