Over the years, there have been a number of a capella performances that have really moved me, and so I’ve decided to share some of them with you tonight.
Starting with a capella powerhouse Take 6, here is an early live performance of their version of “A Quiet Place”:
As a complex harmony junkie, this arrangement is nothing short of a trip through the vast depths of space for me. It provided a pleasant and total escape many, many times during my college years.
Next are the amazing Nordic Voices, an a capella group from Norway, with whom we had the privilege to have a master’s class while I was in the Chamber Singers choir at Dartmouth. Here is their touching version of a Norwegian lullaby:
I always think of a mother trying to lull her child to sleep in the cold, hungry winter, when the days are short and the nights are long. The ending is bittersweet – it doesn’t spell out with certainty the fate of that mother and child.
On a more positive note, here is the a capella group called Committed, who won The Sing Off in 2010, and their beautiful version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”:
Sooo suave, it’s like letting yourself float on your back in the sea. And the sea is made of smooth satin. You get the point.
Tonight’s selection ends with my recent favorites – the Pentatonix – winners of The Sing Off in 2011. Their musicality is really out of this world:
It can be a bit disheartening these days that so few people seem to be into classical music. But every now and then I discover that folks I know have secretly had a crush on classical music for a long time, and it takes a geek like myself to bring them out of their shell and into the soothing arms of confession. Here is a small selection of performances I’ve been enjoying lately.
Number 1. is Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso for Strings in D minor:
What I like about this performance is that it’s lively! It doesn’t sound like something someone wrote over 300 years ago – rather like something a 20-something wrote not long ago for a harmony class. Of course, a very, very talented 20-something. The fugue that starts at 1:15 is one of my favorite fugues of all time. Every time I listen to it, I imagine friends who’ve agreed to flash mob people in a sunny park – one by one, they start playing their instruments, each boldly announcing the fugal subject, to the bewildered gazes of unsuspecting passers-by. My fantasy doesn’t provide the details of how the harpsichord was inconspicuously brought to the park, but hey, we don’t have to have all the answers.
The other performance I’ve been enjoying is this one, of Bach’s Partita No. 2:
Martha Argerich is one of my favorite pianists, and I like how, yet again, she brings vivaciousness and layers to a piece that’s older than the US. When I listen to it, I think of motion and travel – a relentless impetus to go forward and not look back. Who knows what I’m reflecting onto the music out of the murky woods of my psyche, but still – if I need to remind myself to keep going, and keep my head up, I won’t hesitate to play this piece.
I like bands that expand the limits of my musical imagination. Sadly, there aren’t that many bands that have that effect on me, but since I’m practicing the whole “glass half full” nonsense – it is so joyful that there are bands that do! One of those bands is Massive Attack, which, like all my favorite musical acts from Britain, have the uncanny ability to sound different and always reinvent themselves. Each of their albums has something different for me, something that has become a mental landmark that I find myself revisiting over and over again, no matter how much time goes by.
For today’s bit, I’m not going to drag you from “Unfinished Sympathy” through “Angel” to “Flat Of The Blade” (although I’m tempted, and I probably will, later). I’m going to focus on the one-man show that “100th Window” was, because in some ways I find its blend of introspectiveness and experimentation fascinating.
Here is song number one, “Antistar”:
The first thing that strikes me about this song is that it has texture. The intro makes me imagine a jam session where Brazilian musicians and modern electronica virtuosos come together and let the music build itself; I could easily imagine throwing an Arabic tenor chant on top of those pulsating admixtures. The concept of pulse is very pervasive in this song and the next ones I’m going to talk about – the feeling that the space around you is not static, but instead it is vibrating in a multitude of frequencies. I like it because it breaks the monotonicity that is endemic to so much of contemporary music, and instead boldly declares – the world is multidimensional, reality is as rich as your sensibilities allow for you to experience it.
Similar ideas permeate the next song in the sequence, “Future Proof”:
I have always had an idea to write a novel about a guy who sees the world differently, for whom colors, shapes, and everything else just looks different. The intro to the song is how I imagine that guy going down the street on a cloudy afternoon, looking at the buildings, seeing them vibrate in a different colors and sounds, seeing the people in the street as multidimensional superpositions of their past, present and future. If only I could hit my head the right way, so I could see all that too… 🙂
In closing, I present you with “Small Time Shot Away”:
Here, again, is the flow of life, the spread out consciousness that takes in from multiple angles and perspectives, the drive, the symbiotic coexistence of deeper meaning and just a sense of wonder at the possibility of beauty. This is music in which I can always find new meaning, and which can always stretch the limits of my esthetic understanding, so that perhaps I gain an extra dimension or two myself.
I hope you enjoy this little selection. Best to listen to those songs with nice headphones, btw.
I won’t lie, I am a fan of the 90s musically. I’m now starting to understand, 20 years after the 90s, why my parents are so keen on music from the 60s and 70s. I will look just as antediluvian to my future children and even to today’s youngsters. The epiphany of value, however, is that I profoundly do not care.
Here is a selection of songs from the year 1997. I find it hard to believe this was 15 years ago. These songs create for me an urban, young-adult atmosphere, where I can feel I can kick off my day and everything is going to be alright. I listen to them and I imagine walking downtown with a vibrant group of friends, laughing, discussing, enjoying. I think that kind of sound – modern, full or promise, expansive, warm coffee in the morning – is lost today.
The influence of this sound persisted until around the beginning of the 2000s. The last song that gave me this feeling is probably this one:
I’ve had a 12-hour workday and I’m not in the mood for being nice. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with this blog post. I just wanted to get it out there, metaphorically breaking the boundary between myself and my hypothetical readers by showing my human, fallible, side. Because when I don’t work 12 hours I am more or less godlike.
Today I’m going to focus on Radiohead, a band with which I have a love-what? relationship. Love, because some of their songs have, at the time when I heard them, redefined something about how I imagined music could sound like. What?, because sometimes I listen to a song of theirs and I don’t know how it makes me feel. I don’t know if I like it, dislike it, understand it, can eat it with a side of hummus, I just don’t know. It’s there, it’s been heard, I can’t unhear it, and occasionally I revisit it just to grow more confused.
The first song is their apparently popular “Lotus Flower” from their latest album, “The King of Limbs”:
The minimalism of this song appeals to my intellect, because I’m tired to death of overblown, over-produced mass-consumption songs that surround me from all sides. I like the idea of shedding the layers between the artist’s meaning and the listener, it allows the music to feel like less or a product and more of honest discourse. I like the chorus, the way it breaks out of the repetitive structure of the rest of the song, and almost ironizes similar lyrical moments in pop songs. But the yearning in Thom Yorke’s falsetto stops just a little short of where ideally I would have liked it to be. I like the drive of the beat – together with the sparse texture, it’s like saying: “stop complaining, and keep going”. It states that the only way to go is forward. It is decisive, it doesn’t take no for an answer. However, having heard the first verse I don’t feel like I want to hear the same melodic structure again too many times – it’s too sparse, it leaves me hungry for something I can’t quite explain.
Then of course there is “Codex”:
This song is like talking to someone much older and much wiser than you, someone who’s had enough time to look at this world and has achieved freedom from its petty concerns and turmoils, but who hasn’t lost their compassion. Someone for whom time is no longer racing, and instead is an opportunity to contemplate and take stock of what’s important. Someone who has seen things come and go, and would now like to devote themselves to what is permanent. And permanence implies a steady pace, such as the song possesses. This song takes me to the beach back home, when autumn is golden against the gold of the afternoon sun. Where my soul goes to pray for wholeness and connection. Some would call this song sad or depressing. They would not be wrong, for themselves. But for me, this song draws a roadmap to where I would wan to go, spiritually.
OK, enough for tonight. Time for some alone with the music time 😉
Well, here it is. I’m a music lover, and I think about music all the time. So it only felt natural to write a blog about it, because admit it – who wouldn’t want to read yet another music criticism blog. I promise that everything I have to say will be long-winded, rife with SAT vocabulary and far-reaching digressions, in short – everything your high school lit teacher taught you NOT to incorporate in decent writing style. But I can’t help the way I think, so there.
The song I would like to discuss today is called “Infinite Arms” by Band of Horses. Now, I only discovered them for myself recently, but the discovery has been more than pleasant. Here is the song:
I like how this song opens up to reveal a landscape that, for lack of better vocabulary, I would call serene. But there seems to be more to it – it creates a feeling of detachment from this world and is almost an invitation to enter out into a world beyond. A world with no preoccupations, at least not the kinds we usually have; and yet there is also a yearning, a feeling of not quite having reached the promised land.
Then the song resolves in lush major chords, almost like saying “I can put the yearnings aside for a moment and take stock of the beautiful scenery I find myself in the midst of”. It’s also like a lullaby, gently rocking you from side to side, telling you to set aside your daily worries. I like how it creates the feeling of lightness by using a sound that’s personal and not unnecessarily inflated. I have this song on repeat as I’m writing this, I’m hoping to eventually also understand the lyrics.
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