House concert in CA

The idea for house concerts is neither a new fad nor the latest. Most of us are familiar with the concept of patrons of the arts opening their homes to artists of the classical music persuasion.

These patrons host a private event where friends are entertained, and have the opportunity to mingle with the artist(s). The chance to get intimate with the artist(s) while they spin an exotic yarn or two is often the real reason these musical soirées have ample attendance, and why a reply to Répondez s’il vous plaît is never tardy.

House concert in CA

In America, the trend for house concerts by mainstream – pop artists has become a ‘household’ name, to a point where societies in support of this activity have sprung up to provide helpful hints for hosts and artists alike. (continue reading…)

On the road to Nashville

I set out to investigate Nashville two months ago; an idea that came about from a chat with Tom Brislin (Spiraling).
On the balmy evening of August 21st 2009, Tom and I had positioned ourselves upstairs at the serving area of Bar East Ale House in NYC. I had just met with NJ band Suspyre, their manager and UsaProgMusic editor Jill Hughes Kirtland, and Tom himself, for the article Age of Aquarius; Renaissance Raising.

Texture in Fall

Contrast of red and green

With ‘brew’ in hand, we began an extended conversational ‘trip’ that looked into the depths of ourselves as musicians, but more so about the searching for that success which only each motivated individual can define. Where do we go from here, we asked each other rhetorically.

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Grapevine Opry at rehearsal (Dallas, Texas)

I first got a whiff of this ‘Country Road’ as a kid living in Singapore; Denver wrote fantastical lyrics that espoused all-American living with a tinge of the hippie culture; Woodstock was birthed in the year 1969.

As the power of marketing grew exponentially along with mass media, popular culture took the fast lane down the worldwide multimedia freeway with a grin on its cherubic face!

In my rear view mirror I watch as ‘Country Road’ overtook me to stop at Akasaka’s Bob Lounge where Tokyo’s Cowboy Bob sings soulfully with a twang.

A note for us living in America; the rest of the world gets a delayed effect on our syndicated programs and often live in a pop culture time warp.

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Nine Inch Nails (NIN) frontman Trent Reznor is saying goodbye to more than just the concert stage with the current NIN Wave Goodbye global tour. He’s also saying goodbye to his online persona he’s nurtured on Twitter, after recently quitting the microblogging service.

But even as he took the stage a few hours ago (Monday night) at Singapore’s Fort Canning Park in an effort to let his music, not his tweets, do the talking, there was no escaping that for many fans at the open-air gig, Reznor remains very much an Internet personality and NIN is clearly still an imitably tech-savvy band.

iPhone-toting concert goers chatted with each using the band’s NIN: Access mobile app, and NIN photographer/designer Rob Sheridan photo-blogged to the NIN website from his new iPhone 3GS right from his sweet spot at the foot of the stage. As you can see from his photo on the left, it’s pretty good, and a far cry from the noisy shot below on the right that I snapped on the exact same hardware.

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REDCAT/CalArts Theater CA

I visit the Roy and Edna Disney theater, an adjunct to CalArts in downtown LA at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St.

As I wait to the cross at the traffic lights, I gaze upon the swirls of the architectural sails that remind me of the Sydney Opera House, but on a smaller scale.

REDCAT its acronym conjures synesthetic imagery. (#1)
Red is power, passion, prosperity, new life, the colour for stop …

Red is permission says Lauren Pratt, Associate Producer for Music (REDCAT/Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts) who meets me with Associate Director, George Lugg, for a Californian pow-wow.

Lauren: “Artists are given permission to work outside their realm of enquiry and try something they might not have tried before or thought was possible. They feel it is a truly experimental place for them.” To quote such an instance, Lou Reed in the Fall of 2008, worked with Ulrich Krieger to orchestrate a free Improv work in the noise realm entitled ‘Unclassified’. Reed and Krieger first met in 2002 for ‘Metal Machine Music’.

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One of Coca Cola’s most successful advertisements was centred around a group of ethnically-diverse people, perched on a hilltop singing a song by the New Seekers. Entitled I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke, it was Bill Backer’s idea for the beverage to be “a commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes”. Bill – then creative director on the Coca-Cola account - came up with the idea after being stuck in an airport hotel due to inclement weather. This was in 1971. The rest is ad history. (#1)

This is also the story of Ge Wang, music professor and SMULE cofounder.

We meet at CCRMA, Stanford University CA, one sunny day in June 2009, and Ge tells me he wants to teach the world to sing, but with the iPhone.

Who would imagine that one day our cellphones would be musical instruments? Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson did in an interview I conducted with her in 2003. (#2)

Seven years later I meet the man who makes her dream come true. Seven years later, the cellphone has reached pandemic proportions.

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I must confess that I’ve overdramatized this post’s title but it’s my way of recapping a great week for classical music in Singapore.

On Wednesday, June 10, British pianist Joanna MacGregor played a two-hour set at the Esplanade Concert Hall. And the same venue hosted various combinations of viola virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, his Moscow Soloists string orchestra, and the Moscow State Chamber Choir that very Thursday to Saturday, June  12-14.

I’d like to look at the performing personalities of these musicians – not their artistic or technical calibres but how they behave on stage – and how that affected their relationship with Singaporean audiences, as well as what that could mean for the evolution of audience-artist interaction in general.

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Some of the people who heard jazz singer Richard Jackson perform at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall last weekend (May 29-30) with Jeremy Monteiro, the T’ang Quartet, Randy Brecker, Ernie Watts and Christy Smith probably thought he flew in just for the Arts Festival, just like his fellow Americans Brecker and Watts did.

That couldn’t be further off the mark, however, because Jackson has been based in Singapore for over a year at the Boat Quay branch of Harry’s jazz bar, where bass player Smith is a veteran. His relative obscurity shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise though since in Singapore, more than many other places, familiarity breeds contempt.

Too often, the assumption is that you can’t possibly be all that talented if you had to come all the way to a cultural backwater like Singapore to get a gig; you’re only worth seeing if you deign to set foot here for an occasional performance before returning to New York.

However, that kind of cultural near-sightedness means that we Singaporeans too often miss what’s lurking right under our noses because we’re too busy gazing at Europe and the USA.

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A huge thank you to Shueh-li of Xenovibes for being our first artist guest blogger, and for starting off with such an interesting and thoughtful post on Midi. There’s really no substitute for the perspective of an artist who has actually used technology to make a living. When your music and career’s on the line, that’s when you find out if a gizmo works or not.

However, I think it’s worth exploring some of the downsides of Midi in more detail.

It’s important to distinguish between Midi as a control protocol (eg, Midi pedals and mixers that use Midi to control parameters like volume and panning) and Midi as a medium for recording music performances. The former relies primarily on Midi continuous controller (CC) signals – turn a knob and a stream of info gets sent to gradually adjust a setting; while the latter relies on Midi note signals – press a key on a Midi keyboard and the corresponding note gets played by a synthesizer or sampler and/or recorded.

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It’s most interesting how Midi has taken the world by storm, yet very little is known about this humble but intelligent servant.
Born in 1981 to audio/design engineers Dave Smith and Chet Wood, Midi brought the world together by becoming the universal language for synthesizers and computers to exchange information about a musical performance (the tune “It’s a small world” plays in the background.)

Within the shell of the interface that gave inter-connectability to electronic musical instruments was the common language that later took on a role that extended far beyond its beginnings as a musical slave.

This protocol consists of the parameters of a musical performance and the operations of the synthesizer, and could include note-on and off messages, velocity, pressure, continuous controller expressions, use of the pitch-bend wheel, footswitch, etc. Represented by bits, bytes, words and nibbles these messages are now being used to gain control of other “intelligent performance machines” such as lighting boards, theatrical equipment and computer graphic generation in real-time interactive shows.

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