Issue 50

Mozart’s string quartets and sonatas are deservedly adored members of the classical canon. But he wrote many other genres of chamber music as well. Three recent recordings remind us to pay attention to some of these less-performed works.

In the early music scene, the Kuijken family of Belgium is revered as a group of experts on historical performance, and now two generations of them have turned their attention to Mozart’s two piano quartets (piano, violin, viola, cello).

This is the first and only recording by the particular ensemble calling themselves the Kuijken Piano Quartet. The violinist, Sigiswald Kuijken, is the brother of renowned Baroque flutist Barthold Kuijken and two other famous siblings, with whom he has recorded and performed on other occasions. The two Kuijken women on this recording (Veronica on fortepiano and Sara on viola) represent the next generation. Michel Boulanger fills out the quartet on cello.

Unfortunately there are no examples from this CD on YouTube, but if you register free at Spotify you can hear the whole album:

Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 493 is first on the record. That’s sensible in dramatic terms, since No. 1 is both more famous and more emotionally intense. In a way, the works are conservative for their time: Both these quartets have three movements (like a sonata) rather than the four movements (like a symphony) that Haydn was contemporaneously making the standard for string quartets.

Period performance practice is always a factor when a Kuijken plays. The fortepiano’s wooden frame – as opposed to the metal frame of a modern piano — alters the mood of the piece from the brightness we often associate with Mozart. But this is the kind of instrument Mozart was writing for. The string players seem to be trying to match the keyboard’s muted tone, an impression bolstered by a somewhat slow tempo for the opening Allegro movement.

The violin especially came across as weak at first listening. There are many places where Sigiswald’s bow loses contact with the string. But as I continued to listen, I bought into the quartet’s approach. Veronica’s phrasing at the fortepiano is decisive, shaping and leading the expression of the other three. It’s very fine ensemble playing.

The Piano Quartet in g minor, K. 478, was commissioned by a publisher named Hoffmeister to be sold as sheet music to the amateur musicians of Vienna who were always rabid for a new Mozart work to sight-read with friends in their salons. Boy, I bet they were surprised when they sat down to this masterwork! In fact, the piece was so far beyond the reach of Hoffmeister’s customers that he released Mozart from his contract to write two more such works. (Happily for us, Mozart wrote a second piano quartet anyway.)

The hauntingly majestic Andante middle movement of  K. 478 is particularly moving. Boulanger’s cello brings a bittersweet longing to the bassline, which the other musicians run with. And the final Rondo practically arches its eyebrows with charming whimsy and gallantry.

Mozart also used the quartet format to create some great music for flute (he was particularly enamored of woodwinds, as you can tell from the solos he gives them in his orchestral writing, not to mention all the wonderful concertos he wrote for them). When celebrated flutist Aurèle Nicolet died in 2016 at the age of 90, it inspired the 2017 reissue by Tudor of his recording of the complete Mozart flute quartets, which had originally been released 40 years ago.

These four works are for flute, violin, viola, and cello – or “bassus,” as Mozart indicated. Nicolet collaborates here with the Munich String Trio.

The two-movement K. Anh. 171, in C major, starts with an Allegro, followed by an elegant theme and variations, which Nicolet and company play with appealing languor. The malleable beat and the amount of vibrato might not conform to today’s standard of historically informed playing, but it’s hard to resist the richness of the sound.

The famous opening Allegro of the K. 285 quartet in D major shines with vibrant force, and these four excellent musicians lean in confidently and crunch into those downbeats. (One of the string players is huffing away, clearly audible on headphones!) The articulation is precise and purposeful.

For evidence of why Nicolet was such a revered flutist, listen to his liquid tone in the Andante movement (another theme and variation) of K. 298 in A major. Such a melodist Mozart was, and Nicolet’s singing of the phrases as if they had words – many scholars have pointed out how Mozart wrote for woodwinds as if they were sopranos in an opera — will make you hum along. And the Munich string players support him at every cadence.

Although it was one of the most popular types of ensemble in Mozart’s day, his works for trio don’t get nearly the attention one might expect. The Spanish group Trío Vega helps to rectify that with their Complete Mozart Trios (IBS Classical).

In the 17^th and 18^th century, “trio” referred to a group with three elements: 1) one or two melodic instruments, 2) an instrument that could play chords, and 3) a low instrument to double the bassline. By Mozart’s time, this had been standardized to violin, piano, and cello. He was happy to mix up the traditional roles, letting the cello have solo passages, putting the violin into inner harmonies, and letting the piano do anything he could think of.

Playing on modern instruments, Trío Vega gives a thoughtful performance of the six piano trios. In this Andante grazioso second movement from the Trio No. 4 in E major, K. 542, the musicians seem to be pondering and musing. Their pace and mood follow pianist Yasuyo Yuro’s patient lead.

In the opening Allegro of the Trio No. 6 in G major, K. 564, violinist Marc Paquin begins with a long obbligato line over a busy piano part. When at last he gets to play the melody, it bursts from is instrument as if he could hardly stand to wait. The album is full of enthusiastic moments like this.

The final Rondo minuet of the Trio No. 1 in B flat major, K. 254 shows how much more traditional this early work is than the later trios. The violin is the true star, with piano and cello mostly serving to accompany it. But put on headphones and force yourself pay attention to the relatively simple part for cellist Orfilia Saiz Vega. There is nothing simple about her playing. Clearly she understands both her role in the harmonic progressions and as musical foundation for the group.

Not that I ever complain about new recordings of Mozart’s blockbuster works, but I’m happy to see attention being paid to these chamber pieces. They’re Mozart, after all, so they will always reward close listening when they’re intelligently played.

[We began this series of articles by Belden engineer Galen Gareis in Copper #48 , and continued it in Copper #49. We now present the conclusion of  Time is of the Essence, on time-based distortions in audio cable design,—Ed.]

7) Dielectric effects

Dielectrics have a disproportionate impact upon weak electromagnetic signals. Four-fifths or more of the current magnitude at audio frequencies is below 3,000 Hz, and this clumping is often called “spectral density”. This energy does not stop in plastic or air. It emanates out in an inverse-log power decay through all the materials it encounters along the way.

Electromagnetic fields are most influenced by dielectrics nearest the wire. Using too many small wires splits up the current, and starts to allow the dielectric to influence the sound more and more, negating the advantage of dielectric uniformity. The electromagnetic field is strongest nearest the wire, decreasing with the square of the distance moving out away from the wire. With smaller wire, the electromagnetic signal moves from being in the dielectrics to being around it, as well.

So weaker signals are affected more by the dielectric in general, as they decay the most as they move away from the wire (a great proportion of the signal is in the dielectric). Also, weaker signals are affected most by the dielectric closest to the wire, especially as we go up in frequency. This can be measured by how easily velocity of propagation is nearest to one (100%) for a given cable size. The better the dielectric, the closer the VP will be to one, and at the smallest size.

If we use two dielectrics in layers, say air and plastic, we also see the signal slow as it moves from air to plastic, and speed up as it moves from plastic to air. Some cables (including the Belden Iconoclast) put air nearest the wire, where the signal strength is highest. This reduces the outer plastic dielectric’s contribution to the group velocity, and translates to a lower capacitance number when we use the cable in audio applications. It also significantly reduces the cable’s SIZE.

8) DCR influences

This is mostly a speaker cable issue, as the amplifier’s negative feedback loop works best with ZERO cable resistance. To control the drivers— the woofers being the worst back-EMF devices the amplifier sees— we need as much CURRENT as possible to be delivered to offset their unwanted motion. The higher the cable resistance, the less current the amplifier can generate to manage the back EMF from the speaker. We need to manage DCR with many smaller wires, yet still arrive at low inductance and capacitance, too.

A second effect of too-high DCR is that it can vary the speaker’s frequency response. Voltage at a given frequency dropped across the cable is signal that doesn’t get to the speaker. This is frequency dependent in complex speaker loads.

On interconnect cables, the small to near-zero currents allow small wires to be used to improve current uniformity and lessen proximity. Here we want flat Rs electricals measured out above the audio band.

I will go out on a limb and say stranded wire doesn’t seem to “measure up” to its bad reputation in my studies. I see no need to use them as the cost goes up, and the advantages go down as I already design with small AWG wires, negating the need for the flexibility stranding provides. Bad sound with stranded wire has always been due to the dielectric design, and not the stranding.

9) Cable symmetry

How do you make a complex cable’s cross section look like one simple wire electrically, and have every wire sound the same?

Matching multiple wires into a complex structure isn’t easy to do well. The ideal cable has one wire that has exactly the same structure and length as the opposite-polarity wire. However, if we run two large conductors in parallel, the inductance, capacitance, proximity effects and skin effects between them will be less than ideal. Running several smaller conductors in a single polarity and weaving them around each other to increase the average distance between the center of any one conductor and another in an opposite polarity will reduce the inductance. A carefully designed weave pattern will help cancel out magnetic fields, further lowering inductance. Does it work? A single bonded pair made for Iconoclast has a 0.196 uH/foot inductance. One we complete the cable assembly inductance drops to 0.08 uH/foot.

The use of BONDED pairs in each polarity helps cancel the magnetic fields. No magnetic field means zero inductance! The two flat-polarity halves pulled tightly together with a textile wrap keeps loop are to a minimum, further keeping inductance in check. The proximity effect is lowered by using many, many (fourth eight!) small wires. Alternating current near one another lessens conductor efficiency, especially with larger wire. High current in speaker cables mean that proximity effect is a larger problem than in interconnects. The weave pattern keeps wires less-parallel to one another. The final results are plenty measurable, and are best in class in the designs evaluated.

However, more small wires with a dielectric between them can create a nice big capacitor which negatively affects the signal. Inductance and capacitance have an inverse relationship, so to get both intrinsically low, you can’t go “whole hog” on the opposite variable. This means a compromise, and yes, audio is a whole set of compromises. The end view explains why this is so in the speaker cable. The bonded wires “trade places” between the minima distance and the maxima distances. The weave insures wires end up at the same electrical length. This keeps every wire electrically the same, and lowers bulk capacitance while the bonded pairs lower inductance. The tight spacing and magnetic cancellation in “star quad” cross-over points are unique their ability to lower capacitance and inductance, both, and still address multiple cable issues even handedly and at the expense of nothing. Well, except being easy to make. We’re not an easy crowd, though, are we?

Wire direction showed no impact on the sound. But, the manufacturing process insures ALL the wires are “directional”, so flip the cable around at will if you like, it’s free. I fully refrain from setting critical design goals on immeasurable attributes. As proof to this, we sell the exact same designs in three copper grades, separated by the copper’s costs. The copper quality factor has zero influence on the design, and all measurements are identical. Are there differences in sound? Yes, there are, but the influencing factors do not derail the design between the copper draw sciences.

10) Attenuation at audio frequencies

The common assumption is that better cables are better simply because they cause less linear attenuation. However, when cables are designed for time-based issues, they clearly sound better. The effects of more- or less-linear attenuation are far harder to hear. With a non-optimized cable, attenuation is not linear, and resistance increases from 5,000 Hz onwards in the standard 1313A 10 AWG zip cord style cable, and is essentially a wall of totally lost energy above 20 KHz.

Taking the audio band from 100 Hz to 20 KHz, we see a 6.75% change in overall impedance with Iconoclast, versus a 71.8% change for the 1313A cable. But, this is NOT just attenuation per say, but skin effect and proximity effect variables that effect higher frequencies too.

Summary

The important thing to remember with all audio cables is that arrival times are more important than raw speed down the wire. We call it “sound quality” when we use the cable, but it really is the time-alignment of all the signals. The human brain hears superimposed time alignment and amplitude preservation first, everything else a distant second. Efforts to manage phase (lower inductance) and VP are important. Attributes (smaller wires, lower L and C) that are time-dependent seem to provide the most benefit.

By touching upon some of the considerations of a cable designer, I hope to convey how complex this issue is, and that a cable is not “just a cable”. I’ve often said, “Rest assured, if there is snake oil in these products, it sure looks like physics to me. All the data is measured and real.”

[We will be featuring more articles on cable design by Galen Gareis, with an assist from Gautam Raja, in the near future.—Ed.]

We’ve arrived at the finals of the ‘67 Psychedelic Shoot-out!!!

There was no way of knowing how this whole exercise was going to peel out.

It really just started as me ranting about the differences between The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  and the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and grew, as things like this tend to do, into something much larger.

I’m really in awe over this whole exercise.

In awe…really…like, um..why?

Simply because, as a by product of the 60’s counter culture revolution spearheaded by the Beatles, the “psychedelic” movement became the musical foundation of a generation of artists that reacted as if the chains had come off (meaning strictly commercial restraints) and all of a sudden, hundreds, if not thousands of writers, singers and players were now free to explore a new kind of music fueled by psychedelic (read: mind altering) drugs

Many of these artists have gone on to form the musical  bedrock and soundtrack of millions of peoples lives around the world.

Here we are 50 years after the the music in this analysis was created and the effect of much of it still reverberates in today’s culture.

I am proud to have come from that era and, more importantly, to have experienced it, in real time.

That kind of impact will not be duplicated in my lifetime.

The era was nothing short of a Zeitgeist.

As important as any of the greatest movements of cultural shape shifting that the world ever experienced!

And…yes, there are many artists from that era that didn’t make this face off so let me give many of them (and yes. I know there are more) my due respect now:

The Who

The Moody Blues

Donovan

The Incredible String Band

The Mothers of Invention

The Fugs

Pearls Before Swine

The Electric Prunes

Captain Beefheart

The Rotary Connection

Fever Tree

Ultimate Spinach

The Strawberry Alarm Clock

The Blues Magoos

13th Floor Elevator

Bonzo Dog Band

Firesign Theater

Velvet Underground

Bob Lynd

Scott Mackenzie

Small Faces

Having said that, I have had an incredible amount of fun revisiting some of the most important records of my youth but find myself almost in awe, as I gave my creative writing soul over to the last 2 albums in the “contest”.

Because, for reasons that have no discernible context, the last 2 albums are actually the most most important (to me) of all.

Simply put, because of all the albums reviewed here, Cream’s Disraeli Gears and Pink Floyd’s  Piper At The Gates Of Dawn have either never really left my turntable (in the case of Disraeli Gears) or become diminished as a true psychedelic statement (in the case of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn).

Let us begin…

Cream, Disraeli Gears

If you never watched a Cream documentary you would probably believe that the title of the album was a political statement or deep historical reference of some sort.

Well, neither was the case. It seemed that a “roadie “ for the band, during an early van ride to a gig, was trying to describe his new bicycle to Eric, Ginger and Jack. he wanted to say the it had a Derailleur system that changed gears when you pushed a lever.

In his ignorance he called them disraeli gears.  Bingo. The band thought that was the funniest thing that they ever heard. Hence the album title.

Cream. At this point, 1 year in, was at the height of their powers and came to NYC to make a follow up to Fresh Cream and to change their name from “The Cream” To just plain “Cream”.

The name “Cream” referred to the three of them as being the “cream” of the crop of British musicians at the time.

From the minute I put on the album, 50 years ago, It has never left my playlist. I can’t say that about any other of the great albums I listed.

Eric’s playing has always done that to me and this album is so incredible that it just sounds as great today as it did 50 odd years ago. Songs like “Sunshine of your Love”, of course, is a standard, but others like “Dance the Night Away”, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”(which btw, along with “White Room” is actually the stolen chording of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City”), SWLABR (She Was Like A  Bearded Rainbow) “Outside Women’s Blues” and “Take It Back” are all classics but hardly a day ever goes by (that’s 50 years of listening) that I don’t play “Strange Brew”. That song was originally called “Lawdy Mama” and sung by Jack Bruce but Ahmet Ertegun, The president of Atlantic/ Atco believed that Clapton was the star and wanted Eric to sing lead and that it would be the lead single.

Jack’s vocals were removed, the song re-written by their producer Felix Pappalardi and his wife Gail and recut  after Jack returned to England (the album was recorded in NYC at Atlantic’s studio on 60th and Broadway). Much to everyone’s surprise, however, The song “Sunshine of Your Love”, sung by Jack, was actually the breakout smash.

So why Eric and not, say, Jimi…

I always thought that Jimi was unattainable. Just so out there.

Eric’s tone was attainable, however, and because he was in reach felt more comfortable to me.

I had seen Cream live earlier in 1967 as an opening band for the Murray The K Easter show at the RKO Theater in Manhattan, along with The Who. (The Young Rascals, Mitch Ryder and Wilson Pickett were the main attractions that night).

I was and still am an unabashed Clapton fan.

The album cover was also a Day-Glo delight and the band played up the whole psychedelic vibe 100%.

As I bought this album with the aforementioned Their Satanic Majesties Request in early December, Disraeli Gears, never left my turntable for long.

A very sentimental favorite but not a musically super psychedelic album per se.

I gave it a Psychedelic Factor: 9 out of 10… because …I can.

And now, at last,  the last entrant:

Pink Floyd, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

This album lies beneath the pile of most Floyd fans who came along for the ride at Dark Side. Maybe you went back to Umma Gumma, the soundtrack for the movie More, or even Saucerful Of Secrets.

Yes, you may have heard the first single “See Emily Play” from the US version of Piper.

Strange, as that single was on the US album and not the British release of PaTGoD.

Floyd already had established cred (in 1966) as the real pied pipers of the British Psych scene, playing dance halls (not sit down concerts per se)

Stranger still, as the band started out as a blues band.

Originally called “The Tea Set”, the band hurriedly changed their name one night when they found out there was another band called The Tea Set. Guitarist Syd Barrett quickly named the band after two favorite blues musicians. Pink Anderson & Floyd Council.

Because they had to play  three 90 minutes sets in an evening, they started to jam during the instrumental parts. That is how their sound evolved.

They signed to EMI (The Beatles label) and recorded their first album, PatGoD in the spring of 1967 in studio B of Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were finishing up Sgt. Pepper in Studio A.

Of course, none of this was known to me. I was 14 going on 15 during the summer of 1967.

I didn’t even know that this album existed until the spring of 1968 (coincidentally the very same time that I first dropped acid).

One of my best friends, Danny Birch, told me about the band and invited me over to his house to listen to the album.

This I can tell you: I was tripping when I heard it, and thought that nothing, and I mean nothing, sounded so incredible, amazing and otherworldly. Like I was in a sling shot, fired from a launching pad into outer space.

This must be what Interstellar travel sounded like. It was then that I saw the title of the songs “Interstellar Overdrive” & “Astronomy Domine”.

It felt like I was time traveling through the cosmos and injected into the Astral Plane.

Every song was wondrous.

“Lucifer Sam”, “Matilda Mother”, “The Gnome”, “The Scarecrow”.

I couldn’t get enough of this.

I went down to Greenwich Village and found an import store.

I bought the UK album, both mono and stereo because they had different sounding mixes as did the US mono and stereo. This album was not just music but the my soundtrack of LSD pulsing through my veins.

Floyd was coming to the Fillmore in the fall of 1968. I bought tickets but they canceled before I could see them with Syd.

It probably would have sucked anyway,  as Syd, by this time, was basically a non-performing zombie on stage. You can see the results of acid on Syd by watching Pink Floyd on American Bandstand shortly before Syd became impossible to work with.

They decided to perform the song “Apples & Oranges” on American Bandstand.

A very strange choice as it wasn’t even released as a single at the time in the US.

But, I digress..

You see, This album was a statement of a mind going where no mind had gone before.

This music on PatGoD was the sound of a meltdown and breakdown happening right before your eyes and ears.

Take the lyrics on the closing track “Bike” for example:

“I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like, It’s got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good. I’d give it to you if I could but I borrowed it”

So out there and disconnected to anything I ever heard.

Way more childlike than anything Lennon could conjure up…

And so much more…

I haven’t taken any psychedelics for over 45 years, and yet…I can taste the lysergic acid on my tongue just listening to this album.

So, to capsulize this entire face off, Jimi was pretty straight while recording his amazing guitar-laden sonic debut masterpiece, The Stones mixed the acid with heroin, The Doors had a mega hit & a very dark side,  Love gave us astonishing beauty and poetry, The Grateful Dead, in 1967, were just a mediocre garage band (yes they became great but not at this point) , Moby Grape maybe the most talented of the Bay area bands came to play but didn’t get traction, The Jefferson Airplane had bonafide hits, Procol Harum had the international song of the summer of love, Traffic was great and fun to listen to, Cream made a blues/rock masterpiece, The Move had yet to make a full album, The Yardbirds ‘67 entry “Little Games” didn’t live up to the Beck period and that leaves us with Sgt. Pepper and Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Sgt. Pepper is and was a psychedelic tour de force packaged (as only the Beatles could) in a pop landscape created by George Martin. So meaningful to so many and rightly securing its place as one of the greatest pop albums of all time.

The cover, the production, the songs, the entire legend

This is why I gave it a Psychedelic Factor: 9.9 out of 10.

Pink Floyd’s Piper At the Gates Of Dawn, however, is the sound of brain cells melting down into the abyss of ones cranium.

It stands absolutely alone in the world of truly Psychedelic experimentation.

It never has let me down.

When someone asks me what taking LSD was like, I just tell them to listen to Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

You either get it…or you don’t.

Pink Floyd’s Debut Album:

The only 10!

RIP Syd…..The Madcap Has the Last Laugh

CASE CLOSED.

[Ooh, boy…I can’t wait to see the comments on this pick! —Ed.]

Modern popular music differs most significantly from classical music in that the original performance is considered to be the definitive expression, and any others that follow are generally considered to be ‘covers’.  Furthermore, it is considered bad form for a ‘cover’ version to attempt to replicate the original – a ‘cover’ is expected to provide some variation, innovation, or other interpretive departure from the original.  With classical music, the emphasis is on the composition itself – a specific recipe that sets out the notes each instrument has to play, and how to play them.  Individual performances, therefore, tend to concentrate on the more subtle aspects of phrasing, rubato (tempo variations), tonal palette, and sonority.  New arrangements and other major departures from the score are generally frowned upon.

A consequence of this – and this is perhaps more true from a historical perspective than from a practical one today – is that the composer’s involvement with a composition tends to be completed when he has finished writing it, rather than when it is first performed.  In fact, many of the world’s greatest classical works were never even heard performed by the composers who wrote them!

In classical music, therefore, the written or published score – rather than a particular recording of it – is considered to be the work’s definitive encapsulation.  By contrast, in modern popular music that honor is typically bestowed on the original released recording, such as Time Out, Revolver, Dark Side Of The Moon, Straight Outta Compton, or OK Computer.  In other words, in modern music the specific performance is held to be more definitive than the original score … and in fact, in many cases – including all of the above – a definitive “score” as such doesn’t even exist.

This is important, since if we wanted to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of the song, ” Brothers In Arms”, we would play it, listen to it, and exchange opinions based on having heard the exact same recording of it.  And if I were to venture that it was a fundamentally flawed opus, based on having listened to a cover of it by Jay-Z, or Rage Against The Machine, you might consider that it was my opinion which was fundamentally flawed!  But that’s exactly how we face the world of classical music.  To what extent can I validly expound a critique of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony by listening to Carlos Kleiber’s recording of it, or would that be solely a critique of Kleiber’s recording?  How can we assign merit to the notes on the page, as opposed to a recording of somebody trying to play those notes?  It is a subtle but important distinction.

Let’s consider the symphonies of Mahler.  He wrote nine of them, and left a tenth unfinished.  Suppose I produce a hitherto unknown manuscript which I declare to be a previously unknown 11^th symphony.  Let’s say that there is absolutely no way of knowing whether or not this manuscript is genuine, and that nobody is willing to take my assertion at face value.  Furthermore, let’s suppose that I persuade a major orchestra to perform the piece, under the baton of a sympathetic Mahlerian conductor, and that the general reaction is that it sounds like a genuine Mahler symphony, and a great one at that.  What are we to make of this?

The core question here is this one.  Does a composition have any more or any less merit if it turns out it was written by someone else?  Particularly if the presumed composer has a notable reputation, and the ‘someone else’ most pointedly does not.  What if it turned out that the famous symphonies of the immortal (and stone-deaf) Beethoven were all in fact written by his housekeeper?  How would that impact our view of them?

These questions and more crystallize into high-definition reality in the bizarre case of the “Japanese Beethoven”, Mamura Samuragochi.  Born in 1963 to parents who were Hiroshima survivors, as a young man in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s Samuragochi had found himself a gig as a composer of music incorporated into Japanese video games, and was by all accounts quite successful at it.  His compositional aspirations expanded and deepened, but at the same time he developed a profound deafness.  Undaunted, in 2003 he released his Symphony No 1, “Hiroshima”, to great public and critical acclaim.  The work was received as a compositional tour-de-force, and Samuragochi began to be lauded and revered as the “Japanese Beethoven”.

However, all was not as it seemed.  In 1996, whether through a crisis of confidence or as a shrewd business decision, Samuragochi had teamed up with Takashi Niigaki, a young music teacher with a cripplingly severe case of low self-esteem, but a talent for composing.  He persuaded Niigaki to write his music for him, freeing himself up to promote and market it.  However, Samuragochi insisted that he himself would always be the official “composer” and Niigaki would remain very much out of the public eye.  It seems that Niigaki may even have provided his service unpaid, as an opportunity to actually compose music and have it played.

They say that in order to maintain a lie, you have to live it in perpetuity, and so it became for Samuragochi.  He was a tireless and shameless self-promoter, so as his career took off quite dramatically – still dominated by video game soundtrack work – he became more and more concerned that he would be unable to keep up his subterfuge under the glaring eye of the media.  His solution, bizarrely enough, was to assume the pretense of having gone deaf!  He could then introduce Niigaki the music teacher into the picture as an assistant who could also answer the more difficult musical questions from interviewers and other interested parties.  Amazingly, Samuragochi was able to pull this off, with Niigaki, the ultimate shrinking violet, as a willing accomplice.

The Samuragochi story was proving to be very popular in Japan, a country which had developed a proud western classical music heritage, but which yearned for its own compositional native son.  The “Hiroshima” symphony was performed at a grand concert to celebrate the G8 meeting in Hiroshima in 2008, and a contract was signed with Nippon Columbia to record the work and distribute it on CD.  Meanwhile, Samuragochi put more pressure on Niigaki to continue to write major works for him.  Something had to give, and eventually, it did.

The pressure on Niigaki was intolerable, but the shrinking violet was becoming more and more his own man.  The last straw for him came when Japanese figure skater Daisuke Takahashi, already an Olympic bronze medalist, announced that he would use a Samuragochi composition for the Olympic games of 2014 in Sochi.  Niigaki called a press conference and blew the lid on the whole thing.  Even so, it took a full two months for Samuragochi to come forward with an apology of his own, after which he abruptly vanished from public life.  Niigaki, by contrast, took full advantage of his 15 minutes of fame, quit his teaching job, gained confidence through appearances on the talk-show circuit, and even launched a career as a pianist.  Readers interested in a more detailed treatment of the whole episode may enjoy reading Christopher Beam’s excellent piece in “New Republic”.

In the wake of the scandal, Nippon Columbia withdrew its recording of Symphony No 1 “Hiroshima” from the catalog, and it is now a remarkably difficult CD to find.  However, much to my delight, I recently discovered that it is freely available on TIDAL, and I have been playing it of late.  It is very Mahlerian indeed, and in fact Japanese composer Takeo Noguchi noticed at a very early stage that the work contained adaptations of music by various late-romantic composers, including Mahler (although that in and of itself is by no means unacceptable).  But even if it is unmistakably Mahlerian, it is eminently listenable, even quite riveting at times.  I personally will continue to listen to it for a while until I settle on a considered opinion.  Here is a YouTube video of the finale performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Naoto Otomo, which gives you a sense of the scale of the piece (Mahler’s 3^rd, anyone?) – and Samuragochi himself comes to the podium at the end to receive the audience’s applause.

So there are a number of questions that come to the fore as we try to decide into which box to assign this symphony.

• Regardless of its merits, how do we receive a symphony written in 2003 in the manner and style of the late romantic period of 100 years earlier? Can such an endeavour be considered artistically valid without some explanatory knowledge of the composer’s motivations?
• Is the work to be considered so tainted by fraud and scandal that it is unworthy of future performance, as seems to be the present status quo? Alternatively, how many years must pass before it will be possible to evaluate this work (and other works from the same pen) on its own merits?
• Was it composed by Mamuro Samuragochi or Takashi Niigaki? The genesis of the composition remains murky, with Samuragochi continuing to claim significant input, and Niigaki continuing to deny or downplay it.

It may be another 100 years before these questions will ever receive a consensus view.  But I can’t help but think that, if the truth had never come out, it is not inconceivable that this column could instead have been about a composer of some significance – “The Japanese Beethoven”.

I want to wrap up this attempt to answer the question of what goes into a bass (a question only asked by one person) by talking a little about the electronic circuits that go into stringed instruments. But it occurs to me that some readers may not know why I’m focusing on basses (besides the obvious fact that I’m a bassist). [For the latecomers to this series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 —Ed.]

In the beginning, basses and guitars were different versions of one instrument  (either you thought of it as a bass guitar or an electric bass — but it was still the same thing, however it was referred to). With the innovations that I’ve written about for the past few issues, though, that diverged; not as a matter of design — everything that went into the basses I’ve discussed has been able to go equally into guitars. But one set of musicians embraced the design changes, and one didn’t.

For the most part, electric guitars have been stuck with two basic, and classic, designs: the bolt-on necks of the Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster, and the set neck of the Gibson Les Paul. There are near-infinite variations, of course: hollow-body guitars, both deep (arch-top) and shallow (thin-line Gretsches, Guild Starfires and Gibson 335s), and thin solid-body set-neck guitars, like the Gibson SG. But many of the alternate construction styles and materials, the metal and graphite-and-epoxy necks, haven’t been embraced by guitarists in nearly the same numbers as they have by bassists. Are guitarists more conservative?

Well — yes.

The range of acceptable guitar tones, as prominent as they are in most popular music, is pretty narrow, though it’s more apparent. Or maybe because. There are certainly guitarists who haven’t walked the narrow path — Lindsay Buckingham, Henry Kaiser, Jerry Garcia and Carlos Alomar spring to mind — but they’re few and far between. (Of course, I’m prejudiced.)

In any event — electronics: they can be as simple as no controls at all (just the pickups), or pickups and a volume control, as on my fretless Guild M-85. Most common is passive volume and tone (or treble roll-off), one set per pickup. Bass roll-off controls are incredibly rare –– I’ve got them on a ‘69 Les Paul bass.

Circuits are divided into passive and active — just as in home equipment. I’ve mentioned that Ron Wickersham of Alembic pioneered active circuitry in an instrument and that Ron says that my fretless Guild had the first active circuit, installed in 1969 (prior to the company forming). It was a pair of Darlington emitter followers, used to lower the impedance of the pickups. I don’t know if the bass had any active tone circuit. By the time I got it, it was passive, and now it’s active again.

Jack Casady’s Guild basses were passive, or mostly passive, though his Alembic had a variety of active electronic modules that could be plugged into the bass. Phil Lesh’s Alembicized Guild Starfire and ultimately his Alembic were active, and had what became known as Superfilters. Alembics in general are active: the stock Alembic electronics feature low-impedance, low-gain pickups, that drive a circuit containing a pair of low-pass filters with either switchable or continuously variable “Q”, or resonance, and a differential mode hum-canceller (does any of that need explanation?), a control each for volume and frequency — in this case, being a low-pass filter, it’s a treble cut. A Superfilter is a state-variable filter with five controls per: one for switching the mode between high, low, and band pass (the variable states), a frequency setting (the beginning or the center of the roll-off), a filtered volume, a direct volume, and a continuously variable Q setting.  Add in pickup selection and master volume and some switching for the quad mode (one pickup per string), and Phil’s basses were about as elaborate any ever were. But it was early days. People were exploring.

In the years since, people have tried everything they could think of. Leo Fender’s next venture, after selling Fender itself, was MusicMan, in the mid-70s. MusicMan basses have a strange active, battery-powered circuit, in which the pickups feed treble and bass controls. The treble is very sizzly — I turn mine all the way down.  It really functions as a treble boost, and turning it down apparently just makes it flat. I rely on the bass control, which I boost all the way, to overwhelm the treble. That sound is used for much of the album Tuesday Night Music Club, direct. (With its graphite neck, the MusicMan is sort of my no-issues bass — it would always come along on a session; if I picked one that didn’t work, well, the MusicMan ALWAYS worked).

Rick Turner (again!) uses a semi-parametric equalizer on his post-Alembic Model One instruments — it’s what Lindsay Buckingham uses. I used a Model Two (a 2 pickup version) on the song “Black Cadillac”. (Semi-parametric means a frequency-selection control and a level control for that frequency.) There’s also a passive treble-cut and a hard-wire bypass of all tone circuits. Generally, I just turn the control until I hear something I like for what I’m doing — for “Black Cadillac” the frequency control was set near the bottom of its range and the passive treble was just about all the way off.

I used to play around with my Alembic’s tone settings, especially the back pickup — tweaking its filter to bring out harmonics is especially satisfying. But since the bass hit it’s magic age, I generally just set it flat — tone controls opened up, “Q” set flat, and do all the tone adjusting with my hands (moving to Thomastik-Infeld flat-wound strings from Superwound helped with that). (I actually went to Alembic in ‘80 or ‘81 and Ron Wickersham and I went into Prairie Sun Recording in order for me to record a demo of how the Alembic electronics worked — but with Ron present, I froze, all the while thinking that he should be doing the talking).

Anyway — what does all this stuff, all these controls, give you? In a word, control. When you hear an electric instrument, you’re really listening to a whole system of materials and electronics — in the instrument, the amplifiers and the recording chain. Just as when you listen to acoustic or classical music, you’re still listening to materials and electronics.

The estimable Rick Turner has a few comments on the progression of this technology:

“Actually, the first on-board active electronics I encountered were on both the Baldwin classical electric guitar and the Gibson C-1E electric classical guitar!  Both were for buffering the actually excellent piezo bridge saddle pickups.  Also, I think Burns of London did some active magnetic pickup guitars in the early 1960s…that bears more looking into.  There is also some weird connection between Burns and either Gibson or Baldwin there, too. More research…   BTW, the Baldwin pickup and electronics are what Willie Nelson has in his Martin classical guitar to this day, and Baldwin made a special amp that sent power, I think in excess of 20 Volts, up to the guitar.  That’s the “PrismaTone” pickup.

“I started mounting battery powered effects on my Peanut guitar in 1967…a “Boss Tone” fuzz, and a Vox treble booster ( trouble booster? ), so in a funny way, I may have beaten Ron to the punch, though my intent was to have the effects…which did also buffer the pickup signal, though I didn’t really understand that yet.  Obviously, by the time that guitar got to Garcia, the effects were history.

“The earliest stuff Ron was doing on the Guild/Hagstrom BiSonic pickups was to buffer the pickup and line drive the signal at low impedance so no highs would be lost.  Gain was not a consideration.  Then when I came along, we realized that we could extend the frequency response of the pickups out past 20 KHz, and make up for lost pickup voltage (lower turns count) by adding some gain…however much was needed to meet or exceed the “normal” output voltage of electric basses and guitars.

“The real Alembic/Wickersham break-through was in putting truly studio quality preamplification and filter/EQ on board the instruments with Jack’s bass being the test bed for all that.

“I’d started literally hand winding pickups in ’68 when I moved to California, and they wound up being relatively low impedance as much because I didn’t know better and because of what wire and other supplies were available to me.  Turned out that they had really wide frequency response when Ron tested them, and we were off to the races.

“The earliest commercial amplified guitar was the Stromberg Electro…1928!  The pickup was magnetic, but sensed top movement, not string movement, and a few years later, Lloyd Loar founded ViViTone making electric guitars, both hollow and solid bodied, mandolin, violin, viola, and upright bass using bridge and top sensitive magnetic pickups.  But then in 1933, out came the Rickenbacher frying pan lap steel with the first really successful string sensitive pickups, and that became the dominant technology…by far.  Once the horseshoes were stripped away, you had what is now known as the Charlie Christian pickup in Gibsons, and the race was on.  With a bunch of odd branches to the tree!

“BTW, I’ve never seen one of the Stromberg Electros, but I do have a ViViTone from 1933.  Stromberg was also Stromberg-Voisinette which became Kay.  Henry Kuhrmeyer, the “K”, designed the pickup for the Electro.  He then took over the company and renamed it.  Clever dude.

“There are persistent rumours of Lloyd Loar experimenting with amplification when he worked at Gibson, but there’s no actual proof…yet. If he did, it may have been essentially a condenser pickup…a copper plate attached to the underside of the top with another closely mounted copper plate.  Charge it with voltage and it would work just like a condenser microphone.  The expert on the history of electric guitar, Lynn Wheelwright, doesn’t think that Loar did.  When I met Seth Lover, he said that he thought he saw some left over experimental stuff at the old Kalamazoo Gibson factory when he started there in the 1940s. Seth was in and out of Gibson several times. Pretty decent Wiki on him.”

[Basses are property of, and photographs courtesy of, the Schwartz California Institute of Bassology–-Ed.]