Mozart In The Morning

It’s a drizzly, wet, gray Saturday morning in Columbus, Ohio, with temperatures in the low 50s–which is about part for the course the Midwest in March. It’s not exactly the kind of day that encourages you to get outside and do anything. On the other hand, it’s ideal for staying indoors, listening to music, and trying to get caught up on checklist items that have languished during the work week.

On days like this, I like listening to Mozart. This morning, I am enjoying an excellent recording of Mozart piano sonatas by Orli Shaham. It’s ideally suited for a damp day. The pieces are bright, tuneful, and interesting yet calming–the kind of music that helps you focus as you tackle the tasks on your to-do list.

Years ago, back in the CD era, I had a CD called Mozart for the Morning Commute that featured music designed to keep you alert as you navigated the roadways to the office. I wore that CD out. Based on what I’ve read, Mozart was more of an evening person than a morning person, but his music certainly is ideally suited to the morning hours.

The Closed Captioning Playlist

From time to time we’ll watch a TV series with the closed-captioning function on. The sound quality on some shows seems to be more muddied than on others, and if you’ve got a character who speaks with an accent it also can be hard to follow the dialogue. (I ruefully concede that age and hearing decline might be a factor, too.) In any case, in some situations closed-captioning definitely comes in handy.

One feature of the closed-captioning function is particularly enjoyable: the effort to describe the incidental background music during the no-dialogue scenes. In fact, in my view it’s often hilarious–as in the closed-caption example above. You can imagine the closed-captioner, listening to the music, and then searching for the right words to best describe it to someone who can’t really hear it. In the example above, for example, you wonder whether the closed-captioner was wrestling with the choice between “eerie” and “creepy,” or between “chimes” and “tubular bells.” Sometimes the closed-captioner gets a little more granular on the music description, too, and you’ll learn that what you’re hearing can be described as “techno pop” or “industrial synth” or some other genre you’ve not heard of before.

The adjective choice in the music descriptions can have a bit of a spoiler effect, too. Among the more common music descriptors are “suspenseful,” “ominous,” and “menacing.” Those three words seem to form a spectrum. If music is described a “suspenseful,” that probably means a character is just walking through a darkened alleyway, but there’s a good chance nothing will happen. “Ominous” kicks it up a notch, and tells you that the character is going to at least be confronted by a bad guy emerging from the shadows, so be prepared. And “menacing” is even more heightened. If you see “menacing” used in a music description, brace yourself– the hapless character on the screen is going to be the victim of imminent bodily harm and perhaps a grisly death at any moment.

I wonder if the composers of music for TV shows like the closed-captioning takes on their creations, and work with the closed-captioners to come up with apt descriptions?

Surviving A Bad Review

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. From our vantage point decades later, we know that the Beatles’ performance was an epochal event for popular music and for culture that forever changed the direction of the ’60s. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the Beatles’ impact and influence.

73 million people watched that broadcast, which smashed all TV viewing records up to that point. And, hard as it is to believe today, not everyone was impressed by the Beatles. In fact, they got some blisteringly negative reviews–some of which are collected in this piece from the Los Angeles Times published on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ broadcast. The reviews are interesting to read, in retrospect. Some of the critics couldn’t get past the Beatles’ suits or hair–a good example of how the Beatles provoked a cultural revolution as well as a musical one–but some of the critics hated the songs, too. Newsweek‘s take commented on both of these points, and couldn’t be more dismissive:

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments….”

William F. Buckley, in a review for the Boston Globe, focused more on the music and wrote:

“The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”

Ouch! But of course, Newsweek and William F. Buckley and the other biting naysayers turned out to be totally, hilariously wrong. The stiff-necked critics who reamed the Beatles didn’t understand–and weren’t really the audience, anyway. The young people who watched the Ed Sullivan Show that night, though, did get it. They felt the energy, they sensed the coming change, they loved the music . . . and the rest is history. It’s worth remembering that the next time you get a bad review, or a negative comment. 

The Great Sound Barrier

Yesterday was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthday. The child prodigy who astonished the crowned heads of Europe, who then went on to become one of the greatest composers in history, was born on January 27, 1756. Yesterday marked the 268th birthday of this genius, who wrote some of the most beautiful and moving music known to humanity. He is long since gone, but fortunately for us his piano and violin concertos, sonatas, operas, serenades, and symphonies live on.

I’m currently reading Mozart: A Life, a very interesting book written by Maynard Solomon that tells Mozart’s fascinating life story and tries to put his musical creations into their proper chronological, biographical, historical, and critical context. Solomon often illustrates his textual descriptions of the depth and reach of Mozart’s music by choosing examples from certain of Mozart’s pieces, such as the portions of the Sonata in A minor shown below. The reader is supposed to be able to read the music, hear the music in his head, and thereby grasp the author’s point.

Unfortunately for me, I’m missing out on this element of the book, because I can’t read music. I briefly took guitar lessons as a youth, because everyone took guitar lessons during the ’60s, but I never understood the written representation of the music. Put pages like the ones below in front of me, or hand me a church hymnal and ask me to sing one of the songs, and in my mind it’s like looking at ants on a page. For me, trying to read written music could be called the great mental sound barrier.

Some people resolve to learn a new language; I should try to finally learn to read music. It’s something to add to my growing list of life goals.  

Algorithmic Imbalance

For some time now it’s been clear that Facebook’s algorithms have been hard at work in their relentless pursuit of clicks from me. They’ve offered up countless smorgasbords of film clips and other clickable options, hoping to establish my likes and dislikes and hone in on the former. So far, they’ve been successful in determining that I like the Beatles, Johnny Carson Tonight Show clips . . . and the Three Stooges, preferably during the Curly era, although the Shemp era clips are a close second.

With that important information at hand, the algorithms have given me a steady diet of those three interests. I never suspected there were so many “Beatles pages” on social media, cranking out the content for Beatles fans like me–including a Spanish language version that I get in translation. My Facebook feed includes written pieces, still photos, and performance clips of the Beatles, presumably because I’ve indicated I am capable of clicking on all of them. With Johnny Carson and the Stooges–so far, at least–I’ve been only getting the clips, although lately the still photos are starting to creep into the mix. I figure it’s just a matter of time before the algorithms start to throw the written content in as a test, too.

Once it became clear how these algorithms seize on a click and start to build a personal profile, I decided to exercise some conscious restraint on the clicking, not wanting to expose too many of my interests and predilections to the ruthlessly efficient software. So I keep it to the above-noted topics, and no more. To the Facebook algorithm, I’m no doubt seen as narrowly obsessed with the Beatles, the Tonight Show and the Three Stooges–not exactly the kind of person you’d like to get stuck talking to at a cocktail party–despite being given tantalizing options to click on clips from Midnight Special, other ’60s and ’70s music shows, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, or The Little Rascals. But since I’ve stoutly resisted clicking on those tempting options, it’s still just Carson, Curly and the Fab Four.

This leads me to wonder: does the Facebook algorithm ever conclude it has reached the point of single-topic overload? Does it ever just give up?

Singing Star Trek

Star Trek and its various spin-off series have always featured quirky episodes. The original series had episodes like The Trouble With Tribbles and A Piece Of The Action, where Kirk and Spock go to a planet that had adopted the governance principles of ’20s-era mobster Chicago due to the contaminating influence of a book inadvertently left behind by prior Federation visitors. We’ve watched episodes where characters lost their inhibitions, prematurely aged, lived alternative lives, met their evil selves, time traveled to meet historical figures, and just about every other oddball plotline you can think of.

But there has never been a musical Star Trek episode–until this year. Brave New Worlds, the show that features Captain Christopher Pike, Spock, Uhura, and Nurse Chapel on the Enterprise in the pre-original series years, aired an episode called Subspace Rhapsody in which the characters periodically burst into song and dance steps, just like they do in ’40s musicals or West Side Story. I’ve been trying to catch up on Brave New Worlds this week, and I finally watched the episode last night.

The concept underlying the episode is that the Enterprise encounters a fold in subspace, tries to use it to speed up subspace communication, and broadcasts a song at the phenomenon–which reacts in a way that causes everyone in the Enterprise to start singing their deepest innermost feelings. The phenomenon spreads, and eventually crew members in every ship in the Federation are launching into revealing songs, which incidentally poses obvious security problems. Even the fierce Klingons are affected–and they don’t like it, because rather than singing Klingon opera they’re crooning a “boy band” number with accompanying dance moves, which is pretty hilarious.

From the on-line reaction, it looks like the episode was a hit with viewers. You can read a Variety interview with the creators of the episode here, check out a “behind-the-scenes” article here, find out about the musical abilities of the cast here, and see the nine songs sung in the episode ranked here.

I’m not a big fan of musicals, but I thought Subspace Rhapsody was a worthy addition to the roster of classic, one-off, quirky Star Trek episodes. It did make me regret, however, that the original series didn’t try this approach, at least one. It would have given Dr. McCoy the chance to utter the timeline line: “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a singer!”

Uber Music

I’ve taken a few Uber rides over the past few weeks, and the experiences have made me think about the role of music when you Uber.

Music is one of the things that distinguish an Uber from a cab. Cabs typically don’t have music on the radio. Uber drivers, in contrast, usually have music playing, which is a plus in my book. It gives the ride a homier feel and avoids the awkward conversations you might get in a cab, where some drivers will ask you questions and try to make small talk when you’d rather just scroll through your phone and check your messages.

But how do Uber drivers decide what kind of music to listen to as they drive? Do they consciously consider the potential musical tastes of riders, or just pick what they like? I’ve heard just about everything in the back seat of an Uber, from hip hop to Top 40 to classic rock to blues and jazz, but no classical music . . . yet. The variety is fine with me. I get some exposure to music I haven’t heard before, and I’ve discovered some Columbus radio stations that I wouldn’t know about otherwise thanks to Uber drivers.

The downside risk, however, is that you’re defenseless and just have to politely endure what’s playing, when if you were driving you’d be stabbing the radio buttons to change the station. Last week the driver had dialed up a station that played Lobo’s I’d love you to want me, a sappy ’70s song that I haven’t heard since the early days of high school more than 50 years ago–and I quickly realized that I could have gone another 50 years without hearing it again. (Lobo, shown above in his early ’70s finery, had another mushy hit called Me and you and a dog named Boo that I also hope never to hear again, incidentally.)

What Columbus radio station would be playing a Lobo song on a Saturday morning? I have no idea, but that’s Uber music for you. You might exit the vehicle with the lyrics from a maudlin ’70s folk rock tune running through your head, but that’s just a price you have to pay for getting some music on your ride.

The Ohio Songbook

Ohio is a bit of a crossroads state. Many people from other parts of the country have gone to one of the colleges here, or done business in one of the state’s many big cities, or been here for football games, or simply traveled through on one of the highways crisscrossing the state. Some significant events have happened in Ohio, too. All of those are reasons why the state has been featured in many songs. That, and the fact that the state name is only four letters yet three syllables long and easy to work into a rhyme.

The New York Times recently published a list of six memorable musical odes to Ohio, many of which are simply called “Ohio.” The Times list topped by Randy Newman’s Burn On, his tribute to the infamous 1960s incident where the Cuyahoga River caught fire as it moved through the industrial area of Cleveland just before the river reached Lake Erie. (The song also memorably opened the classic film Major League.) It’s a good choice, for sure, but then there are a lot of good choices, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio, or My City Was Gone by the Pretenders, or Dayton, Ohio — 1903, also by Randy Newman. Another favorite is O-H-I-O by the Ohio Players, which maximized the use of the state’s name.

You can see an expanded list of 25 of the best songs about Ohio here. It’s a pretty good list, and if you’re like me you’re going to find some good songs you’ve never heard before–like Damien Jurado’s song (wait for it) Ohio. The Buckeye State might not be up there with New York or California in the popular song department, but it has nothing to be ashamed of.

Sunny Boston

After more than a week of rain, fog, and overcast skies in Maine, it was a pleasure to wake up to sunshine, blue skies, and a nice view of downtown Boston from the vantage point of Logan Airport.

Seeing the River Charles calls to mind the Standells and their classic Boston anthem, Dirty Water, and its killer guitar riff intro.

Sunny Boston

After more than a week of rain, fog, and overcast skies in Maine, it was a pleasure to wake up to sunshine, blue skies, and a nice view of downtown Boston from the vantage point of Logan Airport.

Seeing the River Charles calls to mind the Standells and their classic Boston anthem, Dirty Water, and its killer guitar riff intro.

M-O-T-H-E-R

As I’ve mentioned before, my maternal grandmother, Grandma Neal, had an elephantine memory when it came to songs and poetry. It was not uncommon for her to interject some appropriate snippet of verse into a conversation to make a point.

On Mother’s Day, Grandma Neal enjoyed reciting the lyrics to the song M-O-T-H-E-R. Released in 1915, M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means The World To Me) was a sentimental tribute that was the work of Theodore Morse, who wrote the music, and Howard Johnson, who penned the lyrics. Grandma Neal knew the song by heart. She liked the spelling chorus part the best and recited it with special emphasis. The lyrics are as follows:

I’ve been around the world, you bet,
But never went to school,
Hard knocks are all I seem to get,
Perhaps I’ve been a fool;
But still, some educated folks, supposed to be so swell,
Would fail, if they were called upon a simple word to spell.
Now if you’d like to put me to a test,
There’s one dear name that I can spell the best:

“M” is for the million things she gave me,
“O” means only that she’s growing old,
“T” is for the tears she shed to save me,
“H” is for her heart of purest gold;
“E” is for her eyes, with lovelight shining,
“R” means right, and right she’ll always be,
Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER,”
A word that means the world to me.

When I was but a baby, long before I learned to walk,
While lying in my cradle, I would try my best to talk;
It wasn’t long, before I spoke, and all the neighbors heard,
My folks were very proud of me for “Mother” was the word.
Although I’ll never lay a claim to fame,
I’m satisfied that I can spell this name:

“M” is for the mercy she possesses,
“O” means that I owe her all I own,
“T” is for her tender sweet caresses,
“H” is for her hands that made a home;
“E” means ev’rything she’s done to help me,
“R” means real and regular, you see,
Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER,”
A word that means the world to me.

Happy Mother’s Day to Grandma Neal, Grandma Webner, my mother, my lovely wife, my sisters, and all the mothers out there, old and new!

Testing The Power Of Classical Music

One of the residential buildings across the street from us in downtown Columbus has a sound system that plays classical music in the area right outside the entrance, all day long. When you walk past, you inevitably hear a snippet of a classical favorite. We suspect, however, that the building does its broadcasting not because the residents are devoted classical music lovers, but because the music tends to keep the street people who might otherwise camp out there moving along to another location.

This potential power of classical music is being tested on a bigger scale in Los Angeles. The L.A. Metro system is dealing with homeless people camping out in stations, drug overdose deaths on buses and trains, and a spike in serious crimes. One subway station in the L.A. Metro system is trying to address those problems through a pilot program in which floodlights and a classical music playlist featuring Beethoven, Mozart, and Vivaldi (pictured above) feature prominently, in hopes of influencing drug users, would-be criminals, and homeless people to leave the station and go somewhere else. An L.A. Metro spokesperson said the music is being used “to restore safety at the transit station” and “as means to support an atmosphere appropriate for spending short periods of time for transit customers who wait an average of 5 to 10 minutes for the next train to arrive.”

L.A. Metro says the classical music technique has produced an “improvement in public safety,” with a “75 percent reduction in calls for emergency service, an over 50 percent reduction in vandalism, graffiti and cleanups, and a nearly 20 percent drop in crime.” Critics of the program say, however, that the the music is being played at dangerously loud levels, weaponizing the music so that it is akin to a torture device. Others say that the music makes the station feel like a set from a dystopian movie. And still others say that the L.A. Metro station approach isn’t getting at the root cause of the homelessness problem that has plagued the Los Angeles area.

Obviously, playing classical music, or any music, at volumes that might do damage isn’t appropriate–but if sound levels are properly regulated, the music and floodlights approach seems like a reasonable effort to discourage criminals and non-riders from hanging out in transit stations. To be sure, the L.A. Metro test program doesn’t address the “root causes” of homelessness, but that criticism isn’t a fair one in my view. L.A. Metro’s charter isn’t to solve the broad societal problem of why Los Angeles has so many unhoused people or why people use dangerous drugs. Instead, its purpose is to provide safe, reliable, clean public transit options for riders. Crime, drug use on buses and trains, and homeless encampments in metro stations clearly interfere with those goals–and if playing some Vivaldi at reasonable volumes helps to address those issues, that seems like a good idea.

Ludwig’s Locks

Ludwig van Beethoven was a musical genius who was almost as well known during his lifetime for his health problems as for his titanic, soaring symphonies and his beautiful piano works. Beethoven famously suffered from progressive hearing problems that eventually produced functional deafness–requiring him to produce his later compositions in his head, without actually hearing the music he was creating–but his health problems went beyond hearing loss. Beethoven experienced chronic gastric issues for years, and when he died in 1827, after having been bed-ridden for months, he was afflicted by jaundice, liver disease, swollen limbs, and breathing problems. His health problems were so great that Beethoven wrote out a testament asking that his conditions be studied and shared after his death.

Two hundred years later, scientists have heeded those wishes and tried to figure out what was wrong with Beethoven. They took an interesting approach–identifying locks of the composer’s hair that had been cut from his head in the seven years before his death and preserved ever since, and then using DNA analysis. The team started with eight samples that purported to be Beethoven’s hair, and found that two of the hair clippings weren’t his and another was too damaged to use. One of the five remaining samples had been initially provided by Beethoven himself to a pianist friend, and analysis showed that all of the hair in the samples came from the same European male of Germanic ancestry.

The DNA analysis did not reveal the causes of Beethoven’s deafness or his gut issues, but did indicate that he was suffering from hepatitis B and had genetic risk factors for liver disease that may have been exacerbated by the composer’s alcohol consumption habits–which a close friend wrote included drinking at least a liter of wine with lunch every day. The genetic analysis also determined that one of Beethoven’s ancestors was the product of an extramarital affair.

I’ve ceased to be amazed by the wonders of modern DNA analysis and what it is capable of achieving. To me, the most surprising aspect of this story is that five legitimate clippings of hair from Beethoven’s head survived for two centuries. It make you wonder how many people were given locks of Beethoven’s hair in the first place. Ludwig van’s barber must have been a very popular guy.

The Vinyl Rebound

We got rid of our vinyl records decades ago. They were a pain to maintain, and little kids and turntables, toner arms with delicate needles, and easily scratched vinyl records are not a good combination. When CDs were introduced, I figured vinyl would inevitably go the way of the dodo.

But I was wrong–vinyl has made a comeback. Last year, for the first time since the 1980s, the sale of vinyl record units outpaced the sale of CDs. Of course, both physical forms are far behind streaming services in the delivery of music–but still, vinyl obviously has its fans.

Interestingly, no one knows exactly why vinyl is hot (or at least lukewarm) again. Some diehards insist that the sound produced by vinyl is superior to streaming services and CDs–richer, fuller, more robust, more nuanced. Others believe vinyl fans like the album as a kind of art piece, and clearly some classic covers, like that of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, look a lot better on a full-sized album sleeve than on a shrimpy CD box. Others believe that album lovers like the tactile sensation of playing an album and its related elements, like carefully removing it from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, keeping it clean to avoid those annoying skips, and deftly replacing it when the playing is done.

And here’s proof that the album renaissance has some legs: manufacturers like Sony and Victrola have started to produce new turntables again. Obviously, they think there is a market there, and one that is probably here to stay.

50 Years On The Dark Side

Yesterday the music world celebrated a momentous milestone. On March 1, 1973, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released in the United States, and the world of high school and college students would never be the same again.

I can’t remember where or when I first heard Dark Side of the Moon, but I know that I bought it in high school because I remember listening to it in my room at the back of the top floor of my parents’ split-level house. The fact that I bought the album distinguished me from absolutely no one, because in those days everyone seemed to have it, and play it. Along with Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Songs in the Key of Life, it was an album that you could count on being in pretty much everyone’s collection during the ’70s. If you had a college roommate and compared your respective album holdings when you moved in, Dark Side of the Moon was the inevitable, predictable duplicate.

None of this is surprising. Dark Side of the Moon has sold 50 million copies, and remained on the Billboard 200 album chart for almost 1000 consecutive weeks, from 1973 until 1990. That’s awesome, generation-spanning appeal–and of course people are still buying it.

What makes this now 50-year-old album so great? From the initial heartbeat, crazy laughter, and machine sounds that make up the intro to the first song, Speak to Me/Breathe, the album sets a mood that sucks the viewer into the Dark Side world. The songs are great, of course, and anyone can sing along with them, but the lyrics and the mood they and the music created combined to make you quiet down and think.

You could put the album on at a lively party with lots of free form conversation, and before you knew it, everyone at the party would be sitting quietly, listening to the record. And when you hit the point of Us and Them, with its great lyrics like “Forward he cried, from the rear, and the front ranks died,” and “with, without, and who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about,” every substance-addled student in the room was thinking: “Whoa!” Still later, the same quiet group of listeners would hear the running feet, and the clocks, and then be jolted back into reality by the alarm clocks and gongs. Listening to Dark Side was the quintessential communal experience.

That remains the case, even as new generations of music lovers are introduced to this legendary album and become mesmerized by its entrancing effect. Over the past 50 years, we’ve all visited the Dark Side of the Moon.