Issue 25

Episode IX – Apocalypse Now?

It is my contention that the music industry – by which I mean both the creation and consumption of music – is ripe for a major upheaval.  Digital audio has forever changed the way we consume music, but at the same time the music industry is trying desperately to cling to the financial models which drove it a generation and more ago and which no longer serves its consumers.

There are two major challenges that the industry faces.  The first is to monetize their assets (i.e. get you to pay for the music you listen to).  The second – perhaps surprisingly – is to get you to care more about what you listen to.  The monetizing issue is one which most audiophiles are quite familiar with, and in any case is more of a business than a technology discussion.  But the “getting you to care” bit is perhaps more nuanced than you might have realized.  Its importance lies in the fact that if consumers don’t care, then it no longer matters what your financial model looks like.

As a great unwashed mass, we have become accustomed to the Radio Station concept of music consumption.  We tune in to a station we like, and listen to whatever they happen to play.  Beyond choosing the station, the idea of deciding what we want to listen to doesn’t come into it.  We allow the radio station to choose for us.  It seems we tend to like the idea of being constantly ‘surprised’ by what comes up next.  Accordingly, right from the start, CD players have usually had a ‘shuffle’ button which randomly shuffled the order of play of the tracks on an album.  [For the life of me I can’t see the appeal of that, and I know of nobody who has ever actually invoked that feature on any routine basis, but the feature has largely persisted.]  Today, that ‘shuffle’ feature is commonplace on computer audio playback software such as iTunes, where individual users can engage it to create their own ‘Radio Station’ experience.

There is currently quite a lot of effort that goes into creating this ‘Radio Station’ experience in modern playback software.  In iTunes, for example, it is called ‘Genius’, and you use it to create random playlists of nominally similar material.  In order to do that, iTunes relies on its ability to know stuff about the music in your Library.  But what does it know, and how does it know it?

For software like iTunes’ Genius, the only information it has to go on is what it finds in the music’s metadata, and I described the origins of metadata in the previous issue of Copper.  But the metadata you find in music files – and certainly the metadata that iTunes supports – is limiting to say the least.  The titles of the song and the album, the Artist, the Composer, the Genre, that’s about all there is to it.  And that was fine by the people who invented and introduced embedded metadata in the first place.  Their main objective was to provide an informative display on the computer screen of what was being played, and to enable a superficial ability to organize the Music Library according to useful categories, and it worked quite well according to the objectives of the hour.  However, in today’s massively-interconnected, information-driven age, we have run into the limitations of what this simplistic metadata system can deliver.  Consider what’s in the metadata, and compare that to what you can uncover by giving the name of the track to Mr. Google!

There are, broadly speaking, two major aspects to this that we need to think about collectively.  These are (i) what should be in the metadata (and, conversely, what shouldn’t)?; and (ii) who gets to decide?  Already, the music industry has dragged its collective feet and accomplished exactly nothing, which has encouraged the community of enterprising individuals to step in and fill the gap.  They have done so, by and large, on two fronts.  One community is attempting to establish massive on-line databases which can identify individual recordings and associate them with vast tracts of related metadata.  They have even found a way to monetize what they are doing, such as Gracenote (who started off as the free CDDB) which now charges handsomely for its service, whereas MusicBrainz and Discogs remain free.  Meanwhile, another community, working much less formally, is trying harder and harder to establish all-encompassing metadata standards which attempt to clarify what fields should exist, what data should go into them, and how that data should be stored in them.  Good luck with that.

These two communities still work independently, due to the combination of an immovable mass of self-interest and the absence of an irresistible force to draw them together.  The desired endgame here is a scenario where, with regard to any given music track, we can access any information that we might want about it, in a structured and consistent manner.  Not only does the technology that can allow this to happen already exist, it is also quite surprisingly mature.  So, for example, if I’m playing a Beatles song, and I’m wondering who the producer was, that information should be no further than a mouse click away (or even a tap on the screen).  And with another click/tap it should be a trivial thing to bring up all the other tracks in my music library that were produced by the same guy.  Right now, there are no technological objectives that prevent such a high-performance system from being developed and deployed without delay.

To a large extent, though, the door to that stable has been left unlocked – if it was even installed in the first place – and the horse has already bolted.  Technology is starting an inexorable move away from the concept of individuals maintaining their own personal music libraries, and towards one where we will just download what we want from the Internet, when we want it.  Already, TIDAL is offering this concept to audiophile users with CD-quality data.  The next step will be to integrate the metadata capability of the Gracenotes of this world with the music distribution model of the TIDALs, and empower them with a game-changing user interface – the one component that is yet to emerge.  When that happens, everything – but everything – will change.

But just how is that going to happen?  The music industry – whose very future we are talking about here – has proven conclusively that it prefers looking backwards rather than forwards.  Those involved in metadata don’t have the muscle to make anything happen, and TIDAL is still struggling to find a critical mass of relevance.  I said in my previous Copper post that Apple is going to move in and eat everybody’s lunch, just as they did with the mobile phone industry.  They have the financial muscle to take on the music industry, the technical chops to execute and deliver it, and an immediate and pressing business need to make their next big move.  Oh, and don’t be fooled into thinking that the music industry will be their focus here.  It isn’t, not by a long shot.  It’s the whole entertainment industry, driven mainly by Movies and TV.  The music end of things is just going to get swept up in the maelstrom.

And when it does, we at the ‘high end’ – like the music industry as a whole – will still be staring at our own navels.

Every issue, we will present major news of the audio industry as we learn of it. Aside from expository text  required to make sense of the press-releases, we will refrain from editorial comment. —Ed.

[In its 70 year history, McIntosh Laboratory has had a number of owners. The company was bought by the Japanese car audio maker Clarion in 1980, and was sold to D&M Holdings—which also owned Denon and Marantz, among several other audio companies— in 2003. The Fine Sounds Group was formed in 2007 when Italian capital group Quadrivio SGR bought Sonus Faber; Mauro Grange came on as CEO of Sonus Faber in 2009, the same year the group bought Audio Research. Subsequently, Fine Sounds purchased the importer/distributor Sumiko in 2010; Wadia in 2011; and McIntosh in 2012. Fine Sounds also owned an Asian distribution company, Fine Sounds Asia, and started a luxury headphone brand, Pryma. In 2014, Grange and McIntosh Laboratory President Charlie Randall led a buyout of Fine Sounds in partnership with two capital groups, and in 2016, the group was renamed McIntosh Group. Complicated, eh? —Ed.]

 McIntosh Group

CEO Mauro Grange stepping down after 8 years at the helm of the Group.    Charles Randall, CEO of McIntosh Laboratory Inc. to step in.

New York, USA – January 23, 2017: After successfully leading Fine Sounds Group, renamed McIntosh Group in 2016 for almost a decade, Mauro Grange will be stepping down from his position as CEO, effective December 31, 2016, as planned at the time of the Management Buyout supported by financial sponsors LBO France and Yarpa.

During Mr. Grange’s tenure, the Group developed into one of the leading players in the High End Audio industry.

“We thank Mauro for his service for the last 8 years. He built McIntosh Group into a world-class leader and has prepared the organization for the future challenges, as the widely appreciated new Lifestyle products and the strategic entrance in the Premium car audio sector demonstrate” said Robert Daussun, President of LBO France. “Mauro is leaving us in a strong position to move towards our goal of consolidating our leadership position in the core audio market and continue our momentum in new sectors, including Lifestyle products and Premium car audio,” added Luca Paveri Fontana, Yarpa’s Executive Vice Chairman.

“It has been an incredible privilege and personally gratifying for me to have led Fine Sounds Group first and McIntosh Group later for the last 8 years and to have worked side by side with brilliant colleagues whom I now call friends. I’ve been surrounded by an incredible team, many of whom have been at the organization even longer than me. I’m confident that with this team in place the future goals will be achieved,” said Mr. Grange.

Mr. Grange will remain Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Group for a period of time to ensure a smooth transition for his successor and will maintain its equity position in the Group’s holding Company. Charles Randall, CEO of McIntosh Laboratory Inc. will step in.

Randall while holding the position of COO of the Group for the last 5 years, and his 30 years of experience with McIntosh Laboratory Inc. will continue the mission of the Group as CEO to be the premier collection of brands in the consumer electronics industry.

####

[The Norwegian technology company Aspiro started up an online music-streaming service called WiMP—no, I don’t know what it stood for, in English— back in 2010. When the service came to the US in 2014, the name was changed to Tidal, and the company was an early leader in providing CD-quality streaming. In 2015, Aspiro was bought by rapper/businessman Jay-Z for $56M. The service has struggled to gain subscribers, but at CES, announced that it had gone live with MQA Authenticated content. And now, a third of the company has been purchased by Sprint, allegedly for more than three times what Carter/Jay-Z paid for the whole company. Who says rappers aren’t good businessmen?—Ed.]

You probably know that the vinyl LP is enjoying an incredible regeneration in interest. Not that it was ever dead in many of the circles that I encounter. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Since a number of Copper’s readers might consider themselves vinylphiles, I thought it’d be a good idea to make them angry with this article…  NOT!  🙂

However, I do want to say a few things that might make some readers unhappy. So consider this a thought piece.

Why I cringe

In my travels, attending and participating in shows, dealer events, and countless voicing sessions, including those going back for over 35 years, I have yet to encounter a single turntable that I thought was voiced as well as it could have been. That’s right, I’ve never heard one that I thought was delivering all of the music!

The bad news is that all of them could have been better. Some ‘tables needed just a bit of help – and sadly, some required a lot.  The good news is that — at least in recent times — typically, it didn’t take much to effect an improvement.  When I had the opportunity to experiment, it always proved to be the case that I could make that vinyl-playing-rig sound better. And it often didn’t take long to do it. Maybe that’s why I cringe when I see audiophiles claiming their ‘tables sound so good.  They might sound OK, but are they playing at the level that they could?  Probably not.

Vinyl – Vivid or Veiled? – A Dozen Dilemmas

To be fair, who knows what our vinyl replay is really supposed to sound like?  The truth is, none of us have that information, and (with a few exceptions) that may include the mastering engineer.

1) Most of us fancy ourselves as purists who wouldn’t sully our rigs with EQ – analog or digital.  I cannot recall many audiophiles answering YES to this question: “Would you use a full-range equalizer in your system?” Yet every time we play an LP, the sound has gone through not one, but two levels of EQ! First, the RIAA mastering curve is introduced to the LP itself, and then we must play the LP back through a phono preamp stage that contains (hopefully) the mirror image EQ to get us back to “flat” response.

This situation assumes precisely mirror-imaged curves (recording & playback), which, truth be told, occurs less frequently than we might think.  Different labels introduce slightly different emphasis.  Earlier, pre-RIAA recordings used their own “in-house” EQ curves (which is why manufacturers such as Zanden offer a selection of EQ curves). So we have two levels of the dreaded EQ, and they may not be accurately EQ’d for some of our recordings anyway.

2) Most audiophiles pay attention when they see an electronic design that has managed to dispense with an extra gain stage, but for some reason, they give the additional – and relatively high-gain – phono-stage a pass.  Additionally, if we have moving-coil cartridges, then we may opt to purchase a high-quality outboard phono-preamp.  Same EQ question, same gain required, only now we’ve introduced even more cables and connections into the equation.

Of course, this is totally against what we attest to – or have been led to – believe is best – fewest gain stages, fewest connections & cables, but, hey, this is analog, so fuggedaboutit! 🙂

3) You never see mention of the varying eq in the high frequencies as you get further into the center of the LP.  In other words, cutting requirements may require a subtle (or sometimes severe) change in high frequencies as the stylus gets nearer to the inner grooves.

4) Sadly, no engineering breakthroughs have occurred that significantly reduce inner groove distortion – it’s simply a part of the vinyl LP package.

5) You do know that no two (same brand & model) phono cartridges sound the same, right?  Question – is the one that you own the best of its breed?  Have you compared it to other cartridges of the same manufacturer and model number?  Just asking… ☺

I remember going through a number of Decca London cartridges (back in the’70s) to find one that didn’t sound too harsh, too thin, too bass heavy, mistracked less, and so on.  The Deccas were primarily known for two things – potentially awesome sound, and – unfortunately – total inconsistency in sound, from cartridge to cartridge (but this was the same model – such as the Mk. 5).  I was a Decca dealer at the time, so I could hand-pick from our stock – but our clients?  Not so much.

Fortunately, today’s cartridges are far better, and much more consistent in performance.  But you do know they still don’t sound alike, right?

6) The varying thickness of LPs will mean that often you will not be playing your LPs at the optimum SRA/VTA. Are you going to readjust for every record, or simply live with the resultant degradation in sound.

I only know of one audiophile who has worked out a repeatable and fairly straightforward technique to adjust SRA. Certainly there are more – I just haven’t met them.  However, when he changes cartridges, it’s a new game and he’ll have to log it all over again.  Sheesh…

7) IMO, as someone who has made hundreds of master recordings (mostly for NPR broadcast) – both 30 and 15 IPS analog as well as digital – when I hear an audiophile claim that analog LPs deliver the music in true reference quality, it simply indicates that they have never heard a true master tape (not a commercial copy) compared to the resulting commercial LP.

The tape master makes the LP sound broken – lacking in dynamics, tone, & presence.  No turntable at – any price – can bridge the inherent gap between the master tape and the mastered LP. It is HUGE – and even that comparison assumes the use of a correctly set-up turntable/phono-stage rig.

Now there is a growing group of audiophile who are paying big money for second generation – often third or worse – copies of the master tapes.  And they say that those copies are w-a-a-a-y better than the corresponding LPs.

8) These days, anyone who is willing to go to the effort and expense of playing vinyl LPs should have managed to properly execute the basic mechanical aspects of setting up their turntable.  And now, there are a number of useful tools that make the mechanical aspect of the task achievable.  When I a mention that I still encounter turntables that fall short, it’s rarely from the mechanical set-up side – overhang, azimuth, etc.  That’s good news indeed.  The one mechanical aspect that often can still be addressed is turntable isolation.

9) One more mechanical aspect that can sometimes be addressed would be the variable ratio of moment of inertia of the counterweight and cartridge (when the option is available).  This can make a significant difference in dynamics.

10) The areas that seem to consistently benefit from a bit more work are phono cartridge loading, vertical tracking force, VTA/SRA, and anti-skate.  I do NOT feel that gauges can get this job done – you need to LISTEN to the effects of all of them.  And they are inter-related – as is room temperature (which is often ignored).

11) Finally, if the main system hasn’t been dialed in to “play the room” how can the vinyl lover know if his/her adjustments are going in the right direction?  This reminds me of RoomPlay Reference clients who come here, and at some point, ask to hear their CD, because they “know it”.  IMO, they probably do NOT know it, but I try not to say that – at least not right away.

12) Need I mention LP surface noise?

A finyl word

When a digital system is done right, or at least pretty well, the music can flow and pluck your heartstrings.  Although I love to listen to my vinyl, I haven’t in several years, preferring for a number of reasons (mostly a lack of time) to pursue making my digital archives the medium of choice.

Most of my clients assume – and often mention – that one reason the sound is so listenable is that I am playing “Hi-Rez” digital, but no, it’s simply 16/44.1 material done with care.  This news usually comes as a big surprise to them. No one ever complains or expresses a desire to hear vinyl.  Maybe it’s just an unusually polite crowd, who knows?

All the above being said, I wish there weren’t this source divide, but it is very real. Fortunately, it seems to be softening.  And maybe it’s healthy, if it keeps us engaged.

It would be nice if some audiophiles would stop and think before declaring that their vinyl playback is the superior/more accurate/higher resolution medium.  Maybe it is for them (IF they address the issues above), but these days, it’s not necessarily for others.

The current digital offerings are worth the effort of exploring now, if for no other reason than archiving your beloved analog LPs. And yes, in some cases, better sound.  There, I said it.

Note: This Copper article has been excerpted and edited from an article I wrote several years ago for Chris Sommovigo’s The High Fidelity Report – now known as Simple Mag – http://thehighfidelityreport.com/  You can also read Jim’s work at his website. www.getbettersound.com   

For at least as long as I’ve been aware of the original Quad electrostatic loudspeaker— close to 50 years now— there have been folks who have tried to improve those speakers.

The targets for improvement have been:

-Greater bass extension and impact;

-Broader dispersion, allowing more than one listener in the “sweet spot”;

-Greater treble extension.

The most famous of all “Quad mods” sought to improve all three aspects: Mark Levinson’s HQD System. For those not around back in the day, the Initials HQD stood for Hartley Quad Decca. Levinson—still the man, not a corporate entity—designed a frame that would hold stacked Quads for greater SPL and a larger sound-source, then inserted the Stanley Kelly-designed Decca ribbon tweeter between the two Quads on each side, crossing over at 7 kHz, the frequency above which the Quad treble panels really stated to beam. Separate woofer enclosures utilized the milky-white 24″ Hartley woofers, perhaps not the ultimate in controlled bass or the best match for the Quads, but they were big and impressive and scarce. Levinson matched all the speakers with his electronics (surprise!): the ML-2 Class-A monoblock  amps, designed by John Curl, 25 watts that would drive almost anything. There were also custom electronic crossovers and a Levinson pre. The whole shebang ran about $26,000 in 1984, and left Stereophile‘s J. Gordon Holt thoroughly unimpressed.

[Sidebar rant: the $26,000 cost of the HQD system in 1984 was viewed by JGH as horrifically-expensive and of interest to only a few of his readers. In 2017 bucks—that’s this week, who knows about next week—that price translates to about $60,000 today. And given today’s prices, it’s hard to conceive of that much hardware only costing $60,000. Hell, for many high-end speaker brands these days, $60k is entry-level. What happened?? end of rant. ]

in 1994, Chris Beeching wrote in Hi-Fi News about a number of Quad mods and variants: stackers (like Levinson) included SME owner Alistair Robertson-Aikman; Russ Andrews in the UK offered a beefed-up power supply; and in the US, John Koval’s Quad Mod was a new crossover unit that some loved, some hated.

(After the ESL-63 appeared, a new generation of mods appeared. Most famous in the US was the Crosby mod, which stiffened the ’63’s somewhat flexible frame, among other changes. Oddly, almost no info on the Crosby mod can be found on the web. But the ’63 is outside the scope of this article.)

Our old friend and Copper contributor  Haden Boardman is one of the world’s foremost authorities on vintage hi-fi gear. Here’s what he has to say about the Quad ELS-57, and Tim de Paravicini’s direct-drive Quad mod:

“My early interest in hifi was initially read, rather than fully experienced, and my first ever introduction to the written world of Hifi was an English 1969 Hi-Fi Year Book (incidentally a very good year!)  inherited from my Grandad Fred when I was aged 10. I read that book cover to cover like 10,000 times. I studied every piece of hifi in it, and on the cover was QUAD.

“It was pretty clear from just the cover that QUAD was cool. As a company they have never feared using a good out-of-house design consultant for aesthetic design, advertising and literature (present corporate fathers IAG, take note).

“Which brings us to the original electrostatic. A speaker practical and petite as an electrostatic speaker can be…  Electronics-wise two bass panels flank a central mid/treble unit. The audio transformer steps up the amplifiers output, and via its carefully worked out secondary  loading and ingeniously simple crossover loads the panels with  high enough voltages for the physical modulation of the air by the panel. The bias voltage is supplied by an early solid state extra high tension (EHT)  unit, really remarkable for the time.  A wooden frame holds the ensemble, with a metal grille front and rear, and dainty little feet.

“It was 9 or 10 years from the time when I read about the QUAD electrostatic to the time when I actually heard one—and that was actually the later ESL63.  Nonetheless, it completely exceeded my expectations. Still a teen, I just had to have a set, and managed to find a pretty messed-about-with pair of original ‘57s for the kind of money I could afford (£150 in about 1988).

“Neither side of the pair sounded that good, and disappointed was I.

“A conversation with a QUAD service engineer at the time was just amazing. He took the time to fully explain aging in the panels and the drop in efficiency of the original EHT units, plus how the panels were made, what mods had been done to them, etc. It cost me another few quid for new EHT units, but then I had a working pair of electrostatic speakers.

“Mods are rather obvious and have been well covered: ditching the cutesy feet for a proper stand; removing the “wadding” from behind the midrange / treble panel. If your listening room is isolated, and you aren’t plagued with rug rats or pets, removing the metal grilles makes a goodly difference also. If you have house room and a suitable wallet, stacking them makes a lot of sense. I heard a triple stack once, and  that was pretty awesome.

“The best sounding set ever was when Tim de Paravicini was “told” by  a certain smart ass magazine editor that it would be impossible to direct drive the Quad panels direct off a tube amp. Now, Tim, being Tim, [HA! —Ed.] already had the idea planned out in his head long before the challenge was thrown down, and those lucky enough to visit the 1993 Hi-Fi News show were given the treat of hearing an uninhibited electrostatic speaker. Devoid of its audio transformer and driven directly from the anodes of a couple of PL519 tubes, glowing brightly with 19,000 volts on each anode, 38,000 volts across the two. The power supply for the amplifier was lethal, sadly making the chances of productions zero, even if the sound was to die for [perhaps literally–Ed.].

“Tim’s rather unique driving style is famous. The two chassis were built in big “U” shaped enclosures,  and  [while transporting the amps] Tim’s driving had thrown one of the large chassis against the back seats of his car, bending one side of the “U” slightly inwards towards the 38kV inside. (I’m exaggerating- it was just one side, a mere 19kV)  This was not noticed until… on initial powering up, the said few kV now had an easier path to ground, jumping through the reduced gap from a ladder of 3 watt resistors acting as anode load  (must of been twenty per tube) and directly arcing to the chassis. One little 3 watt resistor took the brunt. The resulting arc and current flow totally dissolved the resistor in the air, and resulted in a permanent X-ray of yours truly in one of the bedroom walls of the then Ramada Hotel, Heathrow!

“Oh to be young and foolish….

“I still have electrostatic speakers in the ‘family’ but my discovery of high SPL horn speakers pushed the units out of my main listening spot. In standard trim, I find the speaker frustrating: it’s so damn good. The bass plays deeper than anyone generally gives it credit, but freed up  from the usual cone resonances and tuned bass ports, the lack of bass “color” can be underwhelming for some.  But the  reason they aren’t my ‘daily drivers’ is simply the lack of SPL. They do some things and some genres better than any other speaker I know, and if you are in a smaller room or really don’t listen at excessive levels, you are probably listing to the best speaker in the world.

“Unlike conventional speakers, the panels fade and need to be rebuilt with age.  This can make a £150 set cost more like £800. When tracking a set down, budget on panel replacement before you give yourself a shock!” [pun not intended, I trust–Ed.]

Today, 60 years after their introduction, the original Quad electrostatic loudspeakers still provide business for a cottage industry of rebuilders and improvers. Instructions can be found on the web for a number of standard tweaks like removing the dust-covers and the damping material; either one may shorten the lifespan of the speakers and make them more open to prying fingers. Such modded Quads are not suitable to homes with cats, small children, or a lot of dust.

Those in the field of Quad ESL restoration and/or improvement include True Sound, ElectroStatic Solutions, and Quads Unlimited in the US; Sheldon Stokes,  and Classique Sounds/One Thing Audio in the UK. There are undoubtedly others in those countries, and I’ve seen listings from specialists in Canada, Australia, and Germany.

Unlike many pieces of vintage gear, the ’57 still has a strong support community. Original units will undoubtedly need attention, but there are plenty of choices in parts and repair options.

In October, I appeared at a 3-day event called the Fretboard Summit, on a southern California golf course, along with Rick Turner and Jack Casady. Rick has been one of my best friends for about 40 years; Jack is a friend, but of course, and more to the point, he’s one of the most important, and in my opinion, the absolute best, of electric bassists. Our talk was ostensibly to be an overview of the steps that had led us to where we were, but the two-hour talk was barely enough to just feature Jack.

The whole event was so guitar-centric that I didn’t really know what I was doing there. Once “our” talk ended, I wandered around kind of aimlessly, thinking about how I would pass the next two days; Jack left immediately. And that’s how I came to wander into the lecture hall after dinner on the first night and stumbled upon a revelation: Courtney Hartman. A lone young woman under the spotlight, with a guitar: no big deal, right? But she was a huge deal, and it’s here that my failings as a writer are going to get the better of me. I’m about to attempt to communicate in words what has to be witnessed to really get.

Jack Casady, when I interviewed him in 1993, talked about the “Mysterious Ghost” that arises around people when they play together just right. This woman has the spectral being residing right where she does. If there’s such a thing as a spirit of music, she has it in spades. (Naturally, I’m skeptical that such a romantic notion exists — until I’m confronted by it, once again. I’m pretty sure when I was her age, though I was on my way to understanding, I still had no clue it really existed. It took some years and Ali Akbar Khan to make that real.)

We can talk about her effortless technique, but that’s really beside the point. I can’t say if there are more facile players because everything I’ve witnessed her do, flows from her easy and naturally. Sure, she’s unusual in that she generally flat-picks where most other people would finger-pick. And she really works up a head of steam when she gets going. But that’s not the thing that grabs me—it’s the sheer musicality flowing from her.

As flowery as it sounds, imagine you’re sitting still, in any environment you like. A note is struck, and you fall into a chasm and then rise up with the notes. That’s what happened to me with Khansahib at times; it’s what happened when I saw the Allmans in ’71; it happened frequently with the Grateful Dead in those years. And, it happens every time I hear this young woman play. Even on the noisy and crowded floor of the NAMM show, a week or so ago .

There is a younger crop of acoustic players that are well known; Nickel Creek are the most obvious example. She’s a member of the nouveau acoustic band Della Mae, who are starting to be well known. But… there’s something else going on with her, and it’s something that, so far at least, I think may only arise around her, in Casady’s phrase, when she’s playing by herself.

It was a Friday night when I first saw her. On Saturday, I met guitar-builder Dana Bourgeois by chance and got the story on who Courtney was and where she’s from. Originally from Colorado, she now lives in Brooklyn. Dana met her at the IBMA conference around 10 years ago, when, after a pretty fierce jam by a group of highly respected players in his display booth, Courtney (then about 17 and with her family band) wandered into his booth and asked to see a guitar. Dana continued on with what he was doing, but her playing kept demanding his attention.

They met again at the IBMA conference a couple years later when Della Mae, which she had just joined, did an impromptu set a couple booths away and she asked to borrow a guitar. The guitars there were all already sold, and Dana’s first reaction was to say no—but then he recognized her and immediately “pivoted”. From there a nice friendship blossomed.

Late on Saturday night at the Summit, I was playing my fretless by myself, and Dana tried to bring Courtney over to do a little playing. But it didn’t seem like the moment to me. Instead, guitarist and dealer Eric Schoenberg began playing a Bourgeois guitar where I was sitting, and a few gathered around. After a bit, Courtney went and got her guitar, and the pair held a group of us spellbound until late.

If you’re at all inclined, if you’re a fan of American acoustic music, keep track of when she’s going to be anywhere near you. She’s certainly worth seeing, and hearing.

Onward and upward with our New Year’s survey of musical elements. Last time, we got a start on rhythm, because any art form that moves through time must consider rhythm primary.

Yet in Western classical music, pitch is usually awarded pride of place. Westerners have done pretty well with it. Purely melodic constructions in Euro-American “serious” music lack the complexity found in, say, Indian music, with its long tradition of improvisations on raga or mēḷakarta. But in our own brief history we did create—besides melodies—harmony and counterpoint, two pitch-centric techniques largely absent elsewhere.

Pitches also seem to be prime carriers of emotional rhetoric. The range and specificity of feelings that come with a pitch sequence are arguably wider than those that come with rhythms.

In these thousand words I’ll explore how melodies are constructed, while mentioning harmony and glancing toward emotion. It’s a tall order. We may ignore a few hundred details. Let’s begin with Beethoven’s Greatest Hit, as delivered sensitively by Alfred Brendel:

In terms of structure, Für Elise scores high on the Simple and Repetitive scales. That’s why it’s popular; check out any song in the Billboard Hot 100 to confirm this principle. It begins with one crucial, ear-wormy ingredient, a pair of oscillating pitches (o.p.’s) rounded off with repeated ascending broken chords (b.c.’s), leading to a repeat of the entire phrase (o.p.’s plus b.c.’s)—call it all “A.” That much—from first o.p. to last b.c.—is immediately repeated (so, A again). For a moment Beethoven switches up with little b.c. variations, and then. . . . back to the o.p.’s. This is the B-to-A half of the piece, which is—you guessed it—immediately repeated, resulting in a form of AA BA BA. Perfect for ringtones.

Is a profound emotional association in there somewhere? No. Beethoven himself called it a Bagatelle, i.e., a trifle. For deeper emotion, try this (Brendel again):

But wait, where’s the melody? It’s certainly not present in the first 23 seconds. That’s just the accompaniment, consisting of a repeated b.c. plus an equally placid, hypnotic bass line. As the music goes on, bass and b.c. subtly change, together, to produce harmonic flow. This is what people remember. The “melody” begins about 24 seconds into the movement, with a repeated single pitch. Eventually, Beethoven arranges five whole pitches artlessly (i.e., with extreme care) in sequence. You don’t pay much attention to them, because the first few seconds have already established a mood. This time it is profound, encompassing sadness, longing, and loss.

Anything simple or repetitive in this is expertly offset by unconventional treatment. Few Classic-era piano sonatas begin this way: not quickly with fanfare, but slowly, with only the barest attempt at melodic action. We cannot for an instant dismiss it as a trifle. Again and again during his career, Beethoven proved that “melody” is not an issue; it’s how you work with it.

When other good composers practiced the economies of the “Moonlight” Sonata, they also produced superior music and avoided Ringtone Syndrome. Here is Chopin’s famous E-minor Prélude (Ingrid Fliter, pianist), which relies on a harmonic progression delivered in placid, unchanging 8th-note rhythms under an almost non-existent melody:

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that good composers ignore melody. It’s that they prefer to subvert, extend, or otherwise modify the formulae. Listen to the first few bars of Mozart’s C-minor Piano Sonata, K457 (from Mitsuko Uchida):

How many melodies in there, fans? Let’s enumerate: (1) dramatically ascending b.c., brusque, demanding; (2) immediately met with a fluttery, downward-swooping treble response; (3) followed by that dramatically ascending b.c., now in the dominant; (4) return of the fluttery, etc. etc.; (5) all giving way to a driving murky-bass accompaniment and right-hand “melody” of mournfully interlaced, irregularly descending chromatic lines. That’s just the first 16 seconds. Mozart uses these abrupt thematic switches to create a miniature drama, a fast-moving dialogue.

If dialogue is possible, then so is soliloquy. Berlioz manages a whole series of them based on a single theme, the idée fixe of his Symphonie fantastique. Here’s how we first encounter it (Daniel Harding conducts):

This lengthy, complex melody begins with another version of the ascending b.c., by which it gains height and gathers energy. Then it stalls, falling slowly downward, step by step. Another try, on the dominant, reaches greater heights before stalling. The stall-and-fall fragment repeats at successively higher pitches, eventually producing a climax, then a final downward fall.

Thus does Berlioz depict his autobiographical protagonist’s unfulfilled longing. Whereas Berlioz used a term from contemporary psychology connoting obsession, this theme’s musical rhetoric—its “sigh” motives and more—goes back to the 17th century. The point was to communicate a specific feeling through melody. It still works; even 21st-century listeners get it.

I could cite further examples. Another thousand words might introduce Brahms properly: he adopted Beethoven’s minimalist strategy, proving again that the simpler the material, the more you can do with it. Or we could explore Tchaikovsky’s endless flirtations with, and narrow escapes from, the Simple and Repetitive. In his negotiations with popularity, he avoided Ringtone Syndrome by crafting tunes both shapely and memorable. People got melodies they could take to heart without fear of earworms:

(as shaped by Mikhail Pletnev!) Are these tunes’ emotional content as specific as Berlioz’s? As Shostakovich’s (see below)? Perhaps not, and that’s also a key to their relative popularity. Listeners can project personal emotion into them with far greater ease.

We’ll come back to Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Meanwhile, two recent recordings offer veritable master classes in melody. First is cellist Natalie Clein’s set of Suites for Solo Cello by Bloch, Dallapiccola, and Ligeti. Late in life, Ernest Bloch (1880–1959) wrote three unaccompanied suites for Zara Nelsova, with whom he had earlier recorded Schelomo and Three Pieces from Jewish Life. The suites owe something to Bach but a lot more to Bloch, who steadfastly “proclaimed the primacy of melody in his creative thinking.” (New Grove 1980, italics added)

Here Bloch anchors a series of three-note statements with single bass-note “accompaniment,” gradually allowing the embryonic melody to expand in length, range, and intensity.

In the First Suite’s third movement, “Canzona,” Bloch heads for the instrument’s high register, offering a finely spun melody in which low-register anchor notes drop after the melodic statements:

Clein has a big, warm sound, and she’s not afraid to use it. Even Dallapiccola’s difficult 1945 Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio, which reflects the harrowing war years in Italy, emerges as pure music. A fervent anti-fascist, he expressed his love of freedom in part by adopting Schoenberg’s 12-tone method. The results remain passionately human. The second movement is subtitled Allegro con espressione drastica:

And so to our second master class, Shostakovich Violin Concertos from Frank Peter Zimmermann, Alan Gilbert conducting the NDR Elbphilharmonie. I found the keening lines of No. 1’s first-movement “Nocturne” particularly moving:

In 1948, as Shostakovich was finishing this work, he found himself back on a government blacklist, his music considered too “formalistic” for good Russian ears. You can hear the composer’s anguish at having to bear—again—the loss of his public voice at a time when he had so much to say; this concerto waited seven years for its first performance. Throughout the recording, members of the orchestra add exquisite counterpoint, intensifying the music’s impact. It’s also superbly recorded, as is Clein’s collection.