Arachnophonia: Table Songs of Georgia

Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.

All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by student assistant Nikoloz (class of 2026) and features collection of traditional Georgian choral music. Thanks, Nikoloz!

Table Songs of Georgia – The Tsinandali Choir

Table Songs of Georgia - Tsinandali Choir

Although the country of Georgia is small, its history and culture are rich with no bounds. Over the millennia of struggle, Georgia has amassed history and myth. It’s hard to take in all of it, but one can experience a small piece of Georgian culture by listening to the traditional choir songs passed down through generations. The songs often talk about freedom, victory, faith, tradition, family, brotherhood, and more.

The Music Library has 3 CDs with mesmerizing collections of Georgian songs, for example, Table Songs of Georgia. This is a collection of songs that are, of course, commonly sung at tables during feasts.

The other 2 CDs are Supra / Iberi and Georgia the resounding polyphony of the Caucausus [sic].”

Students can come by the Music Library and listen to these CDs in one of our study rooms!

Arachnophonia: Writing in Music

Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.

All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by Music Library associate Melanie and features a guide to writing about music.

Writing in Music: A Brief Guide by Lynne Rogers, Karen Bottge & Sara Haefeli

Writing in Music: A Brief Guide book cover

A new school year is upon us and everyone is getting back into the rhythms of classes and activities.

You’re excited about the new music class you’re taking this term, but feeling a bit trepidatious because the syllabus says you have to write a research paper/review/analysis as a big part of your grade. How on earth do you approach even picking a topic, much less writing a paper about it?

Worry not! The Music Library has useful resources like Writing in Music: A Brief Guide to get you started.

This pocket-sized style guide offers a practical introduction to many aspects of writing about music in an academic context. It offers useful tips and tricks for all stages of the writing process from choosing a topic and creating a thesis to the nitty gritty of researching and drafting a research paper.

Writing in Music will help you explore writing about music from a historical and cultural context and/or writing from a musical analysis point of view (or both!). This comprehensive intro will get you on your way to creating a great paper, thus making your professor happy and making the class a more enriching learning experience for you!

Writing in Music and many more helpful resources are available in the Parsons Music Library – just ask our friendly staff for help.

Arachnophonia: Mathematical Music

Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.

All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by student assistant Christine (class of 2025) and features a book about mathematics in music. Thanks, Christine!

Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI by Nikita Braguinski

Mathematical Music book cover

If you or a musician you know have ever learned a challenging piece, one of the most important things you can do to successfully practice is count as you play. Measures, rhythms, polyrhythms, fingerings, tempo… numbers are all over music, whether explicitly or hidden between the notes. What you may not realize is that the mathematics of music has been studied for thousands of years and is a widely expanding field today. In the book Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to AI, Nikita Braguinski explores this relationship from 550 B.C. to the present-day and future.

If this doesn’t sound interesting yet, here are a few fun facts from the book:

– The first machine entirely dedicated to “composing” music was designed around 1650 and combined random snippets of notes to generate a melody. Referred to as a “musical thinking machine”, this demonstrates just how long people have been using machines and mathematics to create music – hundreds of years!

– Some of the same names we know from calculus and other advanced math reappear on the music scene as well. Both Euler and Leibniz published works searching for the hidden mathematics behind what makes different ratios of frequencies (or intervals) delightful or unappealing to the human ear. Although they didn’t find anything concrete, they introduced the idea of listening as an art of subconscious counting.

– The (then) newly-formed Soviet Union had an intense interest in structural formalism in music and created multiple initiatives dedicated to art as a science. This coincided with an era of musical exploration into dissonant, atonal music and shows how the new revolutionaries distinguished themselves from the traditional Russian music of years past.

– Today, we have the computerized tool of neural networks, a deep learning AI technique to generate music on the spot given a certain style (or input parameter). Where do you think this will take music?

All of these stories, experiments, and techniques can be found in the Parsons Music Library. If you’re intrigued, be sure to check out this book along with others on the interdisciplinary nature of music.

Arachnophonia: Modern Method for Tympani

Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.

All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by student assistant Eli (class of 2024) and features insert title info here. Thanks, Eli!

Modern Method for Tympani by Saul Goodman

Set of 4 timpani (kettledrums)

While performing my duties as music library student assistant, I discovered a thin workbook titled Modern Method for Tympani. I come across hundreds of books, scores, and instruction manuals in my job, but it was the name of the author of the workbook that caught my attention: Saul Goodman, the namesake of one my favorite TV shows, Better Call Saul.

Further research showed Saul Goodman (the percussionist & author of Modern Method for Tympani) has a fascinating history. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, by the time he was 20, Goodman was the principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic. He played with this premier orchestra for 46 years and taught at Juilliard, the premier U.S. music school, for 41 years.

Goodman was instrumental in innovating the timpani, introducing both new techniques and inventions such as replaceable-ball timpani sticks and chain-tuned timpanis. He also remains one of the most renowned and influential percussion teachers in history. To add to his long list of accolades, Goodman played the first performance of a timpani concert to be broadcast on air. When he died in 1996, the New York Times credited him with over 6,000 concerts and a place as the longest-held principal Philharmonic position in history. If you would like to try to follow in Saul Goodman’s steps, take a look at Modern Method for Tympani, found at library call number MT660.2. G6, or ask a Music Library student assistant for help.

Music of Chile

At the Music Library, we have celebrated this year’s Chile-themed International Education Week with an exhibit about the country’s music.

Chile - International Ed Week flyer

Our exhibit highlights items (both physical and streaming) from UR’s collection as well as information about traditional Chilean instruments and dance. It also includes thumbnail biographical info on several Chilean musicians.

Here’s a little info on the music with some links to items in the library’s collection and a few video clips for good measure!

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The traditional music of Chile is a rich mixture of Spanish and Pre-Columbian influences.

Some of the traditional instruments commonly used in Chile include Andean instruments such as

Charango

* The charango – a small stringed instrument of the lute family. It was traditionally made from armadillo shell, but is more commonly made of wood today. It has 10 strings.

and

Zampoña - Chilean pan pipes

* The zampoña – these are Chilean panpipes.

You can hear some examples of these instruments in action on songs like “Nieve, Viento Y Sol (Snow, Wind and Sun)” which is available to stream at this link: https://richmond.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01URICH_INST/191gg5k/alma9917693733606241

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The Cueca is considered to be the “most traditional music and dance of Chile” and is officially the country’s national dance. While cueca’s origins are not entirely certain, indigenous, African and Spanish influences are evident.

Cueca

It is a partner dance which is indented imitate the courtship of a rooster and hen. Men usually wear a traditional Chilean cowboy costume while women traditionally don a flowered dresses with an apron.

Here is a video of a cueca performance:

And here is a link to a reference article about the dance.

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Nueva Canción Chilena

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chilean songwriters like Victor Jara and Violeta Parra used the tonada as a foundation of the “Nueva Canción,” explicitly political music that blended Chilean folk music with progressive politics, similar to the way Bob Dylan and Joan Baez led a political folk revival around the same time in the U.S.

The foundations of nueva canción were laid by Violeta Parra (1917-1967) who was a popular folk singer-songwriter and musicologist who researched and recovered the poetry and songs of rural Chile.

Photograph of Violeta Parra

The library owns several resources with information about her and also a 2013 biopic about her called Violeta se fu a los cielos (Violeta Went to Heaven) that’s worth a look. Here’s the trailer for the film:

Víctor Jara (1932-1973) was a legendary Chilean folk singer and political activist who also pioneered nueva canción. His activism led to his murder by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973.

Photograph of Victor Jara

Jara’s life and work continue to be celebrated by Latin American artists as well as globally known bands like U2 and The Clash. The 2018 documentary film The Resurrection of Víctor Jara is a great introduction to his life and legacy and is available to UR students, faculty and staff as a streaming video resource.
Here’s a trailer for the documentary:

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Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) was a Chilean pianist known for his interpretations of a vast repertoire, especially the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms.

Photograph of Claudio Arrau

He is widely considered to be one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.

Here are a couple of library resources about his life and work:

* Claudio Arrau, the Emperor (DVD)

* Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau: A Guide to His Philosophy and Techniques (Book)

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Of course, this is only a small sampling of music from Chile, but hopefully it will intrigue you and make you want to learn more!

Map of Chile and surrounding countries

Parsons Playlists: Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!: Fun with Non-Lexical Vocables

Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection called “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!: Non-Lexical Vocables” curated by Music Library associate Melanie Armstrong.

This playlist began as a discussion with a friend online a couple months ago. I had shared a song that I’d had stuck in my head and my friend said that it was their least favorite song by the group because (and I quote) “SHA LA LA is a terrible lyric 🙂”. The discussion that followed was all in good fun, but led me to want to research songs that have nonsense syllables in them just to prove that “sha la la” is NOT (necessarily) a terrible lyric.

scat singing notation

Vocals like “sha la la” in songs are called non-lexical vocables. Basically, they are nonsense syllables which may or may not be mixed together with meaningful text and they appear in all manner of different musics. This, of course, led to me being extra geeky and having a lot of fun creating a playlist highlighting a variety of different songs that use nonsense syllables in this way. In point of fact, it goes all the way back to at least the middle ages with songs using things like “fa la la” in them – but I decided to stick to more modern examples for playlist purposes. Which means this playlist starts with some scat singing (from circa the 1920s-1940s) and goes on from there.

Your mileage may vary in terms of your tolerance of the non-lexical vocable, but I maintain that sometimes one doesn’t need an actual word to create musical meaning and that non-lexical vocables can be super fun!

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five – “Heebie Jeebies”

Cab Calloway – “The Scat Song”

Ella Fitzgerald – “Blue Skies”

The Crew Cuts – “Sh-Boom”

Little Richard – “Tutti Frutti”

The Muppets – “Mah Na Mah Na”

The Jackson 5 – “ABC”

Suzanne Vega with DNA – “Tom’s Diner”

Primitive Radio Gods – “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”

Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps – “Be Bop A Lula”

Louis Prima & Phil Harris – “I Wanna Be Like You”

The Del-Vikings – “Come Go With Me”

Ben Folds Five – “Magic” (this is the song that triggered the whole list!)

Earth, Wind & Fire – “September”

Spice Girls – “Wannabe”

Tenacious D – “Classico”

Lady Gaga – “Bad Romance”

Bobby McFerrin & Chick Corea – “Song for Amadeus (Improvisation on Mozart’s Sonata No. 2 in F Major)”

The Beatles – “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”

Mungo Jerry – “In The Summertime”

The Tokens – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”

Wilson Pickett – “Land of 1000 Dances”

The Chips – “Rubber Biscuit”

Ben Folds – “Army” (Live at Roseland Ballroom New York, NY – June 2002)

The Beatles – “Hey Jude”

Here is a link to a YouTube playlist version: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU94rco57ZeyCsgxI0Edsp3YEZWPigCRX

And here is the playlist on Spotify:

Digital Resources: Grove Music Online

The Music Library has more resources available than physical items. We’re highlighting some of our digital resources, and including information about them as told by our student employees.

Today’s digital resource is:

Grove Music Online

Grove Music Online logo

Grove Music Online is an authoritative reference resource. It includes the full-texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, with updates and emendations.

Oxford Music online

Here is what student assistant Allison (class of 2022) had to say about Grove Music Online:

Grove Music Online is an extensive online music encyclopedia that provides detailed information on composers, their music, and other music scholarship. I like how the resource is run by an editorial board at Oxford University Press so that there isn’t much question regarding the credibility of the content. I looked up Paul Hindemith and George Gershwin and found a lot of information about each of their respective lives along with some articles about their work. Grove Music Online seems like a very valuable resource for researching composers and music in the classical/jazz field.”

George Gershwin composing at the piano. American composer,

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

New CDs added – October 2020

New CDs for October 2020

Parsons Playlists : “A Tribute to Adam Schlesinger (1967-2020)”

Welcome to our second installment of Parsons Playlists. Our second playlist is from Music Library Associate, Melanie Armstrong and is a tribute to songwriter Adam Schlesinger, whose career was cut short on April 1st, 2020 due to complications from Covid-19.

Adam Schlesinger

Melanie says: “I first became aware of Adam Schlesinger’s work when I discovered the band Fountains of Wayne in the early 2000s. But come to find out, I had already heard his amazing pop sensibility thanks to the title song of the 1996 movie That Thing You Do!. He wrote music for many other TV, Broadway and film projects and also for the musical TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which happens to be one of my very favorite recent TV shows. I also threw in a couple of TV Christmas songs since I blog about holiday programs with my husband. So please enjoy this sampling of his amazing and alas too short career! This music will definitely make you smile though, and that’s quite a legacy to leave behind.”

Fountains of Wayne – “Stacy’s Mom” (2003) (probably the biggest hit of the group’s career)

Fountains of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers album cover (2003)

Fountains of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers album cover (2003)

The Wonders – “That Thing You Do” (1996)

Pretend 1960s single cover for "That Thing You Do"

Josie and the Pussycats – “Pretend To Be Nice” (2001)

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast featuring Santino Fontana – “Settle for Me” (2015) (A delightful Emmy-nominated little Fred & Ginger musical pastiche)

Settle for Me

Hugh Grant & Drew Barrymore in Music & Lyrics – “The Way Back Into Love” (2007)

Fountains of Wayne – “Radiation Vibe” (1996)

Fountains of Wayne - Self Titled Debut album

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (featuring Rachel Bloom) – “You Stupid Bitch” (2016)

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Stephen Colbert – “Another Christmas Song” (2008)

A Colbert Christmas (2008)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast – “California Christmastime” (2015)

Cry-Baby Musical Cast – “Nobody Gets Me” (2007)

Cry-Baby the Musical

Fountains of Wayne – “Hey Julie” (2003)

The Monkees – “Our Own World” (2016)

The Monkees - Good Times!

12th studio album by the Monkees, produced by Adam Schlesinger and released in 2016

Ivy – “Edge of the Ocean” (2001)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast (featuring Michael Hyatt) – “Antidepressants Are So Not A Big Deal” (2019) (Won Emmys for Outstanding Music & Lyrics and Outstanding Choreography)

GettyImages-1174801858

Adam Schlesinger, Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgen celebrating their Emmy win for “Antidepressants Are So Not A Big Deal”

Fountains of Wayne – “Sink to the Bottom” (1996)

Adam Schlesinger – Youtube Playlist

Spotify Playlist (with bonus songs!)

Arachnophonia: Death Cab For Cutie “Transatlanticism”

Editor’s note: Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about items in the Parsons Music Library‘s collection. All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by Music Library student worker Cole (class of 2021) and features Transatlanticism the fourth studio album by indie rock band Death Cab For Cutie originally released in 2003. Thanks, Cole!

Death Cab For Cutie

Transatlanticism

Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

“So this is the New Year
And I don’t feel any different”

So begins Death Cab for Cutie’s 2003 album Transatlanticism, and so too begins another calendar year. I mentioned this record in my previous Arachnophonia post, so I found it fitting to further detail it for my first submission of 2018. Written entirely by front man Ben Gibbard and recorded at the same time as The Postal Service’s Give Up, Transatlanticism offers a darker and more personal rumination on love than the synth-pop optimism of Gibbard’s collaboration with Jimmy Tamborello. Whereas Give Up dwells on relationships past, it ultimately is a celebration of those experiences. Transatlanticism is principally about the distances from others–physical and otherwise – that prevent us from being happy. It condemns, rather than celebrates, past failures.

Gibbard’s obsession with destructive distance is evident from the first moments of the album, and indeed the record’s name itself. The aforementioned intro track “The New Year” finds him mocking the inane celebration of the New Year’s holiday. Eventually, the song drops its cynical façade and ends with an honest rumination about the first type of distance addressed in the album – geographic:

“I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways
There’d be no distance that can hold us back”

Gibbard has become disillusioned about the “magic” of the New Year. Rather than celebrating with his friends the progression of time, he chooses instead to lament about “the old days” when the world was flat, senselessly believing that this would somehow allow him to be closer to his estranged lover.

Further on, numerous songs wrestle with an entirely different form of distance – temporal. In “We Looked Like Giants,” the second to last track of the album, Gibbard reminisces over the novelty of first love.

“I’ve become what I always hated when I was with you then
We looked like giants in the back of my grey subcompact
Fumbling to make contact as the others slept inside”

He notes the irony of how much he’s changed in the days since his high school affair and views the entire experience with an acute awareness of their naïveté. Unlike most other songs from Transatlanticism, Gibbard doesn’t pine for anything here. “We Looked Like Giants” reminisces but doesn’t dwell. It examines an old flame for what it was, not what it might have been, and in doing so provides the closest thing to a sense of closure found on the album.

Contrarily, “Title and Registration” recounts a personal experience of Ben Gibbard, stumbling across pictures of an ex-lover he “tried to forget” while searching for a legal document in the glove compartment of his car. He reminisces about this love lost thus:

“There’s no blame
For how our love did slowly fade
And now that it’s gone
It’s like it wasn’t there at all
And here I rest
Where disappointment and regret collide
Lying awake at night”

Gibbard takes an intriguing stance in this verse, first asserting that there’s “no blame” for the end of the relationship, but still expresses “disappointment and regret.” He takes issue not with the ending of the affair, but with how both parties allowed their love to extinguish with whimper. It’s only now, since distance has developed from the ending of the relationship, that Gibbard is tormented by his failure.

The final form of distance addressed in Transatlanticism, and indeed the most crucial, is emotional. As suggested in “Title and Registration,” Gibbard’s deepest wounds are delivered not by betrayal, but the slow division that sedates love into apathy. In “Expo ’86,” he critiques the very pursuit of love itself:

“Sometimes I think this cycle never ends
We slide from top to bottom then we turn and climb again
And it seems by the time that I have figured what it’s worth
The squeaking of our skin against the steel has gotten worse
But if I move my place in line, I’ll lose
And I have waited, the anticipation’s got me glued
I am waiting for something to go wrong
I am waiting for familiar resolve”

Like Sisyphus eternally rolling his boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back once he’s reached the top, Ben Gibbard feels trapped in a never-ending cycle of relationships. He desperately wants more than anything to just finish. This fixation with repetition prevents him from truly engaging in any meaningful way. Instead, he’s just “waiting for something to go wrong.”

Death Cab For Cutie

This dissociation from romantic endeavors is what drives Gibbard in “Tiny Vessels.” Here, he confesses to his emotional detachment, painting himself in a selfish and potentially even misogynistic light:

“So one last touch, and then you’ll go
And we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
And you are beautiful
But you don’t mean a thing to me”

Heartbreak after heartbreak has driven Gibbard from seeking passionate love to purely physical stimulation – the very transformation he despises. While “Tiny Vessels” proves to be a moral recession, it exists to embolden the revelation of the next song, the title track “Transatlanticism.”

Just shy of eight minutes long, “Transatlanticism” stands as the focal point of the album. In many ways it proves to be antithetical to every other song on the record. Rather than a cynical dismissing of past relationships, the title track is a heartbreakingly honest plea for true love. While the song is literally about a man being separated from his lover by the birth of the Atlantic Ocean, in truth it details the death of a relationship at the hands of a widening emotional disconnect.

“Most people were overjoyed
They took to their boats
I thought it less like a lake
And more like a moat”

Gibbard makes use of all three forms of distance – physical, temporal, and emotional, – and in doing so, produces the most genuine and stunning track of the album. Unlike “Title and Registration,” in “Transatlanticism” the speaker hasn’t resigned to simply regret the death of his relationship, because a fragment of it still remains. Rather than accept the slow death, he fights tooth and nail to preserve the love that’s slipping through his fingers. The song crescendos with a simple refrain – “I need you so much closer” – repeated twelve times, and then finally climaxes with the outro:

“So come on, come on
So come on, come on
So come on, come on
So come on, come on”

In my personal opinion, this is Ben Gibbard at his absolute best. Sparse, honest, and absolutely agonizing.

Since its release, Transatlanticism has been near-universally accepted as Death Cab for Cutie’s greatest work, and a seminal album of indie rock. While the band’s fan base consistently ridicules them for their more recent, upbeat outputs (fans often ironically lament how they want Ben Gibbard to be miserable again), Gibbard himself remains realistic about the band’s necessity for evolution. In a 2015 interview with Medium, Gibbard offered this:

“I cannot be the 25-year-old who wrote Transatlanticism as much as the fan can’t be the 19-year-old college student going through a break-up again.”

So I implore you, while you have the opportunity to be that 19-or-20-or-however-old-college-student-going-through-a-break-up-or-whatever-else, listen to Transatlanticism and be it.

Death Cab For Cutie