Let’s go look at music tonight

Nature reports a study just published by Chia-Jung Tsay in PNAS:

He is sometimes called the first rock star. He would whip his long hair around as he played, beads of sweat flying into the audience, and women would swoon or throw their clothes on to the stage. This is not Mick Jagger or Jimmy Page, but Franz Liszt, the nineteenth-century Hungarian pianist whose theatrical recitals made the composer Robert Schumann say that “a great deal of poetry would be lost” had Liszt played behind a screen.

But who cares about the histrionics — it’s the music that matters, right? Not according to the latest study, which shows that people’s judgements about the quality of a musical performance are influenced more by what they see than by what they hear.
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The participants [in the study] were presented with recordings of the three finalists in each of ten prestigious international competitions, and were asked to guess the winner. With just sound, or sound and video, novices and experts both guessed right at about the same level as chance (33% of the time), or a little less. But with silent video alone, the success rate for both was about 46–53%. The experts did no better than the novices.
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However, there are limits to how much what you see can override what you hear. That might happen for competition finals, where all performers are comparably excellent, but previous studies of the role of visual information in musical assessment have shown that trained musicians have no problem distinguishing between good and significantly poorer performances.

You wanna be a DJ?

A few words of advice!

Please analyse your interest in music and find out whether you want to play instruments, sing songs or play and mix music. After all, you’re talking about some valuable years of your life. Once sure that DJ’ing is where you want to go, take it very seriously and be ready to work your butt off – nothing comes easy! If you want to do it for the money, don’t even try. Like all professions, money is less in the beginning but once you start making your mark, it gets better. And it’s a Glamourous profession with lots of Money & Fun 🙂

advices Jazzy’s DJ workshop.

Caravan has a story on DJing and learning to be one:

[Sunantha] looks down at her cell phone—vibrating repeatedly—and says, “Fish! I need to run.” We laugh at her toned-down expletive as she pushes her petite frame past hefty male bodies milling around at the entrance of the mall. The slight Keralite seems completely at home with the rambunctious crowds.

“The last two clubs I played at had lots of uska reference ka party hais,” she says. “The crowds would ask me to play popular Jat songs like ‘Jat da chora’, and would threaten to call their ‘contacts’ if I didn’t have a song they wanted to hear.” Sunantha would snap back saying their fathers weren’t paying her, or would intentionally tear up the occasional napkin scribbled with a compliment. Once, she even slapped a guy who was fiddling with the console. “I just told him to F-off, I didn’t care who his contacts were!” Two years of dealing with the rowdiness of the clientele at Last Chance was enough to steel her nerves—but also left her hankering for something less conflict-ridden.

Vapour was the place she settled for—and is also where we’re soon sipping a mug of in-house microbrewed light beer. One of the few places that have opened in Gurgaon to cater to the satellite town’s more upmarket and genteel residents, Vapour’s rooftop offers diners mezze platters, a view of the glass-and-steel skyline and pints of freshly-brewed beer. It all ties neatly into Gurgaon’s desire to be more like Singapore and less like, well, a developing-too-quickly-for-its-own-good Haryanvi village. For Sunantha it fit like a glove.
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“After I’d put away some money, I started looking for courses and came upon Jazzy Joe’s and Spingurus’s websites. And just decided to call Jazzy Sir.”
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The son of an Indian Foreign Service officer, he grew up on the move: “Papa was a rolling stone and we rolled with him,” he said, with a slightly theatrical air. At the age of 17, he began running a fortnightly song request program at a small Indonesian radio station off his two-in-one, and a decade later Jazzy was the resident DJ at the Taj Palace’s My Kind of Place (MKOP), where he conceived of the very popular expat hip-hop nights on Fridays.
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DJing, which used to be seen as a bad career choice—associated with “daaru, masti aur ladki”—got an image makeover when albums like DJ Akbar Sami’s Jalwa and tracks like DJ Suketu’s ‘Pyaar Zindagi Hai’ began to rule the charts. “Ever since we started making top-of-the-pops remixes, got married, got good offices and studios, DJing became a more respectable career. It might be a night job but we take our jobs very seriously,” explains 43-year-old Suketu. He tells me about 19- or 20-year-old kids who walk in “wanting to do something with music”. And since learning an instrument or singing takes years of committed practice, they turn to something easier, like DJing. What adds to the allure is that the entertainment business is one of the few that seem immune to fluctuating markets; recession might sink every other industry, but people are still going to step out to drink no matter what, on happy days and sad.
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In India where unofficial counts peg the number of DJs in Delhi alone at more than 10,000, training schools are springing up even faster than bars. The duration of a course at these academies ranges anywhere between two weeks and three months, and the training module is a standard mix of theory on the history of DJing and introductions to various genres of music, and practice with equipment like mixers, turntables, tape decks, amplifiers, headphones, lighting effects, computers and sound processors. A workshop ideally concludes with professional grooming, a completion certificate, and, occasionally, some guidance towards job opportunities.
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DJ Jitesh is here to make DJs and make some money while doing it. Having started Spingurus five years ago, Dang specialises in private shaadiparties (said quickly, as one word).

“My first question to them is, do you want to be a club or a mobile DJ? If they say club, I usually send them back,” Dang says.

“Club DJs’ lives are the hardest. They play five days a week, for most of the night. They go home late, families get disturbed and you smell of smoke and alcohol, and only get paid a quarter of what a senior DJ gets. Club managers offer you so little because there are enough people willing to play for that much. Sometimes I even feel like I should stop doing this. But I have a belly to fill!” he says while rubbing his, which looks well filled.
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Akbar Sami has harsh words: “I’ve visited schools all over India who claim they teach DJing, but these people don’t seem to know the first thing about DJing themselves. It’s all a money-making racket. They think with a few CD players, and a little teaching about stuff like beat matching and mapping, they’re running institutes!” He is exasperated with the lack of expertise and technical know-how in the market today: “You have to understand the console and people. And sound systems. They’re made by experts who know DJing is about not just the press of a button.”

Suketu is just as dismissive of the dilettantes. “They don’t understand that it takes more than just a two-month DJ course to be that successful in the industry.”
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At VAPOUR, we move up to the terrace, where Sunantha’s seniors are now setting up the apparatus for the Friday night. Neon apples glow on the backs of the systems and the faces behind them glow in the light of their screens.

DJing sounds a bit like blogging, doesn’t it?

Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

From Der Spiegel:

Frank Zappa famously had a very individualistic approach to rock: groupies, no sheet music and extra-strong coffee instead of drugs.

Writing about musicians: Beth Ditto

Of course, it is much easier to write about musicians, as this article from The Believer shows:

Beth is short and her body is a stack of curves upon curves. Her hair changes so swiftly you could mistake it all for wigs, from a black bouffant to short, choppy, and orange to the jet-black asymmetrical bob she wears to Fashion Week. Also of note, Beth is a lesbian, and is super outspoken about it. Same goes for feminist. Same goes for her emergence from a legacy of backwoods Arkansas poverty that few people escape.

But even in Portland, Oregon—where Beth lives in a ramshackle house with her best friend and her pet, a brain-damaged, blind cat that was accidentally killed while getting spayed, then revived in present, imperfect condition—people have little idea how insanely famous Beth and the Gossip have become in Europe. Unless they are total music nerds with a subscription to London’s New Musical Express, they likely don’t know that the influential magazine voted Beth Ditto the number one coolest person in the world in 2006 (the first time in the history of the magazine that a female had been so dubbed). The following year Beth was naked on the NME cover, covered in giant lipsticked lip-prints. By 2007, the London paparazzi began behaving badly, flinging themselves in front of Beth’s cars, clambering up the sides of buildings Spider-Man-style. She turned up on Jonathan Ross, Britain’s David Letterman, telling stories about her pothead cousin shooting backyard squirrels to satisfy his stoner munchies. She began penning an advice column, “What Would Beth Ditto Do?,” for the Guardian. She accepted an offer to design a line of clothes for Evans, the plus-size women’s clothing chain owned by Topshop’s parent company.

By the time Fashion Week 2009 rolls around, Beth is naked on the cover of Love, a new magazine created by British fashion avatar Katie Grand. A larger-than-life blowup of the photo—featuring Beth with messy, flame-colored hair, topless, holding a ruffled fuchsia bolero jacket against her crotch—is plastered onto the side of a building in London, and it is official: Beth Ditto can no longer safely ride the Tube.

Writing about music

After lamenting the absurd lack of material about Ali Akbar Khan’s music in his obituaries, I have been trawling the web for writing on music. 3QD pointed me to an article, not about criticism, but about literature from The Believer:

I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.

At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or three years trying to produce something that could not be produced. I tried to put aside the line’s foundational snobbery (“My music is too ineffable for your inky art”), and then, reassuringly, it seemed like nothing more than a truism: words are words and music is music. And perfume is perfume; paintings are paintings; facial features are facial features. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?

This is a wonderfully written, meaty and long, piece about music in literature which I urge you to read in full.