Something of a language-evolution-now observation: I had always thought that "an historical" is wrong, and the result of us getting lazy with our aspirated "h" sounds. It should be printed as "a historical," at least for now. Nonetheless, I and many others pronounce it "anistorical" when speaking quickly, so I'm totally down with not pronouncing things completely correctly.

I do cringe when people pronounce the phrase "an historical" very carefully in their public speaking voices. Kinda like the CEO of a company carefully pronouncing "LOL" without irony. Course, this is how language changes over time, so what we're witnessing is really the same sort of thing that took the aspiration OUT of "who" and "what". Or changed all the "in-" prefixes to "im-" in words beginning with bilabials, like "impossible" or "immoral".

But there's more to the story than that, involving several opinions. Tina Blue has more, invoking a whole hierarchy of syllabic stress:

In the word historical, the first syllable is actually slightly stressed, though far less so than the second syllable, which carries the primary stress.  But in the word hotel, the first syllable, though less stressed than the second, is significantly more stressed than the first syllable in historical. In historical, the first syllable receives only tertiary (third-level) stress, whereas in hotel, the first syllable receives a secondary stress so strong that it is nearly equal to the primary stress on the second syllable.  For this reason, the h in a hotel is pronounced almost as fully as the h in a hot day.

Earlier this summer, I finished reading Meyer's Music the Arts and Ideas.  Now Leonard Meyer is no slouch in the field of music theory—his classic text Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) has been endlessly cited for convincing music theorists that there might actually be something to *gasp* empirical descriptions of musical works!

Of course, I jest; it's only half-true.  The postmodern wave in the humanities was still a decade off when Meyer published his opus (the same year as George Miller's The Magical Number Seven), and Claude Shannon's introduction of information theory was still tickling the minds of humanities scholars, who thought we might have struck on an Urtheorie of culture.  Well, the short story is: no such luck.  Humanities types retreated into hermeneutics and hyperrelativism, and that seemed to be that for the time being.  Meantime, Leonard Meyer shifted his focus to studies of musical style, since meaning was too fraught with postmodern peril.  Oh, silly academes.

Which brings us to Music, the Arts, and Ideas, published in 1967.  The book is something of a ragtag collection of essays, but there are some common threads.  Most importantly, Meyer sets out to describe how he forsees culture in the postmodern age progressing.  This happens to be exactly the age in which I was born, so I figure I have a reasonably good standpoint from which to evaluate his statements.  But oh, what statements he makes.  Get a load of this one, chosen by flipping through and pointing with my eyes closed:

Though analytic formalism and transcendental particularism are clearly in conflict regarding the efficacy of causal explanation, it should be emphasized that they do not necessarily disagree about either the existence or the nature of causation.  (p.163)

Woo-ee! now that's a humdinger there.  Meyer is an incredibly well-loved and much-missed personality, and deservedly so.  But boy does it take some effort to wade through his prose.  Here's some reader's digestif:

Meyer has learned from cross-cultural studies of the 20th century that sayings like "Change is the only constant" don't really apply world-wide.  Sure, in Western history from the Romans on up, we've seen a huge parade of history, a flowing river of chaotically repeating eddies and flows.  But looking around, it seems like stasis in culture is far more "normal" than the constant bustling change that we're used to in the Western world.

But what has changed, says Meyer, is that technology has grown to the point that we are able to look back and enjoy recordings of music produced forty years ago just as well as we can enjoy recordings of music produced yesterday.  All time periods and fads, all historical styles are equally accessible.

So in the end, he describes rather effectively what it looks like for culture to move to a steady-state system with local fluctuation.  He even predicts that, due to a "psychological accessibility of the past" (p191), all sorts of recycling of old culture will take place.

Furthermore, we shouldn't be surprised to find that "A multiplicity of styles, techniques, and movements, ranging from the cautiously conservative to the rampantly experimental, will exist side by side… past and present will, modifying one another, come together not only within culture, but within the oeuvre of a single artist and even within a single work of art." (p209)

Sounds like remix culture to me.  More distressingly, he seems to have a certain Williamsburg, NY demographic pegged, but didn't correctly predict the ultimately uncontrolled spiral of meta-snark and strangeloops of ironic kickballing.  We can compliment ourselves for those!

Paul Williams of the Temptations, singing For Once In My Life by Ron Miller and Orlando Murden.  The tune was originally composed for the Motown label, and Stevie Wonder's version made it famous, but it has been performed and recorded by a variety of other outstanding artists.  This live rendition, Williams's most famous, is from December of 1968.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoM6QTotf6k

The performance is monumental and triumphant!  It's a cruel irony that Williams himself died at age 35 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He had been experiencing marital problems at the time, and struggled his whole life with Sickle-Cell Disease.

We are now Portamental—and an official dot-com!  What is Portamental?

A portamento is fluidity of pitch in music.  It's a slide from one pitch to another, blurring the boundaries between notes.  Portamental is mental fluidity, playing with concepts, eschewing quantization for analogue, or even vice-versa.  Don't worry, though, the SmarterGuides are still here.

Why the change? A change in the status of the collective.  I'm at Ohio State University, pondering the ins and outs of academia, and busying myself with the literature of music theory.  In particular, I'm immersed in academic literature in music perception and cognition.  But this leads also to mathematical and computational modeling, philosophy of language, evolutionary theory, and social psychology.  Ridiculously exciting, but also ridiculously insulating, if we're not careful.  Others have transitioned and moved about, and need a broader platform.

So we'll move about, and be fluid.  Portamental.

Don't miss Phoenix -- and get their album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.  Those French know what's up!

Here's a mashup:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtRQsCgYmtc

Update: It's offline—another case of major industries sniping down creative remix projects with legal nastygrams.  But that's another story entirely.

A reader wrote in requesting some pointers on arranging for his high school a cappella group, and I thought I'd post a few here: advice for writing your FIRST arrangement.  These tips do not necessarily apply to ALL arrangements and are not general rules, but are good ways to make sure nothing goes too haywire from the start.  Enjoy!

• The best advice for somebody who hasn't tried it before would be 1) to map out the structure of the piece, 2) to figure out the chords and make the arrangement conform, and 3) don't write women's parts -- even the sopranos -- higher than an an A or B.  Things can get very messy very fast.  Exceptions exist, of course.

• Make sure vowels match between parts.  Have at most two different vowels happening at once, but really writing a homophonic texture is good.

• The way I arrange is by singing first.  So, sing along to the original song, improvising a line that you think might belong in the arrangement.  Then, I go back and expand it through harmonization, and/or fill in the chord with other parts.

• More specific to the song you're working on, try to find a midi of it with a decent piano transcription, or find piano sheet music.  This can help take a LOT of work out of the project.

• Your first arrangement will probably have lots of repeats in it, and that's okay.  You can repeat a section COMPLETELY and just instruct the choir to sing different vowels, and it's a good quick way to make the piece sound like it's growing.  Sustained oos can turn into sustained ohs or ahs.

• The most important part about writing a good arrangement is making it FUN for everybody to sing, since that makes all the difference in how well they do it.  So, make sure you sing every single part of your written arrangement on your own, and see if you enjoy it.  If you don't, fix it.

One of the biggest issues of this ossified study of hundred-some year old music is that our university students are being taught that Beethoven, for instance, is forever... or at least his music is.  We play them wonderful excerpts recorded on Steinway 9-footers of his Sonatae, and it never occurs to the young initiates that this music invites a more curatorial perspective.  Jan Swafford at Slate has a wonderful article with sound examples of the difference a period instrument can make.  After all, Beethoven had only 5 and a half octaves, and timbres that varied widely!  No wonder he treated each hand as a different instrument -- the timbral differences in the high and low ranges made them sound quite constrasting indeed.

An update on the state of things --

Graduate school calls, and I've begun work on a PhD in Music Theory and Cognition at the Ohio State University, working under David Huron. Things are chugging along quite nicely, and I'm slowly getting into the groove of things, so to speak. Surprisingly, though, there's not much of an a cappella scene here; there are murmurs that something might soon begin though. In the middle-term, it's life as usual, piano lessons, and more arrangements for hire. In the meantime, take a good look at Diana Deutsch's speech-to-song page to get a feel for the type of work that will be happening here. As I get deeper into the work, expect some more incremental updates to the A Cappella guide, and other cognition-related posts.

Cheers!

Otis Redding has a fantastic output, and everybody should take a good listen to a classic master singing his own and those of other people.  Here's some My Girl: