Ntuple Indemnity

It’s usually dangerous to claim an immeasurable first unless the activity in question involved the creation of something wacky and original derived from your own warped consciousness, often something that nobody would dare touch. The world is sufficiently large so as to render true originality almost unachievable – or if achieved, unverifiable. The flipside of this is that one could also stumble upon an unanticipated conjectural finish line, be the first to do so, and not know it. Either way, I will make no claim to having done anything special of late. Speciality kneels to probability.

That said, I would find it unlikely that very many others have underscored a formal Catholic wedding with music from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for Super Nintendo.

The signing of the registry is unpredictable when it comes to timing, you see. So not only do you need something sweet, romantic and unintrusive – it needs to be extensible, yet easy to conclude on cue. For the latter requirements, turning to classic video games should be the obvious solution, though not one that a lot of mercenary musicians will spot. And to be fair, there aren’t a lot of old Nintendo anthems that make good tearjerkers.

An ounce apiece of “Kakariko Town” and “Zelda’s Lullaby” turned out to be the perfect melodic cocktail for the occasion. The music was very well received, and the source went by unnoticed and strolled off on its innocent little way. It keeps things in perspective that the standards of the game music in-the-know that everyone recognizes and everyone plays – the Kakariko theme, for one, or “Terra”, or “Corridors of Time” – are pretty enough in their own right that they don’t connote frantic button-pushing to the casual observer, unlike, say, anything from Super Mario Bros.

The whole kerfuffle validates one and only one hypothesis: a Koji Kondo melody is a beautiful thing. In a way, I think he will go down as the great lost composer of the late twentieth century, someone who took finite sequences of beeps and whistles in infinite repetition and found art, and receded into the shadows of his accomplishments. Nobuo Uematsu’s already getting his due with the legitimation of game music; the American synchronized swimming team performed to music from Final Fantasy VIII. Zelda aside, though, Kondo and his associates haven’t done a whole lot that translates directly to the realm of the symphonic. For someone who’s written themes that everybody knows, he remains comparably obscure.

Oh, and the honorarium was generous.

At some point in your life you’ve probably heard some controversy about this thing called “love at first sight,” which to me is neither that compelling an issue nor at all fair to blind people. It even arises in the hypothetical reality embedded in literature, as do most debates that circle around the kind of representational silliness that abounds when misattributing to fiction the false responsibility of corresponding to the human condition.

You don’t hear so much about love at first listen, probably because it’s systematically demonstrable and there is no reason to doubt its operation whatsoever. To take someone at face-value is subject to being considered shallow, but to take someone at voice-value is a different matter entirely, because the voice says something. And this ambiguous something is not limited to the words and utterances it produces; consider someone who speaks in another language, where that is not at all a factor. This is a “how” property that lies in tone and melody. I venture I am not the only one who never understood all the hype about Marilyn Monroe until that scene in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot where she punctuates “I Wanna Be Loved By You” with that meaningless little poo-poo bee-doo. That – not the Coca-Cola pin-up look or the Kennedy affair – that’s what made Miss Norma Jeane a legend.

A quick scan of Google’s 3,630 results for “love at first listen” reveals that it is almost exclusively used in reference to recording artists, from whom one can be detached in all other respects, and for whom melody is what feeds the kids. While I do think the possibility of the concept transcends this medium of delivery and is active in day-to-day personal interaction, I am not going to deviate from this pattern.

This most prolific of strains is the kind of FALAFEL (Far-Away Love At First Enchanting Listen) where listening to a certain vocalist for the first time – it might only be a track, though a fraction thereof is occasionally sufficient – sells you on their albums on the spot. Let’s call the most extreme case the Ella Effect, not because this immediate rush was what accompanied my first encounter with Ella Fitzgerald, but because if you didn’t react the same way the first time you heard her sing, you’re deaf.

The Ella Effect manifests an aural holiness of the highest and most elusive order. It’s a rare gem. In nerdier terms than I dare manage, we’re talking Alpha Edition Black Lotus rare. Lady Ella herself aside, you’re about as likely to be washed over by this whopper of a falafel as you are to stumble upon the Chris Houlihan room on a hot summer’s day. Hear it once, and that’s a songbird you’ll be listening to for the rest of your life.

And I think I’ve found the Ella Effect once more.

Meet Emilie-Claire Barlow. A few weeks ago I awoke to a CBC broadcast of her take on “The Things We Did Last Summer” from her superb new self-arranged album Like A Lover, which was released this month. The setup was about as minimalistic as you could get – just ECB singing over a walking upright bass, already of interest by itself given that writing bass lines and playing them on a so-so Clavinova sample is something I’ve been trying to pick up for some time. But the track title is a bit of a misnomer, because far from being that old Cahn/Styne jingle by its lonely little self, it’s a framing device for a vocalese trip around the sun, a scatty-wah collage of about a dozen standards of a seasonal bent.

It’s the kind of chart that makes you want to shell out for the record right now – which I couldn’t at the time, because it wasn’t released yet. But now I’ve acquired the disc along with her 2003 release Happy Feet, and she’s phenomenal.

The written word fails to provide an adequately lossless isomorphism that captures her sound, but I’ll do my best and describe her tone as… open, cheerful, happy. Lady may sing the blues, but boy, will they ever bring a smile to your face. She channels that excitable flavour of brightness that veers a sharp left on the cute-sexy spectrum, and this day in age when Canada flies the flags of Diana Krall’s moody alto and Molly Johnson’s, uh, being Billie Holiday, Emilie-Claire’s is the road less travelled. She also uses little or no piano, so the albums are pleasant to comp over if like yours truly, you’re an ivoryman who fancies to pretend that a chanteuse of her calibre would have anything to do with you.

Of all the jazz singers recording today, I think she’s my new favourite. It’s unfortunate that her upcoming performance schedule is limited to Ontario and Quebec, and makes nary a mention of us alienated provinces.

Ms. Barlow also keeps a blog. Here we return to what I said earlier about how voice-value says something: after listening to her recordings, her fruity, lighthearted bubblegum writing style should come as a surprise to nobody. And if a weblog isn’t a metric of personal disposition, then what is?

I’m to play a number of pieces at a wedding that is taking place on Canada Day, and the task of preparing them is my first serious return to the rigour of practicing small-C classical piano for the sake of performance since completing my Royal Conservatory ARCT three years ago. Skill at a musical instrument is something that atrophies quickly, but comes back with the kind of whoosh that brings to mind Stephen Chow, eyes shut and enlightened, reawakening to his repressed Shaolin or Buddhist Palm powers or what have you. It seems that if you spend a nontrivial proportion of your adolescence perfecting a tricky Liszt cadenza, it’s programmed into your fingers for life. The power that courses through your digits upon its return is a release of energeia so magnificent, you are led to think you can harness it to fry a rack of bacon. You would be wrong, but never mind those mortal limitations.

For this event, I was given a list of requests at a few weeks’ notice, with instructions to throw in any other favourites I deemed appropriate should the guests be taking inordinately long to seat themselves. Naturally, in addition to the standard corpus of the pretty Chopin waltzes nobody ever thinks of because they can’t remember the indices, I entertained the notion of sneaking in “Han and the Princess” from The Empire Strikes Back for good measure. “Across the Stars” is the more relevant cue in a wedding scenario, but playing it by ear is not a straightforward initiative, not because the compound rhythm is hard to pin down on first listen (it’s simple once you figure out which beat to think of as your anchor), but because Williams introduces a very subtle modulation with each iteration of the theme: the key you finish in is a whole tone lower than your key of origin. So you can take it for as long as you want, hitting five other keys before you loop back to where you started; the subsequent transpositions generate a cyclic group modulo 6. Whenever it comes up in the score to Attack of the Clones, a meandering transition escapes the cycle after only about two iterations at a time, and it’s a hard one to capture without having some sheet music as a guide.

The requests were an item of interest, though – and two of them in particular, both by that most temperamental of legendary German folk, Ludwig van Beethoven. They had two things in common: everybody knows them, yet after over a decade with the instrument, I’d never learnt them.

The first is “Für Elise”. Its popularity is unfathomable. I sometimes wonder what Beethoven would say should he return from the grave to discover that this innocent little Bagatelle in A minor he wrote for some chick is not only the default ringtone on the biggest overnight hit in the technological history of mankind, the mobile phone, but is – no joke – played by Taiwanese garbage trucks to signal their presence, like how ice cream cars over here use Joplin’s “The Entertainer”. It’s not a very spectacular composition – a simple ABACA with no modulations except for brief jaunts into the relative major a few bars at a time, and only meagre hints of Ludwig’s trademark tantrums – and one wonders if it is the phenomenon it has become because of its technical simplicity. It’s very easy for a beginning pianist to pick it up and woodshed it, and at the same time rewarding, because it has just enough musical elegance to not sound as dinky as a lot of early piano repertoire is wont to be.

The second piece to which I refer is the First Movement of the Sonata quasi una fantasia in C-sharp minor, perhaps better known as the “Moonlight Sonata”. I’m pointing out the obvious here, but like “Für Elise”, this composition is, to borrow what John Lennon said of the Beatles, bigger than Jesus. It was significant enough to be the namesake of an infamous German bombing operation – indeed, the source of one of Winston Churchill’s most controversial wartime gambits, a classic game-theoretical case study. Again, I have very little idea why it has penetrated the cultural consciousness so deeply, to the layman it bears on synecdoche for what classical piano sounds like. It is said that on the sonata’s popularity, Beethoven once wrote Carl Czerny with the remark, “Surely I’ve written better things.” And if we speak of quality in terms of the intricacy and range of his manoeuvres in the dimensions of harmony, melody and rhythm, he’d be right. But maybe the simplicity of the piece – long pedal points that change up in broad strokes under the controlled pianissimo of periodic triplets overhead – is what attracts the casual listener.

More to the point, in both of these selections, Beethoven doesn’t go very far, but what he does is sit on universals. Now, the musically literate may harp on this idea of universals as good old-fashioned Western European paternalism, but the precept that makes Beethoven tick – the very property of Mozart that makes babies smarter – is the binary relationship of tension and resolution that occurs when you frame music as consonance punctuated by dissonance. “Für Elise” and the First Movement of the “Moonlight” are similar in this respect: they are, fundamentally, grounded in minor-key consonances that are broken and arpeggiated, thinned out so the listener can in effect capture everything. And for the performer, as I am discovering firsthand, these ideal patterns spin a safety net of technical comfort.

I would deem it likely that it is because of this property of traditional forms underlying a proto-Romantic versatility of expression that they persist, while in the latter half of the twentieth century, the experiments to dissolve the binaristic “othering” of dissonance in opposition to consonance (or in the case of John Cage, silence to sound) led the methodical compositions of art music down a path that an untrained listener would consider highly esoteric. Yet the divergent rise of popular music in the 1950s with the emergence of doo-wop and rock-and-roll went in the opposite direction – back to simple harmonies and catchy melodic constructions.

The implication is that there is a disposition present in all of us, and arguably not something merely constructed, to be receptive to consonant harmonies and furthermore, retain them not in their harmonic form, but in terms of the melodic variations built on top of them. It is like how we feel the push and pull of a conflict in a dramatic setting, but we don’t remember the different kinds of conflict in terms of their categoric labels. On the contrary, we retain instances: Hamlet and Claudius, Rhett and Scarlett, Linus and Lucy. In primary school some talk about conflict as a 3-vector of man against man, himself and nature, but even that is demonstrated by example, and remembered by example. Like melody over harmony, it is not a relation of part to whole, but of building to foundations.

There’s a much bigger question that comes out of all this, one that strikes out at what it is we acquire that one equates with a heightened cultural literacy. For the sake of not obfuscating the above with interminable length, this is a thread I will leave hanging for now.

My regular readership is in all likelihood aware that I spend an arguably unhealthy proportion of my time feeding my nostalgic interest in video game music. It is with much pleasure that I encountered a video of an a cappella choir’s live performance of several signature tunes from the 8-bit era – yes, including thematically relevant stage choreography. Now I know what an abstract interpretive human rendition of falling Tetris blocks looks like.

There is often some measure of debate on whether or not the music to Tetris should properly be considered a video game tune, as it pertains to what is by convention admissible on remix and arrangement communities like VGMix. There is no doubt that it is through the classic puzzle game that the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki” (“The Peddler”) has seen the most widespread exposure in the Western world, but many are unaware of its roots. For those interested, I would advise a look at some traditional Russian folk dance videos, specifically this one.

It’s amazing how every time there’s a clip like the aforementioned choir performance that spreads memetically over the Web, people swell with nostalgia and perhaps recollect other gems they’ve found – most often the orchestrated medley from Super Mario Bros. from Orchestral Game Concert that is commonly misattributed to the Boston Pops – yet they have nary a clue how big a video game music community is out there, constantly taking the bleeps and bloops of yore and endowing them with near-professional quality across all musical styles. I think there’s a huge audience out there for game remixes that remains untapped, simply because the publicity for these independent niche-genre covers relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

I now turn my attention to written media and two posthumous literary treasure troves of note. The first is Runny Babbit, a billy sook by Shel Silverstein – essentially, a book of never-before-published spoonerisms by the master himself. If you grew up on his work, you would understand the warmth of this assurance that his death six years ago was, indeed, not where the sidewalk ends. The second is an archaeological breakthrough that has unlocked an archive of classical texts too unbelievable in scope for words… my words, anyhow. I’ll let this article do the talking.

Speaking of archaeology, I got around to catching the Matthew McConaughey-starring film of Clive Cussler’s novel Sahara. It’s good, clean popcorn fun once it gets past the awkward beginning, albeit nothing special. Intriguingly, one of the things holding it back is that it plays it too safe and doesn’t quite capture the extent of Cussler’s outrageous strokes of revisionist history, which elevate the Dirk Pitt stories to an almost unimpeachably ridiculous degree of escapism (and which, I might add, he pulls off a lot more successfully than the likes of Dan Brown). Although my recollection of the novel is rustier than a decommissioned ironclad – the one time I read it was several years ago – I do recall much of it focusing on a delightfully far-fetched premise involving Abraham Lincoln and a well-placed doppelganger, which was omitted in the adaptation and, to my surprise, somewhat missed.

As far as prospects for a Dirk Pitt film franchise go, it’s hard to say; let’s not forget that Dr. No sucked, but that didn’t stop Bond. And Sahara is far from terrible – it’s more of a one-time pleasure not quite guilty enough to harp on, aside from a number of pesky annoyances. The best compliment that I can offer the movie is this: at least it buries Raise the Titanic! for good.

As some of you know, I played a banquet Saturday night (that being the National Debating Championships formal), accompanying Happnin’ alto and fellow debater Maria Chen. Word is that we survived the dinner performance in spite of a horribly out-of-tune B natural above middle C that forced us to work around the charts we set to sharp keys, and the precarious decision to situate my personal decorative glass of red wine on the grand when the wheels were not locked in. I can’t speak to any of this myself, as I wasn’t listening.

Later in the evening, as I took a break for dinner, some random attendee who had earlier attempted to run off with my precious Hal Leonard “Little” commandeered the piano in my place, approaching it in much the same way as Draco Malfoy would treat a Hippogryph. Now, he was hardly without skill, though a brief conversation on technique I had with him about Gershwin’s changes in “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” revealed him to be new to substitution. But one should remember that skill is very different from finesse, and while some finesse is bound to be lacking even for the relatively seasoned improviser – I’ll freely admit that I somewhat butchered Koji Kondo’s “athletic” Donut Plains theme from Super Mario World – there is really little excuse to throw it out the window for cheap tricks when it comes to playing something fully composed.

There is a very simple litmus test for rooting out rank amateurs who try to show off at the keys with little respect for the music they are performing, especially when that music is ragtime. This performer I speak of, whom I have yet to identify, committed the crime of trying to play “Maple Leaf Rag” as fast as he could.

I don’t see why people insist on butchering “Maple Leaf Rag” the way they do. It’s marked Tempo di marcia, but there is no end of piano hacks who play it not as a march so much as a hundred-horse cavalry charge. Well, the guns of Aqaba may face the sea, but anyone who has ever bothered to take Scott Joplin, ragtime and stride seriously is not so inattentive, and knows that ragtime is never played fast.

Observe the following tempo markings. “Elite Syncopations”: Not fast. “The Easy Winners”: Not fast. “The Entertainer” – yes, that “Entertainer”: Not fast. Joplin’s sheets to “Fig Leaf” and “Sugar Cane” carry a little box on Page 1 akin to a Surgeon General’s warning: “NOTE – Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.”

“Maple Leaf Rag”: For the love of all that be Good and Holy, dare I invoketh the honoured rolls of Tin Pan Alley and Preservation Hall, do not ever play this piece fast, you simple-minded irreverent blasphemous fool. Or, in other words, Tempo di marcia.

It is especially appalling that even performers who are otherwise professionals of a calibre well beyond that of my own still drag “Maple Leaf” through the mud at tempos befitting the Autobahn for a spurt of cheap amateur showmanship. Over the summer, I saw the keyboard player in a band performing on as prestigious a jazz-tourist destination as the Mississippi steamship Natchez do the exact same thing. Technically, he was a talented performer with a good sense of syncopated rhythm who had huge hands that graced progressive tenths with ease. I think he was blind, too, but I’m not sure. But for goodness’ sake, that is not by any means a license to play ragtime as fast as you can.

Maybe it comes of how most people are exposed to ragtime in the form of ice cream delivery vehicle jingles and cellular telephone ringtones, but I do not presume to know the origin of this tragically widespread interpretation. Now, I’m not one to commit the intentional fallacy and say that ragtime shouldn’t be played fast because Joplin said so, but I am one to say that to a literate musician, it sounds like ass. There are pieces that you can play as fast as you can to show off to your friends – “burner” swings like Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and Kondo’s “athletic” Donut Plains theme from Super Mario World. “Maple Leaf Rag” is not one of these pieces.

The tournament itself was fantastically run by the organizers behind the curtains, and they have really done the club proud. After adjudicating one round I was pulled into a swing team (which, in debate lingo, is a placeholder team to even out odd numbers) with Dan Sirbu, who had never done a Canadian Parliamentary tournament before. After cleaning up in the first two rounds, we dropped like rocks in the other four. I think it was a positive experience for my partner, though; it’s not every day that a complete novice gets the beneficial learning experience of being creamed, eviscerated, and totally wiped out by Jo Nairn and Ren in the later bracketed rounds of a competition. And I say that in earnest, as nothing drives you to improve so much as being done in by the best of the lot.

Congratulations to Mike Kotrly and Rahool Agarwal, who won the tournament this year after a second-place finish apiece in the last two Nationals. Mikey I’ve talked about, but Rahool was also someone I was quite glad to see win. Yesterday, he definitely slowed down from the rapid-fire rhetoric he used to display, but he remained as analytically thorough as ever. Rahool was on his way out of Alberta in my novice year, and much of the values and debating philosophies to which I subscribe bear traces of his influence. For such an accomplished orator who was well aware of the distinction between good and bad debate and never hesitated to point it out, he was always eager to train us newcomers. It’s been a long road to the title, but he earned it.