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Elise Hall and A Modern History of the Saxophone
The following is an interview with Dr. Adrianne Honnold, an ethnomusicolgy professor at Lewis University. Her book The Legacy of Elise Hall: Contemporary Perspectives on Gender and the Saxophone is available here online for free. The role of establishing one’s unique sonic profile That’s something that is really important to a lot of jazz musicians
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Deterioration
Haunting. Perhaps the single most pain-inducing and existentially intimate thing I’ve ever listened to. The work in question? The Caretaker’s “Everywhere at the End of Time.” This six and half hour long musical project portrays dementia, a debilitating neurological disease that gradually strips one’s ability to think and remember. The project consists of six albums,
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Despair
Lost & Found by Amon Tobin is a song fundamentally about despair. Despair as Kierkegaard defines it. I hate the term “ego death”; there is no attainable “oneness” in Freudian psychology. To “attain” ego death is not the spiritual elimination of the self. It is the complete absorption of the self, such that it is
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Practical Barrier to Creativity
Sometimes it is not the artist’s fault they can’t finish a project. Time and physical constraints can restrict and artists ability to be creative. Musicians need an instrument to play, if they want to get a particular sound, they need to get that instrument, or find a workaround; but often such workarounds are not so
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Mashups
Similar to my last commentary, I’ll be exploring in depth the influence of classical music on pop. However this time my focus is on a unique style of music, commonly known as a mashup. Funnily enough, my first exposure to the style was through YouTube with a mashup between Smash Mouth’s All Star and Ed
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Quality vs Streams
Streaming services often make the sure that the listener knows how many other people have streamed the songs they listen to. At the very top of the artist’s profile are their most streamed songs. But truly streams are not a good indicator of quality. Often times people choose to listen to the songs that are
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Sampling
Audio sampling has been around since the 70s, where DJs would use turntables to mix audio from different records. Modern sampling uses digital audio workplaces to incorporation samples in a song. A sample is often thought to be an piece of a different song incorporated in a different way. It is also the art of
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Songs of Last Week 7
This week (or a couple weeks ago, I am a bit behind with these posts) I listened to some modern progressive rock. This isn’t a new genre for me, rather a genre that I had strayed slightly away from in the past year. The songs I listened to are Noseblunt by Waxamilion, Farewell by Syncatto,
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Should you equalize music when listening?
I claim not to have an answer, but to present this question that has been troubling me the last couple days. Is it a distortion of the artist’s intended art if you run it through your own EQ settings? Of course the composition remains the same, and the timbre generally remains consistent, but the overall
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Classical Music
A brief commentary on classical music—its history, perception, and decline in relevance… The term classical music itself is misleading. While it technically refers to music composed during the Classical period (approximately 1750–1820), it has become an umbrella term encompassing works from the Baroque, Romantic, and 20th-century periods, all the way to living contemporary composers. Analogous
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Limits of Sheet Music
When composing with microtones, it can be very difficult to find a way to notate one’s music since there is no unified notation system for non 12tet music. Software like Musescore has some degree of notating beyond the chromatic notes, but those are often limited or not easily available. Even then, if one were to
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Songs of Last Week 6
Guitar Sbrego by Danielle Gottardo This song an incredible mix of Steve Vai like fluidity and modern tapping and fingerstyle techniques. A common critique I hear regarding virtuosic guitar players is that they are more concerned with using difficult techniques than with making an actually enjoyable song, but this song defies this critique. In fact,
