Structure and Function in Bookshelves and the Music of Phil Spector

What do bookshelves and Phil Spector’s music have in common? The answer is structure, but you can’t talk about structure for very long without talking about function.

For example, you decide to build some bookshelves because you need a way to store your books and yet keep them accessible.  Storing books and accessibility is about function; how that is accomplished is about structure. But first, some questions need to be asked and answered:

   

    1. How many books are we talking about?

    2. What are the sizes of the books?

3  3. Where will the bookshelves go?

We need to make sure that we build shelves that are roomy enough to accommodate the books and that the space between the shelves is sufficient to accommodate our larger books.

Will the bookshelves have to fit under a window? Then the shelves need to be long and not very tall. If, on the other hand, the space is limited but the ceiling is high, then the bookshelves can be tall and narrow.

Now we need to consider some other things with regard to ability:

1.      How much are we willing, and able, to spend on materials and necessary tools?

2.      How much time are we willing to commit to the project?

3.      And, realistically, is our skill level and knowledge up to the realities of the project we envision?

Makes sense, but how does this all apply to music? With music as with carpentry, no one just begins to build something without reason and motivation and without some idea of what that something is going to be. Creativity is not the exercise of the infinite freedom of possibilities; creativity is the process of the limitation of possibilities. One needs to start with an idea, and, no doubt, the idea can develop and change as the project progresses, but one does need to start somewhere—with some idea.

Do I envision a song, a motet, a sonata, or a symphony? Do I have the tools and skills to succeed at the project?

Before the beginning there was nothing and that nothing held infinite possibilities. After something emerged, the very nature of something eliminated the state of anything. The first something became the cause and what followed was the effect, and that effect, became a further cause.

I was ten years old when I first went to summer camp in Hayward, Wisconsin. I think I went to that camp for three or four consecutive summers. It was called, Camp Big Chief, if anyone is interested.  Hayward Wisconsin was about 500 miles from Chicago—where I lived. We travelled by train in Pullman cars—you know, the ones where the seats convert into bunk-beds at night. Our train was always a milk train that stopped at every stop along the way.

I liked the lower bunks because they had windows, and I liked to look out the windows at night while I listened on my little transistor radio to whatever rock and roll station I could find. We’re talking somewhere between the mid and the late fifties here. “Sh-boom, sh-boom, life could be a dream sweetheart.”  And life definitely was a dream for this little kid—come to think of it, it still is…

It was an interesting time for pop music—a time of change. Influences were changing from white to black—or maybe white to blues—and then a new white emerged—maybe something more grey—and then a new black—and then there was Elvis who absorbed and reflected all the influences from pop and blues to gospel and  jazz and what eventually emerged was called Rock and Roll—and I loved it!

It spoke to me; it was my life; and I still listen to it, still love it, still respect it, and I still learn from it. In fact now, I feel that I am only beginning to really understand and appreciate the music of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

And Phil Spector; was he a musical genius or what? Consider his famous Wall of Sound.  I know we’ve jumped into the early sixties, but the sixties were the natural emotional and spiritual evolution of the new music of the late fifties. Everything is connected, nothing just comes and goes by itself—could there have been an Elvis without first an Ellington? Did Miles, or Monk, or Coltrane, just emerge from thin air?

Anyway, Phil Spector was a master of structure and function. When he worked with a song he knew what he wanted, and he was very particular—very demanding—in the recording studio. The Wall of Sound was something more than just filling all the space on the sound stage with sound. Sound without structure would just be noise. Putting shelves just anywhere in any way in our bookshelves would satisfy neither the demands of function or structure. And remember, that every sound takes time, and so sound is not just about pitch it is also about rhythm.

Sound has to respect and support the underlying structure of the music. Take for example, and we really could take any one of dozens of Phil Spector productions as an example, the 1963 mega-hit, Then He Kissed Me…

He asks her to dance, he walks her home under shining stars, they kiss, eventually fall in love, and one day he proposes marriage. “I felt so happy that I almost cried, and then he kissed me.” – sung wonderfully by the Crystals.

Not a complicated song; 4/4 time, key of E Major, pretty much a lot of I-V-I-IV, etc., but the arrangement is very intelligent and fully respects and highlights the structure of the song.

The song begins with an instrumental guitar lick—dum da de dum, dum da de dum, etc. —between the I and IV chords.  That same lick, joined by an organ, and later strings, colors the empty white space of the sound stage with a kind of gray under-painting.  It stays with us to the end of the song, also filling the space between the vocal phrases.  

That little lick catches your attention, no doubt, but really what grabs you are the drums—that tambourine on the high hat—is that not the coolest little titillating rhythm? It gallops all the way through the song. And then there is, in the lower frequencies, the thundering drums and bass. Phil Spector really knew to use drums for both tone and rhythm.

Oh yea, and then there is the saxophone which moves to the front of the sound plane to underscore the verse’s change to the sun-dominant IV chord.

And we can’t overlook the use of the strings and upper range of the organ during the bridge section. Listen to it with good head-phones; these are in your face sounds that all but scream at you and are perfectly placed to heighten the climactic moment  of the song, musically and lyrically, that comes at the end of the bridge.

Contrast this use of strings with the instrumental interlude between the last verse and the repeat of the last verse. This is the verse where he asks her to marry him. It is not the climax of the song, more the anti-climax, that which begins to bring the energy down enough to give the song a satisfying ending—like beginning to apply the brakes to your car  in order to stop without going through the windshield.. Here the strings have quite a different feeling than they did in the bridge. They don’t scream; they express a sweet, soft, melody, which enables a subtle lessening of the energy in the repeat of that last verse.

Again, consider how important the repeat of the last verse is. Without it, the song would not have had such a smooth ending, and even so, the last line had to be repeated three times to bring it to a close.

And what do we hear at the very end of the song? Yep, that same little lick we started with:

                                           dum da-de dum,

dum da-de dum,

dum.

Oh, and by the way, all that I described, and more that I haven’t,  actually takes place in a mere two minutes and thirty two seconds!                                      

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Meet Charles Ives

So did you ever just sat still for a while and quietly observe the workings of your mind? I mean, does it not just go anywhere and everywhere—on its own—right? Thoughts about the past; thoughts about the present; thoughts about the future… Inspired thoughts; thoughts you might be embarrassed to share with anyone… But no, this is a music blog, not a blog about meditation.

Now imagine that you can spontaneously write down all these thoughts—like James Joyce writing in what came to be called train of thought.

Further, imagine that these thoughts  you are thinking, observing, and writing down—these thoughts which are images and feelings—are being heard by you as music—as melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and that your skill is such that you can orchestrate them in any way and any compositional style that please you.  Well, if you can imagine all that, then meet Charles Ives.

Charles Ives, the illustrious American composer, was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, long before the age of computers, sampling, and digital recording techniques. He was the son of George Ives, a talented and far-thinking church organist, who encouraged his son to hear and play different melodies in different keys and different meters—all at the same time. It is told that George Ives even arranged for different bands to march around the Danbury town square playing different pieces of music so that his son could experience the effects of the changing relationships of the sound sources on his musical ear.

Add to this musical background the fact that Charles Ives considered himself a Transcendentalist in the fashion of the great American thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Transcendentalists shared many philosophical views with followers of the Masonic traditions of the time. These are the same teachings that inspired such great composers as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. What did they believe? In this brief quote from an 1842 lecture at a Masonic Temple in Boston, Emerson said the following:

“The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.” – copied from the American Transcendentalism Web http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/transcendentalist.html

The Transcendentalists set themselves apart from what they called the Materialists. Simply put, a Materialist believes in the supremacy of the material universe. To the Materialist, the material universe is reality—a reality that to the Transcendentalist proves itself to be passing, transitory, and ultimately inferior to the eternal realm of higher consciousness, inspiration, and ecstasy.

I speak of this transcendental perspective because I find it in the music of Charles Ives.
I am not satisfied with the idea that it just a description, or even an exploration, of life he experienced in his world of Danbury, Connecticut, or even  that world seen through the eyes of a modern classical composer exploring new musical realms and pushing old musical boundaries. I believe that Ives grappled with the tensions that exist between the consciousness of the Transcendentalist and the consciousness of the Materialist. I believe that this grappling can be heard to one degree or another in all of Ives’ music.

Familiar tunes, often spirituals and church hymns momentarily establish themselves only to fragment and ultimately drown in other tunes and harmonies. In other words, nothing lasts for very long in Ives’ music. Things come and go, sometimes many things come and go at once; is this not a valid description of life? Religious hymns and spirituals, popular songs, music quoted from other composers, all entwine, vie for one’s attention, and ultimately go—disappear— swallowed up—lost in time.

A most interesting piece of music by Charles Ives is his, The Unanswered Question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkaOz48cq2g

I suggest this link because it shows the notation, but is a rather short version.  The one I most enjoy is the 7 plus minute version by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Please listen to the piece on the best sound system possible or, at least, through really good headphones.

There is a continuous backdrop of shifting consonant harmonies in the strings sounded sans regular rhythm and definitive phrases. The music just flows on like a gentle unimpeded stream. Does it represent the eternal, the transcendental?

At measure 16, a little over a minute into the piece, a five note motif is sounded by a horn against the strings.  Beginning with a descending diminished 7^th, the sound is dissonant and unsettled and lasts no more than a few seconds. Is this the question? What it is? And who is asking it?

The harmony of the strings—could it represent Pythagoras’ Harmony of the Spheres?—seems unmoved, unaffected by the question. The piece goes on like that. The constant strings, the persistent, sometimes disturbed, questioning of the horn, until in the end, the strings win out—or at least, are the last to be heard. Is the question resolved in the eternal harmony of the spheres? Or unlike the music by which Ives represents it, is there really any end to the ‘real’ Unanswered Question that Ives represents?—And what, if anything, does it all mean?  

  

Brubeck, Joyce, and the Relationship that Exists...

Years ago, when I was living in Chicago, there was  an elderly blues-man who often played acoustic guitar  in a coffee house in my neighborhood—I am sorry to say that I can’t remember his name. He began and ended every set with the song, “I’ll Fly Away.”

He wasn’t flashy either with his singing or his guitar playing, but he was always engaging and never failed to get his audience tapping their feet and clapping their hands to his music. His power emanated from his rhythm, though, on the face of it, he did not seem to do anything that was not characteristic of blues.

Other players, myself included, used these same rhythms, yet could not elicit the same response from our audiences—and I, for one, wondered why. I wondered what he had, or what he did, that we didn’t. I came to the conclusion that it was not what he had, but where he had it that made all the difference. I concluded that while I had the rhythms in my head, he had the rhythms in his body. I reasoned that since human beings respond to rhythm with their bodies, not with their minds, then if the rhythms came from a performer’s body, then it would be that which would make the difference—would give their rhythms power.

What does it mean to have the rhythm in the body? I decided that it was the body that had to understand the rhythm and that  being able to count and play a rhythm did not mean that the body understood it.

For decades I have been a full-time professional musician—performer and teacher. My studio is my laboratory. It is there that I study myself and my students in order to make us all better musicians. One thing that has become clear to me is that for the average student, rhythm is one of the last pieces to be fit into the matrix of their music. Again, I am not speaking about being able to count and play the rhythms, this ability usually develops pretty rapidly with traditional musical work, but to get the body to really understand rhythm and convey its power through the music takes a different kind of work—a different kind of awareness.

I think that James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was on to something when he said, “Rhythm is the relationship that exists between the whole and its parts; between any part and the whole; and between any part and any other part within the whole.”

The important word here, the key to his definition, is the word relationship. Rhythm is relationship and for a relationship to exist there needs to be at least two—two sounds, two people, two things.  Rhythm in music can thus be understood as the relationship that exists between a piece of music and every sound that makes up that music; between every sound and every other sound within that music; and also the relationship that exists between every sub-phrase and every phrase and even every chord within the whole piece of music.

The greatness of Joyce’s definition of rhythm is that it is not limited to the relationships that exist between the relative duration of different sounds in music; it can also be applied to the relationships that exist between the pitches of those sounds, and all of the distinctions of timbre and dynamics also. His definition applies also to painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, in fact, everything and anything that is made up of more than one thing—and perhaps even to all that appears to be only one thing when we consider that one can always be in relation to nothing.

And what is the basis of all rhythm—of all relationships? It is the self. What we understand as the self, ourselves, is the beginning of every relationship we contemplate, and to neglect this truth is to render any study of rhythm and relationship a non sequitur.

Please listen to this recording by the Dave Brubeck Quartet of Unsquare Dance in 7/4 time from his epic recording Time Further Out ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDB4K5zCcfk ).

Dave Brubeck, like the old bluesman, like James Joyce’s poetry and prose, had his rhythms in his body. He, like them, and the many others not mentioned here in this blog, communicated their rhythms in a very powerful way to others. They all inspire me, and hopefully, my music too, and that of the student’s also with whom I have the privilege to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igRMwiKPLrU&feature=youtube_gdata

                                                                                                © copyright Michael Kovitz, 2016