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This semester my admiration for Nick Drake has been obsessive. My iTunes calculates that I’ve spent over 72 hours listening to Pink Moon, my favorite of his albums. I’ve learned everything Wikipedia has to offer about his life story, his collaborators and his family. I’ve struggled daily to articulate why his music so compels me.
I’ve been walking past the photo exhibits in the long hallway in Perkins Library for a while. Right now, the exhibit features a photographer named Ronald Reis. It’s hard to find information about him even with a Google search, but it’s clear that most of the works exhibited are photos that Reis took in urban settings during the 1960s. It’s a time period when Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand were also documenting everyday city life.
Arts editor Katie Zaborsky and Music editor Dan Fishman sat down in front of an audio recorder Wednesday to record Recess’ first podcast of the year: a music review of James Blake’s new album, Overgrown. Below is the transcript of the first couple minutes of the conversation.
One of my goals for this year is to consume fewer works of art. If you know how much I love art that probably sounds like a strange and counterproductive goal. But hear me out.
After only a few minutes talking with each of this year’s PhD candidates in music composition, it’s clear that each takes a very different approach to the creation of classical music. Tim Hambourger makes musical miniatures: short movements he tightens until his language is both succinct and distinct. His work Last Wave Reached summons many of the adjectives used to describe the poet Kay Ryan, whose compact, intricate poems are woven throughout Hambourger’s composition. Dan Ruccia’s song cycle, which incorporates poems by Canadian sound poet Christian Bök, operates on a much larger scale than Hambourger’s. At times Ruccia describes the post-Philip Glass and post-Steve Reich sound world of Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons as “gigantic” and “overpowering,” the size of which Ruccia believes was a necessary response to Bök’s “monolithic” text. And then there’s Paul Swartzel, whose concerto Barbecue Man, Unleashed: The Greatest Professional Wrestling Work of All Time takes inspiration from the entrance music of WWE wrestlers.
This past week Duke announced a new minor in creative writing. The news spread with no great fanfare, and, excluding English majors, I doubt many students know about it. From what I can tell, it’s the first time Duke has ever marketed creative writing as something that warranted a credential.
At first glance, the disciplines of philosophy and music appear to have little in common. Whereas philosophers strive to create clear arguments using definable concepts, musicians compose melodies and symphonies that resist linguistic understanding. Whereas philosophy is hyper-verbal, music is predominantly non-verbal. When commenting on music, philosophers often speak in roundabout or simplistic ways (e.g. Schopenhauer once wrote that “music is the answer to the mystery of life”). Likewise, many composers explicitly allude to philosophical texts—e.g. Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra—but few musicians would say that their philosophy-inspired compositions have added to the substantive philosophical arguments or discussions surrounding the thinker’s work. Despite these difficulties, philosophers and musicians have long studied each other’s disciplines for both inspiration and new understanding.
It has been seventy years since the first publication of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Over time, the poem has been increasingly recognized as the poet’s magnum opus, his most impassioned attempt to find meaning in a world badly traumatized by two world wars. It’s a dark poem, at times ecstatic and intensely spiritual. For many artists, especially Christian artists, the work serves as a dependable source for inspiration and solace.
It’s hard to talk about the history of the Duke Wind Symphony without mentioning Paul Bryan. Among alumni who played under him during his thirty-eight year tenure, his status is legendary. Part musicologist, part conductor, the man who students call P.B. presided over many of the symphony’s most thriving years. He envisioned, planned and eventually led five semester-long concert tours and study abroad programs in Vienna, Austria for DWS members. A relentless advocate for the creation of compositions made especially for wind symphonies, he commissioned pieces by some of the most famous American composers for concert bands, many of which, including Norman Dello Joio’s “Variants on a Medieval Tune,” have been played by symphonies around the world. He’s published numerous academic articles on Haydn and Mozart, helped run Durham’s Youth Symphony and, even though he’s turning 93 in April, still plays the euphonium at many of the Duke Wind Symphony’s twice-weekly rehearsals. In 2008, former students of his worked with him to publish a book about his life and work under the apt title P.B., Who He?: Teacher, Not-your-usual Band Conductor, Musicologist and Human Being.
MUSIC
At 8 p.m. this Friday, Chapel Hill-based folk-pop band Lost in the Trees will join a chamber orchestra on the stage of Reynolds Theatre. The Duke Performances concert will run through the band’s latest album, A Church That Fits Our Needs. Recess Music Editor Dan Fishman spoke on the phone with Picker to discuss Friday’s show, his thoughts about the Triangle music scene and his favorite music of 2012.
This issue marks the last Recess of the fall semester. Most years this occasion prompts an editor to write something that resembles a state of the union address. I’d rather not do that—partially because Michaela wrote a wonderful overview of the semester during last week’s note—but also because, in my currently sleep-deprived state, the only thing I can imagine writing about is Emily Dickinson.
Another year, another year-end music review from Recess. 2012 gave us a wide array of solid music, including an impressive selection from young electronic musicians (e.g. Shackleton, Holly Herndon and Laurel Halo) and many solid new albums from unironic rock groups (e.g. Japandroids, Swans and Ty Segall). Everyone’s already talking or talked about some of our favorites—Grizzly Bear, Frank Ocean, Beach House, the xx, Kendrick Lamar and Fiona Apple—so we figured we would use this space to talk about the albums that didn’t get as much notice. Obviously we can’t write about all of the albums we enjoyed listening to, so if your favorite’s not on here, go to our list online and add a comment. Without further ado, the Recess-approved albums of 2012:
When I imagine Neil Young in my mind’s eye, the picture I see is from a YouTube video of “Old Man” from 1971. He’s so damn young. Long locks of brown hair extend past his shoulders. He still has the last remnants of baby fat on his unwrinkled cheeks. His head is cocked slightly to his left so that he looks a yard ahead of his feet when he plays. And singing that song, singing about how he finally understands his father… I don’t know how he can bring himself to play that song now—now that he’s an old man.
I like to think of the genres of art as different languages. Each genre—dance, music, painting, poetry, architecture, etc. —has its own grammar, its own sensory dominion, its own expertise, method, rigor, citation. Often the thrust of a painting can be translated into poetry (e.g. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”); the stoicism of a novel translated into the timbre of opera (e.g. Philip Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians). Some pieces of art are so language-specific that accurate translations are hopeless: imagine what Ulysses would look like as a painting, a photograph, a curated exhibit or an experimental film. There are new pidgin/hybrid arts that evolve every year, each with its own slang, and some of these dialects have grown to become major languages (e.g. graffiti, slam poetry, R&B) while others live to see their cultural importance shrink to near-obscurity (e.g. flipbooks, Polaroid photographs, royal portraiture). Someone who becomes fluent in a few different arts can more easily learn the next—which may partly explain the abundance of ‘poly-lingual’ artists—and there are good reasons to believe in a critical period for the acquisition of artistic communication.
I think about electronic dance LPs in the same way I think about baseball lineups. The opening track is equivalent to a leadoff hitter: great dance albums start quickly but don’t overwhelm with too much power. The job of the second track is to maintain momentum: in baseball terms, it moves the runner into scoring position. Around the ten-to-twelve minute mark is a dance record’s heart-of-the-order, its most memorable and high-energy tracks. From then on, songs need to preserve accumulated energy, wind down slowly but not too slowly, so as to position the lineup for another go-around.
Everyone agrees (or at least I hope everyone agrees) that we should remember Nina Simone. But which Simone? Simone was a woman of many hats. There’s Simone the Civil Rights activist: the Simone whose songs spoke so freely and so confidently about the suffering of black Americans that many southern states decided to boycott her music altogether. This is the Simone who was the mouthpiece for Langston Hughes’ “Backlash Blues,” the Simone of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Then there’s Simone the ‘High Priestess of Soul’ who wrote some of the most powerful and sexy lyrics of the last century—including my favorites, “Real Real” and “Do I Move You?” There’s Simone the fearless songwriter who rebelled against simplistic and degrading stereotypes about black womanhood (“Four Women”). And then there’s the Simone of gospel music, the Simone of blues, of Broadway, of folk, of jazz.
This coming December marks the ten-year anniversary of Reynolds Price’s Founder’s Day address. If you get nothing else from this editor’s note, I hope it prompts you to read Price’s speech. He speaks candidly about the status of Duke’s intellectual climate. He avoids the nebulous, hidebound responses that one might expect from a proud professor speaking about his alma mater. The address has had great meaning for me, more so as of late, now that I have more experience and a somewhat different perspective.
This isn’t G.R.E.A.T. Music. It’s G.O.O.D. Music. Cruel Summer isn’t and wasn’t ever going to be Kanye’s bid for immortality. He’s been there. He’s done that. Kanye doesn’t need to worry about prestige. Kanye calls himself the god of rap and nobody argues. Domo Genesis (of Odd Future) said in an interview with Pitchfork, “I think only one person is cool, and that’s Kanye.” Even President Obama is a fan. “I like Kanye. He’s a Chicago guy. Smart. He’s very talented. He’s a jackass. But he’s very talented,” said the POTUS in an interview with The Atlantic.
Tonight at 10:30 p.m. Matthew E. White will present what Hopscotch Music Festival co-director Grayson Currin calls “the biggest production that Hopscotch has ever done.” White and his 30+-person orchestra have arranged an all-acoustic rendition of his debut album Big Inner that, after tonight, will never be performed again. The final show of the night at Fletcher Opera House, White’s concert is billed under the moniker “One Incantation Under God,” which is an appropriately grandiose name for his unique blend of American spirituals, gospel music and dramatic arrangements of horns and strings. Recess Music Editor Dan Fishman talked on the phone with White about his new record, how he made his bones in the music industry and, of all things, White’s childhood obsession with Duke Basketball player Bobby Hurley.
