05.27.11
Mari Kimura, a Japanese violinist laughs in the face of Pythagoras whose notion that the lowest pitch a wire can produce when stretched taught is when it is vibrating freely i.e. unstopped.
Bah. Bah!, she says.
Because she has developed a technique that allows her to play an octave, fifth, or third below the fundamental. It’s like pedal-tones for your violin.
She calls them subharmonics and accusations can’t quite figure them out. But they totally happen and you can hear them for yourself. The bonus feature is you get to see Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT Media Lab and Artificial Intelligence Lab, be totally confused.
If she can do it on a violin, let’s hear it on a cello. Just sayin’.
(h/t Matthew Gurewitsch)
05.26.11
Patrick Jarenwattananon’s “conversation” with James Huizenga contains this line:
In the third movement “Playful – Fast (With Swing),” you get this long tour through the forest of timbres, with Carter on soprano sax, and then his tenor saxophone cadenza. (Did I mention he can play all the saxophones, all really well?)1
I don’t want to sound like I have sour grapes here, and Carter is amazing, but these guys need to come to the next NASA Conference and hear Anubis Quartet or Michael Ibrahim if that’s what gets their gears going.
Seriously, playing every saxophone really well is step zero for being a saxophone player at all. We all play every saxophone – from soprano, and even sopranino, to bass.
That said, a jazz-concerto by a well-known composer is very exciting. I hope Carter can program this in a bunch of the major orchestras and really promote the idea of a saxophone concerto.
05.26.11
With 28.6 days of total playing time sitting in my iTunes library, it became necessary to cultivate a pretty developed system of organization for all of my music. Here’s how I keep my iTunes library looking tidy and working smoothly.
The following headings are my “default” set of fields running across the top of my iTunes library. Of course they can be re-arranged in any order, but this is how I like to keep them.
Name
This is the name of the track (duh!). In most cases I use the title of the track. Since iOS devices don’t support the grouping tag, which we will get to in a moment, I tag multi-movement works with:
FullTitleOfWork - 1. FullTitleOfMovement
so an example would look like:
Harmonielehre - 3. Meister Eckhardt & Quackie
Occasionally it is beneficial to include opus numbers or dates in this field to distinguish sets of piece from each other on an iOS device. For example:
Etude in F Major, Op. 10, No. 8 by Chopin, Frédéric recorded by Murray Perahia
vs.
Etude in F Minor, Op. 25, No. 2 by Chopin, Frédéric recorded by Murray Perahia
The easiest way to tell which set of etudes I am looking at is the opus number in the title field. However, if there’s no need for a distinction I do not include additional information to keep the title field length manageable.
Grouping
The grouping tag is used to group tracks with different names together, i.e. multi-movement works. This is particularly nice in iTunes for isolating multiple recordings of the same piece for comparison listening. The ninja-trick is to be exact with your syntax when tagging each piece. I always include opus numbers and occasionally dates if it will help delineate this work from another similarly titled work.
Note: This usually doubles the first part of the name field so it’s not entirely necessary. I hope that someday iOS devices will support this field, but I’m not holding my breath.
Time
Auto-filled in. No touchy.
Artist
This is where things can get wonky. This field is mandatory — I never leave it blank. I never include multiple people or things in this field so only one name goes into this field. If there is a clear single performer, I use that. If it’s an orchestra, I put the conductor’s name in this field.
I use the format FirstName LastName here because my brain thinks of performers by their first names. I’m still not sure why.
If the track has multiple performers (i.e. Jay-Z featuring Kanye West) I include the main performer on the album, and put the other performer in the comments area with the syntax feat. Kanye West. When I search for Kanye West in iTunes this track will come up. However, when I select the artists tab on my iPhone I won’t see multiple entries for Jay-Z all on the same album.
For classical duos I use the main performer here and put the other name in the comments with their instrument. (i.e. Artist: Gideon Kramer; Comments: Emanuel Ax, piano).
Album Artist
This field is new with iTunes 7. It was intended to solve the above mentioned problem of XYZ feat. LMNOP. In most cases the same name as the Artist goes in here, and in these cases I usually don’t bother to fill in the field. Where this field comes in handy is with orchestra recordings. I always include the name of the orchestra in this field so that no matter who the conductor is I can group all of the Chicago recordings together, or all of the Met Opera, etc.
The reason I don’t use this field in the aforementioned Jay-Z conundrum is because it does not map correctly to iOS devices. The intention is that the Album Artist is the main artist on the album and the Artist is the featured guest. But iOS only recognizes the Artist field, so it actually fractures your artist lists instead of unifies them. Maybe it will be fixed someday.
I don’t mind this for orchestral recording because I rarely search by artist for them. I invariably use the composer search and then drill down.
Album
The album title goes here. Sometimes classical music albums do not have titles. In that case I make something up that reminds me what is on the album (i.e. Alfred Brendel: Schubert Impromptus).
Composer
This field is also mandatory. I always use the syntax LastName, FirstName because I think of composers by their last names. Using this syntax also makes for ideal alphabetical sorting. For songs (you know, the ones with words), I list the lyricist. Some pop songs have long lists of songwriters, none of which I recognize. In that case I usually include the first one listed. I’ll never look up those songs by composer anyway.
I know it is common to include the composer’s dates in this field, but I think that is what Wikipedia is for. As I mentioned earlier, my iTunes database is huge, so I try to keep it as trim as possible for searching and sorting.
Genre
I have a limited number of genres that I use. They are:
- Alternative
- Blues
- Classical
- Comedy
- Country
- Drum Corps
- Folk
- Funk
- Hip-Hop & Rap
- Holiday
- Jazz
- Pop
- R&B/Soul
- Reggae
- Rock
- Soundtrack
- Tango
I am very reluctant to add a new genre unless I have a large number of tracks that I feel should be grouped together. Using these large categories allows for better shuffle-play. Drum Corps, Holiday, and Soundtrack exists solely to exclude those tracks from genius lists and smart playlists.
Year
The year of the original release of the recording. A simple Google search will usually yield this information quickly.
Rating
I use the stars to rate tracks. Here’s my system:
1 Star
- Needs to be deleted or re-downloaded
- Duplicates
- Sound Effects
- Holiday Music (also genre tagged)
- Song Parts
- Something I will search for, but has no other purpose
2 Stars
3 Stars
- Mediocre tracks
- Weird, but important
- Could be good
- Need to re-listen
- Long tunes (not good for shuffle)
4 Stars
- Tracks I like to listen to
- Will go on the iPod
5 Stars
iTunes will use your rankings for shuffle and genius lists by favoring higher ranked tracks.
Disc
I always fill this field in, even if there is only one disc. For multi-disc sets, it’s a no-brainer.
Comments
…or as I think of it, Notes.
This field is for optional metadata, some of which I have included above. Two major “tags” that I use in this field are @saxophone and @piano, as those two categories dominate the majority of my classical music library. With those tags in place I can build smart playlists that hold only @saxophone tracks ranked 4 or higher, giving me a best-of classical saxophone list that I can put on my iPhone. I also have a smart playlist that includes all of my classical genre except tracks with the @saxophone tag, you know, for easy listening.
At times I need to do more research to complete the metadata for a track. I tag those tracks with @needsData and I have a smart playlist that collects them.
How to use the metadata
Once you have all of that latent metadata in the system it becomes easy to leverage it in many ways. The first method I use is “Best of” smart playlists to pull out the top-rated tracks from each genre. So every genre except Drum Corps, Holiday, and Soundtrack have a playlist that only holds tracks with 4 or 5 star ratings.
I have a playlist of the 100 Greatest Rap Songs that I downloaded from somewhere. I spent a few hours listening to excerpts of each track (some of them I knew already) and rating them. Then I collected the 4 and 5 star tracks into a smart playlist called “100 Rap Songs ± 20%” which is a great shuffle list.
The possibilities are bountiful when your database is robust.
Conclusion
Is it fiddley? Yeah, sure. But isn’t library maintenance always fiddley? This system allows me to find music on my iMac along with my various devices very quickly and yet also allows me to generate great playlists and shuffle orders. I encourage you to take this summer to organize your iTunes library. You will be glad that you did.
05.21.11
Marvin J. Ward from The Boston Musical Intelligencer writes:
Chopin was notoriously unlike his friend and colleague Franz Liszt, who preferred Érard pianos; Chopin put all his expression into his hands and fingers without any flamboyant body language and coaxed beautiful sounds out of his instruments rather than beating them into submission. He reportedly played in a concentrated fashion and rather quietly; there are not too many dynamic markings in his scores above mf.
What a great description of the less-mentioned pianist of the 1800s.
Frequently Chopin is talked about as a composer, which was his primary profession. We shouldn’t forget that he was a gifted pianist as well. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to tackle his works.
Whereas we often think of Liszt as a performer first, and a composer second. In fact, he was an exceptional pianist; probably the best ever, and a gifted and progressive composer as well.