Thanks Les!

A short while ago I received a phone out of the blue, a call from my musical past.

In 1982 I’d played a gig at the Princeton Art Museum with a fabulous lead guitarist: Les Scharfstein.

After the gig, Les took off for New York and… I always wondered what happened to him.

Anyways, it was Les who — out of the blue and from 37 years ago — left a message for me.

When we did catch up voice-to-voice, one thing we talked about was musical creativity.

In with that topic was the notion that a songwriter might take a chord sequence from another song — could be a known song, but needn’t be — and “force” him/herself to compose with that immutable sequence.

So last night, I collected the chord sequences from five songs. Two of those songs had relatively simple sequences, the other three were more adventuresome.

This afternoon, I picked Chord Sequence #1 and… got to work.

I decided to block in the sequence with piano and drums in Logic Pro X.

First reaction: almost an irritation at being tied to someone else’s sequence.

Sure, I might have come up with a similar sequence on my own, but that would have been after noodling away on the guitar for days, and I’d have a melody. Here, the chords felt stark, naked.

But as I worked with the sequence, I started to get ideas.

This sequence was fairly simple, so I found myself playing with simple melodies early on, then more complicated, more rhythmic melodies later, over the same chords.

I couldn’t resist transposing the verses and chorus up 2 semitones when it came ‘round to repeating them. Weirdly, the transposition is almost seamless. I’ve made a note to myself to find out why, theoretically.

I’m going to let it sit for a bit… then get my guitar out and play along… see where it all goes…

Stay tuned…

Thanks Les!

It's the known that the artist should fear, not the unknown

Ben Folds of the Ben Folds Five recently published, A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life Of Music And Cheap Lessons.

The following excerpt caught my eye:

As satisfying and safe as it can feel to have mastered a craft, it also can be a sign that it's time to learn a new trick.

It's the known that the artist should fear, not the unknown.

All that terrain that's been well illuminated should scare you artistically.

Because the known is where boredom takes root. Staying in the well-lit areas is what gets you stuck.

I felt a strong urge to lurch into the dark and leave pop music behind, but of course we all resist change, we all want to keep our job.

It is the known that the artist should fear, not the unknown.

Amen to that.

Now — to have the courage to do so.

Copy. Copy. Copy. Create.

Many years ago I worked in Tokyo, the first and only foreigner in a well-known and highly-respected firm.

One day, I was chatting with one of the company’s managing directors about innovation.

“The secret” he told me, “is copy-copy-copy-CREATE!”

While enthusiastic folk want to leap directly to CREATE! — and sometimes believe they can — a more sober investigation of creativity suggests many years of dedicated apprenticeship.

A master artist I know bemoans too many art students — encouraged by today’s raft of art teachers in art schools — skipping the hard work involved learning to draw and mix paints, and instantly leaping into “originality.”

“They leave art school and… don’t really know the basics. But you know, it’s hard to get a job in illustration or graphic design if all you are is ‘original’ — and a know-nothing about the craft.”

Apprentices learn their craft, ideally from an accomplished master.

Apprentices copy.

Apprentices copy, copy, copy — and once they’ve mastered their trade — CREATE!

Music — like art — is so rich and varied, we can be apprentices always.

And that — that is the joy in creativity!

Memory is a Strange Thing

In 1976, when I was 16, I wrote a lengthy, YES-inspired piece of music.

The piece included a quiet instrumental that I quite liked.

I kept playing the piece until 1991, when lyrics finally got written: I'd seen YES in concert (Union Tour, 1991).

Then... "It Is Done" got put aside.

And — foolishly, stupidly — I never made a recording of the piece. Having played it for 15 years, I figured I'd never forget it.

Yet, forget the instrumental section I did. Intro, yes. Verse/chorus sections, yes. Outro, yes. But not the instrumental section.

So for the last 15-20 years, I've been racking my brains to remember it. Among other things, the instrumental section I'd written for "In the Dreamtime" kept interfering. I even worried that I'd re-used the "It Is Done" instrumental section.

"Racking" my brains is correct: the "rack" in question is the medieval torture device known as "the rack."

And for 15-20 years I got nowhere. I assumed the music was lost.

But memory is a strange thing.

June 30, 2018 I sat down, began playing my 6-string guitar, and —

— the "It Is Done" instrumental section came back! Everything: melody, chords, even the fingering.

I grabbed my iPhone and captured the second time I'd played the section in 15-20 years. (It's on the HOME page, and in the AUDIO section.)

Never again would I be racking my brains to try to remember it! Thank goodness these days we all have memory recorders in our pockets!

Warmest aloha,

Cat

Creating Performance Backing Track Drums for "Lean"

June 26, 2018 note

The National's "Lean" caught my ear while listening to the band's Live at Sydney Opera House video.

As Rolling Stone reports:

The National sound restrained and somber on "Lean," their new contribution to the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack.

The band builds a moody texture of acoustic guitars and, later, violin embellishments as frontman Matt Berninger portends doom with lyrics like, "Everybody needs a prayer and needs a friend / Everybody knows the world's about to end."

Throughout the song's four minutes, though, the band barely break a sweat, keeping their cool even as Berninger coos "Dying is easy" in the chorus.

Today, I began working on a performance backing track for the tune. As usual, I begin with piano. Fairly straight-forward. Guitars will go on top, live.

Next: backing-track drums.

Drums...

From Modern Drummer

Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is deceptively simple.

A brilliant accompanist to The National’s diverse, moody, and propulsive oeuvre, Devendorf provides vital rhythmic hooks to some of the group’s best-known songs.

If you seek out a live performance of “Bloodbuzz Ohio” or “Squalor Victoria,” you can hear an audible audience roar when Devendorf introduces the signature drum patterns for these fan favorites.

"Deceptively simple" is an understatement.

Admittedly I'm not drum-schooled, but I've just spent many (many) hours trying to get that Devendorf rhythm, often working in looped 2-bar segments to get it right. No Logic Pro X Drummer track here! Each note counts.

The joy, of course, is listening, listening, listening. And asking... how does he do that?

Just about every review of any National album will mention Devendorf ‘s unique, off-kilter drumming. But more drummers should take note of his creativity... 

Devendorf’s drums can take songs that don’t seem to have much rhythm or shape whatsoever and give them their punch, but his playing never feels invasive.

A perfect example is “Squalor Victoria” off of their 2007 breakout album Boxer. His dancey, tribal march gives a song built around a droning violin and a lock-stepped piano groove its life and its sense of building dread.

And live, he turns it into another beast...

from 5 Drummers of Indie Rock to Pay Attention To

Finished performance backing track June 27.

Glad I spent the time getting the drums reasonably "right"!

Warmest aloha,

Cat

Generate, Generate, Generate!

Peter Hammill, THIS.

The willingness and ability to generate, generate, generate prepares the ground for creativity.

Why "willingness"?

If you commit yourself to "generate, generate, generate," everything you produce will not be "the best." Indeed, in addition to not sharing your generation products, you may be inclined to hide them, even trash them!

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg shares a great story:

A famous poet arrived at a gathering, notebook in hand. The audience eagerly awaited a reading of his well-known and much-beloved poems.

Instead...

Instead, he read from his notebook — his write-everyday-no-matter-what notebook — and almost everything he read was drivel. Some of it was pure drivel.

The point?

The point Natalie Goldberg drives home is that the very best poets — and by extension, the very best writers, songwriters, artists — generate, generate, generate, because generation is fundamental to creativity.

We the public rarely, if ever, see these non-spectacular productions.

What the famous poet was teaching was that he had the guts to write — and read in public — parts of this creative process that weren't up to snuff. If we wished to be creative, we would have to show the same courage.

He was also teaching that looking only an an artist's sublime achievements misses a lot of points.

Peter Hammill, The Silent Corner & Empty Stage

Peter Hammill illustrates a musician willing to generate, generate, generate — often in public through his 30+ solo recordings, not to mention his work with Van der Graaf Generator.

As a solo artist, Hammill has released dozens of albums reflecting an incredible diversity of musical directions and interests. He’s explored the worlds of improvised music, solo keyboard- and guitar-based songs, opera, soundtracks, electronic music, and straightahead rock.

His most recent releases include 2012’s PNO GTR VOX BOX, a seven-CD set of solo performances, and Consequences, a dark, moody studio album that explores the perils of assumptions and insensitivity, and the chaos that can ensue.

2013 Music Without Borders Innerviews

I don't like everything PH writes, yet I listen to him often: for the inspiration!

And yet...

As I've pulled together material for CAT LIVE (MUSIC) I've still had to remind myself that "generate, generate, generate" is a fundamental part of the creative process.

So many of my lyrics, and much of my music is... crap! ("Crap" being a highly technical term.)

And, tho' I've put up some cringe-worthy lyrics...I've not posted the worst of my musical crap!

But I am looking at it and listening to it...

Mantra: generate, generate, generate — and keep your gold!

Warmest aloha,

Cat

Spread/Open Triads

Photo courtesy of Josh Tidsbury

Creating performance backing tracks can be quite the creative task.

• You want enough similarity between various tracks so your audience feels it's listening to a coherent "band," and not the radio.
   
• But you don't want your performance backing tracks to be so similar the audience gets bored by the sameness of it all.

One day, while researching the Lydian mode, I chanced upon Rick Beato's Film Scoring 101 — The Lydian Mode and a whole new avenue of arranging performance backing tracks opened up for me.

At 16:24 Rick Beato begins a discussion of spread (or open) triads. I was dumbfounded. So simple. So effective.

(In it's simplest form, take a major triad like C major (C - E- G) and move the middle note (the E) up (or down) an octave.)

Immediately, I made a copy of one of my performance background tracks, then changed the basic keyboard chords to spread (or open) triads.

Rick Beato is so right, it "opens up" the sound.

I kept the new arrangement! And I made the same change to other performance backing tracks I thought would benefit from the sound.

Rick Beato's "Everything Music" series includes a Music Theory Lesson — Spread Triads that explains more and offers many more examples.

Google "spread open triads" and... a wealth of theory and application is at your fingertips.

New (big) learning for me: Even if you don't compose film scores, YouTube has many excellent film-scoring lessons a singer-songwriter (creating performance backing tracks) can learn from.

Warmest aloha,

Cat

Inspiration: Stylus Phantasticus

Musical inspiration outside your typical listening/playing orbit stretches your ears — hopefully your compositional neurons too.

Listening/playing "the same old, same old:" likely produces the same old, same old.

A New Yorker recommend review caught my eye the other day, a review of Ensemble Libro Promo's "Fantasia Incantata."

Improvisation has played a minor role in European classical music, but it's the basis for...

These works are meant to sound as impulsive as improvisations, while also allowing their performers free reigh in expression, ornamentation, and counterpoint...

Read review

Clicked on PLAY and... wowl

A little Googling, and:

[The stylus fantasticus (or stylus phantasticus)] is the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues.

Many facets of musical modernism were invented in the stylus fantasticus at Kroměříž, such as bitonality... minimalism... stochasticism...  More.

And:

Improvisation and free form were paramount to the Stylus Fantasticus and virtuosity reigned in this early baroque style. More.

And:

[ "Stylus Phantasticus"] is a style of both composing and performing instrumental music which derives from phantasiren or "the art of improvising".

"Stylus Phantasticus" represents a form of liberty in the composition of instrumental music. The style does not confine the composer's imagination or force it to abide by strict rules. More.

Whoa.

A little YouTubing, and found some marvelous online pieces. Check 'em out:

Kathryn Salfelder - Stylus Phantasticus
Vincent Lubeck - Stylus Phantasticus
Dietrich Buxtehude — BuxWV 38 Stylus Phantasticus
Annegret Siedel & Bell'Arte Salzburg — Stylus Phantasticus (Amazon samples)

And a challenging-to-the-ears 2017 Stylus Phantasticus take:

Stylus Phantasticus, musique à voir et à entendre (extraits 7 min, 2017)

As Kathryn Salfeder is alive and well and teaching at MIT, discovered yet another strand on the ever-expanding web of inspiration.

Listening to more Vincent Lubeck (Praeludium in d-moll) as I write. And now enthralled by whoever's singing on Dietrich Buxtehude — BuxWV 38 Stylus Phantasticus. (Suzie Le Blanc.)

Yeah to the joys of inspiration, inspiration that crashes into you or falls on your head, and inspiration you chase like a ghost crab zig-zagging in the surf zone.

Warmest aloha.

Cat

Ah ha — A-ha!

Norwegian synthpop band A-ha's "Take On Me" is a poppy-boppy 80's classic.

At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, the video for "Take on Me" won six awards—Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice—and was nominated for two others, Best Group Video and Video of the Year. Take On Me was also nominated for Favorite Pop/Rock Video at the 13th American Music Awards in 1986.

On the Billboard Charts, "Take On Me" hit #1 in 1985.

Who doesn't know the song? Who can prevent his/her foot from tapping along?

Yet — "Take on Me" was never something I wanted to add to my set list. It just... wasn't me.

Then...

Then a friend and I are watching Deadpool 2... Wade is reconciling with Vanessa in the afterlife and... what is that gorgeous, oh-so familiar melody?

Couldn't place it as Deadpool 2 crashed on. Did a little research afterwards.

Ah... ha...

It's "Take On Me" — unplugged and played at a soulful, measured pace. Brilliant. (And not on the Deadpool 2 Soundtrack.)

"Take On Me (unplugged & slow)" is going on my Possibilities List. Can't wait to create the performance backing track.

Compare:

Classic "Take On Me"
Deadpool 2 "Take On Me" (unplugged)

Warmest aloha!

Cat

Rediscoveries

It's always fun — sometimes shocking — to come across "lost" or forgotten music/lyrics.

A good many of my music notes were saved in earlier versions of Microsoft Word — some as early as Word 1.0 — old file formats which cannot be opened with today's Word.

Fortunately, Apple's TextEdit can open some of these. Wade through the resulting "digital junk" and something might be recoverable — and resdiscoverable.

Today, came across a complete set of lyrics for "It Is Done." I wrote the YES-inspired music in 1976, and have played it and practiced it ever since. I knew I'd written lyrics years later, but had lost track of them. Today I found an "It Is Done" file: it was recoverable — and so the lyrics were rediscovered.

Now, music and lyrics can come together again. Time to record it too!

Also recovered/rediscovered  the lyrics for "Can't You See?" I recall being happy with how they turned out, and had been saddened to think they were lost.

Resurrecting "Can't You See?" will not be as easy as resurrecting "It Is Done": "Can't You See?" is a keyboard challenge for me. The only live recording I have of it has me struggling somewhat at points — and thus forgetting the words after the first chorus (meaning a complete set of lyrics was not available by other means)!

Probably a good challenge to take up!

Fun determining which was the first song I'd written, age 15. Rediscovered an old note that established "In Your Eyes" as that song.

Haven't played "In Your Eyes" in too many years. Will have to brush that song off!

Onwards!

Warmest aloha,

Cat

Memory Lane

It's not often that I revisit "everything" I've written.

But when I do — as with creating CAT LIVE (MUSIC) — it's always a technicolor, IMAX-3D trip down memory lane. When looking back involves listening to old recordings, the experience can be visceral.

If a song was written at a very emotional time, all that emotion surges back. The passage of time is irrelevant. There's no time in the unconscious, as they say.

Sometimes the trip down memory lane is cringe-worthy: What you wrote — musically and lyrically — as a 15, 16 year old looks so different four decades on! "I wrote THAT?!?!?"

On the uplifting side of things, you may re-discover music and lyrics you like. I've started a list of songs to resurrect and revisit.

The roller coaster ride of working on CAT LIVE (MUSIC) continues.

Onwards!

Warmest aloha,

Cat