Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Think you’ve got a good ear for musical style and history? Listen to this extract les-elemens and try to put a date to it. Then look at the last title in the Selected Compositions list on this page for the answer.

You can hear more on YouTube.

The depth in which a new musical concept is explained varies greatly depending on the age of the pupils. Often, the first encounter of a concept contains little in the way of technical data, the main concern being to see whether or not the pupils can hear the concept.

One such concept is tonality – or the idea of a piece of music being in a certain key. In the first instance I mention no more than the fact that in most pieces have there exists one note which is the leader, the centre and the foundation of the piece. This seems to do the trick. I play a short extract and pupils then rummage around the fingerboard until they locate the centre of the piece. The gravitational pull is usually sufficiently strong to ensure that most will eventually get there. In fact, the pull is so strong that the key note does not even have to be present in the tune. If you play this extract, you will hear what the key note (aka tonic) should be and that, in fact, should have been present as the final note: click

This fact bewilders most pupils. An implied planet cannot exert a gravitational pull, so how can a note do it? Normally an analogy would be pulled out here to illustrate the point. The problem is that I can’t think of a convincing one. The nearest I can get is that in certain sentences, a missing verb is so obvious that it feels more or less present:

He ****** the ball so hard that it broke the crossbar

But even this sentence has room for doubt.

Can anyone out there think of a parallel situation in another subject?

How many countries are there in the world? How many of these have a musical culture of which you’ve never heard a note? Would it strike you as odd if one of these countries was Iraq – a place with which we have been heavily involved? I had never heard any Iraqi music live and so was delighted to discover that Reel Festivals was putting on an evening of Music of Iraq at the Roxy Art House on Saturday. This formed part of their Reel Iraq Festival.

The evening featured Farida with the Iraqi Maqam Ensemble, supported by the Babylon Arabic Band. Both groups were very affectionately received and there was an engagingly enthusiastic, participatory feel. This video will give you some idea of Farida and the Iraqi Maqam Ensemble:

If you’ve never heard any Sufi music from Afghanistan you might like to catch a return visit to Edinburgh of the Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawali Group at the Roxy Art House on Tue 26^th May. I saw this group in a fantastic performance in The Queens Hall last year. Here is an excerpt of the email which alerted me to the upcoming event:

The Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawali group is the most famous Qawali group in Afghanistan at the moment. They will be performing at the Roxy Art House on Tuesday, May 26th. The doors will open at 6.30 and music should begin around 7.30. We aim to convert the Roxy into as close an approximation of an Afghan Sufi house as possible for this. As such we won’t have a fixed price for entry, but will ask for £5 suggested donation. More of course will be much appreciated by the sufi group, all money will go towards covering their costs and any left over will be donated to an Afghan Charity. Last year the group raised £7000, which they donated to widows and children disabled by war.

And here is a taster:

Those most blessed with perfect pitch are, according to this New Scientist article, speakers of tonal languages. Next come those who begin learning a pitched instrument at a very young age - between 3 and 6. However, many musicians tend to exist on – or even move around – a continuum of absolute and relative pitch, depending on circumstances. Factors could include hearing music being played on their own instrument; hearing real notes as opposed to pure sine waves; being able to identify a chord more easily that an isolated note. If it is a skill which we can work at, then what better place to start than here?

If ever there were a good reason for a Homecoming it would be to hear this beautiful rendition of Burns’ Ca The Yowes, sung by Zoe in S5 along with some of North Berwick High School’s guitarists: ca-the-yowes

Continuing to experiment with video…here is a hurriedly shot, and appallingly lit, rendition of Now Westlin’ Winds. This is basically an instrumental version of what Dick Gaughan does with Burns’ original on his excellent Handful of Earth album. I did this arrangement a few years ago and a couple of pupils played it their Advanced Higher programmes. The tuning is DADGAD i.e. strings 1, 2 & 6 tuned down a tone (2 fret’s worth).

Just after writing this, I discovered that this is Dick Gaughan’s “favourite song of all time.”

My thoughts have been turning to expanding from the world of midi files and mp3s to consider ways of using video to help pupils. But I very much doubt that I could have come up with this:

 This is an extraordinary video for many reasons: 

• the inventiveness of the musical arrangement

• the huge vocal range of Corey Vidal

• the musical and video editing skill involved in the time-lapse, split-screen a capella singing

• the sheer off-the-wallness of the idea

Imagine you chanced upon the last vestige of a rousing, local, pub-based community carol singing tradition and then found yourself wondering why it has all but died out. Which culprits would first spring to mind? Materialism? Television? The assertion that “there is no such thing as society?” Contemporary “broken Britain?” The real answer (contained in the link below) may surprise you.

Also surprising is the asymmetric scansion of some of the tunes e.g. 00:55 – 1:05 on this link (scroll down to the article at 0820). It would be easy, invoking Occam’s Razor, to imagine that melodies would be sculpted into their most graspable form by generations of oral tradition.

A strange thought occurred to me today while watching a DVD performance today of Raymond Scott’s The Penguin by Mr McFall’s Chamber (check out TheirSpace ). As far as I know there is not a YouTube video of McFall’s playing this and so, to give you an idea, here it is performed by Racalmuto:

I think we’d all agree that the piece (particularly the introduction) could be described as comical – or at the very least light hearted.

Hearing it today reminded me of a remark made at a conference I attended last Saturday entitled Communicative Musicality. The contention expressed was that music, unlike language, does not have semantics. This prompted me to wonder how, given such conditions, this tune has the potential to be unmistakably humorous – even if played in an incongruous setting e.g. a cathedral, or at an inappropriate occasion e.g. a coronation or a funeral (I’d like to have it at my own - funeral, that is). I would go as far as to imagine that nobody from a culture entirely at odds with our own would mistake this for serious music. Surely our perennial vagueness about music is unnecessary and the quixotic elements of this piece could be isolated and their contribution to the overall mood evaluated.

This in turn reminded me of another topic in the conference: how should emotions be conveyed to the audience by a performer? Is it appropriate for the performer to join in? Might they get carried away and be unable to switch emotion when change comes along? You’ll notice that no-one in the above laughing or even smiling – mind you three of them are blowing into things!

If my ears are up to the job, I’d like to transcribe this piece and arrange it for guitar ensemble one day. If successful, I promise not to instruct the pupils to perceive it in a comical light and also to report their reaction to it.

p.s. this piece appears in the climactic and heart-warming circus scene of the film Funny Bones - well worth watching for this scene alone, featuring Freddie Davies - seen in this lugubrious photo from the film.

Syncopation (even earlier etymology here - as daft as that sounds) is the root of most rhythmic excitement – and trouble. The trouble is that, often, the only suitable counterpoint to a syncopated rhythm is another opposing one. How can pupils in an ensemble survive that? You can switch off to surrounding parts and concentrate on your own one but this means missing out on much of the enjoyment. Even if you manage to switch off to the distracting parts and get in the groove of your own part, even its patterns break off into different syncopations in order to avoid monotony. And some of them could turn out to be helpful if only you could single them out.

Take these 32 bars of samba – extracted from a new piece introduced at today’s East Lothian Guitar Ensemble rehearsal. There are six parts with six or seven people to a part. samba-full-ensemble

Closer inspection reveals that the six parts really fall into three teams – each with its own rhythmic patterns and breaks:

1. melody

2. four harmony parts

3. bass line

The trouble is that the pitch of the melody part falls more or less in the middle of the four harmony parts.

So we remove the tune in the hope of hearing how the bass interacts with the harmony parts: samba-bass-harmony-only

Then you can’t help feeling that it might be helpful to hear how the harmony parts bond: samba-harmony-only

In order that the pupils can practice with or against each of these combos – at a variety of speeds – I’ve posted 15 versions of the piece on the Guitar Group Midis page.

While preparing the play-along files I recalled how, around 10 years ago, I was struck to notice a school guitar group incorporating quite detailed articulation* into a medley of Burns tunes – even although there was none written in the music. It occurred to me that years of aural exposure allowed them intuitively to include what the written parts had omitted. I determined thereafter to be as fussy about the articulation as possible. The resulting paradox is that using a completely unmusical tool (a computer) has resulted in more expressive articulation than leaving it to chance and feeling. The pupils can afford to be intuitive but I can’t.

* articulation = the way in which the notes overlap, join up or separate; whether the transition between any two adjacent notes is elided with slides and slurs; the way notes are perceived to be grouped together through combinations of heavy or light touch