How Music Works

...okay, so maybe the title of this blog entry is a little misleading: after all, we can't say we've figured out everything about music. Nonetheless, there's a 4 part documentary whose title is exactly that. It's a really good documentary, even if you already know all of the things it talks about. The presentation is simple and effective, all the while explaining a range of musical theory and historical anecdotes. Really great stuff. Obviously, it's a very Western centric view of music, but it seems to understand that.

The first part is melody, and it tracks the development of melodies and song structures over the centuries. It covers topics like the pentatonic scale, which is a scale found in almost every single culture. Neat stuff.



The second part is rhythm, and it introduces some basic time signature differences, and how rhythm shapes music.



The third part is harmony, and it explores the development of harmony, and what makes it sound good to us.



The fourth part is bass, and it shows how the idea of a bass instrument is relatively new, and how it plays a prominent role in modern music.



An important note! These videos are hosted on what looks like a Russian youtube-like site. I think they limit the bandwidth of each video some how, so sometimes not all the videos will load. Don't worry! Come back and try it again in a few hours, or on another day. It should work eventually.

A Guitar That's Meant to be Smashed

Here's an interesting product: SMASH guitars, by K's Japan. It's a guitar that's specifically designed to be... destroyed. It has grips in strategic places to better enable swinging and smashing the product, and is extremely light for the same reason. Furthermore, each individual part is made so that it breaks off easier! If you pick up the pieces and send it back to the company, they will recycle them and make a new one. You can also buy apps that produce visuals that are in sync with your smashing.

...and it actually works as an instrument, so it's playable too! All for around $50.
Want a more explosive version? They sell one that is filled with picks, so that when you smash it, you have an explosion of picks!

Strange concept, but I guess there's a niche market out there. What do you think?

SMASH by K's Japan

Virtuoso Theramin Playing

The theramin is one of the coolest instruments around, but I find that most people associate it with bad playing, or eerie sounds without real melodies. This is because there are very few true theramin players, and for good reason: it's one of the hardest instruments to play. (If you don't know what a theramin is, check out the wikipedia entry here. It's neat that it got used extensively in psychedelic music and such, but little do people know that it had a classical heritage - it was originally an instrument to play classical music!

So here's a few great theramin players: Randy George, who is a modern virtuoso, and Clara Rockmore, one of the original players of the instrument. You'll be completely surprised if you're used to thinking of the theremin as a soundtrack/psychedelic noise maker. It's really interesting how expressive it can be.

Here is Randy George playing "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley:


Here's Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns:

A National Anthem in 5 languages 5 writers and 2 keys: South Africa

If you wanted to show someone the emotional power that music can have, showing them a national anthem being sung at sports events might be a good example. National anthems are funny that way: most people certainly don't listen to their own national anthem on their own leisure time, and I suspect most people wouldn't say it's reflective of their taste in music either. Yet there's an appreciation and joy out of singing it with lots of people, or when we hear it being played at sports events. Now imagine being responsible for writing a national anthem! The pressure would be incredible - what do you say in it? what kind of music would it be? what language?

Now imagine that you're responsible for writing the national anthem for a deeply divided country with a history of oppression and violence between different groups....and you have South Africa in 1994.

As most of you know, South Africa emerged from apartheid in 94, with just such a history. It's totally fascinating what they did with the national anthem. At the time, Die Stem van Suid Afrika (written in Afrikaans, a language that is derived from Dutch) was the national anthem, with an official english version of it, The Call of South Africa. As you can imagine, the anthem represented oppression for most of the black population in South Africa. Instead, unofficially the song Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika was adopted as an anthem by anti-apartheid groups (which is, or has been, the national anthem for other nations in that region). If you've ever seen the film "cry freedom", one of the scenes involves a huge anti-apartheid meeting where the song is sung as an act of defiance, and it shows how significant the song became. It was a symbol of freedom and human rights. At the same time, the song represented terrorism and communism for the most of the whites, since that's what they were told by the government and media. So one divided country, with two national anthems, both hating the other.
*This is a crude summary of the complexities that existed in South Africa at the time, and in no way am I doing justice to the views that existed. I'm just trying to quickly show how divided the country was. If you want to know more about it, I suggest doing more research. This is not a forum for political discussion.*

In 94 - when Nelson Mandela became president - he ordered that both national anthems be adopted. So for awhile, South Africa had two official anthems. Then, in 96, both national anthems were combined into one, which is the current one that still remains. It's incredible - it starts off with Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in Xhosa, then Zulu, then Sesotho, then switches keys and goes into Die Stem van Suid Afrika in Afrikaans, then in English. Since it doesn't go back to the original key, it is also the only national anthem to be Neo-Modal. In total, the music is written by 2 writers and the lyrics are written by 5. How amazing is that? Hear's what it sounds like:



Here's a video of it being sung by the national rugby team during the 2007 world cup, which they won!