I’ll name that tune in 1
February 19, 2012
I was reminiscing recently about my old composer friend Janet Owen Thomas, who sadly died some years ago. A few of us wore specially made JANET OWEN THOMAS t-shirts when she had a piece performed at the proms – I wish I had pictures! Anyway, she once told me a story about showing her Oxford tutor a half-finished composition assignment in which she’d only got round to writing out the rhythms for the main voice and hadn’t put in any melody. Apparently he thought it was just great, and so she decided to leave the whole thing as a monotone.
Jan Thomas
There’s an enormous amount of music that sits on or hovers around a single note, and depending on the context it can be extremely expressive or hypnotically serene. There are whole genres and musical traditions that use very little melody – from rap, punk and minimal techno to numerous and varied forms of chant and ritual music around the world. Other types of music are built upon drone notes, such as Scottish bagpipe music, didgeridoo playing, and most Indian classical music, which typically uses the tanpura or an equivalent to provide a core tone grounding a complex elaboration of melody.
But what I want to write about today are examples of specific songs or compositions with radically stripped-down melody written in musical styles that generally do prioritise tunes. And the really outstanding example has to be Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Samba de Uma Nota Só.
Tom Jobim
The One Note Samba was a big hit during the global bossa nova craze of the mid 60s, and for me its studied simplicity contributes to it exemplifying the softly swinging, very non-street sexiness of that whole style.
It has long, highly syncopated lines sitting on the tonic and then the dominant, plus a contrasting section running up and down scales that provides a delicious balance in a burst of sunshine. Here’s Antônio himself performing live:
The lyrics by Newton Mendonça draw cheesy but slightly ambiguous parallels between the rules of music and human relationships:
“Anyone who wants the whole show,
Re mi fa sol la si do,
He will find himself with no show,
Better play the note you know.”
“So I come back to my first note,
As I must come back to you,
I will pour into that one note,
All the love I feel for you.”
As with many things, it’s better in Portuguese. (Though these lyrics were evidently too subtle for Cliff Richard, whose horrendous version substitutes a more easily comprehended message!)
The One Note Samba is all about harmony, rhythm and texture, and by taking away melody it really pushes the listener to notice what bossa nova is all about. It’s been recorded dozens of times, and one of my favourites is this version by Walter Wanderley, whose group gives it a gorgeous variety of instrumental colour using electric organ, guitar and trumpet. 
The thing I love best about Spotify is being able to feed an obsession by listening to all the obscure different recordings of a piece of music one after the other. Some of the more interesting ones in this case are by Astrud Gilberto, Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz, The Modern Jazz Quartet, João Gilberto, Joe Pass, George Shearing, Quincy Jones, Barbra Streisand, Stereolab and The Postmarks. It was even performed in episode 123 of the Muppet show according to the Muppet wiki.
However there definitely remains plenty of scope for new interpretations of the song. I was slightly surprised by the relatively narrow overall range of all the performances I found.
Before I move on, here’s a rather serious performance by guitarist Laurindo Almeida & the Modern Jazz Quartet (I love the introductory comments!):
There are two distinct ways in which a piece of music can be focused on one note: like the One Note Samba, using a monotone melody, generally above shifting harmonies and colours; or using a fixed drone as a central point around which the different elements of music are explored. The classic example of the second type is the celebrated Fantasia Upon One Note by Purcell, dating from about 1680.
Henry Purcell
Written for five viols, the alto sustains middle C for the entire duration of the piece, while elaborate polyphony and sometimes startling harmonies hover around this immovable centre. Elliott Carter describes the effect as “having a bell ringing throughout”.
There are good recordings by the Rose Consort Of Viols, Fretwork, the Ricercar Consort (YouTube), and adapted for modern instruments by the Escher String Quartet. I also found this vuvuzela enhanced version (in B flat):
Purcell’s piece has fascinated many modern composers, leading to a range of interesting realisations, elaborations and recompositions, including Oliver Knussen’s “… upon one note” (1995), Elliott Carter’s “Fantasy about Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note” (1977) for brass quintet, and versions by Peter Maxwell Davies and Steve Martland.
Staying with Elliott Carter for a moment, his serene Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for wind quartet include movements probably inspired by the Purcell that take things further. The third etude is composed entirely of a D major chord and the seventh truly is upon just one note.
Moving back closer to the world of Jobim – and perhaps this gave him the idea – we have Johnny One Note, a Rogers & Hart show tune with a ‘normal’ melody but featuring a high drone that reminds me of the expressive wire effects in Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. Here’s Anita O’Day singing it.
There’s also a sweet One Note Blues by Norwegian jazz ensemble The Real Thing. “Forget the samba, I got the one note blues.” Listen to it here.
Moving back to classical music, there’s an intriguing early set of piano pieces by György Ligeti called Musica Ricercata which progresses from extreme simplicity in the first pieces to using the full 12-tone scale by the end. The mournful second piece in the series, using three notes, was used to notable effect in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. But before that comes a piece almost exclusively on the note A, which gradually builds up a tremendous rhythmic propulsion:
Much of the mature work of the bizarrely little-known Italian master Giacinto Scelsi consists of subtle, meditative but often sonically lush microtonal explorations of single pitches. There’s an interesting article about him by Alex Ross here. And here’s the first of his Quattro Pezzi (Su una nota sola).
Experimental artist and composer LaMonte Young took some of these ideas to an extreme, effectively bringing together the one-note melody and the one-note drone in his Composition #7 (1960), which consists of a perfect fifth with the instruction “to be held for a long time.”
I’ll finish this post with a swift survey of a few other pieces I’ve been drawn to over the years that definitely aren’t one-note pieces, but dwell on a single note or chord at length for expressive purposes. It would be interesting to explore the different musical meanings a monotone can have: in some of these examples it clearly creates tension, seeking release in melodic movement; in others it gives rise to a certain inherent ecstasy that needs no resolution.
The second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony
Public Image Limited – Careering
The opening minutes of Das Rheingold
Plastic Bertrand – Ça Plane Pour Moi
Ebben! Ne andro lontana, frmo Catalani’s ‘La Wally’
Consort Sett a 6 in C major by William Lawes (second half)
And finally, this astounding moment from Peter Grimes:
Dance, pray, carve
February 12, 2012
My first awareness of Bali as anything more than an exotic faraway place came from reading the liner notes in a recording of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie that I’d borrowed from the local library, as mentioned in my last blogpost. As well as the extraordinary ondes martenot, Turangalîla includes an elaborate percussion section that evokes the clattering metallic sound world of the gamelan emsemble central to Balinese and Javanese traditional music.
A couple of years afterwards my Dad visited Bali en route to see family in Australia. I remember the stories and pictures of mountains, temples, monkeys, dancers, and especially the carvings he brought back: Garuda, king of birds and ruler of the sky, and one of those appealingly scary Hindu goddesses with flailing arms and perfectly hemispherical breasts.
Then I spent a year studying music in York, and that was when I really got interested in Bali and the gamelan. Asian music expert Neil Sorrell had set up one of the UK’s first gamelans in the York music department, and I was able not only to hear performances but even to have a go at playing.
I won’t try to explain Balinese music in any detail here as it’s a huge subject and it’s been done hundreds of times before. Suffice it to say that the gamelan is an ensemble dominated by percussion – particularly gongs, chimes and a variety of instruments with tuned bars similar to the glockenspiel and xylophone. Other instruments and also voices are used, but the overall effect is of a hypnotic, repetitive metallic sound built up of subtly shifting interlocking patterns. The sound is utterly unique because of Bali’s distinctive position as an isolated Hindu culture, preserving and independently developing cultural threads for centuries that have long been lost elsewhere.
I remember reading a quote from John Adams to the effect that great music needs to fully engage the listener’s emotional and intellectual faculties, and mentioning the Balinese gamelan as an example of music that fails that test. Well, possibly … its impact is certainly more on the sensual, psychedlic side of things than intellectual, and I’m sure that partly explains its appeal. It’s often highly reminiscent of seventies minimal music. In my life there has always been room for the sensual, emotional and intellectual in music, and they don’t all need to be present at once. And of course Balinese music only really comes to life in its religious and theatrical context.
The York gamelan is actually Javanese, which is a little different to Balinese, more in performance style than instrumentation. Balinese music is louder and faster and has a reckless intensity quite unlike the beguiling ritual sound of the Javanese gamelan. The other major difference is the social context: the sheer abundance of music all over Bali. Virtually every village has a gamelan, and it accompanies religious rituals from birth to death, plus dance and wayang performances telling the vivid stories of gods and heroes, and has now become a major tourist phenomenon.
So when I set off travelling in 1995 Bali was inevitably going to be a top destination for me. But I didn’t really know what to expect.
First sight of Bali from Lombok
I’ve turned to my travel diary to see how I reacted, and it’s clear that there was a double process going on. Firstly, a gradual realisation, including frustration and then acceptance, of how busy, densely populated and simply teeming full of stuff Bali is, with mile after mile of choked streets lined with shops and every kind of trade – immediate abandonment of any fantasy of a conventional tropical paradise being essential. But secondly, a growing awe at the abundance and concentration of art, music, religious observance, myth – and really every form of creative human activity, all apparently bound up with everyday life. A few quotes from my diary:
“first day in Bali and I walked along a black-sand beach lined with fishing boats bearing monster heads with bulging eyes and gaping jaws”
“a disappointing 16-mile walk to visit various crumbling thousand-year old temples surrounded by traffic and wearisome commercial bustle”
“Barong dance far more wonderful, fascinating and entertaining than anything I had expected … a large benevolent monster operated like a grotesque pantomime horse; highly operatic hollering and squealing as the gamelan clanged”
(I also saw the kecak, an extraordinary spectacle in which instruments are replaced by a whole villageful of people crammed into a small space who sort of imitate a gamelan – trancey rhythmic chak-e-chak-e-chak patterns mixed with howls and screeches in old Balinese, while serene dancers face down snarling monsters with angular grace.)
“eerily calm walking past a kilometre of souvenir stalls as I approached the temple in the early morning … only those wishing to pray could enter, but pray and pay seemed to be interchangeable words”
“the aesthetic of Bali: a dancer so heavily laden with costume as to be almost a cube, muscles constantly tense, limbs bent, standing at a wonky angle and always aghast in a fierce bulging snarl”
“an 11km walk to see some white herons … passed football games, outdoor table tennis, a lengthy street entirely consisting of Garuda carving workshops, a tug of war about to be won by a large group of women, and a colourful shop advertising PARASITE – ANGLE – DUCK”
Well I left Bali absolutely loving it.
I distinctly recall meeting an American gentleman who told me his story of having felt a sense of homecoming on first visiting the island, and so had decided to stay, and had become a Balinese Hindu priest. At the time I imagine I was quite challenged not to find that ridiculous. Now, having known so many people who have taken extraordinary paths through life, it makes complete sense to me that an individual could make that kind of choice.
Back home I bought the CDs (see below) and spread the word, and when I started dancing myself later on I drew that spiky monstrous (and anti-monstrous) aesthetic into my own repertoire of movement.
It’s hard to find good quality videos of Balinese performance that give any kind of fair impression – the one below and these here and here are among the better ones. There are also some great images of musicians and dancers here.
I’ve found that many European composers have been drawn to the gamelan and influenced more or less explicitly by it. Here are a few good examples (all links open in Spotify):
Messiaen – Turangalîla-Symphonie
Poulenc – Concerto for two pianos
Britten – The Prince of the Pagodas
Reich – Music for 18 Musicians
Cage – A Room (for prepared piano)
Britten’s late work is particularly steeped in Balinese sounds, following his trip there with Peter Pears in 1957. In The Prince of the Pagodas he uses rather intricate forms of counterpoint and polytonality to simulate an oral tradition – the texture and tuning of gamelan instruments.
Finally here’s a ‘Balinese’ étude by Ligeti. Apparently ‘Galamb Borong’ is a made up cod-Indonesian phrase that has no meaning!
Fifteen years later I returned to Bali, with Vanessa and our good friends Matthew and Maureen. I wrote a short guest post on their blog soon after we arrived, describing the unique Balinese urban jungle that seemed largely unchanged, though I’m sure the amount of road traffic must have increased.
I noted that over the intervening years I’d gained much more appreciation of two things that would enrich my experience in Bali – eastern religion and plant life. I still loved the music and dance – we saw the legong, barong, kecak, and also wayang kulit – but this time I was much more drawn to nature, and even more to the profusion of religious art and architecture visible all around.
On our second day we visited a watery palace to the east of Ubud in which I fell in love with the statues in various stages of mossy decay. Everywhere you look in Bali are reminders of impermanance; destruction and renewal. The island is so wet, and so green, that the soft stone crumbles and rots giving a sense of antiquity that isn’t always real. Statues therefore seem more alive, part of the community, than works of art to be admired and preserved. And they are so extraordinarily and publicly abundant.
Looking out from a café we noticed two piles of bricks stacked high, one on either side of an approach to a building. A few days later we were sitting in exactly the same spot when two sculptors arrived with tools and buckets of water and started turning these bricks into art. We watched in fascination. There’s something very palpably Hindu about these ongoing processes of creation and destruction being apparent the whole time in the streets of Ubud. 
My fascination with Balinese carvings led to a huge number of photos, and back home I decided to make something as a souvenir. Perhaps encouraged by the startling, luminous, repetitive feel of Balinese music I decided to take a single representative statue and make a bold, simple pop image by manipulating colours in various ways and fixing together a big rectangular array of prints. The image here is just an approximation in Photoshop to give the idea – the real thing is made of many more prints glued together and framed.
A few final words about the gamelan. There are now far more ensembles in the UK than back in 1990 – as listed here – though most are Javanese. Lila Cita is a London-based Balinese ensemble, and the Southbank Gamelan Players perform Javanese traditional and new music on a gamelan that is also available for workhops and courses. This is the second Gamelan I’ve had a chance to try – highly recommended!
The York University emsemble is still active and is in the forefront of composition of new music for gamelan instruments.
For composers and producers who want an easier option, there’s the sample library from Soniccouture.
Recommended recordings of Balinese music:
Musical inventions (book 1)
February 5, 2012
Last night I had the great pleasure of attending an excellent performance of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony given by the London Philharmonic under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the luxury of having really good seats (generously donated by a kind friend in the fiddles) meant I noticed the horn players switching back and forth to their Wagner Tubas much more than I ever had before.
This set me thinking about some of the more unusual musical instruments out there – where they come from, how they are used, and how you might get hold of them. I’ve not set out to find the oddest, rarest, most beautiful, or ugliest, but simply some that have fascinated and delighted me over the years.
(I’ve split the post into two parts because I keep being drawn down all sorts of internet rabbit-holes and I haven’t been able to resist writing a page about each instrument, rather than just a paragraph and picture as planned. A prize for anyone who can guess what’s on the second half of the list!)
1. Wagner Tuba
First used in early performances of the Ring in the 1870s, this horn-tuba hybrid had a long period of gestation, beginning in the 1850s and only coming to a stable conclusion with the delivery of a definitive Bayreuth set in 1890. It looks like a miniature tuba but is technically an elongated horn, and since it has horn mouth parts it’s generally played by the horn section. Wagner wanted to enrich the orchestral brass balance, bridging the gap between the sound of the horn and the trombone. He probably also wanted to evoke an imagined sense of ancient Nordic horns, though the practical inspiration came from various new band instruments developed in nineteenth century Germany, and also from the experiments of Adolphe Sax.
The Wagner Tuba is in fact a sensitive instrument, producing a mellow, focused sound with little blare, and it’s generally used at solemn, quiet moments in the Ring, and similarly in Bruckner’s last three symphonies.
Which means it’s actually quite hard to point out obvious examples on record, because it tends to be hidden within a rich ensemble. I found this great piece of historic rehearsal footage conducted by Solti which has helpful annotations!
There are good Bruckner examples here (at 7:45) and here (at 2:45) – the latter is entertaining as an example of the bizarre Karajan idolatry that developed in his dotage.
Those late Bruckner symphonies, written in the years following Wagner’s death, probably include the most notable writing for the instrument. Less well known is that it was taken up by Richard Strauss (in quite a few works including Don Quixote, Elektra and Eine Alpensinfonie) and more surprisingly Stravinsky (The Firebird, The Rite of Spring). Many more recent composers have included it in ensembles, including Rautavaara, Henze, Zimmermann, Lutyens (with a very prominent role in Quincunx), and Gubaidulina (the Viola Concerto). Google finds no results at all for “Wagner Tuba Concerto”, which is probably a good thing. There is said to be a Stokowski Bach arrangement using it, and last but by no means least I must mention Mike Post’s theme music for The Rockford Files!
The much more common euphonium is sometimes used as a substitute instrument in the orchestra, and to my surprise this works both ways – apparently performances of The Planets in the Germanic world may resort to Wagner Tubas!
They’re available from Alexander and a few other manufacturers for £3000 or so apiece. One retailer notes helpfully that the valve technology employed is “well suited to the long storage periods that Wagner Tubas are often required to endure” – which I’m sure is an issue for all the instruments on this list!
2. Mahler Hammer
The tragic finale of Mahler’s sixth symphony features a series of brutal interruptions by an extravagantly vicious hammer, symbolising mighty blows of fate. In Mahler’s words, the sound should be “brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe).”
A great mythology has developed around this Mahler Hammer, in keeping with the past century’s gradual mystical glorification of Mahler (I blame Willy Russell). The instrument itself has been refined over the decades and is generally now agreed to be a weighty flat-headed wooden mallet, though some say it’s the box it hits that’s more important for the sound. It even has a Facebook fan page. 
Personally my feeling is that the Mahler Hammer really shouldn’t be considered a proper instrument. If I were putting on Mahler 6 I would want to dig into my own dark side and improvise my own imagined violence. However, there is a standard version, and it can be hired for £35! Could be great for a party, though I imagine the pricing assumes you only hit it three times. Sadly there are no user reviews on the website.
Here’s a great Bernstein-directed Hammerschlag:
I’ve only just remembered that I heard Mahler’s sixth symphony at (I think) the first classical concert I ever attended – with Simon Rattle no less at the 1984 Proms (scherzo placed third). And now I’ve found the Proms archive – oh dear …
3. Baryton
The baryton is a large and rather eccentric viol with six or seven bowed strings plus ten or more sympathetic resonating strings that can also be plucked with the fingers. It was popular in parts of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and by occidental standards it’s a remarkably complicated instrument. It’s really only remembered today because Haydn wrote about 175 pieces for it, mostly string trios – which he did because his employer Nikolaus Esterházy was an enthusiastic player. 
Unfortunately Nikolaus was not a great virtuoso, judging by the music. Haydn’s pieces are inventive but don’t really test the possibilities of the instrument. I’d quite like to have heard a Baryton Sequenza by Berio, but that’s unlikely now.
One of the more expressive pieces I’ve found is Haydn’s Trio No. 87 (Spotify link). There’s more information at the International Baryton Society and on the website of the Haydn Baryton Trio Budapest (with samples).
The baryton has a distinctive delicate sound, coloured by the aura of resonance, but the overall effect is a little wet compared to Asian instruments like the sitar and sarod. I opened the website of the Esterházy Ensemble while No. 87 was still playing in Spotify and it launched straight into an intro sample. I found the effect of two of these pieces playing together in different keys to be my best musical experience of the baryton. I recommend trying it. The Esterházy Ensemble have recorded a complete edition on 21 CDs, but you’ll only need two.
4. Stereophonic Double Violin
Indian-born violinist Lakshminarayanan Shankar (also known as L. Shankar, just Shankar, and now apparently Shenkar – what next: Schenker?) invented this instrument, which gives a single player the five and a half octave range of a full string orchestra.
Built by noted guitar maker Ken Parker, it has ten strings and is electrically amplified. The other proponent of the instrument is Gingger Shankar (relationship unclear), and according to her website there are only two instruments in existence.
For Shankar’s small-group jazz-influenced music it seems to me a really good idea, avoiding the need for lots of overdubbing in recording and prepared backing tracks in live performance. It’s used very effectively in a series of ECM recordings from the 1980s, including Who’s to Know and one of my all-time favourites, Song for Everyone (with Trilok Gurtu, Jan Garbarek and Zakir Hussain.
5. Ondes Martenot
Now this is probably my favourite instrument in the whole list of ten. Borrowing the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen from Dunstable library aged about 17 was absolutely one of my life-changing musical experiences. It was the 1967 Ozawa recording, so I got Takemitsu’s November Steps as a bonus. The squealing, shrieking and buzzing of the Ondes Martenot, eerie, mischievous and erotic, was just one among many extraordinary aspects of this work that set my imagination aflame, probably touching on earlier teenage enthusiasms for the music of Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. It was great to discover the radical side of classical music so early on.
It’s also probably safe to say that the Ondes would by now have been relegated to the world of musical instrument museums if it hadn’t been taken up by Messiaen, in particular in Turangalîla, which now appears to have established a firm place in the orchestral repertoire.
One of the earliest electric musical instruments, the Ondes was invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, bringing together his experience as a cellist and wartime radio transmission expert. It has the very distinctive feature of being controlled by sliding a metal finger ring along a wire (ruban), which is stretched over a piano-style keyboard to indicate pitch. The ruban allows expressive analogue glissandi and vibrato, and combined with a set of timbre controls, foot pedals and specially designed speakers (including the ‘palme’) allows a surprisingly wide range of expression, considering the underlying sounds are pretty basic – sine wave, square wave etc.
Messiaen’s sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod, who died by drowning in 2001, was for decades the leading exponent of the Ondes. She had a repertoire including 14 Ondes concertos, and wrote a definitive three-volume treatise for players. Other notable virtuosi have included Cynthia Millar, rare instrument specialist Thomas Bloch (who also plays Glass Armonica, Cristal Baschet and Theremin Cello), Tristan Murail (also an exceptionally interesting composer), who performed in Turangalîla with the Berlin Philharmonic at the 2008 Proms, and Christine Ott.
Here’s Cynthia Millar in the fifth movement:
Messiaen used the Ondes in several other works, including six in Fête des Belles Eaux and three in his opera Saint-François d’Assise. Other notable composers for it have included Honegger, Milhaud and Jolivet. There’s an early quartet for four Ondes by Boulez (withdrawn of course), and apparently there is a Stokowski arrangement of a piece by Buxtehude that uses it … hmm, a theme is developing here! However, it’s really only Turangalîla that has ensured the instrument’s survival. 
Some of the imagery and compositions from the early days of the Ondes suggest a kind of ethereal Satiesque cod-occult aesthetic that could easily have led to it being sadly past its time before it had a chance to be avant-garde.
Not surprisingly it was widely taken up by film and television composers, generally exploiting its capacity for spookiness, before smaller and cheaper electronic instruments became available, and also to some extent since. In recent years Jonny Greenwood has championed it, using it in many Radiohead songs and even taking part in a performance of Fête des Belles Eaux.
As for where to buy an one … well, you certainly can’t just order online. Apparently they are now available under the auspices of M. Martenot’s son, and there is also a similar instrument available outside the family called the Ondéa. I’ve heard rumours of $20000, and I imagine it’s one of those purchases like an old Harley that needs a lifetime of commitment to maintenance. There is a simplified Ondes-inspired synth from Analogue Systems called the French Connection – clearly a compromise, but it looks good, and does have the authentic ruban.
