Category: Music

Give Us Some (Ecumenical) Music

Kyle

If you’re looking for a Christmas music special to watch tomorrow night, let me recommend “Voices of Christmas” on CBS at 10:30 Central. It was produced by the National Council of Churches and hosted by Michael Kinnamon, who I met a couple of months ago and who’s a brilliant, caring teacher and theologian (I’m standing next to him in this picture in the back row at right).

In fine NCC fashion, the special presents music from a number of member communions, which I think will be a nice change of pace from more monolithic specials from a single tradition. I’ve been a little down on the church these past weeks (and it always gets worse when I get home and start getting sucked into watching cable televangelists–just change the channel, Kyle), so Kinnamon’s closing remarks in the preview below were like a breath of fresh air. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see my friend Cassandra pop up in the interviews. Nicely done, Cassandra!

Music To My Ears, and Eyes

Kyle

I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos (1 2). It turns out that Tymoczko’s techniques explain some of what goes on harmonically in Chopin’s E-minor prelude, and the videos capture the effect beautifully.

Still, I was initially skeptical about Tymoczko’s ideas in the last graph:

What’s particularly amazing, Tymoczko says, is that the mathematics needed to describe these spaces wasn’t even developed in Chopin’s time. Nevertheless, he says, “it is unquestionable that he had some cognitive representation of the space. So there was this period of history where the only way Chopin could express this abstract knowledge was through music. His knowledge of four-dimensional geometry was most efficiently expressed through piano pieces.”

I’m not sure I share Tymoczko’s certainty that Chopin knew anything about what we would call four-dimensional geometry, abstractly or otherwise. But the more I watch these videos, the less I doubt that he “had some cognitive representation” of some idea that Tymoczko’s merely learning another way of exploring. I doubt he’ll be able to fully grasp whatever that idea is any more meaningfully than Chopin could, but it’s hard to fault either for trying, and in the meantime we all get to bask in the beauty.

Sorry to get all heavy on you. I think today’s Daily Office reading sort of puts you in the mindset to want to ponder these things: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

—

I’ve been warned by a psychologist friend about the strength of the science in some of these fMRI studies, but I nonetheless thought this piece was also interesting. Douglas Adams would be pumped about the music & math/science vibes in this week’s Science News coverage.

—

Congrats to the Badgers for clinching sole possession of the Big Ten Championship today at Northwestern. Speaking of Northwestern, I stumbled across this post from a Northwestern student giving online dating a go. Good writer, interesting stuff.

Mostly Talk

Kyle

I went to see Girl Talk on Thursday with some friends. I was excited about the show–I don’t go to enough of them anymore–but something just felt wrong.

It’s not that I’m against mashup artists–far from it. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my old bosses gave me a copy of West Sounds before I’d really gotten into Kanye, and I’m consequently always a little sad when there’s no “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” sample along with sped-up Aretha in the real “School Spirit.”

No, my trepidation had a more specific cause: I wasn’t sure what a mashup artist had to offer as a live performer. I like going to see DJs, and I think they can be gifted musicians both solo and as part of a larger act (DJ Dummy is one of my favorites; don’t tell me he’s not a performer). Even if you can’t or don’t tear it up on the ones and twos, it’s still not an insignificant musical skill to be able to tell what people are feeling at any given time and to choose the next tune accordingly.

But if you’re only performing your own mashups (a limited repertoire, surely, and perhaps one that lacks the next perfect track for this place and time), and your instrument is your laptop, why do I want to come see you? I was worried that this Gregg Gillis guy was basically gonna just get up on stage and push play. This was before I’d heard about his penchant for “exhibitionist antics,” which could have at least been funny.

The reality was worse. I have no idea what he did, because every jackass from the WUD music committee (and probably a good number of their friends) was up on the stage in the Great Hall dancing (some of them hilariously, but still), so every once in a while you just got a glimpse of Gillis’s laptop-lit face. And he barely, if ever, said a thing.

I had a good time dancing with my friends, but, as a live music performance, this show was seriously disappointing. I wish we’d gone to see Galactic and Chali 2na (aka “The Verbal Herman Munster” from J-5), who were also in town. (And this is coming from a guy who once walked out of a Galactic show midway through the second set because the band had gotten wrecked during their break and went from killin’ it to basically screwing around on stage. Most of the audience was too wasted too notice, so the band didn’t catch any hell for it.)

In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer was a little more generous. It also seems he may have had a run in with the woman who was obviously the drunkest dancer on stage, about whom my friend Steve remarked, “She’s got one dancing speed: intercourse.”

This Algorithm Kills Fascists

Kyle

There’s a great art-meets-science article in this week’s Science News (it turns out their “Math Trek” feature is usually killer). Julie Rehmeyer does a nice bit of science writing here, giving just the right amount of detail about how Howarth and Short’s algorithms were used to restore the only known live recording of the great Woodie Guthrie. There’s even a short audio sample.