I started getting emails about this, so I figured I'd better blog about it.
Surprise surprise! The second song on my album has already been released....sort of. It's called 'Madokara Mieru' (or 'Mado Kara Mieru') and the reason I say that it's sort of been released is because it's actually been covered even before the official release on Calling All Dawns. I know that sounds unusual, but here's the gist of it: Corner Stone Cues, a music library that does licensing of music for movie trailers, heard an early demo of the song and liked it so much that they thought they could license it for a variety of uses; movie trailers, sports coverage, etc. And so with my permission, they recorded their own version of the song, months before I recorded my own. Their version has been released on an album called Corner Stone Cues Presents: Eton Path, which is available on iTunes, Amazon, Walmart, and a number of other places. Already it's been licensed for use for the BBC's coverage of the Premiere League FA Finals, so if you happen to be a British football fan, you might have heard it already.
What are the differences between the two versions? Theirs was recorded by the London Studio Orchestra at AIR Lyndhurst. Mine was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. Theirs features a British choir and percussion. Mine features an LA based taiko group and a Northern California based choir. Mine also has slightly different orchestrations and arrangements. So all in all, they're not outrageously different.
But just for fun, I thought I'd post a clips from both versions so you could get a sneak preview of what's to come. Here's the intro from my Calling All Dawns version (and by the way, this is still a rough mix):
And here's the dramatic outtro from the Eton Path version:
As for the lyrics, it's sung in Japanese, and is based around a series of five Haiku, each corresponding to the changing seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter and ending on spring. Each verse is sung by a singer in a different stage of their life; so a young girl sings the first spring verse, an adolescent girl sings about summer, an older woman sings about autumn, etc. The song ends with a return of the young girl singing about spring, therefore completing the cycle of the seasons. So in essence, it's a song about the cycle of life.
As for the lyrics, they are:
SPRING madokara mieru (kagayaku) ume ichirin ichirin hodo no (sono) atatakasa
SUMMER madokara mieru (mabushii) me ni wa aoba yama hototogisu (aa) hatsugatsuo
AUTUMN madokara mieru (sawayaka) akikaze no yama o mawaru ya (ano) kane no koe
BRIDGE yomei ikubaku ka aru [yo mijikashi]
WINTER madokara mieru (hieta) yuki no ie ni nete iru to omou (nete) bakari nite
SPRING madokara mieru (tanoshi) ichihatsu no ichirin shiroshi (kono) haru no kure
The translations to all these lyrics (with a nod to their authors) are:
Hattori Ransetsu: Through the window I see
on the plum tree
one blossom, one blossom worth
of warmth
Yamaguchi Sodo: Through the window I see
a view of greenery
a wild cuckoo
the first bonito
Kaga no Chiyo: Through the window I see
the autumn wind
resounds in the mountain—
temple bell
Masaoka Shiki: how much longer
is my life?
[A brief night…]
Masaoka Shiki: Through the window I see
all I can think of
is being sick in bed
and snowbound….
Masaoka Shiki: Through the window I see
this lone iris
white
in spring twilight
Special thanks to Ohgi Midorikawa, who helped me with the adaptation of the poetry!
Yes, I've been lax in blogging. But the reason is because I'm on a very cool Microsoft project that's had me completely wrapped up for the better part of a month now. I can't really talk about it until I'm done (hopefully in another month), but it's a rather unique--and somewhat odd--opportunity that I couldn't pass up!
In the meantime, the report on the album is that I spent the month of June flying back and forth to the Bay Area to record backing vocals for my album! Most of the tracks are done....just a little minor tweaking left to do, and the album will be ready to send out to guest soloists, and possibly even labels for distribution deals.
Anyway, the singers that I've been working with are actually my old singing group up at Stanford University, Talisman. Many of you may know them as the group that sang Baba Yetu--well, I spent four weekends recording with the current singers, as well as a handful of alums--a sort of Best Of Talisman group, so to speak. And just for fun, here are some pictures from the sessions.
As I get closer to being able to release the album, I'm going to start posting preview MP3s here of the songs. So keep an eye out for them!
I spent three days at Sage And Sound Recording Studios in Hollywood with an arsenal of percussion. 8 of the 12 songs on Calling All Dawns require percussion of some sort, ranging from African ashikos and udus, Brazilian surdos, Middle Eastern dumbeks and frame drums, Japanese taiko...in other words, the works.
The bulk of the percussion was played by Greg Ellis; session musician (check him out on this summer's blockbuster Iron Man), drummer for Juno Reactor, former founder of Vas, and all around talented guy. We spent two and a half days laying down all manner of raucous noise.
Day three, the neo-taiko group On Ensemble came in to record the Japanese percussion, as well as to add some low-frequency bottom end for the entire album. Shoji Kameda, Kris Bergstrom and Maz Baba came in and played well into the night. Shoji, Kris and I go way back, actually; we all attended Stanford together, and played in Stanford Taiko as undergrads (those two were a helluva lot better at it than I was!).
In addition to their guest appearance on my album, they've got a great sophomore album in the works right now. Keep an eye out for it!
The session was engineered by the incomparable John Kurlander, of course. My album's in good hands with him.
I think I may have found my font for Calling All Dawns. Introducing Delicato, designed by Stephan Hattenbach for the Fountain type foundry (based in Sweden). I think it's quite good; it looks classic, without being overly used, and without the baggage of a font like Trajan.
Here's the creator of the font describing his product:
"After spending my early years experimenting mostly with display faces, my focus now is to make functional text fonts, incorporating both traditional and modern aspects.
Delicato is, in many aspects, built in a traditional way. Still, some modern details have been implemented which classic designs sometimes lack. The prime goal was to make a strong text font for books and longer texts in general. This fact does not exclude the possibilites for use elsewhere.
Throughout history existing designs have often been the source of inspiration for newer ones. Delicato is no exception and looking closely, similarities can be found in the lowercase of Jeremy Tankard’s Enigma and the stems of Petr van Blokland’s Proforma. My goal is to respect these sources and turn my own creation into something new with a unique and personal touch.
Most text faces carry a basic set of weights like regular, italic, bold and small caps. I wanted to expand that a little bit further and added a medium, alternates and a set of ornaments to make the family complete and versatile."
I know I have some artistic readers out there....what do you all think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?
I'm dating a graphic designer these days, and since I'm a big-time design aficionado, the topic of typefaces (otherwise known as fonts) comes up frequently. In most cases, I'm a fan of sans-serif fonts--that is, fonts without the little 'feet'--like the one utilized in this blog, verdana. On the whole, they're cleaner, more modern, and easier to read. In certain cases, though, when I want to tap into various traditions or subconscious associations, I'll utilize serif fonts. Here's what I mean:
Trajan is 'the movie font'...and it has been heavily overused in motion picture advertising, especially with epic blockbuster summer tent-pole fare (which I have to admit, I hate). But if a typeface carries any sort of subconscious association that I want to tap into, then it might not be a bad idea to utilize that font. So in the case of Calling All Dawns, if I want to convey that the scope of the album is epic and cinematic in some way (which it is), I may consider using Trajan as the principal font.
On the other side of the coin, however, is my favorite font Helvetica--a modern classic sans-serif that is purposefully devoid of distraction and meaning, preferring to let the words express themselves without coloration of typographic associations. You've seen Helvetica everywhere; it's the default font for Apple Computers, used in countless corporate logos, and pretty much pops up in all manner of signposts and advertisements. So you can see just how pervasive it really is, here's another clip, from the documentary "Helvetica," created for the 50th-anniversary of the font:
And finally, just for fun, I'm posting this YouTube video of a tribute to Akzidenz-Grotesk, an early predecessor to Helvetica. Some people just really, really love their fonts.
My day at Abbey Road started at 8:00 AM, when I showed up at the studio. Already the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's massive truck was outside, and roadies were loading various large instruments into the studio, including the timpani, celeste, the battery of ethnic percussion I hired, as well as the mother of all taiko drums. (Here's a picture of me having a little fun with it!) Jeff had already shown up early to put all the musicians parts out on the stands, and John was already there making last minute adjustments to the microphones. My ace conductor Lucas Richman arrived shortly thereafter, and with that, we were ready to roll.
The morning session started at 10:00 AM and lasted three hours. The afternoon session was four hours, starting at 2:00 PM. The final lineup I settled on was an orchestra of 85:
Our goal was to record, over the course of 7 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds of music....which is incredibly ambitious! (Why the rush? Frankly, I couldn't afford any more time.) We were able to accomplish this with few hiccups, mostly due to the amount of time I had spent in advance preparing every last detail. It wasn't a 100%-smooth process, though; because of a last-minute fiasco in the parts preparation, there were a number of missing notes in the horn parts that had to be corrected from the podium. All in all we wasted about 5 minutes with these problems, which doesn't seem like a lot on the outside; but considering every minute elapsed costs me about $150 in musicians salaries and studio rental, I was cursing my head off in the control room the whole time.
Most people don't realize this, but orchestras that are contracted to do recording sessions don't actually rehearse the music in advance. They simply show up and read it on sight. It's actually quite incredible; these are some of the finest players in the world, and are capable of playing something nearly perfectly on first-read. However, that means that some adjustments that you need to make to the music will often catch you off guard on the day of the session. After every take, Lucas and I conferred on the podium and made minor changes to the sound. Most were things that can't easily be conveyed with written musical notation; for example, how short to make a staccato note, or how legato to play a melody.
At 7:30 PM The Purcell Singers showed up to record the chorale to my Polish song, Hymn Do Trojcy Swietej (Hymn To The Holy Trinity). Directed by Mark Ford, this 45 member choir spent an hour recording first working on the pronunciation of the text (courtesy of a Polish coach), and then doing take after take trying to find the right sound.
We capped off the evening in exhilarating fashion. I've mentioned before in this blog the Maori tradition of the haka--well, at 9:00 PM four Maori guys came in and laid down take after take of chants, stomps, and body slaps for my closing Maori song Kia Hora Te Marino (May Peace Be Widespread).
10:00 PM, and 14 hours after I had arrived at the studio, we finished with a celebratory pint of Guinness. One of the longest and most exhausting days of my life...and hopefully the beginning of a great journey for me.
The night before the session we were able to get in to Studio 1 to set up for the next day's events. John Kurlander's main task was to get the room set up to his exacting specifications....and when I say exacting, I really mean exacting. One of the reasons I feel very comfortable working with John is his level of attention to detail. Weeks before the session, I was getting detailed floor plans from him with proposed orchestra layouts, microphone setups, etc. The night before the session, he and his team of assistants, headed by the capable Richard Lancaster, got everything ready for the big show.
My task was two-fold; first, to get the ProTools sessions set up with Richard for click tracks and pre-records, and second, to make sure that all the orchestral parts were there. Richard is frighteningly fast on ProTools--the poor man works long hours, but it seems like it will all pay off for him in short time.
As far as parts preparation goes, I had the assistance of a long-time friend of mine from when I was a conducting student, Jeff Eckstein. Jeff has worked in many capacities around orchestras before, from conducting to managing, and so together the two of us sorted through every single part of all 12 songs and made sure everything was there for the session.
That night I climbed into bed at about midnight; it was about 4:00 AM when I finally fell asleep. Three hours later I woke up to start my marathon day.
Today I had the privilege of recording my debut album in one of the holiest of places in the music industry: Abbey Road Studios.
It's 1:30 AM (my typical blogging time), and despite having been working for about 16 hours today, and having only gotten four hours of sleep the night before, I'm still wide awake. People have been asking me if I was "excited"--and the truth is, I was a little too busy to be excited, and so I never really reached any point where I was blown away by what was happening....even up through the moment when I first heard the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra start to play my music. The best way to describe my mood all day, and indeed, the reason why I'm still up right now, is that for the entire day I was extremely, incredibly FOCUSED.
I literally can't wait to dig into the recording files that I left the studio with, and start editing and mixing them. I may even post a sneak preview or two of some of the tracks in time. But for now, I thought I'd start by sharing a few pictures.
My first day back in London I paid a visit to my old alma mater, the Royal College of Music, to do a little guest lecture to the composition students about what life is like in Hollywood, the game industry, the commercial industry, and as an independent recording artist making his first album. It was a very enjoyable day--I always love to teach and lecture, and was thrilled at the opportunity to do it at the RCM.
Then the next few days were spent alone in my little academic suite that I rented at my old dorm, preparing for the session. There was a bit of a last minute panic with the parts preparation, and so I really didn't get a chance to go out and have any fun in London. But ultimately all the preparatory work paid off, and Monday night, before the session, we were able to load into the studio.
That's when the fun really began....and for that, I'll wait until my next post.
I leave for London tomorrow, everyone! Wish me luck!
I've got a busy week ahead of me. First, I visit the Royal College of Music on Friday to do a little guest lecture at my old alma mater. Then meetings with some old friends and old professors. Then the day before the session, meeting with the conductor, the contractor (who will be bringing the orchestral parts) and finally going to the session set-up at Abbey Road the night before.
Then it's showtime! 7 hours with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 1 hour with the Purcell Singers, and 1 hour with some Maori guys performing a 'haka' (see previous blog entry). A busy day!
Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans and American expatriots! I had a very productive week, and churned out the third (and pretty much final) draft of my album. It's pretty much ready to go, with only minor tweaks left to be done in the next week. And to celebrate, I'm letting myself blog again.
I was sent this YouTube video by a Facebook acquaintance, Mark Mahaffey. It's a great lecture given by Sir Ken Robinson at the TED Conference 2006, an annual invitation-only summit of the best and most innovative minds across all the disciplines. ('TED' stands for 'Technology Entertainment Design'.) It's a bit on the long side, but it's well worth setting aside the time to watch.
For those who don't have time to watch the whole thing, the most poignant moment of the video for me was when he talked about the early childhood of choreographer Gillian Lynne, who's probably best known for her work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on, among other things, Cats. Make all the snide comments you want--fact of the matter is, that choreography is something special.
An adolescent Gillian was taken in to see a counselor because she was always squirming about in class, and never seemed to sit still. The counselor listened very patiently to the parents concerns, and then asked them to step into the hallway with him. On the way out, he turned on the radio. Outside, in the hall, they peeked back in the room to see that Gillian, thinking no one was watching her, was suddenly dancing all about the room. The parents promptly enrolled her in a dance class, which eventually led her to where she is today: a choreographer who's brought beauty and joy to millions of people.
The point of the story is, though, that if that had happened today, she would have 1) been diagnosed with ADHD, and 2) been put on medication. The world would have lost a formidable talent, because our public school system devalues creativity in favor of the basic R's: that is, Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic. In fact, it is that over-emphasis on these basic principals that quite frankly squashes a lot of artistic talent in its infancy.
(A side note to those of you who had to suffer through a traditional Asian upbringing....you know exactly what I'm talking about. You're only allowed to be brilliant on the violin, as long as you don't think about making it your career. Fortunately, my parents were very progressive in that department, which is why I'm where I am today.)
You can't blame public schools; they have enough problems as it is. But that story took me back to my own experience at the dawn of my own life as a composer, when the administration of Palo Alto High School did a pretty fantastic job in almost crushing my nascent artistic talent.
It was senior year in high school, and as an eager theatre student who could actually hold a tune, I was disappointed to find out that they had cancelled the school musical that year. So, frustrated, I decided that I would write my own musical (how hard could it be?). Trouble is, I wasn't the only one with that idea....a fellow student (a drummer in a rock band) decided that he wanted to write one too. So that year at Palo Alto High School became an unofficial story of dueling original musicals.
The administration, rather than being pleased that their music program churned out two burgeoning composition talents, felt that they couldn't support having two such projects going on at the same time. So first they tried to make us collaborate and write one musical. And then they decided to throw all their administrative power behind one of the shows, and pretty much did everything they could to discourage the other one. For whatever reason, they chose the 'other show' to put forth--maybe it was because that show's creator lobbied better than I did. Who knows.
Point is, they wouldn't let me use their stage to put up my show. They wouldn't give me any resources. They did their bureaucratic best to ensure that my show wouldn't go up, short of actually shutting it down themselves (because that would probably make them look bad).
So my version of being a rebellious high schooler, of course, was to mount the damn thing myself. I convinced the choir teacher, Mrs. Fujikawa, to let me use her tiny classroom as a stage. I begged my physics teacher to stay late on campus, so that I could have a supervising teacher for my rehearsals. (Thanks Mr. Geller.) My production staff (pretty much one guy: Chris Karabats) and I used to break into the classrooms on weekends just so we could build my pitiful little set. I wrote the music, I wrote the script, I did the publicity, I played the guitar in the pit band, and through sheer force of will, my heroic cast of five and I managed to put up three sold out performances. (It's not hard to sell out when you've only got room for 60 people in a classroom.)
My first ever large-scale project, Such Sweet Thunder, was born. It was a bloated two and a half hours, with 17 musical numbers with ponderous dialogue-heavy scenes in between. It tackled an imaginary scenario where a jazz-singer--loosely based on Ella Fitzgerald--dies, and a young upstart tries to take her place. It tackled issues of art, entertainment, and the co-marriage of the two, and quite frankly was way too heady for a 17 year old to tackle, much less for a high school audience to appreciate.
But damn it, people were impressed. And the next day, the popular kids came up to me and said they were humming my tunes all day. (To this day, I'll occasionally have an old high school friend sing one of those songs back to me.) The show was taped and broadcast on local Cable Access TV. My friend Lisa came and saw it, and brought her dad, Steve Jobs--yes, THAT Steve Jobs. She later told me that he said it was the most brilliant thing he ever saw a 17-year old do. (I will carry that comment with me to my deathbed.)
The one person who was conspicuously absent, however, was the principal of the school. Not only had they withheld support for my massive undertaking, but they didn't even deign to attend one of the performances. Now THIS is the problem with public schools: the lack of resources is one thing, but to not even show support for a young artist is another sin altogether. Principal Sandra Pearson, if you're reading this, I ask you: what kind of message are you sending about the importance of creativity when one of your best students writes a two-act musical, and you don't even bother to show up for it?
As a young artist, it filled me with rage. Here I was, trying to create something, and here was 'the system' doing its best to prevent me from doing so. Allow me to psychoanalyze myself for a moment: it's because of this early experience that made me the independent-minded artist I am today. I have a deep-seeded mistrust for any entity or system that holds power over me; I feel much more secure taking control of my own destiny, and not relying on the handouts of others. I don't want to be constantly kissing ass and hoping someone will give me a job; I want to be focusing on writing good music and creating good art. I'm doing this album on my own, free of record labels, free of outside publishers because I CAN. I refuse to let all those Sandra Pearsons out there hold me down.
Whew.
Anyway, the epilogue? A month after my show wrapped, I attended a performance of 'the other musical.' It was presented at the 2000-seat Haymarket Theatre, with lavish costumes, full on-stage pit orchestra, dancers, expensive lighting, and a press-blitz that celebrated the fact that a young high school student had written a musical (wow....how novel). It was a 90-minute comedy about a 17th-century composer who's frustrated that his music is going nowhere, and so he invents rock and roll, and suddenly cellists trade in their bows for guitar picks, the village starts rocking, and everything becomes right with the world, Bill And Ted-style.
The Maori people of New Zealand have an old tradition called the haka. It's a choreographed group dance that's commonly associated with a pre-battle ritual, whereby Maori warriors would shout, stomp and make threatening gestures at their opponents as a means of intimidating them. Today, the Maori aren't waging too many wars, but the tradition is alive and well, most famously with the New Zealand All Blacks, pretty much the best rugby team in the world. The All Blacks have been performing the haka for over a century now, and it's one of the great traditions in sports.
It really is just an awe-inspiring. (Except if you're the French team in this video, in which case you're probably wetting yourself at this moment.)
I'm closing my album with a Maori song, and with the help of Jerome Kavanagh, a Maori collaborator who happens to be an expert on traditional Maori instruments and music, I'm integrating parts of this tradition into the track. I figure if I can harness just a tenth of the goose-bump-inducing power of the All Blacks haka, I'll have a fine finish to the album. Yet at the same time, I have to be careful; the Maori are very proud of their heritage, and are very protective of their traditions. Whatever I do, and however I do it, I need to proceed with the utmost respect for their culture and traditions. I hope, though, that my intentions will be considered honorable; at once I want to increase awareness of their extraordinary musical and oratorical traditions, and at the same time, integrate it into the over-arching message of Calling All Dawns: that we are all one and the same, and all travel the same journey through life and death.
I’m blogging again because it’s 3:00 AM, and I can’t sleep. Mostly album related issues, but I’ll get to that later….
In the meantime, I’m going to ramble about Takeshi Murakami, probably the most famous pop artist since Andy Warhol. The LA MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) is running a show of the Tokyo-based artists works, and it’s driving me nuts that I don’t have the time to just run downtown to go see it.
Murakami is the founder of the Superflat movement—which in essence is both a rebellion against the staid restraint of traditional Japanese art, as well as a celebration—and sometimes criticism—of contemporary Japanese pop culture. It’s a largely character-based movement—that is, much of the art deals with manga-inspired cartoon characters who require no more reason for existance than that they’re ridiculously cute.
Like Warhol, his work is a marriage of fine art and commerce—and one of the most noticeable unions of these concepts is his design of a Louis Vuitton handbag (which sells for a mere $1520). Murakami goes one step further with the partnership, however, and actually created a little animated film to promote the product:
What I love about it in particular (being a musician) is the soundtrack, a song by a great J-Pop artist called Fantastic Plastic Machine. J-Pop is a particular interest of mine, just because I find it so much more creative than American pop (which for various reasons—cough Clear Channel cough American Idol cough hip-hop culture cough—has become image driven and homogenized). Some of my favorite artists (including previously-blogged-about Cornelius) all come from the trendy Shibuya district of Tokyo, and FPM belongs to this Shibuya-kei movement.
What’s particularly ingenious about this music, though, is that it seems to be a reinvention of a concept in German avant-garde concert music of the 1910s called klangfarbenmelodie, which translated, means ‘tone color melody.’ That technique, pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern (who, along with Alban Berg, comprise the Second Viennese School) is the utilization of tone color as a new element to the progression of a melody. So for example, instead of having a melody played by just one instrument, these guys would break up the melody amongst different instruments in the orchestra, so that each note was sounded with a different tone color. Fantastic Plastic Machine has done this here as well—although the melody and chords would fit very handily with one instrument, the main riff is broken up into various combinations of acoustic guitar strums (going forwards and backwards), keyboards, pizzicato strings, filtered synths, and weird honking sounds. It’s mesmerizing, and works really well with the schizophrenic nature of Murakami’s visuals.
Oh, and guess what the name of the song is? “Different Colors.” How appropriate, both to Murakami AND klangfarbenmelodie.
And in other news, the reason I’ve got insomnia is because I spent much of today thinking over the comments that I’ve gotten from various people I played my most recent album draft for—and I’ve realized that there comes a time when an artist simply needs to stop collecting feedback, and just does what they want to do. And so even though there were some valid suggestions that came from my friends and colleagues in the past couple weeks, I’ve nevertheless reached a point where I’m comfortable with my material, and can confidently move forward with it. And truthfully, one could workshop something forever, and each time someone will have something new to say. It has to stop somewhere! More than anything else, this is telling in that I’ve finally reached a total comfort point with all my material. Next stop: Abbey Road.
My readers are probably wondering why the dropoff in posting. I have until the end of the month to finish my music for Abbey Road, and so I'm in full-on isolation mode. But I will share the events of my weekend with you all--I think from here until the sessions on December 18th, I'll be posting more updates about the album, and fewer musical-analysis-with-YouTube-video entries. So, for all those of you who come here for the pretty pictures and musical commentary (that is, all three of you....hi guys), will just have to put up with my little musical diary entries.
I flew out to Knoxville to spend the weekend with my conductor, Lucas Richman, and his family. I brought my scores for the 12 songs to the album with me, and spent a nice day with Lucas sitting down and going over the music (interrupted occationally by the obligatory jam session with his 9 year old son, Max, who shreds like no one's bizness on Guitar Hero, and pwned me thoroughly).
Lucas is the conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, and was a protégé of none other than Leonard Bernstein when he was 18 years old. He's also conducted a lot of film scores, and bridges the gap between classical conducting and session conducting better than anyone out there. AND, he was a former conducting teacher of mine! So I'm in good hands with him.
Lucas is also an accomplished composer, and I absolutely *love* sitting down with other composers and sharing music with each other. He played me his beautiful Oboe Concerto and his Palo Alto Overture--a full-orchestral piece that was written when he was 17 (which is totally unfair), in honor of my very own hometown. (It was really the most random thing--why in the world had Lucas written an orchestral overture for Palo Alto?)
Tonight I'm having friends over for pizza and beer, and to play them my second draft of Calling All Dawns. Woohoo! All twelve songs are written, and I'm feeling good about every single one.
This is something that I've started doing on this album. It kind of brings me back to when I was a grad student, and we would have our composition workshops. We'd all sit around and listen to each other's music, and give (mostly) constructive feedback. Obviously when you're working on a film or game, you don't have time to workshop your music--and really, the director of the project fulfills that role for you. But on a personal project like this one, it's nice to call together a group of my friends for some constructive criticism (and most of them come from diverse artistic backgrounds, and are seriously, seriously analytical).
The only difference between the two is that the A size has an extra 2 players per section, or in other words, is 60 players instead of 50.
The tradeoff is that you get a larger, fuller sound when you add those extra 10 players--however, you also lose a little bit of definition and nimbleness. The larger string section definitely will sound fuller, and lends itself well to bombastic held out chords (Lord Of The Rings was recorded with that lineup)--however, when you get into faster, intricate passages, of which there are a few in my album, you lose a bit of the clarity of the attacks.
There's a secondary consideration; Abbey Road is a rectangularly shaped studio, and when you have a 60 piece string orchestra, it becomes too wide to fit in a portrait-style configuration, and you have to reorient 90 degrees and lay out your orchestra landscape-style. When that happens, because the back wall is a lot closer, you lose a little bit of fullness to the sound. (When you situate an orchestra portrait-style, you have a lot of empty, reverberant space behind you that allows the sound to fill out before coming back at the microphones.)
So, 60 strings would give me thicker string sound, less articulation, less fullness from the natural acoustics of Abbey Road.
And 50 strings would give me slightly less thick string sound, more articulation, and more fullness from the natural acoustics.
John Kurlander Creates The First Ever Hidden Track
This past week I've been having a lot of conversations with John Kurlander, three-time Grammy-winning audio engineer (for his work on The Lord Of The Rings trilogy), former head classical engineer at EMI, and soon-to-be recording engineer on Calling All Dawns. :)
Since I'll be recording the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road in a month and a half, John was the ideal choice to do the recording. Not only was he head engineer at Abbey Road for a good part of his 40 year career, but he's also recorded the Royal Phil many, many times--in fact, one project that he helped produce, an embarassing 70s classical-meets-disco album called 'Hooked On Classics,' brought the RPO back from impending financial crisis by selling 11 million copies. That's right. 11 MILLION COPIES.
He's got some great stories, since he's worked with everyone imaginable...but his best story comes from the very beginning of his career, when he was second engineer on none other than the original Beatles album 'Abbey Road.' Beatlemaniacs out there already know that the last track on 'Abbey Road,' a little :30 second number called 'Her Majesty,' is the first ever example of a hidden track. Indeed, it comes 14 seconds after the end of the side two medley that starts with 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and ends with 'The End'.
Well, originally 'Her Majesty' was wedged right in the middle of the medley; between 'Mean Mr. Mustard' and 'Polythene Pam.' But one night Paul comes in and listens to a rough mix of the whole medley, and decides that he doesn't like 'Her Majesty.' He tells John to toss it out--but according to EMI policy, John is instructed to save everything....so instead of tossing it, he snips it out, and tapes 14 seconds of blank leader after the end of the medley, and sticks it on the end with a note saying that it's a rejected track, and to ignore it.
However, someone didn't get the memo, and the whole medley--blank leader with rejected song and all--got sent over to EMI. Everyone over there got so used to hearing this little :30 second tag at the end of the medley, that they just decided to keep it there--14 seconds of silence and everything. When the album got printed, the initial pressing neglected to include 'Her Majesty' on the back--and so, the first ever hidden track was born.
And if you listen closely to track, you'll notice that it starts and ends rather oddly....that's because the crude edit done by John (those days you literally spliced the tape with a razor) included the last chord of 'Mean Mr. Mustard' at the very beginning of the song, and the last chord was removed, as it fell underneath the first chord of 'Polythene Pam.'
"The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content. Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem." - David Geffen
There was a time when the consumer could righteously declare that they hated the economics and questionable business practices of the record industry. Since the advent of filesharing, however, that moral center has shifted back against the consumer. Every year, the record industry is seeing a 15% drop in profits--soon it will implode. While that may level the playing field and herald the dawn of the indie era, at the same time it's killing creativity on all fronts: musicians are spending more time worrying about how they're going to make a living in the industry, and less time on actually making good music. And what's causing all this? Piracy.
Geffen's right to say that the soul of the major labels has been forcibly removed by piracy--their very own lives are at stake, and they no longer have the luxury of focusing on releasing good music. Instead, their focus is simply on survival: meaning, focusing on selling music, not on making quality music.
On the contrary, my focus with Calling All Dawns is in making as good of a product as possible, but at the same time, my greatest fear is that it's going to be financially disasterous for me. The mindset that kids these days have is that music is free--and while an artist like Christina Aguilera can afford to see her album sales cut in half, she'll still make a bundle of money on tour. Indie artists such as myself, however--particularly those of us who do complex, expensive orchestral/choral/world-music collages, are going to suffer first.
(Quote taken from New York Times article The Music Man.)
Still fighting a losing battle with my Cambodian-imported cold (see previous post). Part of that losing battle is sleepless nights, so what better thing to do than blog at 3:15 AM.
Had one of those flashes of inspiration today, and raced over to the piano to furiously jot down the chorus to my Irish song (for my upcoming album, Calling All Dawns), based on the 18th-century Irish epic poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghair. It's a homophonic, a cappella piece for women: what that means in plain-speak is that it's a song to be sung by a trio (or possibly quartet) of women, where the motion of the voices generally occurs all together in harmony.
What's my thought process behind this? The keen is a dirge for female soloist--generally speaking, a lament for her dead spouse. There's a call and response element to it as well, hence the need for the homophonic chorus. This configuration gives me the most intimate moment on the entire album--a piece right in the middle (it's slated for track 7 of 12) where we leave behind the rich orchestral writing and pare a song down to its basic elements: a melody, and a vocalist performing the hell out of it.
Though not quite Irish, here's the best example of an unaccompanied homophonic vocal I could think of. It's Imogen Heap's 'Hide And Seek':
Like I said, this song does it beautifully....that is, paring it down to its most basic elements: a melody, and a vocalist performing the hell out of it.
Columbia Records recently did a survey of youths, and the alarming consensus was that they don't consider downloading music without paying for it stealing. The majors aren't oblivious to this problem; they're trying desperately to figure out what to do about it. But while this problem is foremost on their mind, everyone's going to suffer in that every label's primary goal these days is not to make good music, it's to make music that will *sell*. When a record label's livelihood is on the line, they won't take chances--instead, they'll just rely on what they can do to make money. So what you're going to get is a downward spiral--the labels are just going to continue to churn out product that they know will do well, at the expense of doing something bold and new. Ultimately this will wear down the consumer, who will become disillusioned with what gets put out there, and will stop paying for music altogether.
Add to this the problem that is created by the iPod; now, your entire music collection is at your fingertips, and it's easy to maintain music collections of thousands and thousands of albums. In the past, whenever you got tired of listening to your latest CD, you went out and bought a new one. Now, with every album you ever bought at your ready access, it's a lot easier to satisfy your craving for new music by simply listening to OLD music that you bought back when music was still bought.
Just spent a fun evening with my friend Maura Dykstra, who's a PhD student in Chinese History at UCLA. Over ramen and tea, she educated me on a bit of text from Chapter 40 of the Dao De Jing. It reads as follows:
fan zhe dao zhi dong
ruo zhe dao zhi yong
tian xia wan su sheng yu you
you sheng yu wu
As much as it is possible to pin down a translation to such a cryptic text, these lines mean the following:
Return is the motion of the Dao
Yielding is the way of the Dao
All things are born of being
Being is born of non-being
Understood? Didn't think so.
I'm attracted to the Dao De Jing because of the core belief in the continual flow and movement of the universe--it fits in well with the themes that I'm exploring in my album (the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth). Ancient Chinese, however, is a very cryptic language, though, and every word can have a multitude of meanings attached to it. (Of particular delight is that the character for 'music' is the exact same as the character for 'happiness!') That's why interpretations of the text are many and varied.
Lao Tzu wrote the Dao at a time when the prevailing philosophical belief system was designed to maintain the status quo of an entrenched ruling class; the Dao, written with purposefully 'ugly' choices of words, was a rejection of that and a call for simplification of philosophical thought. (I mentioned that it reminded me of the Protestant Reformation, and the rejection of Catholic doctrine.)
The end goal of all Chinese philosophy is the attainment of peace. Everyone's striving for nothing more than a simple, balanced life.
