Category: Music

How good a song is Quarter to Three?

You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds?  I’ve been thinking about this question for months.  I feel a good amount is at stake.  If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably.  But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history of popular music (and film) in the earlier twentieth century needs to be rewritten.

What makes the song such a classic?  Claude praises “the upbeat rhythm, engaging call-and-response vocals, relatable lyrics, catchy melody, historical context, and instrumental breaks,” but none of those seem quite scarce or special enough to elevate the tune to classic status.  With a bit of prodding Claude also cited “raw, unpolished energy,” a genuine sense of fun, and “chemistry amongst the performers.”  To that you might add a creative use of repetition and small, stepwise changes, plenty of syncopation, and the hooks are iconic.  The use of echo and phase shifting looks to the future, and the shuffle-like groove drew on calypso influences and also ska.  Nonetheless the chord structure, while effective, is hardly revelatory.

So I’m still wondering — if a song has that ineffable “something” — how much is that the product of our collective imaginations?  How much is it real and objectively there?  Or does a Generation Z teen, with a very different ear, dismiss it as muddled and mediocre rather than memorable?  After all, Gary’s career was not replete with enduring creations.

A critic could allege the dance lyrics are ordinary and the production sloppy.  But was that all part of the calculation?  Wikipedia relates:

The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like.

Bob Roman wrote:

The song opens with muffled crowd noise and a bandleader counting off the beginning of a song. It’s not a live recording, but it sounds like one — and not even like a good one. It sounds like an amazing party happening down the street — wild, frenzied, mysterious, its sound obscured by what might as well be a couple of sets of walls. In any era, it’s crazy that a record this lo-fi managed to hit #1. In the pre-Beatles era where labels were pushing cleaned-up teenage dreamboats, it seems especially strange.

So we’ve got amazing hooks, controlled chaos, and extreme innovation?

The song also has a lineage.  Bill Wyman put it on one of his solo albums.  It inspired Dion’s “Runaround Sue.”  Bruce Springsteen played it regularly in his concerts, and later worked with Gary, writing songs for him and doing two albums together.  Most importantly, Paul McCartney references it in his Sgt. Pepper classic “When I’m Sixty-Four“:

If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?

In essence Paul is teasing us with the notion that the 64-year-old McCartney might someday still be out there, dancing, rather than knitting tea cozies on the Isle of Wight.  And true to Straussian form, Paul released the dance song “Dance Tonight” when he was sixty-four, days before turning sixty-five.

In 1963, during a Beatles European tour, Gary U.S. Bonds was the headliner for them.

You will note that the lineage of the song runs mostly through white performers, though Gary U.S. Bonds was black (or possibly mixed race).  Perhaps one special feature of Quarter to Three is how it spans black and also white R&B, a rare feature at the time but hearkening back to the much earlier years of the blues, when black and white musical styles could be hard to distinguish.  In addition to the Caribbean vein, Gary could span Latino styles as well.

Just as we are finding it impossible to rebuild Notre Dame cathedral as it was, a mere sixty-three years later could any of us still make something akin to “Quarter to Three”?  Or have we lost those “technologies”?

I, for one, have decided to vote in favor of masterpiece status for Quarter to Three.  At least for now.  And by the way Gary U.S. Bonds is still on tour.

How I listen to music

Ian Leslie writes to me:

I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.

I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post.  And I’ve already written about satellite radio.  As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music.  A few more specific points:

1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.

2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning.  They are evening music.

3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.

4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live.  Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”

4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label.  I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine.  I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify.  That is my primary use of those services, at least for music.  That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.

5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.

6. Bach gets the most listening time.

7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen.  Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.

8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time.  Though not when Natasha is home.  Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home.  Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.

9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere.  As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists.  I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.

10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment.  That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.

11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs.  And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.

12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding.  (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.)  As time passes, I am throwing out more discs.  For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.

Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire.  It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery.  I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.

And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.

My Conversation with the very excellent Masaaki Suzuki

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, we recorded in NYC.  Here is the episode summary:

A conductor, harpsichordist, and organist, Masaaki Suzuki stands as a towering figure in Baroque music, renowned for his comprehensive and top-tier recordings of Bach’s works, including all of Bach’s sacred and secular cantatas. Suzuki’s unparalleled dedication extends beyond Bach, with significant contributions to the works of Mozart, Handel, and other 18th-century composers. He is the founder of the Bach Collegium Japan, an artist in residence at Yale, and conducts orchestras and choruses around the world.

Tyler sat down with Suzuki to discuss the innovation and novelty in Bach’s St. John’s Passion, whether Suzuki’s Calvinist background influences his musical interpretation, his initial encounter with Bach through Karl Richter, whether older recordings of Bach have held up, why he trained in the Netherlands, what he looks for in young musicians, how Japanese players appreciate Bach differently, whether Christianity could have ever succeeded in Japan, why Bach’s larger vocal works were neglected for so long, how often Bach heard his masterworks performed, why Suzuki’s  favorite organ is in Groningen, what he thinks of Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach, what contemporary music he enjoys, what he’ll do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: You’re from Kobe, right? That was originally a Christian center along with Nagasaki.

SUZUKI: Exactly.

COWEN: Because they were port cities. Is that why?

SUZUKI: Yes, Kobe is one of the most important after the reopening of Japan in 1868. There are probably two, Kobe and Yokohama, and even Sendai — the port places. This was very important to accept any kind of culture from the outside, but Christianity came in. For example, the oldest Protestant church is in Yokohama. That is the end of 19th century. That’s a really interesting history.

COWEN: How do Japanese audiences for classical music, say in Tokyo, differ from New York audiences?

SUZUKI: Hmmm, probably a little different. American audience are more friendly, I think.

[laughter]

More friendly and more easily excited by the performance, and they look more inspired directly from the music, and also musicians. In Japan, Japanese audiences — sometimes they know very well about the repertoire and they are very cooperative, but at the same time, they are a little bit, well, not so excited immediately. Probably on the inside, very excited, but we Japanese people don’t express directly from inside to outside. We were all told in school, for example, that is a rule. That is not the intellectual demeanor — something like that.

Of course most of the conversation is about Bach.  Self-recommending, and then some.

What should I ask Coleman Hughes?

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.  On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Also from Wikipedia:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer.  So what should I ask Coleman?

Should AM radios be mandated in cars?

No. Here is my Bloomberg column to that effect, excerpt:

Personally, I prefer to listen to XM satellite radio, a paid subscription service. It features channels that appeal to my specific tastes (in this case, if you’re asking, the Beatles, classical music and various Spanish-language programs). AM radio, which is usually advertiser-supported, tends to have more of a “least common denominator” flavor, as it must attract many listeners to pull in the ad revenue. I do not think the federal government should be using the force of law to favor cultural options that are already trying to appeal to the least common denominator.

When I bought my current car, it was capable of receiving a satellite radio signal, and I simply had to request that it be turned on. (This ease of use is one reason why I purchased the model, so the commercial considerations here are real.) There was no law requiring the satellite radio option — just as there should be none requiring an AM radio option. This symmetry of treatment meets standards of both fairness and economic efficiency.

So I’ll say it again, no AM radio should not be mandated in cars, even though Congress is thinking of doing this on a bipartisan basis.

The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)

In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs.  High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’.  What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation.  Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.

To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war.  He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home.  The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation.  Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson.  With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland.  The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory.  But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar.  And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.

That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.

Rasheed Griffith podcast with Andrew Mellor

Here is the audio and transcript, Mellor is the author of one of my favorite books in recent years The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture.  Excerpt:

Rasheed: I’m going to jump right into the first question. Why are there no great Swedish composers?

Andrew: That’s a good question. That is one many of us have asked ourselves many times. There’s something about Sweden’s status in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, where it didn’t have this desperation to prove itself and to emancipate itself.

It had been a great nation, and it had been a huge imperial power, and it had lost everything. In a very modern sense, it came to the conclusion that that’s fine. We can exist as a small nation. Again, we don’t need to prove ourselves. We can just focus on a kind of creativity and happiness. And the legacy of that is still felt very much in Sweden today.

I just think the Swedish music isn’t that interesting in relation to theirs. It’s not that progressive. It’s very nice, but it didn’t push the envelope like Sibelius and Nielsen did. And therefore, it doesn’t still seem so relevant. I don’t know why.

It must be somehow connected to Sweden’s grand aristocratic history. It’s idea of itself. It’s always been the Nordic nation with nothing to prove almost. Maybe it still enjoys that status today. So yes, I don’t know, maybe, maybe there are more boring reasons for it, like the education system there or the system of progress and patronage was a little more tied up feudally, so talent didn’t necessarily get through. That’s the interesting thing about Carl Nielsen, of course, is that he was an absolute nobody, a working-class poor young man from a nothing family who, succeeded as a classical musician at a time when normally that you would have had to have status and education to have succeeded.

And of course, he had an education, but only because he was pushed into it by his community kind of gathering around him and raising the money for him to study. The short answer is, I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out yet. Maybe you have some thoughts on it.

And:

In the UK, Every BBC orchestra is headed by a Finn.

Recommended.

2023 CWT retrospective episode

Here is the link, here is the episode summary:

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.

And one excerpt:

COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.

I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.

HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.

COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.

Fun and interesting throughout.  If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.

Why is the quality of recorded classical music so rising? (from my email)

…hypotheses as to why we are blessed with the avalanche of fine new young musicians:

1. (I feel the evidence for this one is conclusive) Technology (e.g. YouTube) allows young musicians anywhere in the world to see what the world standard is. If you see someone performing at skill level X, which years ago you would have dismissed as out of reach, you know you, too, may be able to do it.  The bar has been raised. Members of the LA Phil famously declared Boulez’s music “unplayable” a few decades back. Now it is standard repertoire. The global standard is now local, and musicians rise to the challenge.

2. (I feel the evidence for this one is less conclusive, but still strong.)  The increasing pervasiveness of pedagogy. Decades ago, one assumed that the best teacher of violin playing (e.g.) was a great violinist. This is like assuming the best coach of running backs is a great running back. Over time, while the “exposure to a great player” tradition is still strong, a parallel tradition of “exposure to a great teacher” has emerged. These teachers understand biomechanics, clarity of terms in instruction, technical developments, etc. See e.g. Paul Rolland (RIP), another one of the Hungarian exiles, whose string teaching method is superb but who personally was not a major performer.

From anonymous, someone in the world of classical music…

My classical music listening for the year 2023

2023 has been one of my very best years for classic music listening.  I’ve discovered an unusually high number of excellent recordings, and made a lot of progress in understanding many composers better.  Most of all, that would be Bach, Scriabin, Byrd, Handel, Robert Ashley, and Caroline Shaw, but by no means exhausting the list.  For whatever reasons, I’ve just had an immense amount of emotional energy to put into these discoveries.

I thought I would write up a list of my favorite new recordings, but there are too many of them.  Here are just a few:

Handel, The Eight Great Suites and Overtures, Francesco Corti.  My whole life I’ve preferred these for piano, say by Richter.  Corti is converting me to the harpsichord versions.

Frank Peter Zimmermann, Bach, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, volumes one and two.  These are some of my favorite works to buy multiple versions of.  I started off preferring the Milstein recordings, which still are wonderful.  Last year went through a Biondi phase, now am enamored of these.  I never tire of these pieces.

Monteverdi, Vespro Della Beata Vergine, conducted by Raphaël Pichon, covered here by the NYT.  Monteverdi’s greatest work, and this recording has been receiving special praise from many quarters.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, the complete score (for the first time recorded), John Wilson and Sinfonia of London.

Here is the Alex Ross New Yorker classical music recording list: “I can’t remember a year of so many pleasure-inducing, addiction-triggering albums.”

You also might consult these 2023 recommendations from Gramophone, the ones I have heard are excellent, the others are high expected value.

It is a marvel that such a revenue-poor, streaming-intensive musical world is generating so many new and amazing recordings for virtually all kinds of classical music.  This is not what I was expecting five to ten years ago.

Another marvel is how many world-beating recordings are coming from young performers who do not have mega-strong preestablished reputations.  A lot of them I have never heard of before.

Most of all, I am pleased to see that beauty is proving so robust.

Merry Christmas everybody!

My favorite non-classical music of the year 2023

I liked these best:

Lankum, False Lankum.  Claims to be Irish folk music, but has ambient textures and is designed to alienate its core audience.

Yaeji, With a Hammer.  A mix of English and Korean, house and hip hop.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Boygenius, The Rest.  Four songs, twelve minutes.

Christine and the Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love.  Three CDs, weird, still growing on me.  By some French person.

Paul Simon, Seven Psalms.  Now he is partly deaf, and he was already singing about dying.

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile.

Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine.  Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering, and you can put her on a par with the very greatest of female jazz vocalists.

Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light.  From a free jazz collective, still vital.

Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.

Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors.  From the year before, but I discovered it this year, a blend of Haitian vodou and jazz.

I will be doing a separate post on classical music.  What do you all recommend in these categories?

Addendum: And, via Brett Reynolds, here is a Spotify playlist for those.