Musical Space

Bjork is wearing masks now. In the pictures, videos and live performances that support the avant-garde singer’s new album Utopia , her face is hidden behind exquisitely made masks that evoke fantasy animals in various stages of their past and maybe future evolutions. Why does it seem more and more musicians are performing in masks? It’s obviously good branding - a way to set oneself apart in a crowded market, like Deadmau5 wearing his memorably huge cartoon mouse head. But there are other

Lately it’s been hard for me to take a lot of pop music seriously, and one reason is that it has become so shockingly apolitical. As tumultuous as civic discourse has become, there’s not too much on the radio that even touches on politics. Current music has become too polite and well behaved, and that puts it in danger of being irrelevant. Unless we start seeing some acrimony in the coming year’s Top 40, I fear that future musicologists won’t have much to say about 2018. We’ve seen periods like

Let’s face it, Christmas has been engineered for the kids. It’s pretty uncomplicated for anyone under 12; winter vacation, TV cartoons, toys and stockings. The music, too, is simple - all jingle bells and ho, ho, ho.

About a month ago, the city of New York repealed its cabaret law, which banned dancing in any place that didn’t have a license. It was enacted in 1926, a year after the Charleston craze swept the speakeasies of Harlem, and was enforced mainly to suppress gatherings that police found undesirable. Not surprisingly, the New York City Cabaret Law made an indelible mark on music history.

Most music concerns itself with basic and raw emotions like love, sadness and anger - and can do a very good job expressing them. Other emotions, like gratitude, are more sophisticated and abstract, which makes them very difficult to bring across in sound. We have a whole holiday devoted to thankfulness, but there’s not a lot of music attached to it - we don’t sing Thanksgiving carols or do Thanksgiving dances. But gratitude is one of our most mature and evolved sentiments; it raises the

This is the song “Mindflowers” from the 1968 album Behold and See by the band Ultimate Spinach. It’s full of echo-y, distorted guitar, it drones on as though trying to make time stop, and the lyrics, like “take a trip to the center of your mind,” allude to some sort of inner discovery. I’m talking today about Psychedelic music because, even though it is mostly a phenomenon of the 1960’s, our musical space is still experiencing flashbacks.

(Music: Rhiannon Giddens, “Come Love Come,” Freedom Highway (2017) ) You’re listening to the work of Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained soprano who’s devoted her career to exploring the African American roots of country and bluegrass. As a solo artist and as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she’s equally adept at art song and country fiddle; deep musicological research has never sounded so riveting. Luckily for us, essential music-making like this is getting recognition

This is Joanna Newsom, singing her song “Sprout and Bean.” It’s a beautiful tune, but let’s face it: she has a weird voice: unschooled, childlike, amateurish. Her singing is not bad , it’s in tune, you can understand the words, but it still sounds weird.

Oktoberfest is officially on in Munich with the tapping of a strong local golden lager brewed in March and fermented all summer.

A lot of thought goes into making and explaining music, but I can’t come up with an intellectual reason for why we actually like it. There is a compelling unintellectual reason, though, and that is body chemistry. Science has found that music affects us because of our hormones. Research has found that our brains produce the neurotransmitter dopamine in response to music. Dopamine, along with opioids like endorphin, are tied to the brain’s reward system. Anticipating and then hearing music gives