Topic 208: Discords

Carol:

A Little Night Music

A chord is a combination of at least three tones or notes sounded at the same time, The dictionary also says that chords are usually “concordant” or harmonious. They “agree” with each other.  We have borrowed from the musical world to describe people as harmonious, or to describe situations as discordant, i.e. lacking in unity or harmony. I have spent enough time using daily themes to talk about the tragic discord of the Civil War, of the American Revolution, of the Vietnam era 60’s. Today, I prefer to write about music.
 

A few nights ago, our family went to a potluck followed by an evening of “musical play” with a local musician. He calls his programs “Music for Every Body” with a clear reason for separating that pronoun “everybody” into two parts. Prescott is full of accomplished musicians, artists, and actors who have gravitated to our mountain community. Jonathan Best seems to roll all those parts into one, and he lives up to his name. He is one of the best.... at making great music, at making people feel comfortable, and at showing people how to play in new ways through Playshops: “We all need a safe place to explore our music like a child.  When we talk we sing and when we walk we create rhythm" (source: Jonathan Best homepage)
 

Tuesday night, we played our musical bodies with  fourteen people of all ages outdoors in downtown Prescott in a circle, accompanied by what sounded like thousands of cicadas in the trees above us. Off in the distance we could hear band music playing from the square, just a typical summer evening in “Everybody’s Hometown.”  Jonathan started out with a little bit of teaching, not the pedantic rule-setting but more like rule-breaking. He shared his experiences with the Masai in Africa, where every body in a village sings and dances. Every body. Then he had us hit a note, our own personal note. Not to worry, Jonathan said. Not to worry about harmony in the traditional sense, i.e. chords with regular intervals based on our scale. There would be no wrong notes, no discord, just an incredible variety of sounds coming together in play.
 

Jonathon’s studio is called “The Music Garden. As the evening progressed and we moved on to trying out his suitcase full of musical instruments from all over the world, he helped us grow more confident as we experimented with musical sounds and unusual noise makers. It was great fun to watch my husband, who will never dance because somebody made fun of him when he was a teen-ager, who never sings in public probably for the same reason. Yet, there he was hitting his personal note, and then experimenting with a tiny accordion as part of an impromptu trio that included a train whistle and a finger harp.
 

In Jonathan Best’s Music Garden, there is not only room for “disharmony" but for silence; in his Music for Every Body playshops, there is room for silence as well as sound and for listening as well as performing. When he said that all the activities were optional, I took him at his word without feeling guilty or self-conscious. I chose to listen, which if done with intention and focus is also a form of participation.
 

By eight p.m. the band in the Square had quieted down and so had the cicadas. The fourteen musical bodies and their conductor, the Best conductor ever, stowed the instruments back in the big, old suitcase. Fourteen happy musical instruments put their chairs away and headed home. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-Long.
 

Sources:
Jonathan Best homepage.

Megan:

I'll show you optional...

The other night I attended a presentation by a local musician at the day-time hospitality center where my mother volunteers – Quixote’s Garage.  Once a month, there is a potluck followed by a talk of some kind. There have been presentations made on the death penalty, neo-natal care in developing nations, native American art. My mother gave a presentation on Women’s History Month.  I never, ever feel like going to these events at The Garage, but when I have a choice about whether or not to attend, it is always clear that not attending is the wrong choice. But they’re only once a month, the other people who go are interesting and invariably I do have a good time.

This week, I skipped the pot luck part to have dinner with a friend first so I arrived late, but while everyone was still eating. I was actually excited to hear this musician play because Dad said he performs in all the bars and is the best in town. I might have misunderstood that though, because it turns out the guy's last name is Best. Either way, I really enjoy live music, so I was relieved that I wasn’t so late that I was interrupting the performance. But when I sat down, my father turned to me and said, “It’s not going to be a show. It’s a proactive thing.” and he pointed to an open suitcase over flowing with instruments.

“Do you mean interactive?” I said. We both frowned. We feel the same way about these programs at The Garage, and an interactive musical event is very much not in our comfort zones. Immediately I started planning my exit. I was going to say that I felt sick from the meal I’d just eaten (this wasn’t a complete lie – I was uncomfortably full), and was only debating whether or not to throw my dad a bone and claim to be too ill to drive myself (thus getting him out as well), when suddenly the unbelievable happened.

We were sharing the table with a couple who were in town visiting their son and his fiancée (who volunteers at The Garage). We’d been chatting about diets (the father had recently lost 50 pounds), when the son came over and said, “I’m really not feeling well, must be something I ate – Dad can you drive me home?”   He totally stole my exit plan!

So, I had to stay. And so did my dad. The musician arranged us in a circle and we each got an instrument. Mom and Dad both chose maracas, and someone passed me a horn that made the same honking sound as a clown’s nose. I couldn’t play it without getting the giggles. AND the musician made us sing! He made us talk in gibberish and then sing the gibberish to people like we were having singing gibberish conversations. I have never been so incredibly uncomfortable and self conscious, although I did find that I enjoyed saying “hay bippity blibbity boo?”

In the beginning, Mr. Best told us that participation was optional, not to do anything we weren’t comfortable with, but I figured I had about the same choice there as I did to attend. And so Dad and I were standing there in the circle singing gibberish when I noticed someone was missing.

My mother.  She was sitting down outside the circle, hands clasped in her lap, and watching us all make complete asses of ourselves. I was like, Seriously?

Topic 203: Bird Music

Carol:

Birdland Lullaby

Mourning Dove

My husband is a collector. He keeps books, magazines and other hobby paraphernalia all over the house. That includes a shelf in our bedroom with 22 books on birds and bird-watching. Binoculars of varying sizes and quality are stored in closets although his favorites are in the drawer of the washstand by our front door, ready to grab when he heads out on the morning walk. Birding has become a passion for him, and it has become enjoyable for me as well. I like to sit on my deck and recognize the symphony of bird songs Marc has taught me to recognize: phainopeplas, mourning doves, Gambel’s quail and Steller’s Jays.
 

Just below the shelf with 22 bird books is a very large book representing another of Marc’s more recent passions,  jazz. The book is Jazz: A History of America’s Music (Ward and Burns) which we bought for Marc along with a set of CD’s from the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ 19-hour PBS documentary (2000). When I told Marc today’s topic was “bird music,” he immediately responded “Charlie Parker.” 
 

Charlie “Bird” Parker, the great jazz saxophonist,   got his nickname “Yardbird” only because he loved to eat chicken. It became shortened to “Bird,” a nickname  he played off in in such  jazz compositions as “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” and “Bird of Paradise” (source: “Charlie Parker).
 

By the early 1950’s Charlie Parker was at the height of his career and influence on the American jazz scene. Bass player Charlie Mingus wrote a tune honoring the musician he admired so much, titled “Gunslinging Bird.”  Parker’s unique chord changes, built off 12-bar blues chords, became known as “Bird Changes.” The Birdland Jazz Club in New York City was named for him , and he was the headliner at the club’s 1949 opening. One of the most famous jazz songs of all times was a direct reference to Parker and the club, George Shearing’s 1952  “Lullaby of Birdland.”
 

Unfortunately, Charlie “Bird” Parker’s personal life was marked by chronic abuse of alcohol and heroin. In the late 1940’s he was committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in California, where he stayed for six months. He was even banned from the Birdland Jazz Club. When he died on March 12, 1955, he was only 34-years old. Actor/Director/Composer Clint Eastwood turned Parker’s story  into the excellent 1988 film Bird starring Forest Whitaker. Whitaker researched Parker’s life thoroughly and even took saxophone lessons to prepare for the part, which won him a Best Actor Award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival (source: “Forest Whitaker”).
 

Okay, so I’m a bit of a collector myself. I have a stack of piano music in a closet off the living-room,  much of it from the 1950’s when I was learning to play the piano.  Right underneath the Czerny book of scales is the sheet music for “Lullaby of Birdland” with George Shearing’s picture on the front. It actually belonged to my older brother Doug, the brother who drove me crazy with his bongo drums and loud rock-and-roll music on the record player, especially "Rock Around the Clock.” But, I loved to listen to him play the piano, hunched over the keyboard and looking cool. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still see him in the corner of the living-room leaning over the keys and I can still hear the notes of that jazz piece.
 

Thanks to Marc, I enjoy bird music. Thanks to Doug, I enjoy Birdland music.
 

Sources:
“Charlie Parker.” Wikipedia. 
“Forest Whitaker.” Wikipedia.
Image of Mourning Dove. Althepal modified by snowmanradio. Wikimedia Commons.
          

Megan:

Did you hear that?

Before I got Bella, I used to turn down going on walks with my dad because I thought he was going to talk about birds all the time, and stop every 3 feet to look through his binoculars at birds, and ask me all the time if I could hear the birds.

For the record, I can almost never hear the birds. There’s an entire world of sounds around me that I can neither detect nor identify. (Just this exact very second, as I was typing this, I felt a fly crawled into my ear. I could hear it buzzing and I had a moment of panic about whether or not I should stick my finger in my ear, what if I squashed the fly and there were dead fly parts stuck inside my ear forever? But it turned out the sound was my phone on vibrate. There was no fly, I was just getting a text message.) Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t hear. My father hears things I can’t. Big deal, so does the dog.

He (my father, not the dog) can identify birds by their sounds. We’ll be walking along in the early morning quiet and he’ll suddenly stop and say, “Did you hear that? That’s a Bottle-neck Toey.” Then, in a higher voice, he says “Drink your teeeea.’” And we’ll pause and sometimes I do hear it – a chirping sound with the same rhythm and number of syllables as “Drink your teeeeea”.

There’s one bird he’s really obsessed with lately, which apparently whistles like it’s trying to get my attention. He whistles to mimic the sound, and I can hear him. The other night at dinner, Dad put down the fork and said, “Did you hear that?” and my mother nodded. “It’s a Fee-No-Pep-La. Megan can’t hear it.”
My mother looked at me, surprised. “You can’t hear it?”
“No.” I said, “I can’t hear it.”
And then both of them were whistling at me, like they were trying to get my attention, a quick short whispered whistle and, again, I could hear them just fine. Then there was be a long pause, and my mom said, “You still can’t hear it?”
 

No.

So, this is what I was hoping to avoid by not going on the walks. But as you can see, there is no avoiding it at the dinner table, and Bella has to be walked. Turns out there are plenty of other things I can talk about with my father, and there’s other wildlife to watch and listen for – I can hear the coyotes howl just fine. But still, I’ll be in the middle of an involved story about this funny thing I saw on Youtube and how explaining it doesn’t really do it justice so I’ll just show him when we get home and then I realize he’s not walking next to me anymore. So I turn around and he’s got the binoculars up, panning the tree line and he says, “Did you hear that?”

Topic 127: Mental Shock Absorbers

Carol:

  Soothing the Savage Breast (and Brain)

In Williamson Valley  the wind pretty well blows everyday. I love that sound just as I love the sound of rain falling on our roof.  I guess other people find these nature noises soothing too because there is a good market on the Internet for downloads of ambient sound.

I first heard about ambient sound in the 60’s although it didn’t have such a fancy name back then. It was called “white noise.”  My dentist began experimenting with white noise as an alternative to pain-killers like novacaine.  I would put on earphones and listen to what sounded like TV snow while he filled my cavities, directing me to turn up the sound if I needed more decibels to block the pain.  I can’t really say how effective the earphones and white noise were as I have a really high pain threshold and an almost perverse ability to relax in a dental chair.

I didn’t really think about what happened to those white noise machines until I saw today’s topic.  Turns out that white noise was not only found to be  ineffective but also potentially harmful because of the high decibel range needed to distract from the pain (source: Tekavec). It is almost never used anymore although the use of ambient sound  to “sooth the savage breast” has become quite common. Most popular are natural noises like ocean waves or steady rainfall.  Ambient sound probably works better to alleviate anxiety than pain.

Music therapy is a profession that I don’t think existed when I was listening to white noise in the dentist chair, but brain studies and new research about how we learn support the positive effects of music. Music therapists are clinically trained, licensed professionals who tailor “interventions” to the individual, depending on whether the need is pain and stress reduction, or memory and learning enhancement.  The website for the American Music Therapy Association includes testimonials from patients who have benefitted from working with a music therapist, including Alzheimer’s patients, children with autism, and people rehabilitating from both physical injuries and substance abuse.  Apparently, the type of music used in these individualized therapeutic programs varies considerably.

Educational research in the last 20 years has also shown the positive effects of music for increasing memory and cognition.  I quit nagged my son about turning off his music to study after his high school teacher shared with me the results of  a learning styles inventory he had taken showing he could actually concentrate better and study more efficiently with music in the background.

I have my own musical tastes and habits to suit particular needs. I  clean house much more efficiently with a little music to set the rhythm, something fast and peppy like Saturday Night Fever although more recently I have taken to using traditional Celtic music. The Old Blind Dogs or Jim Malcolm perks me right up for loading the dishwasher.  On a car trip, I either use classical music to buffer the road noise or I find an “oldies but goodies” station and sing along to lessen the tedium of a long ride.

I don’t think we really needed a lot of scientific research to tell us about the physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of music and sound. And, I think William Congreve said it best in 1697:

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

Today is my day to serve coffee after our dog walk. I have just the right background music,  something with a little Irish lilt to it. Top ‘O the Mornin' to Ya.

Sources
American Music Therapy Association.: http://www.musictherapy.org/
Congreve, William. Quote from The Mourning Bride. 1697.  
            http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/252000.html
Tekavec, Mel. M. “Nitrous Oxide Sedation with Auditory Modificaiton.” 1976
            http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515814/pdf/anesthprog00144-0015.pdf
 

Megan:

Mental Shock Absorbers 

When I was 16, I crashed my car at an intersection just outside of Prescott Valley. I was going about 45 mph at the time, but the car I rear-ended was stopped at a red light. I remember slamming on the brakes and hearing the sound of the impact, but despite (or maybe because of) the fact that my forehead shattered the windshield, I did not feel anything. I opened my eyes and the entire front end of my car was folded up like an accordion – but the car I’d hit had only the slightest dent in its rear bumper.

My passengers and I walked away with bruises and a bloody nose, while an ambulance took the back-seat passenger of the car I hit. I remember she screamed and screamed while we waited for help and I didn’t understand. My car was totaled, and theirs was fine. Why was she hurt? The answer, according to my friend’s mechanic father, was the difference in our bumpers. Mine was full of Styrofoam, which then spilled all over the road. Their car had a steel bumper, which protected the car but absorbed none of the impact.

In addition to insulating car bumpers, packing electronics, and containing take-out food, Styrofoam is also used in bicycle helmets – another mental shock absorber. I’ve never had a serious cycling accident, probably because I never took to the sport, but almost everyone I know who rides on a regular basis has a story about how a helmet saved their lives. 

But not all shock absorbers are physical. The mind has its own way of protecting itself from a shock. I believe “going into shock” is actually one of them. Sometimes, depending on the trauma, the mind suppresses it. Or the trauma leads to a fractured personality or post-traumatic stress. If a mind is repeatedly subjected to disturbing  or stressful events, then it acclimates. It tries to cope, through meditation, or alcoholism, or exercise, or humor.

In the prison, whenever something bad happened, I always asked if any books had been damaged in the incident. This was not because I cared about the books (although I did), or because I knew that no one else gave a damn about them (which they didn’t), but because I thought it was funny. Someone gets beaten or stabbed in their cell, someone starts a fire or a flood, someone goes on dirty protest – whatever… are the books ok?

Maybe you had to be there.

The first time I asked, I was serious. There had been a flood in a cell in the segregation unit. The prisoner’s property had been bagged up to be disposed of, and I could see one of my books through the plastic. I asked if I could get it because I wanted the barcode to withdraw it from the library catalog. One of the officers handed me a pair of gloves and watched as I dug through the damp clothes and papers to reach the book at the bottom of the bag. “By the way,” he said. “That’s toilet water.”  I swore at him and threw the dripping book in the trash.  But after that came the jokes.

Topic 108: Our Rag-time Age

Carol:

My Rag-Time Age: 1973

In American culture, a generation’s identity  is often marked by its music fads, and the generation gap tends to heat up more around the clash of musical taste than from political ideology. My introduction to rock-and-roll in the late 1950’s came from my brother’s bedroom (how many times can you actually play “Rock Around the Clock” in one day without losing your sanity?) and the television show American Bandstand.  I vaguely remember that “Elvis the Pelvis” created a big stir on the Ed Sullivan Show amid concern that his music was a “virulent poison” on the morals of 1950’s youth.  In the early 1960’s, the Beatles were controversial enough that my mother banned me from buying their records. 

By 1973, I was married and living in Connecticut while my husband finished his last year of law school. Vietnam was cooling down,  Watergate was heating up, in a time of increasing distrust of government  I didn’t have the money to buy music , so I mostly listened to the radio or went to cheap concerts. By and large, my musical tastes were shaped then by the soundtracks I heard at the movies, which seemed to offer escapist relief from the darkening political climate.  Top films that year ranged from the romantic (Day for Night, The Way We Were) to the frenetic (Magnum Force, Live and Let Die).  But one of the highest earners for the year and winner of the Academy Award for Best Film was a Paul Newman-Robert Redford re-match called The Sting (source: Wikipedia 1973 in film).
 

So, in 1973 I was introduced to the beat of rag-time and the music of Scott Joplin through the strangely circuitous vehicle of popular film. Composer Marvin Hamlisch adapted Scott Joplin’s 1903 rag-time song “The Entertainer” as the theme song for a 1973 movie about two 1930’s con-men, a generation after rag-time had lost its popularity. Hamlisch’s musical score and adaptation of the Joplin piece earned him an academy award, and “The Entertainer” not only hit the pop music charts, but is listed as #48 on the top 100 songs of 1974. I never bought the soundtrack, but I did buy the sheet music which is in my piano bench right now.

 I imagine most people my age learned about rag-time music and Scott Joplin in 1973. We probably learned about the Rag-time Age from E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel that places its main characters in the physical and geographical heyday of rag-time, the period in New York City between 1900 and 1917 where Joplin was living and writing at the time. 

The best way to learn about rag-time is to listen to the music. Or to play it on the piano. It is peppy, loose, jumps around, and calls for agility on the piano.  I call it “happy fingers music” because it takes a light and quick touch along with speed. I can’t imagine trying to play rag-time when I’m in a bad mood. And when I’m in my best mood and all practiced-up on Czerny, I can manage to play “The Entertainer” at about half speed. 
 

As popular as rag-time was, it too evoked a generational controversy, arousing the ire of both music and moral purists:

The counters of the music stores are loaded with this virulent poison which in the form of a malarious epidemic, is finding its way into the homes and brains of the youth to such an extent as to arouse one's suspicions of their sanity. (Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia)

Sources:
History of Ragtime. Performing Arts Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200035811/default.html
Top 100 Hits of 1974 http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1974.htm
Wikipedia: 1973 in film http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_in_film

Megan:

Our "Rag-Time" Age?

As we have progressed – intellectually, economically, and socially – we have paid a price for that progress. That price has been a change in our thoughts, our customs, and our traditions; and that change has been definitely toward the ragtime. – Editorial in The Optimist

Occasionally we pull a topic that seems timeless, like "Outgrown Opinions". Other times, a topic seems prescient, as with "The Triumph of the Machine." And then we pull a topic like today’s, which seems to firmly set itself in a specific time (ie 1915, when the book of topics was first published). According to Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia,  rag-time is a genre of music characterized by syncopated, or ragged rhythm, which was most popular between 1897-1918.  Rag-time originated among African-American bands and gained popularity in greater American culture through a series of popular (and occasionally racist) songs, published in “sheet music rags.”

In the early 1920’s, Jazz replaced rag-time in mainstream popularity, but rag-time has experienced several revivals—particularly in the early 1940’s, 50’s and 70’s. I’m not really a music person. I like certain songs, but I have no particular appreciation for music as an art, despite years of piano lessons. Instead, I’m more curious about whether this topic can be interpreted as a metaphor, and if that metaphor can still be applied nearly 100 years later.

In preparing for this essay, I found a (poorly written) editorial in The Optimist, which is the college newspaper of Abilene Christian University in Texas.  This editorial used our  topic as its title, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that The Optimist’s journalism classes used our same textbook.  However, it is the only article I could find online that didn’t directly refer to either our book or our website.

Although rag-time is not exactly defined within the article, whomever wrote it did not view his “Rag-time Age” positively.  The introduction includes this assertion:  “More and more we have grown to tolerate things that were considered unbearable by bygone generations.” The closest the author comes to defining his rag-time metaphor is through allusions to speed and living “in a dizzy fashion.” Many of his complaints are similar in tone to statements I have made or thought:

We pick up any passing fad and drop it for the next one. Altogether too many of us take up any trend of opinion and then change it for the next one we meet (…) 

We live in a wasteful manner. Everywhere about us there is a waste that, seriously considered, is alarming to say the least. We waste our natural resources and squandor our wealth, and we make few provisions for our posterity.

Setting aside the irony of a newspaper called The Optimist publishing such doom and gloom, this article seems like a typical college newspaper editorial  (preachy and self-important). If we accept the application of the word rag-time to mean dizzy and out-of-control, then this anonymous editorial might easily have been published last month.  

In fact, it was published on January 19, 1939, around the time Rag-time was experiencing its first revival. As I said before, I’m not a big music person and I have a hard time reconciling Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” (as played by my mother when I was growing up) with the apocalyptic vision portrayed by The Optimist. But then, music has changed  alot since 1915 (and 1939), and perhaps if the author had watched The Grammy’s last week, and witnessed the dizzy and out-of-control tempo of contemporary dance hits, he might instead have titled his essay “Our Gaga Age.”

You can click on this image to make it larger

Sources:
Scanned original editorial can be found here: http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth91648/m1/2/zoom/
Website for The Optimist in its modern incarnation can be found here: http://www.acuoptimist.com/

Wikipedia article on Ragtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime