vocalman2004 odds & ends

Punk had sharpened its claws, and by the time Margaret Thatcher took power a generation of musicians was ready to pounce.

Protest songs thrive on combat. Complicated policy details may cause the songwriter’s pen to freeze but larger-than-life politicians who polarise opinion enable the ink to flow. It is striking that, despite all the frustration and ferment of the punk era, nobody wrote a memorable song about Jim Callaghan. But to musicians on the left Margaret Thatcher was an irresistible super-villain who threw all the conflicts of the time into sharp relief. Penny Rimbaud of anarcho-punk radicals Crass once told me: “I think Thatcher was an absolute fairy godmother. Christ, you’re an anarchist band trying to complain about the workings of capitalist society and you get someone like Thatcher. What a joy!”

Never before had a British prime minister so explicitly identified certain sectors of society as enemies — trade unionists, socialists, liberals — and so diligently set out to crush them. Thatcher’s infamous description of Arthur Scargill’s miners as “the enemy within” (the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri being the enemy without) spoke volumes about her need for foes and this Manichean outlook cut both ways, as did the strength of her personality. The single word “Thatcher”, said with appropriate contempt, handily encapsulated everything the 1980s left opposed.

Even before Thatcher entered Number 10 she was being personally singled out. “Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show,” intoned Linton Kwesi Johnson in 1978’s It Dread Inna Inglan. Joe Strummer originally wanted to illustrate the Clash’s The Cost of Living EP, released on election day 1979, with a collage including Thatcher’s face and a swastika. Just a year into office and the Beat were singing Stand Down Margaret (“please,” they added politely).

The reason is that bands that hated Thatcherism didn’t need time to warm up. Steeled and educated by punk, they were already battle-ready. As Tracey Thorn writes in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, “politicisation seemed to be the norm, and would continue to do so well into the 1980s. Even as musical styles changed, and many of the old punk battles were left behind, for those of my age the ideals of the late 1970s remained a driving force.” Contrary to the clip-show version of the 1980s, all yuppies, Princess Di haircuts and Duran Duran, it was the heyday of political pop, and the leftwing counterculture in general. They already had the values and now they had the villain.

Musical responses to Thatcher came in three varieties. There were songs that took a hard look at the country, especially during the early 1980s recession and the Falklands war: the aimless dispossessed of Ghost Town, the conflicted dockworker of Shipbuilding, the struggling poor of A Town Called Malice, the despair-poisoned citizens of the The’s Heartland. There were the character assassinations: Crass’s incandescent Falklands response How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of 1,000 Dead (quoted to the lady herself at Prime Minister’s Question Time), the Blow Monkeys’ somewhat premature (Celebrate) The Day After You, Morrissey’s Margaret on the Guillotine and Elvis Costello’s venomous Tramp the Dirt Down.

I could name dozens more but there are hundreds in the third category: whole careers, like that of the Smiths, implicitly underpinned by opposition to Thatcherite values. Look at the long list of people who played benefit gigs for such causes as the miners’ strike or Red Wedge and you’ll find such seemingly unlikely names as Wham! and Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp. Asked by Smash Hits to name the last book she read, Tracey Thorn replied The British in Northern Ireland: The Case for Withdrawal. This was just the kind of thing you did in the mid-1980s.

Of course Thatcher lasted longer than anybody expected, but her real victory lay in permanently changing the culture so that by the time she was finally toppled – not by the Beat but by the backbenchers – the deep-seated oppositional values that Thorn described were ebbing out of music. Pulp’s The Last Day of the Miners’ Strike retrospectively traced the path from resistance (“people marching, people shouting”) to escapism (“socialism gave way to socialising”). The fight went on too long; people got tired and craved release; only a few, like Billy Bragg, had the stamina to continue.

Thatcher remains a potent bogeyman for some. Hefner released The Day That Thatcher Dies, which is surely on heavy rotation today. Frank Turner, despite sharing the Iron Lady’s admiration for Hayekian economics, wrote Thatcher Fucked the Kids in 2006. Just the other month Primal Scream’s single 2013 condemned “Thatcher’s children”.

But the circumstances that created that third category of musical protest, broad as well as deep, have gone. Thatcher’s ascendance galvanised a generation of dissenters, but her long-term impact on British culture ensured that, despite some notable exceptions, their ranks were never really replenished.

Original Story Guardian

Works from The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute to Schumann’s Lyric Suite betray their creators’ fascination with numbers.

What’s the next number in this sequence? 5, 10, 20, 30, 36 … ? And the next in this? 640, 231, 100, 91 … ?

If you know your Mozart then you’ll identify 43 as the number that comes after 36 in the first sequence. These are the opening lines of The Marriage of Figaro sung by Figaro as he measures out the room that he will share with Susanna once they are married. It’s a curious selection of numbers that when added together comes to 144, or 12 squared: perhaps a coincidence or maybe a numerical representation of the impending union of Figaro and his bride Susanna.

The second sequence continues with 1,003, the number of Don Giovanni’s female conquests in Spain. The other numbers are part of the famous Catalogue aria sung by Leporello, Don Giovanni’s servant, which include his other conquests: 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey.

Mozart loved numbers. Johann Andreas Schachtner, court trumpeter and friend of the Mozart family, wrote about the young Wolfgang: “When he was doing sums, the table, the chair, the walls and even the floor would be covered with chalked numbers.”

As an adult Mozart’s obsession with numbers didn’t wane. He would scatter numbers throughout his letters to family and friends. His family used a secret code to keep politically sensitive comments from the eyes of the censors. But he also used numbers in more intimate exchanges. His kisses would invariably be issued in units of 1,000, although sometimes he would choose a more interesting selection of numbers to shower his correspondent with.

The curious string of numbers 1095060437082 appears in a letter to his wife Constanze. One decoding that has been offered of this sequence suggests we add 10+9+50+60+43+70+82 to get 324, which is 18 squared, again like the opening of Figaro, expressing the bond of love between Mozart and Constanze. He signed himself in another letter as “Friend of the House of Numbers”; while Constanze told a biographer after Mozart’s death about “his love of arithmetic and algebra”.

Mozart isn’t the only composer to be fascinated by music, numbers and codes. Bach’s name spells out a series of musical notes that Bach employs often in pieces as if he is musically signing his work. Other composers during the baroque used a cabalistic code that changes letters into numbers which could then be used in musical composition to hide words. For example, by replacing each letter with its number in the alphabet, Bach’s name translates into 2+1+3+8=14. Some commentators have tried to identify an obsession with the number 14 running throughout Bach’s work and life. Apparently when he was asked to join Mizler’s society of Musical Sciences he delayed until 1747 just to ensure that he could be the 14th member to join.

Schumann too was an inveterate user of musical cryptograms. More recently, Alban Berg regarded 23 as his signature number, rather like a footballer being identified by his shirt number. For example, the Lyric Suite is made up of a sequence of 23-bar phrases. Embedded in the piece is a musical representation of a love affair that Berg was having at the time. His lover was denoted by a 10-bar sequence which he entwined with his own signature, 23, using the combination of mathematics and music to serenade his affair.

But it’s probably Mozart’s final opera, The Magic Flute, that is the work most laden with symbolism and numerical imagery. The opera is full of masonic symbols, which in turn are underpinned by mathematics – Mozart had been admitted to Beneficence lodge in Vienna seven years earlier. The number three, for example, is very significant in masonic practice. The three knocks at the lodge door that are part of the initiation ceremony for a new mason are heard again and again throughout the opera. As Goethe, a fellow mason, declared: “The crowd should find pleasure in seeing the spectacle: at the same time, its high significance will not escape the initiates.”

Beyond the three-note rhythm sequence the number three is threaded through the opera in numerous ways. Much of Mozart’s masonic music is written in E flat major, a key with three flats, although this may have more to do with the key being best suited for the wind instruments that Mozart employed. Many of the characters come in threes: the three ladies who serve the Queen of the Night, the three boys. Three-part harmony abounds.

The opera is also full of pairs. Day and night, fire and water, Osiris and Isis, gold and silver, sun and moon. The number five plays a part, another important number for the masons given their choice of the symbol of the pentagram or five-pointed star. Trios give way to quintets, not quartets. And ultimately Sarastro’s power is bound up in the mystical seal of the seven circles of the sun.

For Mozart The Magic Flute is also a statement of his belief in a changing order, not just politically but also musically. The work premiered in Vienna in 1791, two years after the revolution that swept the streets of Paris. The masonic order had suffered repression because the authorities feared the enlightened ideas this secret society was promoting. This transition from ancient regime to enlightenment is captured in the music. The ornate music of the Queen of the Night gives way to a new sound that Mozart hoped would be his legacy.

• This article was amended on 5 April 2013. The original gave 1,001 as the number of Don Giovanni’s female conquests in Spain. That should have been 1,003 and has been corrected.

Full Story – Guardian

For many people, music is essential for a satisfying and strong workout. It’s not just about elevating our mood or keeping us in rhythm, though. Scientific American rounds up the recent research showing just why music helps us run faster, cycle longer, and do other exercise much better.

Music affects our bodies and minds in multiple ways:

Music distracts people from pain and fatigue, elevates mood, increases endurance, reduces perceived effort and may even promote metabolic efficiency. When listening to music, people run farther, bike longer and swim faster than usual-often without realizing it. In a 2012 review of the research, Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University in London, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of exercise music, wrote that one could think of music as “a type of legal performance-enhancing drug.”

We’ve previously seen that the right BPM (beats per minute) of a song can improve a workout, but why is that? Citing a 2012 study by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in which people who cycled in time to music needed 7 percent less oxygen than other cyclists, Scientific American explains that syncing your movements to music might help your body use energy more efficiently: maintaining a steady pace, reducing false steps, and decreasing how much energy you expend.

The distraction explanation we’ve seen previously is also noted here. By distracting you, music helps you override fatigue and make it seem easier to do more.

And, of course, music can be motivational.
Original Story – Lifehacker

Imagine collaborating with a classical composer to create a symphony about your hometown. The people of Toronto, Canada, have done exactly that.

On Saturday 9 March, residents were treated to a ground-breaking concert that was the result of an almost year-long project.

Sounds recorded by volunteers across the city – everything from noisy traffic to children’s voices – were woven together with the strings and horns of a traditional orchestra. Contributions were invited via the internet and the audience were even able to manipulate the ending of the music via an app.

Composer Tod Machover, who is also a technologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Peter Oundjian, the music director at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, explain how the innovative idea worked.

Produced for the BBC by Anna Bressanin; camera by Ilya Shnitser

BBC Story

London tech start-up Roli are showing off a new musical invention at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas on Friday.

“The Seaboard” has the shape of a familiar keyboard, but the keys are made from a flexible, soft material. The instrument represents a musical revolution, according to its designers, some of whom are accomplished pianists themselves..

It is part of a growing trend for “haptic” solutions, touch-based technology that allows for intuitive, fine control, as opposed to blunt instruments like the mouse, or joystick.

Rory Cellan-Jones went along to the company’s east London premises to try out the technology, with the company’s founder, Roland Lamb.

BBC Story

Could learning music help children with attention disorders? New research suggests playing a musical instrument improves the ability to focus attention. To the musical ear, life has a rhythm comparable to grand opera or simple folk tunes.

To the musical ear, life has a rhythm comparable to grand opera or simple folk tunes. Our ability to understand that rhythm and synchronise with each other is at the core of every human interaction.

That’s why researchers in San Diego believe that learning to play musical instruments can help us focus attention and improve our ability to interact with the world around us.

For more than a year, children at the city’s Museum School have been taking part in an experiment involving Gamelan, a percussion style of ensemble music from Indonesia that emphasizes synchronicity.

Sensors attached to the instruments monitor the children’s ability to hit the beat precisely. The data is analyzed and a mathematical algorithm is used to determine a base measurement of their accuracy. That measurement is then compared to the results of behavioural and cognitive tests, and assessments by teachers and parents.

“So far, we’ve found a correlation between their ability to synchronise and their performance on cognitive tests,” says Alexander Khalil, head of the Gamelan Project, funded by the National Science Foundation.

“What this could mean, is that learning to time in a group setting with other people musically, could improve your ability to focus attention.”

Khalil began the research after several years of noticing that children who lacked the ability to synchronize also struggled to pay attention during other activities. As their musical ability improved, so did their attention.

“It is possible that music practice could become a non-pharmacological intervention for problems such as ADHD (attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder). We haven’t tested it yet but it’s a possibility – and an exciting possibility,” he says.

ADHD is a neurobehavioral disorder that affects one in 10 children in the US. They have problems paying attention, controlling impulsive behaviour and can be overly active. It can’t be cured but the symptoms can be managed – often with medication.

It’s thought music might help such children because our sense of timing affects so much of our behaviour.

“The ability to time, to synchronise with others underlies all face to face communication,” says Khalil. “People imagine that synchronizing is doing something simultaneously. But synchronizing actually means processing time together – perceiving time together in such a way that we have this common understanding of how time is passing.”

Music offers many different layers and levels of time, from the milliseconds it takes to gauge a series of beats, to the minutes of a musical phrase or fragment and the hours of a full performance.

“By learning music, one of the things you learn is rhythm and how to be aware of the temporal dynamic of the world around you and how to keep your attention focused on all of these things while you do what you do.”

The Gamelan Project is part of a growing body of research into the effects of music on the brain. New imaging technology is making it possible to discover how different areas of brain function are connected.

“Having these ways to look into the brain gives us a tool that we can then use to study the effects of music on the growth and development of the brain,” says Professor John Iversen of the Institute of Neural Computation at the University of California San Diego.

He’s heading the Symphony Project, one of the first longitudinal studies of its kind on the effects of musical training on brain development.

“There’s always this nature/nurture question – are musicians’ brains different because of music, or are the people with that kind of brain the ones that stuck with music because they’re good at it?” says Iversen.

“To really understand whether it’s music making these brain changes, you have to study someone as they begin to learn music and as they continue learning music. Then you can see how their brain develops and compare that with children not doing music.”

It could be five years before any results of the study are known but scientists are already speculating that it could have far-reaching implications for musical training.

“What if we have some kids that are intensively studying music and we find that their brains grow at an accelerated rate?” says Iversen.

“The more you work out, the bigger your muscles get. The brain may work somewhat like that as well. The more you practice the stronger the circuits will become.”

Paula Tallal is co-director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She spent her career studying how children use time to process speech. She says people who have had musical training have been shown to have superior processing skills.

“What we don’t know is whether there is something common to musical training that is common to attention, sequencing (processing the order in which something occurred), memory and language skills,” she says.

“We know from multiple studies that children who have musical training do better at school. We don’t need further research to show that. What we’re interested in from a scientific perceptive is why that occurs. What neural mechanisms are being driven by musical experience and how do they interact with other abilities.”

She says this research is ever more critical because many schools facing budget shortfalls are cutting music programmes.

“We’re creating an impoverishment that nobody understands the long term effects of,” she warns.

BBC Story