#nonmusician

[marmotsomsierost]

When you fuck with the youtube music algorithm long enough, it's useful (discovering opal ocean, chinchilla, black pumas, etc) and entertaining (unexpectedly being teleported back to high school when smashmouth's flo pops up, realizing the marcus miller version of higher ground is a stevie wonder cover*) and, at times, the risk of creating a sudden bluescreen is absurdly hazardous.

Such as tonight, when i was about 2/3 the way through this song

when the combo of it plus the ambient xcom noises and the more acute noises of sierra gnawing on the mini-mjølnir and the clunking of the dryer abruptly tripped all the overstimulate-audio switches in my brain, so i skipped it.

Algorithm gave me this next, followed by several other Hu songs

and then this, which was a little heavier than i was vibing with tonight, but i had zucchini all over my hands and no easy way to skip to next without zucchinifying my phone or my earbuds.

All fine, right. So why the post, M? This was the next thing to play:

Like. Youtube. Buddy. I know i listened to like three phish albums on wednesday and yesterday was a lot of andy allo and leikeli47 and frank ocean and tuesday was, like, seventeen repeats of the great gate of kiev and jupiter the bringer of jollity and tine ting helseth's recording of hummel's fuck this trumpet in particular concerto in e flat and also abdelazer's rondeau from empire brass and bill kuhlman (listen tuesday was A Day, okay, monday was not so bad and we paid for it with tuesday) and i understand that might make it difficult to accurately predict what i might next want to hear. But.

Going from italian gothic metal to swedish folktronica is certainly A Choice. Not one i would recommend. I would also especially not recommend timing it in such a way that you are in the middle of dealing with hot oil and moist vegetables, because the resulting bluescreen might lead to dumping the entire bowl of shredded zucchini directly into the pan from somewhat higher elevation than desired.

In entirely unrelated news, everything to the left of my stove and the floor is very very clean now.

I'm adding this one in here because though it was not involved in today's youtube shenanigans, it is a fucking excellent song.

(I was at the concert this recording is from, and it is one of my most favorite memories of college. I had been having an absolutely shit day, decided i absolutely could not deal with one of my classes that day and went to the masterclass the empire brass was offering instead- that was a small mood-booster, but the actual concert was just...joyful. Instantly obliterated any and all of the crappiness from that day. It's still pretty far up there on my most favorite concerts. I will always recommend this album to people who like brass arrangements or organ or are unable to escape my general vicinity. or tumblr.)

*i could hear my mother declaiming 'A HOLE in your eduCATION!' from 800mi away. I know, mom. I know.

[cutesymiku]

fuck it! making a gender for loving the viola (as in the stringed instrument) because violas deserve love

[supercantaloupe]

a big part of the reason why i like baroque & classical music so much i think is because of how Structured it is. like it sounds nice yes but it's also very Predictable. i can listen to the first half of a phrase and pretty easily predict where it's going harmonically speaking, and predict where an entire section or aria or whatever is going based on its opening motives. the universe is ordered and comprehensible and beautiful and i can stick my fingers in it and pull it apart at the seams to see exactly how it works

[bunmellos]

i’ve had a violin hickey for years but now that i’m practicing 2-3 hours a day it’s There. and sometimes i wonder if nonmusicians look at it and think i’m just absolutely shameless or something

[juno-infernal]

i love when i, a person without vocal/musical/technical skills, get to sit in on studio sessions. just drinking my little coffee. nodding seriously while the engineer says something i don’t understand. contributing nothing. vibing. i’m like a mascot. they just think i’m fun to have around. an emotional support nonmusician.

[transhuman-priestess]

Nonmusicians listening to “Tribute” by Tenacious D: “Haha song funny”

Musicians listening to “Tribute” by Tenacious D: [violently sobbing and rocking back and forth from flashbacks]

[ongreenergrasses]

🔥🔥 for your favorite media?

hello 💖 i have SO many favorite medias but i will take this opportunity to talk abt daisy jones and the six thank you

🔥: i don’t understand why people want billy to be more likeable. he’s not going to be likeable and honestly that’s kind of the point. nothing about his life is conducive to creating a calm, happy, well adjusted person. he’s clearly deeply unhappy with his home life and as such is avoiding being at home by working himself to death, and at work he’s expected to perform music and tap into his natural creativity at consistently very high levels. that alone is a nightmare, and he’s doing this while also being in recovery and surrounded by people who are constantly using. would you be a very likeable person in that situation? i don’t think so.

🔥: i love that they cast a bunch of nonmusicians and taught them to make music. to me it’s really inspiring and it shows it’s never too late to learn an instrument or get involved in music. (big caveat, the actors obviously have more privileges than most of us in terms of access to resources to help them learn how to make music, but i think overall it still sends a really nice message.)

🔥 asks

[performing-personhood]

One of my hidden special interests is historical figures I've never heard of. So when this post came across my feed today, I was instantly rapt. Tiny Davis? Rabbit Wong? The International Sweehearts?? These are great names why don't I know them!?

Well I figured yall might not know either. So here's what I found, grab a comfy spot cuz we're about to learn some history (and by the way I'm an armchair historian, okay, so all this research is extremely unscientific and entirely googled but I had to know)

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was a jazz band founded by a school for impoverished black children in 1937, who went independent in 1941 and started touring. They were unique at the time for being the country's first all-female, racially integrated band, which we get a glimpze of in op's photo up there - their musicians were Black, Asian, Latina, Native American, Puerto Rican, and white also. They did USO tours like the one photographed, but they also toured the country and played in such esteemed venues as the Howard Theater in Washington DC (where the broke box office records), the Regency in Chicago, and the Apollo where it seems they played multiple shows with some very big namss in attendance.

Ernestine (Tiny seems like such a derogatory nickname for such a lovely and talented woman) was born in 1909 and began playing trumpet at the age of thirteen. In her early twenties she moved to Kansas City and in 1935 joined a swing band known as The Harlem Play-Girls, whom she played with until late 1936, when she stepped away to have a child. She joined the Sweethearts after they went public in 1941. She and the band would play opposite Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, and would jam with many of the biggest names in jazz. She is quoted as saying "I could have played with Count Basie, Cab Calloway—the greatest. But I loved them gals too much. They were some sweet gals." (Which says a lot about her as a person.) In 1949, she founded her own all-female jazz band called the Hell Divers (🤘🏻) with whom she would play one of the biggest jazz ensemble concert of the early 1950s, record an album for Decca Records, and tour the US, the Carribean, and Central America. It says she actively performed until her early seventies. She died in 1994.

Willie Mae Wong was born in Mississippi in 1920 to a Chinese father and a mixed-race mother, and she identifies as African Asian American. She was one of the original founding members of the Sweethearts, playing the baritone (and later also the alto) saxophone. Unfortunately I couldn't find out as much about Willie Mae as I was about Ernestine, but interestingly, while Ernestine was an established musician when she joined the band at age 32, Willie was a completely untrained nonmusician when she was recruited for the band at fifteen years old. There is also a reference to a quote from Willie recounting that more than once the band would have to eat on their bus because restaurants would refuse them service. It seems she continued playing music even after the Sweethearts disbanded, although to much less press coverage; She happily married, had four children, and passed away in 2016 at age 94.

The International Sweethearts did and still receive praise from big band aficionados. In my brief and very unprofessional research I found everything from "[they make] jazz that cooks", that their "stage presence was electrifying", and that Louis Armstrong would watch from the wings when they played The Apollo. I even found a listing for a Sweehearts record on Discogs, where I was pleased to discover a track written by the Gershwins as well as a track written by Count Basie. It seems they still are recognized as one of the greatest swing bands of their day.

A few resources I used:

And finally,

Trumpeter Ernestine ‘Tiny’ Davis and saxophonist Willie Mae ‘Rabbit’ Wong traveling with the International Sweethearts on a European USO tour.

[thatkjbell]

Many of these were a more frequent occurrence during my undergrad work, but many still happen in the real world.

[tzovgo]

love how i tell people my conditions aren't suitable for my work and they just don't believe me. because the nonmusicians have the expertise to make that judgement.

[antonio-caetano]

In what sense is the Tao real?

Some might claim that the Tao can be known only by mystical experience. Just what is mystical experience? Almost everyone knows what is meant by aesthetic experience, but what about mystical experience? These may be closely related, but I would hardly say they are identical! To me, the mystical sense is as different from the aesthetic sense as either is from the sense of humor.

But what is this mystical sense, and what is a mystical experience? Is it a free-floating experience, or is it an experience of something? And if it is an experience of something, is it an experience of something real or something existing only in the imagination?

So much controversy has ranged over this strange issue! Many psychologists of mysticism have gone to all sorts of lengths to prove that mystical experience is not an experience of anything real. They characterize mystics as people who are emotionally disturbed (often schizophrenic or hysterical) who populate their fantasy world with those things they were unable to find in the real world.

On the other hand, apologists for mysticism (who are usually philosophers rather than true mystics) have gone to equal lengths to try to convince us that what mystics perceive is something very real indeed. Well, who is right? Do the mystics perceive something real or not?

Well now, suppose two people, one a musician and the other extremely unmusical, are listening to a theme. The unmusical one admits frankly “I hear the notes, but I don’t hear the melody”. The musician assures the other that in addition to the individual notes, he hears something much more important—the melody!

Now, just what is this “melody” that the musician hears? The notes themselves—the sound waves, that is—are heard alike by musician and nonmusician and are universally acknowledged to be real in the purely physical sense. But what about the melody itself? Is it something real or does it exist only in the mind or imagination? The question is a rather strange one!

I think it would be most misleading to say that it exists only in the imagination; the musician who says he hears a melody is not just imagining things. No, the melody heard is something very real indeed, though whether it should be said to exist in the mind is a much more subtle question which I cannot answer. At any rate, I don’t think many will disagree when I say that melodies are real. And I think it is more in this sense of real that the Tao can be said to be real.

The true Taoists (or so called mystics of other religions, or even nontheistic mystics) directly perceive that which they call the Tao (or which others call God, Nature, the Absolute, Cosmic Consciousness) just as the musician directly perceives the melody. The musician does not need to have “faith” that there is a melody, nor does he have to accept the existence of the melody on some scriptural authority; he obviously has a direct experience of the melody itself. And once the melody is heard, it is impossible ever again to doubt it.

Just how is the Tao perceived directly? Well, how is a melody perceived directly? Through the sense of hearing? Not quite! The physical hearing process obviously plays a necessary role, but this is not the whole story. The nonmusician can have just as good auditory equipment as the musician, yet the musician experiences the melody whereas the other one does not. So what we call “hearing a melody” involves use of the word hearing in a more extended and subtle sense than “hearing the sounds”.

The point is that the melody is far more than a group of sounds; it is their sounds together with some sort of pattern or superstructure some-how imposed.

Some might say that the Tao is nothing more than the physical universe. But this would seem to miss the crucial point in much the same way as it would to say that a melody is nothing more than a group of sounds. Rather it might be said that the universe bears the same sort of relation to the Tao as the group of notes of a melody bears to the melody itself. Raymond M.Smullyan, The Tao is Silent __________________ Cheguei ao texto quase por acaso, mas ele aborda um tema sobre o qual tenho refletido muito, especialmente desde que terminei meu web-livro Meditando com Descartes: o ouvido, a sensibilidade, para a experiência metafísica. Seria justamente nesse ponto inefável que a metafísica se distancia da filosofia e se aproxima da poesia. Mas prefiro deixar o tema para um texto futuro.O texto está em inglês, mas o Google está aí pra isso mesmo. https://cafenasnuvens.com.br/?p=414

[garudabluffs]

The music business as we knew it lasted about a century, from 1903 to 2003.

The End of the Music Business

A century of recorded music has culminated in the infinite archive of streaming platforms. But is it really better for listeners?

By Ethan Iverson

April 10, 2023 "My own career as a musician was launched right at that moment. My jazz trio the Bad Plus signed to Columbia Records in 2002, and our debut disc, These Are the Vistas, sold 100,000 copies in the United States alone. (This was a surprisingly large number for an avant-garde instrumental outfit, and probably a matter of luck as much as anything else.) In retrospect, this was the last gasp of the old system; fans told us they burned our 2004 sophomore effort, Give, for their friends. Seemingly overnight, and perhaps for the first time ever, record companies were making substantially less money. Panicked, Columbia attached copyright software, known as XCP, to a raft of 2005 releases, including our third album, Suspicious Activity? Unfortunately, the software contained a digital back door that could be exploited by nefarious hackers. Grimly, we told our fans not to buy our record until this digital rights violation was sorted out, and our contract with Columbia expired."

"You can’t stop music, but these vicissitudes did stop many nonmusicians from continuing a career in the industry, especially those employed at record companies and record stores. A lot of committed and supportive people were suddenly out of work. Of course, many of the bosses of those companies were titans of an evil empire, especially in genres that commanded top dollar. Countless musicians have been exploited by the system, in some cases making pennies for innovations that have influenced the culture worldwide. Many of us can quote Hunter S. Thompson verbatim: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

READ MORE https://www.thenation.com/article/society/music-industry-ipod/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Comments (14) "Thomas Edison invented the phonograph for business dictation, not entertainment."

No other idiom more than Bebop invites performers to invent and create while an audience watches and listens. Its a style that evolved during a hiatus in the recording industry when union musicians were concerned their livelihoods were disappearing. More in the show notes at https://accelerandocast.com/show_notes/

The post 49. Unions, Jazz and Fairytales first appeared on Accelerando Podcast.

[macmanx]

The link between arts and academic achievement has been noted by educators for many years. But it's only in the past couple of decades that technology has allowed scientists to see some of the changes in the brain that explain why.

In 2010, for example, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that professional musicians had greater plasticity than nonmusicians in the hippocampus, an area involved in storing and retrieving information.

"The arts provide children with the kind of brain development that's really important for building strong neural pathways," Magsamen says, including pathways involved in focus, memory and creativity.

[st4rfvckerr]

BAND AU !!!! (guitarist!brenda / nonmusician!teresa... i have a vision)

brenderesa, the bingo prompt "based on a song" & chappell roan's entire discography r rlly tempting me rn......