Issue 30

Scholars help us understand what chant is. That’s been true for a long time. As musical tastes changed starting in the Renaissance, the old chant melodies were “corrected” by well-meaning composers who thought they sounded odd. Fortunately, the monks of the French abbey of Solesmes in the late 19^th century undertook a massive research project to restore the medieval versions of Gregorian chants as well as possible.

Since then, musicians interested in “authentic” early-music practice (or, as it’s called these days, HIP – historically informed performance) have contemplated the rhythm, diction, pitch, vocal arrangement, and sources of chant. The last aspect seems to be of particular interest currently, especially when it comes to the Catholicism of Eastern Europe.

In Latvia, for example, Riga Cathedral has stood since the 1880s, but the tradition of singing chant in that region is far older. The CD Domus Mea (LMIC/SKANI 046) by Schola Cantorum Riga presents the music of two historical services. The first is the complete 13-section Missa in dedicatione ecclesiae (Mass for the dedication of the church). The men’s unison singing is powerful if sometimes their entrances aren’t exact. They sing under the direction of Guntars Prānis, who explains in the notes that some of these chants are the earliest known Latvian-composed music. The echo in the cathedral, however, is so intense that it causes muddiness and unintended dissonance.

The men are joined at times by a Riga-based girls’ choir called TIARA. Not that girls would ever have sung at a monks’ service, but they stand in for the boy choir that most monasteries would have had. Also, for variety, one track is sung as organum, a simple arrangement of a chant melody in which perfect fifths and fourths are sung against it, note by note in the same rhythm.

The album also contains five chants for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. An interesting twist is the use of hurdy-gurdy, a common instrument in the Middle Ages that featured a wheel-shaped bow, turned with a hand crank, playing both a drone pitch and a melody.

Another scholarly experiment in Eastern European chant can be found from a Polish group Flores Rosarum. Musica in Monasteriis Femineis in Polonia Minore, Vol. 1 (Dux 1242) explores the music of Polish nuns. Perhaps most surprising is that a few chants are in Polish, although most are in Latin. Two harpsichord improvisations identify the period they’re trying to emulate as the 16^th century. Before then, the majority of churches did not house keyboard instruments.

Flores Rosarum, led by Susi Ferfoglia, sing with soaring voices. On more complicated melody lines their sound can be slightly pinched, but the intonation is solid, especially impressive given the large range of some of these chants, which they unearthed in convent archives in the southern Polish region of Małopolska.

 

But scholarship can be dangerous. An obsession with authenticity can make you forget that chant is more than words and music. It is prayer. Emphasis on is.  

 Some recent efforts turn the focus back to chant’s worshipful purpose. The highest profile example is Assumption: Monastic Choir of the Abbey of Notre Dame of Fontgombault (Valley Entertainment; no listed catalog number). It’s clear from the dozens of blogs and church newsletters that have published reviews that the CD was sent free to every member of the clergy the marketing team could locate.

These reviewers write from the heart, all noting how prayerful the chant makes them feel. Fair enough, but now we hit what may be a moral issue: If a recording of religious music makes you feel more religious, does the musical quality matter? For this listener, the answer is yes. Not even a direct line to the Almighty can make up for the breathy, unsupported tone of the monks in this recording. Nor does it help that their phrasing and extreme use of dynamics are more suited to Fauré than to a medieval tradition. Same goes for the ubiquitous organ.

 

But fear not. If you seek living authenticity in the chant tradition, stop by Barrouxchant.com. The Monks of the Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux stream their holy offices, the seven times per day they worship apart from Mass. The monks sing out with pleasing forthrightness and accurate pitches. The tempos are faster than one finds in scholarly recordings, and the busier passages of text sound like exactly what they are: a bunch of hermits who all happen to be praying in the same room. That is, after all, the principle on which monasteries were founded.

The bad news is, this is a very low-tech site and ridiculously buggy. During the first week of April, they could not stream at all. Happily, they archive their services, so here’s the one from March 31, 2017. Be patient. The monks aren’t there to entertain you, but to sing their Creator’s praises.

It would be remiss not to take this opportunity to say adieu to one of chant’s strangest modern legacies.

In 1994 the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, surprised the world with a smash-hit recording called Chant (Angel Records D 102957). Since then, the music industry has tried to make a buck off the chant phenom.

German group Gregorian: Masters of Chant was the brainchild of Frank Peterson, who had the astonishing idea of using the singing style of Gregorian chant to perform covers of pop songs. The men dressed in hooded robes. On stage, they moved in stately processional patterns. Deep voices sang in somber unison, their melodies broken into short phrases, as monks would sing. So, you end up with pious-sounding renditions of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” and David Bowie’s “Heroes,” to name a few.

Gregorian disbanded at the end of 2016 after 17 years. For the curious, there are a few recordings, most recently Masters of Chant X: The Final Chapter (earMUSIC 0210742EMU). In these familiar songs, the melody is washed over with synthesized sounds and beats. Occasionally Amelia Brightman (younger sister of classical crossover star Sarah) joins in to spice things up. How distracting that would be for real monks!

 

Every phrase of every song sounds the same, so the lyrics lose their meaning. They might as well be singing in Latin.

[If their shimmery robes didn’t clue you in to the fact that something was askew with these “monks”, the disorienting presence of a bright red Stratocaster surely will. There have been days when I’ve asked myself, “What could possible be more irritating than the twee sanctimony of U2?” The answer: U2 performed by bogus clerics. Oooghhh. —Ed.]

If you were to judge purely by her quiet, breathy voice and earnestly clipped diction, you might think Anaïs Mitchell was just another mousy folk singer. You would be wrong. Mitchell is a powerhouse and a visionary.

“I could tell you stories like the government tells lies.” The first line of the first song on Mitchell’s first album (Hymns for the Exiled, 2004) announces to the world this poet’s essence. She’s a storyteller with a distrust of traditional authority. One might argue those are common ingredients defining “indie.”

But Mitchell specializes in defying expectations. The Vermont native is neither a standard guitar-slinging lefty nor an indie punk. The song “1984” on the first album demonstrates this. The simple guitar and banjo accompaniment — used throughout the album – and the gentle, lilting rhythm belie the song’s dark humor. Yes, the title refers to the Orwell book, but its message is couched in a sweet, even joyous love song. And why not? There’s a love story at the center of the novel. But, as is typical of Mitchell, with just a few words she twists the romantic scene of the first few verses into an Orwellian nightmare: “Sure is gonna be lonely / after I turn you in.”

In contrast to such a political opening salvo, on her second album (The Brightness, 2007) Mitchell lets another aspect of her personality shine, namely her ability to put the mundanity of human relationships into words. The song “Santa Fe Dream” is an exquisite ode to someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and notices not only the moonbeam shining on his lover, but also everyday things like “the clock on the table and the cable bill.” (Oddly, the title of this song is switched on Spotify and iTunes with that of “Hobo’s Lullaby,” but is labeled correctly on the CD.)

 

Given what’s happened in Mitchell’s career over the past couple of years, however, the most important song on The Brightness is “Hades and Persephone.” This turned out to be a small taste of quite a significant work. Mitchell told me in 2016, when I had a chance to interview her, that she had grown up loving ancient Greek mythology. Around the time she was writing songs for The Brightness, she and Ben t. Matchstick [Yes, the middle initial is lower case. Artists! —Ed.] were also co-creating a “folk opera,” as Mitchell calls it. Hadestown is a Depression-era retelling of two myths: the heartbreaking love story of Orpheus traveling to the Underworld to save his wife, Eurydice, and the tale of how Persephone was tricked into marrying Hades, king of the Underworld.

And now that little show, done for friends and fans in rural Vermont, is a big show rumored to be Broadway-bound. Hadestown enjoyed a sold-out run off-Broadway in 2016 in a production at the New York Theater Workshop directed by Rachel Chavkin. Currently Mitchell is retooling the musical with the hope of bringing it to the Great White Way. Not a lot of folk singer-songwriters have ever been eligible for a Tony Award, but Mitchell has again plowed her own path.

The first recording of the Hadestown score was released on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label, and has indie rocker DiFranco singing the role of Persephone. Mitchell sings Eurydice and fellow folksinger Greg Brown is Hades. When that 2010 album came out, the country was not quite primed for its message of a despot blind to human needs and equality. (Again, Mitchell intertwines love stories and politics.) But when I attended an off-Broadway performance, the 2016 presidential election was in full swing. The song “Why We Build the Wall” stopped the show and left us breathless. “How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy.”

Here is a video of “Why We Build the Wall” from an earlier concert version, featuring Mitchell. The cast album from that NYTW production is also available, with several new songs added to the score.

 

Before being swept up into the world of high-profile theater, Mitchell recorded another album of new material. Young Man in America (2012) marks a change in production concept from her earlier records. Besides the usual voice and guitar, the tracks feature added sounds such as flutter-tongued flute, creaking wood and snare drum. Those layers sit rhythmically askew, giving the songs a metrical freedom also evident in Mitchell’s loose vocal phrasing. A good example is the song “Wilderland.”

 

Clearly a woman who never slows down, Mitchell has also made two albums of pre-existing material in the past few years. Xoa (2014) contains simple, scaled-back recordings of 15 of her own songs; the new vocals have a painful beauty. Child Ballads (2015) is a celebration of Mitchell’s roots in traditional folk music, presenting story-songs as preserved in the famous 19^th-century musicological collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, by Francis James Child.

It’s tempting to pigeonhole Mitchell as a contemporary folk singer, given her devotion to acoustic recording and performance. But she has a greater panoply of influences, not to mention goals. Like most artists carrying on the legacy of the civil rights movement, she wants to make the world a better place for the average Jane and Joe. She also has the poetic sophistication of an Emily Dickinson and the imagination of a C.S. Lewis. Average, she is not.

It’s often said that we don’t build anything in America anymore. That’s clearly bunk; we just build different things than we used to.

The same could be said of Americans: DIY and projects in the home are bigger than ever…we just don’t build the things shown in Popular Mechanics mags of the ’50’s, like  miniature train setups or hovercrafts powered by lawnmower engines.

Or hi-fi kits.

At one point, most major brands of American  hi-fi gear produced kits. Looking back from a distance, we mostly think of Dynakits (produced by Dynaco), and the two leaders, Heathkit and Eico. But kits were also offered by HH Scott, Harman-Kardon, even McIntosh. The Vintage Hi-Fi website has a lot of information on vintage kits, and several of these images are from that site (many thanks to them). Almost everything was available in kit form, back in the ’50’s and ’60’s. Speaker drivers were often sold accompanied by enclosure plans., and enclosures built by third-party companies like Barzilay were readily available. Even top-of-the-line speaker systems like the Electrovoice Patrician and JBL Paragon were offered in simplified two-way configurations that could be upgraded with the purchase of additional drivers and crossovers.

The Dynaco/Dynakit Stereo 70 amp and  matching preamps PAS-2 and PAS-3 probably introduced more folks to component hi-fi and kit-building than just about any other gear. The Dynaco name periodically reappears; the company may be in business again, right now—I’m just not sure.

When we think of hi-fi kits, amplifiers usually come to mind—but turntables and even tone arms were offered in kit form. This 1959 Audax tone arm kit would run about $130 today, adjusting for inflation.

Walt Jung—a designer known for his pioneering work in the characteristics of capacitors—wrote about his early experiences with audio kits in a nostalgic piece in The Audiophile Voice. Even Julian Hirsch wrote about amplifier kits in Hi-Fi Review, way back in 1962. Reproduced here, the article is an interesting comparison of kits from Eico, Dynaco, Scott, and others.

As is true of most special interests, once you get looking, there’s a lot of information out there about vintage hi-fi kits. There’s even a subculture that collects unbuilt kits, like toy collectors who seek out toys that were never played with, and still reside in pristine boxes…like tiny corpses in tiny coffins….

I get it— but there’s just something wrong with that….

So: ever build a kit? Or build gear from scratch? Tell us about it. Being the king of cold solder joints, I’ve never done it.

Consider for a moment the Fourier Transform, which I discussed back in Copper # 18.  Hands up if you think they’re tough to understand!  I want to open your eyes to the world of magic that lies behind it, where the Fourier Transform itself is but one single – but very productive – play in the grand game of transform mathematics.

This column is going to kick off with Imaginary Numbers, and get steadily more head-splitting from there.  If you’re up for the ride, good for you!  If not, this would be a good place to get off.

Imaginary numbers is the term given to the mathematical representation of conceptual quantities which are square roots of negative numbers.  In the real world we only see real numbers.  Count the number of spoons in your cutlery drawer, and the answer will always be a real number.  There are no real numbers which, when squared, result in a negative number.  However, both mathematicians and engineers have long realized that square roots of negative numbers – the so-called ‘Imaginary’ numbers – actually have a fundamentally important relationship with the real world.  We can think of all numbers as comprising a juxtaposition of two parts, a Real part and an Imaginary part.  We refer to such numbers as Complex numbers.  For all quantities that we encounter in our everyday lives – like the number of spoons in the cutlery drawer – the Imaginary parts of those numbers are all zero.  We therefore describe them as purely Real numbers.  But mathematically speaking, pretty much everything that we can do with Real numbers can also be done with Complex numbers.

So now we dive back into the Fourier Transform.  An audio signal, mathematically speaking, is a Real function of time.  By this, we mean that the signal itself describes the evolution of a certain property with time.  It can be air pressure, it can be an electrical voltage, but whatever it is the key thing here is that it varies with time.  And both the thing we are describing (the voltage, or whatever), and time itself, are Real quantities in the sense that neither have an Imaginary component.  Now, we all understand that a Fourier Transform takes this data and converts it into a different representation, one which is a function of frequency.  That is to say, the transformed signal now describes the relationship of a different property with frequency.  Let’s take a closer look at that property.

Like time, frequency itself is purely Real.  Just as there is no such thing as Imaginary time (although I have worked for bosses who were not always clear on that concept), there is no such thing as Imaginary frequency.  However, in our Fourier Transform, the property of frequency that the transform has spat out is actually a Complex number.  That is to say it has both Real and Imaginary parts.  This is our first opportunity to deal with Complex numbers … so how are we to interpret them?  In this case, the answer turns out to be quite simple.  Complex numbers can be rearranged so that instead of having Real and Imaginary parts, they have a Magnitude and a Phase Angle.  If we do this, the Magnitude of the property can be seen to represent the amount of that frequency present in the original signal, and its Phase Angle represents the phase of that frequency component.  Usually when we deal with Fourier Transforms we ignore the phase and just display the magnitude – which is a Real number – so the Complex number aspect ends up hidden from view.

I wrote above that, like time, frequency is purely Real.  But the transform itself is not constrained to working with purely real bases.  After all, it did spit out a bunch of Complex numbers.  In the equations governing the Fourier Transform we can easily replace the Real numbers which correspond to frequency with Complex numbers.  This modified transform is normally referred to as a ‘z-Transform’, and it turns out to be even more fundamental than the Fourier Transform.  Indeed, the Fourier Transform is but a subset of the z-Transform.  Where the Fourier Transform’s output is in frequency space, the z-Transform’s output is in an expanded version of frequency space called z-space.

It turns out that z-space is a magical kingdom in which wonderful things happen.  We can design almost any signal processing operation imaginable in z-space.  In particular we can design filters that have all but limitless properties.  But there’s a catch.  Having designed a filter in z-space, it doesn’t tell us how to implement it in the real world.  Only a certain highly specialized set of properties appear in both z-space and in the real world, and so we can only design real-world filters which are based on those specialized properties.  Even so, z-space really is a magic kingdom inhabited by wizards who design signal processing algorithms.

At this point, you can think of Fourier Transform space (or Fourier Space) as a place where advanced amateurs like me – and maybe you too – can feel comfortable.  z-Space then can be thought of as a place where only serious professionals will really feel at home.  So, extending that metaphor, where might the real bad-@ss, serious-sh^t, PhD-and-bar experts hang out?  Our Final Frontier, if you like … ?

Let’s go back to that notion of time, like frequency, being purely real.  A couple of paragraphs up I replaced the Real frequency number with a Complex number and ended up in z-space.  Can I do the same thing with the Real ‘time’ number, and replace it with a Complex number?  What happens then?  Well … something quite unexpected happens.

If you have got this far you have probably heard of Einstein’s concept of Space-Time, where space and time are melded into one entity, and all the weird stuff we observe in the universe, but couldn’t account for, seems to drop straight out into our laps.  Well that’s what happens here.  It turns out that both time and frequency are in fact one single entity called Time-Frequency.  They’re not independent at all.  In fact, we can view the Time-Frequency domain as a Complex number space, where the Real part is Time-like, and the Imaginary part is Frequency-like.

An ‘Argand’ Diagram is commonly used to represent Complex numbers.  It’s an x-y plot with the Real part on the x-axis and Imaginary part on the y-axis.  On the Argand Diagram, the time-based view of our music signal – the one we started out with – lives at the 3 o’clock position, along the x-axis.  The frequency-based view – the Fourier Transform – lives along the y-axis at the 12 o’clock position.  From this perspective, the Fourier Transform can be seen as a rotation by 90 degrees counter-clockwise.  A further rotation of 90 degrees takes us to the 9 o’clock position which turns out to represent a time-reversed version of the original music signal, and a further 90 degree rotation to the 6 o’clock position actually corresponds to the inverse Fourier Transform.

This place we have arrived at has several names, and is actually at the very forefront of pure research into signal processing.  It is mind-blowingly difficult to master, and I would say that those who are able to do so probably already enjoy an international reputation in their fields, and sport long beards.  I for one am so not among them.  In the signal-processing field the most commonly used terminology is Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT, or FRFT).  This is because, understanding the picture in the terms I just described, it becomes possible to design transformations which transform the signal into some intermediate position in the Time-Frequency domain, where the datum is neither one thing nor the other.  In other words, a rotation of some arbitrary angle somewhere between zero and 90 degrees, hence the term ‘Fractional’ Fourier Transform.

This really is the cutting edge.  Researchers are only just beginning to uncover what can be done using these theorems and representations.  For example, I have read (but am sadly unable to fully comprehend) a paper claiming to show how FRFT can be used to design mathematically perfect sample rate conversion algorithms, something that practically escapes the current state-of-the-art.  Furthermore, FRFT shows that the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theory is but a specific case of a more general theory by which sampling is not just constrained to be band-limited in the frequency domain, but in a more complex sense in the entire Time-Frequency domain.  There are, I imagine, things one can do with such knowledge!

So … hands up if you thought Fourier Transforms were tough!

…is in the ears of the beholder.

I chose the image above because for me, the worst kind of bad sound is that which has a massive amount of harmonic distortion. The result is high notes that bring to mind shattering glass, and lows that become an atonal thrum like the sound of a distant generator. Such sound is not only amusical, it’s unreal. It’s like you played your favorite music at the same time you cranked up a signal generator. —Well, not quite: harmonic distortion is at least related to the original signal, while that signal generator would be independent of your music.

For me—and perhaps only for me—it’s much easier to live with sins of omission, rather than sins of commission. I’ve frequently had speakers that didn’t reproduce low bass; as long as the bass that’s there is well-defined and undistorted, I can live with it. It’s obvious to me that I’m missing something, but I’d rather have that than overbearing, monotonic bass, like y0u used to hear vibrating the trunk lids of Donk Impalas (is it possible that car stereo has improved more than home stereo? There’s a scary thought).

Closer to home, think of that friend who bought the $300 home theater in a box set-up and proudly wanted to demonstrate to you just how awesome Master and Commander sounded over it. Tiny woofers trying to escape their surrounds, tweeters close to flaming out: exactly what I don’t want. Nor do I want the complication of telling a friend that their gear is unlistenable, but that’s another matter.

A lot of bad sound is caused by pairing components that just don’t go together, like 2-watt SET amps and massively inefficient speakers. Think of a FIAT 500 forced to pull a U-Haul trailer filled with a collection of bowling balls: something bad is bound to happen.

I encountered my own personal standard of bad sound early on. A family friend was proudly demonstrating his Belle Klipsches driven by a ’70’s Kenwood solid-state integrated amp. I know there were decent Kenwood amps, so don’t take this as a wholesale dismissal of that pile of silver stuff you have in your garage—but this particular pairing was horrific. I did notice that the proud owner rarely even finished playing a cut, jumping from record to record as though maybe the next one would set things right. My fellow teen audiophile and I had to fight the urge to sprint from the room, while simultaneously forcing ourselves to make vague comments like, “MAN—that’s REALLY SOMETHING!!”

The something that it was, was as strident and screechy as a roomful of first-year violin students, as shudder-inducing as a bunch of drunks crunching on ice cubes (again: maybe that’s just me).Ever since that afternoon, forty-five years ago, I’ve been apprehensively sensitive to possible equipment mismatches. Don’t think that only newbies make these mistakes—some of the worst mismatches I’ve heard have been an audio shows, committed by supposed professionals. Oddly enough, the worst mismatches are often committed in the biggest rooms; sometimes, the mismatch of speaker size to room size is enough to make me pivot-turn as soon as I step into the room.

The most common show error is the use of way too large a speaker for the room: those are the rooms whose walls you can hear vibrating, a floor away (often with that same damn Master and Commander!). The too-small speaker is relatively innocuous in comparison—until the speaker is badly overdriven, anyway.

I’m curious to find out what others consider to be particularly heinous in the world of bad sound. Let me know, will you?

For about six months of my life, around the time of my 18th birthday, I played in a cover band—six sets a night, and finished at 2 AM. The band’s “home base” was a club just inside the boundary of Camden, NJ.

We sometimes would go to the Penn Queen diner after performing. One night early in 1975, I loaded my bass into my Volvo 164, strapped in, turned the ignition, flipped on Diaspar (as usual) and — I was, quite literally, transfixed; maybe the only time that ever happened. I didn’t care about how tired I was, or about the smoke stench permeating my hair and clothes. I remember that I drove to the diner, but mostly remember seeing the guys in the band looking at me through the windows just sitting in my car (utterly “blissed out”, as the kids say) listening to the music. The piece was announced, I called the station the next day to find out what I could, and wrote a letter to the label.

A week later two copies of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company[1] arrived on my doorstep with a nice note from group founder David Borden. Maybe I’ve been writing about minimalism as an excuse to write about Mother Mallard. I dearly love the records, certainly as much as the best Steve Reich — maybe more. It’s “minimal”, yes, in that it’s made up of small repeated motifs, but it’s also rock and roll — at least my version of it. And unlike the other “Big Three” (Riley, Reich and Glass), it’s primarily synthesizer music. In fact, as I was to discover, they were the first synthesizer ensemble — they had their beginnings in the studio of the R.A. Moog Company.

The piece I heard that late night on Diaspar was “Ceres Motion”, by ensemble-member Steve Drews. How can I describe it without using superlatives? Despite my enthusiasm for the other composers, I had never heard anything quite like it: a word that comes to mind is shimmering — the piece shimmers in place, but underneath is a rolling bass line that rocks prominently back and forth on IV and I.  And rocks. And rocks some more. In a field that has a lot of propulsive music, this piece really hurtles forward.

 

They formed in late 1968, initially to perform music by the aforementioned, as well as by Robert Ashley and John Cage (clearly they were very hit-oriented – not!), with the help of Bob Moog. At first, their orientation was strictly live performance. In the book Analog Days[2], founder Borden tells the story of what it was like to perform:

“Mother Mallard practiced their patch changes[3] in rehearsal: ‘We’d go into army drills.’ This produced a remarkable scene: ‘We used to have rehearsals where we didn’t play any music, we were just practicing the patching for the pieces… So we got it down to five minutes, five-to-seven minutes between pieces.’ During the five-to-seven minute interval where Mother Mallard would go through their silent patch-change choreography, they would show classic cartoons from the thirties and forties. David recalls that for some, the cartoons may have been the best part of the evening. ‘And I heard someone go out and say, ‘You know, it was worth it just to see the cartoons.’ ‘ ”

On top of everything else I love about the group, they took themselves seriously but not religiously so. They were hippies at heart with a good sense of humor about their name and titles. (And cartoons, of course.)

A few months after discovering them, on a trip to northern New York state to decide if I wanted to move there[4], my friend Pete and I spent a couple hours with Steve Drews in the studio at their “shitty farmhouse” (his phrase) as he worked on the bass part of a piece for the 2^nd album, a composition called “Oleo Strut”[5]. It was from a version of the 2^nd album that I still regard as superior to the CD, made up of less and better music (same with the first record). The added tunes on the CD are interesting, but I think they got it right out of the gate.

For instance, Drews’ piece “Train”, from the first album, perfectly captures my experience of lying with a girlfriend on the banks of the Delaware late at night when I was a teen, hearing a train going slowly by on the opposite bank of the river. The second record’s Borden-composed C-A-G-E Part II is the composer’s major recorded piece of the time, emphasizing the title pitches as a motif against the dense textures that only thin out, incredibly dramatically, close to the end.

Years later, I was surprised to discover, when I worked with Jon Hassell, that he had on occasion been on a bill with Borden. As the 50^th anniversary approaches, Borden is active as a composer, and still on occasion performs under the name Mother Mallard. Drews has been active for many, many years, engaged in his second act as a photographer.

I feel very, very fortunate to have stumbled on their music late that night. It’s shaped my path.

Next: the final installment, a modern minimalist.

[1] Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co., Cuneiform Records Rune 109

[2] Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002

[3] The changing of interconnections and settings of the modules

[4] I didn’t! I ended up in southern California 3 months later. It was the last weekend of April, and still the trees had no leaves.

[5] Like A Duck To Water, Cuneiform Records Rune 147

Last month I was in Montréal for a professional meeting when Bill Leebens texted me: “Larry. Listen: there’s a hell of a good audio universe next door!” He was right, of course. I hadn’t been to an audio show since Axpona’s dismal Atlanta debut and demise. But here was Le Salon Audio Montréal, celebrating its 30th anniversary as le seul show de Haute-Fidélité GRATUIT en Amérique. Veteran organizers Sarah Tremblay and Michel Plante put together a show that was free to attendees. How about that?

How owning an audio system is like “Chasing the Dragon”

A old friend of mine became a gambling addict. His thing was Off Track Betting. He is extremely intelligent and while we were growing up never showed any signs of a personality disorder, let alone a gambling addiction.

One day i asked him how it started. He said “Well, I was hanging out with A friend of mine one beautiful spring day as he went to the local OTB and, as he was placing a bet, suggested that I put down 10 dollars on a horse. I had never bet a day in my life. I didn’t know how to fill out the slip and, more importantly (or so I thought) knew nothing about the horses running. He just told me to bet on the horse that he was betting on”’

He did.

The horse won.

And my old friend, on that beautiful spring day, won a couple of hundred dollars. Adrenaline pumped through veins. He thought that, somehow, his instincts were incredible and that it would lead to bigger and bigger wins.

The next day he went back to OTB.

He lost $300.00.

He then spent the next 30 years and $50,000 trying to get that $300 back…

My friend was Chasing the Dragon.

That is how I sometimes feel about my obsession with my audio system.

I think it is safe to say that to most readers of this magazine the love of music preceded any knowledge of “audio”.

I was 11 when my mother gave me a table top radio to listen to when I was home from school for three weeks in February 1963. I turned the dial until I came upon the number one radio station in America at that time: 77 WABC.

The number one song in the country that week was “Hey Paula”. The top twenty (actually, the top 10) was played over and over and that is when my addiction to pop music happened. I spent the following summer of 1963 listening to all the hits over a transistor radio that my dad gave me.

A transistor radio with a 1’ speaker.

A tinny, crappy, battery powered transistor radio.

But the songs…ah..the songs like “One Fine Day” by the Chiffons, “So Much In Love” by the Tymes, songs by The Beach Boys, The Surfaris, Jan & Dean and Little Stevie Wonder’s “Finger Tips part 2”.

All that and more, streaming out of a piece of crap transistor radio, and y’know what?  It was fantastic. I fell in love with all of it.

Then, 9 months later, The Beatles hit the US with the force of a category 5 hurricane.

My parents bought me my first album Meet The Beatles and with it, a Westinghouse stereo record player with built in speakers.

Wow…

What a difference that made. I never heard music like that.

Ever.

And so it began.

Next came a Zenith record player with removable stereo speakers so you could spread out the sound.

But that wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted bigger. I wanted better.

And the music….well, there was great music still to come but I could no longer listen to it from a transistor radio.

I was hooked on better audio. Listening would or could ever be the same again.

The way high end audio is marketed, it appeals to all of us who want to get closer to the music. To be fair, the best products do just that.

I can’t say that we get to the Absolute Sound as defined in that magazine as the “sound of an acoustic instrument in real space” that almost all audiophiles can reference because that is a myth. It is impossible simply because a performance is recorded.

What we strive for is to get closer to how the music sounds when it is played back in the studio where it was recorded or mixed. That’s as close as anyone can get. If it ain’t on the tape, no amount of money will get you closer.  But, along the way, some of us just get lost in the hype and technology.

Would money actually allow me to buy audio gear that would give me the thrill and magic of hearing what I heard when I was 11, through that radio, come back? For years, I thought it could.

The more I spent, the closer I got (for short bursts) until I realized that I was no longer listening to the music. I was listening to my audio equipment.

I really thought that my audio (now High end audio) addiction was somehow justified by that journey.

One day I realized that all I was doing was an audio version of chasing the dragon.

As time went on, however, and without intervention or therapy, I reached bottom.

I had to remind myself that If a song was great, it was great because the song was great, not the audio system. If a band sent a demo to me, and I fell in love with it it was because it was always the music.

I began to learn to listen in a new way:  I started to trust my emotions again. I started to put technology in perspective. That a reference system is a great luxury but not a necessity.

I can truly marvel at the ability for my reference system to create an immersive and emotional connection to the music I love and, if one can afford it, the toys to get you there are plentiful and amazing but I also have learned over the years that convenience trumps quality a lot of the time and that the music remains enjoyable regardless of how you play it back.

Okay…The audio Genie out of the bottle and I am not listening to music on a transistor radio but one can buy very inexpensive gear and still enjoy the music.

That is a testament to the quality of audio products available today (after adjusting for inflation) that sound amazing.

Now, 50 years later, I have also finally gotten to the point (it took long enough) where I actually listen to the music and not my system (s).

I live in Manhattan where, instead of owning multiple cars, I own multiple audio systems that serve different purposes:

—A Sonos system when friends are over that costs about $1,500.00 which Is on 75% of the time;

—A system hooked up to my computer so when I’m writing I have stereo music on my desktop. It costs about $1,000.00, and I listen to about 15% of the time.

—A vinyl based reference system that runs about 100K that we listen to on Sunday evenings with a glass of wine.

It’s like owning two Camry’s and a Mercedes: Camry’s are always dependable and easy.  A  Mercedes (like a high end audio system) is a very different animal….Like I said, We listen to my vinyl reference system on Sundays while having a nice bottle of wine.

It really does sound incredible, and It stands as a symbol.

It always reminds me of the time when I started Chasing the Dragon….

I haven’t said much so far about Arnold Schoenberg’s craft, i.e., how he pulled the notes out of his hat. You’ll get some of that this time. It matters to musicians, who want to know just how the magician worked his magic. To audiences, it doesn’t matter quite as much. We can concern ourselves more with style, i.e., what the music sounds like and how it pulls our chains.

I’ve learned something about that from seeing how my undergrads responded when they first encountered music by the Emancipator of Dissonance. Almost to a person, they would recall that stock horror-movie scene in which an oddly curious young woman decides to see what’s up with the bumping sound she hears coming from her gloomy, cobweb-choked basement. Schoenberg apparently enabled several generations of film composers to do their best work ever, at least in terms of Full-Out Creep. Or: he vastly extended musical language in order to express areas of extreme human emotion and experience previously underserved. Such artistic work became known as Expressionism. It’s an effect, not a technique.

Late in 1912 Schoenberg completed his Expressionist masterpiece Pierrot lunaire and introduced it in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. (Gershwin heard Pierrot at its New York premiere in 1923.) Then a funny thing happened.

He fell silent.

Not entirely silent, of course. But the upheavals and privations of the war years made it hard for him to undertake major works, especially knowing that performances of whatever he wrote would likely never take place.

Something else was going on too. Schoenberg had found the radical “atonal” language of Pierrot lunaire difficult to create and sustain: Pierrot is a series of vignettes, each built around a different generative idea. To assemble “melodies” and “harmonies” that suggested no tonal centers, no chords, few of the structures that had governed Western music since the Renaissance, was an arduous task with no clear guidelines. Like Philippe de Vitry in the 14th century, Schoenberg needed new theory to enable new craft to help him to make quicker, smarter decisions about his material.

In the course of the 1920s Schoenberg devised just such a method, now known as serial technique or “12-tone theory.” Its principles were simple: the basis of every composition was at least one row or series of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale arranged in a particular sequence. The sequence could also be stated in reverse (retrograde), or upside-down (inverted), or in retrograde inversion. Furthermore, its beginning pitch could be transposed to any note in the chromatic scale. But the integrity of the sequence should be maintained, and no pitch should be omitted or repeated. In this way Schoenberg maintained the character of motives drawn from a row. And he didn’t have to work out the pitches for every chord or tune as they came along!

Schoenberg developed this technique in a number of remarkable instrumental works modeled on Classical forms: the Serenade op. 24, Piano Suite op. 25, Variations for orchestra op. 31, and String Quartet No. 3 op. 30, among others. All utilized familiar formal patterns, rhythms, and textures that somewhat offset the alien qualities of the pitch language.

Yet the work I’d recommend as an introduction to Schoenberg’s 12-tone music is Moses und Aron, a sprawling, unfinished opera written between 1930 and ‘32 that received no staged performances until the 1950’s. Why this? First, because it tells a story. You can hear how perfectly Schoenberg’s radical music supports the churning emotions unleashed in this Old Testament tale. Second, once you’ve experienced it you’ll better understand Schoenberg the man. Moses und Aron is an allegory about aspiration, vocation, leadership, and human frailty. Schoenberg—a religious man—saw his own work as a calling (Lat. vocare = to call); he deeply identified with Moses, a visionary chosen by God as his prophet but also a man who lacked the eloquence to sway crowds. He asks God for help, so God appoints Aaron as his spokesman. Although Aaron’s tongue is silver (he’s a tenor!), he is all too ready to compromise, to lubricate his message with “images” rather than the purer, plainer spiritual truth. It’s pretty clear where Schoenberg’s sentiments lay. For an earlier work, he wrote these words:

You shall not make an image. For an image confines, limits, grasps what should remain limitless and unimaginable. . . . You shall not worship the little! You must believe in the spirit, directly, without emotion, selflessly.

In Moses und Aron, Schoenberg speaks through Moses, who tells the Israelites that the One, invisible, almighty, and unimaginable, requires no sacrifices from them—only their complete devotion. Unable to comprehend such a god, the crowd responds derisively until Aaron performs three “miracles”—sleight-of-hand that astounds and quiets the crowd. In Act 2, they require that Aaron erect a golden calf, another image they can see and thus understand. His accommodation of their shallow faith leads to an orgy of social destruction.

If I hadn’t been in Vienna years ago doing research by day and scoring cheap tickets to the Staatsoper by night, I might never have understood M&A myself. But when I saw it presented in a naturalistic staging (e.g., actors wearing Bronze Age bathrobes, the desert as a desert, the Golden Calf as, well, a golden calf) with first-rate singers and the support of the Vienna Philharmonic, I was hooked. Later I acquired Pierre Boulez’s DG recording and further acquainted myself with M&A’s boldly drawn characters and sumptuous orchestral accompaniments.

Since then I’ve made the acquaintance of Sylvain Cambreling’s more recent release (Hänssler Classic 93.314; SACD), an account I found even more compelling, and slightly better recorded, than Boulez’s. Here are two scenes that hint at the riches within this work. In Act 1, Scene 1, the Burning Bush calls Moses to “Be God’s prophet!” brushing aside his protestations:

Moses: Only one, infinite, omnipresent, unperceived and inconceivable God.

Voice from the Burning Bush: Here lay your shoes aside. . . . You stand on ground that is holy. Be God’s prophet!

Moses: God of my fathers . . . ask not thy servant to be thy prophet. I am old. I ask thee, let me tend my sheep in silence.

Voice: You have seen your kindred enslaved, have known the truth, so you can do nothing else: . . . set your people free!

In Act 2, Scene 3, worship of the Golden Calf leads to (as the libretto calls it) an Orgy of Drunkenness and Dancing:

 

The complete Georg Solti performance above is the best currently available on YouTube. Click here for the (downloadable) libretto you’ll need, from the Hänssler SACD.

Two other strong works, from Schoenberg’s American years, offer additional perspectives on his music. One is the 1942 Piano Concerto op. 42. Written when it began to look like the Allies might actually defeat Hitler, it’s almost light-hearted. Its single movement breaks down into four sections: a waltz, a scherzo, a slow movement, and a rondo finale. Once again, Classic forms lend form and familiarity to serial pitch language. Sort of.

Mitsuko Uchida’s disc with Boulez (Philips) is a useful collection; it includes other significant solo piano works by Schoenberg and his pupils and acolytes Webern, and Berg. I also like an older recording from Alfred Brendel:

 

Finally, the 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46, motivated by

a report of an occasion when Jews on their way to the gas chamber found courage in singing the Sh’ma Yisrael, the command to love God, who is one lord. . . . The orchestral accompaniment to the witness’s spoken narration illustrates a reality more horrible than anything that Schoenberg could have imagined [earlier], and his original melody for the Hebrew cantillation is an extraordinary concept, expressing a desperate tenacity that belongs very much to its author. (O. W. Neighbour, New Grove 1980)

My reference recording is that of Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic (DG, 1993). It is recommendable for its visceral, supercharged playing and for DG’s vivid sound. The remainder of the album consists of orchestral music by Anton Webern, well worth hearing.

 

The text, like that of M&A, is by the composer, based on accounts he obtained from several survivors. As with Pierrot, the text is delivered in strict rhythms specified in the score. (It is not quite the Sprechstimme of Pierrot, which also specifies approximate pitches.) A number of other performances are available on YouTube; since the stumbling block for many first-time listeners is this recited text, which can sound quite stilted, as an alternative I suggest Hermann Prey’s for its naturalism.

Next time: American symphonists, including a whole other A. Schoenberg.

Consider for a moment the Fourier Transform, which I discussed back in Copper # 18. Hands up if you think they’re tough to understand! I want to open your eyes to the world of magic that lies behind it, where the Fourier Transform itself is but one single – but very productive – play in the grand game of transform mathematics. This column is going to kick off with Imaginary Numbers, and get steadily more head-splitting from there. If you’re up for the ride, good for you! If not, this would be a good place to get off. Imaginary numbers is the term given to the mathematical representation of conceptual quantities which are square roots of negative numbers. In the real world we only see real numbers. Count the number of spoons in your cutlery drawer, and the answer will always be a real number. There are no real numbers which, when squared, result in a negative number. However, both mathematicians and engineers have long realized that square roots of negative numbers – the so-called ‘Imaginary’ numbers – actually have a fundamentally important relationship with the real world. We can think of all numbers as comprising a juxtaposition of two parts, a Real part and an Imaginary part. We refer to such numbers as Complex numbers. For all quantities that we encounter in our everyday lives – like the number of spoons in the cutlery drawer – the Imaginary parts of those numbers are all zero. We therefore describe them as purely Real numbers. But mathematically speaking, pretty much everything that we can do with Real numbers can also be done with Complex numbers. So now we dive back into the Fourier Transform. An audio signal, mathematically speaking, is a Real function of time. By this, we mean that the signal itself describes the evolution of a certain property with time. It can be air pressure, it can be an electrical voltage, but whatever it is the key thing here is that it varies with time. And both the thing we are describing (the voltage, or whatever), and time itself, are Real quantities in the sense that neither have an Imaginary component. Now, we all understand that a Fourier Transform takes this data and converts it into a different representation, one which is a function of frequency. That is to say, the transformed signal now describes the relationship of a different property with frequency. Let’s take a closer look at that property. Like time, frequency itself is purely Real. Just as there is no such thing as Imaginary time (although I have worked for bosses who were not always clear on that concept), there is no such thing as Imaginary frequency. However, in our Fourier Transform, the property of frequency that the transform has spat out is actually a Complex number. That is to say it has both Real and Imaginary parts. This is our first opportunity to deal with Complex numbers … so how are we to interpret them? In this case, the answer turns out to be quite simple. Complex numbers can be rearranged so that instead of having Real and Imaginary parts, they have a Magnitude and a Phase Angle. If we do this, the Magnitude of the property can be seen to represent the amount of that frequency present in the original signal, and its Phase Angle represents the phase of that frequency component. Usually when we deal with Fourier Transforms we ignore the phase and just display the magnitude – which is a Real number – so the Complex number aspect ends up hidden from view. I wrote above that, like time, frequency is purely Real. But the transform itself is not constrained to working with purely real bases. After all, it did spit out a bunch of Complex numbers. In the equations governing the Fourier Transform we can easily replace the Real numbers which correspond to frequency with Complex numbers. This modified transform is normally referred to as a ‘z-Transform’, and it turns out to be even more fundamental than the Fourier Transform. Indeed, the Fourier Transform is but a subset of the z-Transform. Where the Fourier Transform’s output is in frequency space, the z-Transform’s output is in an expanded version of frequency space called z-space. It turns out that z-space is a magical kingdom in which wonderful things happen. We can design almost any signal processing operation imaginable in z-space. In particular we can design filters that have all but limitless properties. But there’s a catch. Having designed a filter in z-space, it doesn’t tell us how to implement it in the real world. Only a certain highly specialized set of properties appear in both z-space and in the real world, and so we can only design real-world filters which are based on those specialized properties. Even so, z-space really is a magic kingdom inhabited by wizards who design signal processing algorithms. At this point, you can think of Fourier Transform space (or Fourier Space) as a place where advanced amateurs like me – and maybe you too – can feel comfortable. z-Space then can be thought of as a place where only serious professionals will really feel at home. So, extending that metaphor, where might the real bad-@ss, serious-sh^t, PhD-and-bar experts hang out? Our Final Frontier, if you like … ? Let’s go back to that notion of time, like frequency, being purely real. A couple of paragraphs up I replaced the Real frequency number with a Complex number and ended up in z-space. Can I do the same thing with the Real ‘time’ number, and replace it with a Complex number? What happens then? Well … something quite unexpected happens. If you have got this far you have probably heard of Einstein’s concept of Space-Time, where space and time are melded into one entity, and all the weird stuff we observe in the universe, but couldn’t account for, seems to drop straight out into our laps. Well that’s what happens here. It turns out that both time and frequency are in fact one single entity called Time-Frequency. They’re not independent at all. In fact, we can view the Time-Frequency domain as a Complex number space, where the Real part is Time-like, and the Imaginary part is Frequency-like. An ‘Argand’ Diagram is commonly used to represent Complex numbers. It’s an x-y plot with the Real part on the x-axis and Imaginary part on the y-axis. On the Argand Diagram, the time-based view of our music signal – the one we started out with – lives at the 3 o’clock position, along the x-axis. The frequency-based view – the Fourier Transform – lives along the y-axis at the 12 o’clock position. From this perspective, the Fourier Transform can be seen as a rotation by 90 degrees counter-clockwise. A further rotation of 90 degrees takes us to the 9 o’clock position which turns out to represent a time-reversed version of the original music signal, and a further 90 degree rotation to the 6 o’clock position actually corresponds to the inverse Fourier Transform. This place we have arrived at has several names, and is actually at the very forefront of pure research into signal processing. It is mind-blowingly difficult to master, and I would say that those who are able to do so probably already enjoy an international reputation in their fields, and sport long beards. I for one am so not among them. In the signal-processing field the most commonly used terminology is Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT, or FRFT). This is because, understanding the picture in the terms I just described, it becomes possible to design transformations which transform the signal into some intermediate position in the Time-Frequency domain, where the datum is neither one thing nor the other. In other words, a rotation of some arbitrary angle somewhere between zero and 90 degrees, hence the term ‘Fractional’ Fourier Transform. This really is the cutting edge. Researchers are only just beginning to uncover what can be done using these theorems and representations. For example, I have read (but am sadly unable to fully comprehend) a paper claiming to show how FRFT can be used to design mathematically perfect sample rate conversion algorithms, something that practically escapes the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, FRFT shows that the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theory is but a specific case of a more general theory by which sampling is not just constrained to be band-limited in the frequency domain, but in a more complex sense in the entire Time-Frequency domain. There are, I imagine, things one can do with such knowledge! So … hands up if you thought Fourier Transforms were tough!