The View from the Spaghetti Factory

New music… a piece called “Traffic Island”. Full details over at the s f o c a t a site.

Thanks to Pete, here’s a couple of musical Flash animations that have just made me laugh. A lot. And laughter is always so much more rewarding when the butt of the joke is Robert Kilroy-Silk, don’t you find?

Mr Tangerine Man (880K)

Veritas Party song (350K)

Everybody sing along…

“Veritas, Veritas
The party for the vain and crass
Stick it up your suntanned ass
Kilroy-Silk you utter spaz”

So it seems not all germs are cute. I’m quite a healthy person… only get a really heavy cold (or, indeed, anything more than an isolated single-symptom hint of a cold) every 18 months or so, only had proper flu a couple of times in my life, only had a handful of other illnesses and nothing at all serious. So when this year’s lurgy decided my sinuses would be a cosy holiday home for a couple of days, I wish it hadn’t chosen the weekend of my good pal Ross’s wedding. Bah!

I hate missing an opportunity for drinking and merriment with musical mates, but having (through a monumental effort) launched myself out of bed and onto a train to Victoria, only to feel even more BLEURRGGHH, I figured my germs and decidedly non-celebratory frame of mind would be better off elsewhere than at a wedding reception. Curling up and sleeping in a corner is not really the done thing, at least not *before* you’ve hit the bar! Still, my very best wishes to Ross and Jo. I’m sure they had a marvellous day and have a great future ahead of them.

However, a couple of days worth of cold virus don’t account for ten days of non-blogging. That’s just laziness…

Regular readers may remember that I wasn’t particularly impressed with the UK launch of Apple’s music download site, the iTunes Music Store, or indeed any of the legal download sites. Paying just under £8 for an album of low-bitrate mp3s (or similar) is ludicrous, when you can get the “proper” CD of the same album for only a couple of quid more from Play.com or Amazon. The low bitrate is unnecessary, given the ever-falling price of server space and the ever-rising speed of our internet connections. Furthermore, the available music isn’t particularly unusual, so if your tastes lie outside of the High Street mainstream, you’re stuck with Ebay or illegal download networks. My general impression was of a poor implementation of a great idea.

But anyway, I’ve been meaning to write something about a link I’ve had sitting on my desktop for a few days (the origin of which I’ve forgotten… probably BoingBoing)…

The Smithsonian Global Sound website is an ingenious and worthwhile use of “music on demand” technology. For 99 cents (US) per track, you get to explore the vast historical archive of music held by the Smithsonian Institute. You can search by geographical region, culture group or musical instrument, and the downloads are in either mp3 or… wait for it… lossless flac format. Yay!

I mean, how could you not want to do research to learn more about these little chaps? They’re so cute!

Next time a pro-life lunatic comes along and tries to tell you that there can be no benefit from stem cell research, just think of all those cute little red furry fellows that want to be our friends.

Yeah okay, so I did have to, er… “adjust” the image (from a BBC article) slightly, but only to enhance it, you understand.

And what about MRSA?

See… they’re not so bad, really. Next time you’re lying in a hospital bed, just console yourself with the thought that you have thousands of little tiny friends waiting to come out and play. Just in case you’re wondering, the one on the left is stoned… he ate too much of those super-strength antibiotics his parents warned him about.

No more “enhanced” microscope pictures, I promise… ;-)

Very little is known about Pérotin. What we do know is informed mostly by the work of “Anonymous IV”, an English student based in Paris in the late 13th century, who wrote at length on the daily life and musical pursuits in a medieval religious community. Pérotin was around in the late 12th century, and was probably choirmaster at Notre Dame cathedral; this is nothing remarkable by our 21st century standards, but you have to bear in mind two important facts. Firstly, the Christian liturgy provided the context for most of the major musical advances in the Middle Ages and secondly, Paris was rapidly becoming one of Europe’s major cultural centres. This enhanced cultural reputation had a lot to do with the groundbreaking music emanating from Notre Dame cathedral, with our man Pérotin as one of the major influences.

Some musical background… the earliest known religious music was plainchant (sometimes, and probably erroneously, known as “Gregorian” chant). One or more people would sing a single melodic line. This is monophonic music. One of the earliest types of polyphonic music (where more than one line is played or sung simultaneously) is known as “organum”… for composers of the Notre Dame school, this involved slowing down an existing chant to drone-like speed and adding another, faster part over the top. As our roving medieval reporter Anonymous IV reports, Léonin, another Notre Dame composer, was a master of organum, compiling “Magnus Liber”, the definitive book of organum at the time.

Some years later, and with the benefit of a decade or several of musical progress, Pérotin set about expanding upon, and updating, “Magnus Liber”. He also pretty much set the standard for polyphonic writing for much of the next century. As you do.

So, wanna hear some Pérotin? With any music for which no contemporary audio recordings exist, you have to rely on the quality and authenticity of the performance (and, with music so early, on the musicological research required to learn the performance parameters of the time). For early choral music, the Hilliard Ensemble are always a pretty safe bet, and their album ‘Perotin’ is one of the finest early music CDs I’ve heard. If you think you might be into any of this pre-Renaissance stuff, buy it now.

To really get an idea of what Pérotin was up to, though, you need to compare his music with what came before. There’s a CD by the Early Music Consort of London called ‘Music of the Gothic Era’ which contains two versions of the same piece, “Viderunt omnes”. The first is by Léonin, written as an organum for 2 voices. It’s a fine piece of writing, with plenty of intriguing melodic ideas and a cute little tinkly bell. Then you come to Pérotin’s revision of the same piece and… BLAMMO! It’s like going from black & white to colour TV or putting on a pair of 3D glasses. Pérotin’s four-voice organum (no tinkly bell for him, oh no) is so lush, you could spoon it out of the speakers. Remember, this is medieval polyphony, so there are no “chords” as such. The multiple parts are moving independently, but they meet to form a variety of consonances and dissonances, some of which leave me gobsmacked every time I hear them.

When I first heard Pérotin’s music last year I was amazed by it. Amazed by its beauty, its richness of texture and, above all, by the fact that someone was coming up with that stuff back in the 1190s. I’m still amazed by it.