I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?*

Well, not always… We caught a show this past Wednesday that was interesting in its contrasts, as well as for its connection with some musical stuff I’ve been thinking about. When we walked in, Franco-oldtimer-gettheworkdonemotherfucker blues-punk band Whodunit? were playing. They looked like the perfect punk band - cocky, tussledly-suited, then the gogo dancer came out. It was pure artifice. Their songs were short, loud, not so interesting as music, but by the end, I couldn’t keep my head from bobbing.

The headliners were a German band called Get Well Soon. They were perhaps the exact opposite of Whodunit?. You could tell from the moment they hit the stage that everything you were going to hear was going to be serious. Very, very serious. I think I saw the guys from Whodunit? over in the corner making fun of the earnestness. Their front man, Konstantin Gropper, looks much too young to be as much as 25, and also has a voice about 2 octaves deeper than it should be.** That he’s old enough not to be singing plain teen angst actually forces me to reassess the music a bit, but my strongest reaction was to the rhythmicality. Gropper’s melodies are fluid enough, but the drums were playing even quarter notes, and so was the rhythm guitar. And the lead guitar and keyboards had straight eighth notes. And the trumpet and electric violin were pretty stable in the half note/whole note region. It was all very static, and it overwhelmed the relative melodic freedom. Harmonically, the music is interesting, but rather preoccupied with cadential 6/4 progressions.***

And then out pops the chorus of the third song in the set, “If This Hat Is Missing” - 4 falsettos in unison, those static sticky rhythm parts gone so just drums left in a glorious fleeting transformation. Singing “shoot baby shoot baby pull the trigger fire a bullet an arrow or a poison dart baby shoot baby shoot free us from the pressure with a rifle or a gun we can live forever.”**** Happiness is here! But the moment was oddly, brightly, staring-into-it sunny because it was such a contrast to what came before.

This was one of the two exceptionally successful moments in their set. The other was the cover of a tune that got famous from Trainspotting (thank you Jon for placing the song), Born Slippery .NUXX. Jon tells me (I can now confirm, thank you youtube) the original is very different, up-tempo dance music instead of the earnest music of pain. Well, still the music of pain, but in a different way. The song is obsessive, the melody never changes pitch, repeats the same rhythmic phrases over and over again. Why does this work so much better than the other rhythmically repetitive songs that Get Well Soon plays? Because the repetition is overwhelming. Repetition is all there is. In the other songs, there’s plenty of variety - melodies moving, harmonies shifting, timbres changing, registers shifting, trumpets accordions violins glockenspiels filling in the middle or vaulting over top. Just not rhythmic variety. But this version of Born Slippery .NUXX allows you to fall into a trance, to let the music run through you.

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Last Friday, we analyzed Fauré’s Requiem in my analysis class. I’m ashamed to say that this was my first listen to the warhorse. But I had a similar reaction - or rather, my reaction to Get Well Soon was informed by the Fauré. The music shows a remarkable lack of rhythmic pliability. Take the tenor line at m. 20 of the first movement:

This is a major motive in the piece, but manages to repeat itself almost literally each time it recurs. Fauré extends it at times, but the whole 2 measures act as a head motive,***** it never gets broken down into a smaller unit. The phrases that follow are 2 or 3 or 4 or more measures long, but this thing never gets beyond its four-squareness. It would be unfair to ask Fauré to produce the sort of rhythmic gymnastics we’re used to these days, but I have to compare what Fauré does with what Brahms could have done to a motive like this, and I’m reminded of Jeremy Denk’s post(s) on Brahms and motives (and Tchaikovsky). And since the Fauré is kind of modal, I’m even more specifically thinking about the horn call at the start of the second movement of fourth symphony.

One unchanging head motive is fine, by the way, but it’s really how the entire work is constructed. We looked at the Introit + Kyrie, the Agnus Dei, and the In Paradisum, and each one is built around a rhythmically static melodic figure.

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So on to the self-analysis portion of this post. I should first mention that listening to Get Well Soon’s recorded work has given me a better opinion of their rhythmic versatility - the bass and drums actually have some really nice off-the-beat kicks throughout their oeuvre. The “shoot baby” thing probably works better live, but overall I have a better impression of them from the recordings. They definitely accomplish neater noises on record. In the end, I’m sort of hooked, I had “shoot baby” running through my head all afternoon.

But back to looking at myself in the mirror, it’s probably reasonably obvious that I’m having some issues with rhythm these days - why else would I be spending so much time writing about this? How to connect rhythmic change with the other aspects of music is probably my greatest compositional weakness, so in moments when I’m being particularly haunted, I lash out at others. Fauré and Gropper don’t deserve the abuse, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But how do I improve my work? One route, the one that interests me the most while also I’m sure being exactly the wrong answer, is to experiment with super-long notes - that is, neutralize rhythm altogether. The piece I’m writing for Croatia contains a drone that runs through the whole piece, albeit a Scelsi-like drone, changing all sorts of parameters while the pitch stays put. This sort of thing appeals to me - we’ll see how it turns out - but I don’t want to abandon dramatic tension, and I fear that drones are going to lead me down a path to meditation music, which isn’t my goal. That the piece for Croatia also has other, moving, parts is to it’s advantage, I think. Also, I think I want my drones to have a lot happening within them. They might not even really be drones anymore if I keep changing colors and intensities, etc, during them? Ultimately, though, the answers are going to have to be worked out in front of music paper, not the computer screen. I’ll have to come back to the subject in 6 months or so and see where I am.

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*motto “Indie Rock Entrée Libre”

**Actually, listening some more online, his voice’s timbre (not his pitch) is a bit flat and blah. I have a feeling he ought to be more of a tenor - and in those rare, well-chosen moments when he sings higher, his voice is suddenly much more distinctive. The advantage and disadvantage of his voice in the lower ranges is that it fades into the mass of sound.

***The link might not help that much - but it’s the best one I found because it largely used ii6 chords as the predominant instead of IV chords. If you don’t read music, you should still be able to see the general direction in which the music moves (that is, down).

****By the way, holding the poi in poison for 3 beats is a stroke of genius. So is the inversion of shoot and baby going into the second line. Good job to the non-native speaker! But I have to say, overall, this talk of violence vs., say Jeff Tweedy in “Via Chicago,” and, well, really, I’d rather not pay attention to a song’s lyrics, anyway.

*****A head motive is a group of notes that form the beginning of a number of different developments of an idea. Following the links below, that dotted figure that Jeremy Denk is talking about is a quintessential head motive. So is dah-dah-dah-DUM in Beethoven’s Fifth.