Musical Space: Recent Episodes
Mark Foley
Musical Space is a look at all things music, by KMUW music commentator Mark Foley. Mark is Principal Double Bass of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and Professor of Double Bass and head of Jazz Studies at Wichita State University.He has been a featured soloist with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra, performs extensively as a jazz artist is also an avid bluegrass player. Passionate about promoting new and diverse music, Mark is the founder and music director of the Knob Festival of New Music, a series of concerts held in Fisch Haus Studios every Fall.
Blues guitarist Robert Johnson is said to have gotten his musical talent by selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads close to the famous Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi Delta. The same story was told earlier about another bluesman named Tommy Johnson.
A fire destroyed an obscure factory in California a few weeks ago. Apollo Masters Corporation ran one of only two plants in the world that supplied lacquers, crucial components in the creation of vinyl records. The source of three-quarters of the world’s lacquers is now gone. I had never thought much about this process before, but the prospect of a lacquer shortage has given me a new appreciation for the arcane art of making records.
Winter is dragging on, and I’m not a fan of the cold. Freezing weather brings pain, a lingering kind that you sit and ruminate over. Add to this the uncertainty. January temperatures in Wichita have ranged from -15 to 75. The weather might blow from the Texas Gulf or from North Dakota. The fickleness builds hope, only to destroy it. Songwriters agree: Winter is misery, which is probably why there is so much music about the cold.
Tomorrow - New Year’s Day - a number of works written in 1924 will have outlived their legal copyright status and enter public domain. This means anyone can record and perform these old songs and symphonies without having to pay royalty fees to estates or publishers.
With the cold weather season driving us indoors, it’s a good time to consider how room acoustics affect our sonic space.
This year’s NEA Big Read book is Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, and you’ve probably heard about all the local celebrations of this botanist’s memoir. The book drew me into Jahren’s joy of uncovering secrets and finding connections with plants. As a musician, this is a subject dear to my heart — Lab Girl underscores how the music world relies on the diversity of tree species.
Watching a country tear up its continental agreements has gotten me thinking about how music is an international industry. The U.K. exports more than three billion dollars worth of recorded music a year. Its artists make another billion from live tours, acting as goodwill ambassadors in the process. A lot of this success comes from British artists’ abilities to freely sell their records and live music to other EU countries. But it seems 10 Downing Street has forgotten both how important music is culturally and its part in offsetting the mounting English trade deficit.
Historic events can shape the course of music. This week marks the anniversary of the Kansas Oil Boom, when a well just east of Wichita struck crude in 1915.
I have no plans to help storm Area 51 on the 20th of this month. I’m referring to a joke Facebook event that some UFO enthusiasts have taken seriously: Their motto is “They can’t stop all of us.” There are also plans for an impromptu, unlicensed music festival in a nearby village.
Allow me to bring to your attention the British DJ John Peel, whose posthumous 80th birthday is this Friday. Peel worked for an offshore pirate station outside of London before moving in 1967 to the BBC, bringing with him an attitude of independence and iconoclasm. For 37 years he programmed music he thought people should hear, regardless of charts or market research, and in doing so defined what it means to be a music curator, and what can happen when a truly good one comes along.
Every Quentin Tarantino film is a musicological event — a study in the use of soundtrack music — and his latest is particularly interesting, because he limits himself only to music heard when the movie takes place, in 1969. So, without divulging spoilers or trying to be a film critic, I really have to talk about Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood.
A couple years ago I was playing in an opera production; a famous Hungarian singer was slated to star — except that his visa application was held up because of a backlog, he couldn’t legally fly to the states, and the company had to hire a last-minute substitute. This kind of thing has been happening lately to international musicians, authors, dancers and filmmakers wanting to present their art in the U.S. using a special visa, the same kind used by athletes to compete and scientists to present at conferences. The paperwork is cumbersome and the decisions can be arbitrary. For the sake of the arts and international relations the process needs to be streamlined.
It looks like Apple is killing its music app iTunes. Introduced when mp3s were becoming the new medium, iTunes was a brilliant move for Steve Jobs, and perfect for the revolutionary iPod, and it soon made Apple the world’s largest music seller.
Canada Day is July 1, so I figured I’d send my browser to points north to find out what’s going on up there musically.
I’m seeing all kinds of good concerts coming to Wichita this summer. And the lineup is surprisingly free of washed-up acts trying to squeeze the last dollars from their fleeting fame. Instead, we’re being treated to musicians with a lot of hipster cred, including some rising stars.
Weddings are just about the only events where it is still traditional to hire a band. Sure, you can get by with a DJ or even a digital playlist, but live music is still classier - they’ll wear tuxedos for you - and this may be the only opportunity for your nephew to come face-to-face with a living, breathing, member of the ancient fraternity of professional musicians.
I’ve been talking lately about good film music, but what about films about music? I imagine it’s difficult to do - what can a movie say about music that the music itself doesn’t already tell you? - but great directors have turned their cameras on music makers in lots of different ways.Music biopics often fall flat for me - it’s hard to idolize a musician and tell an interesting story at the same time, but the Criterion Collection has some good ones: Sid and Nancy, about the Sex Pistols’ doomed bassist Sid Vicious and The Buena Vista Social Club, which brought some of Cuba’s best musicians to the attention of the world. Instead of riding on the fame of their subjects, these talk about the mixed-up cultures that the music came from.
The recent tragic fire at Notre Dame got me thinking about that building, and others like it. Music history is tied to a thousand years of cathedrals being at the cultural center of every European city.
A lot of movies use music as sonic wallpaper - just background sound to fill silence and fit the genre - but bold, memorable films tend to have equally strong and unforgettable music at the forefront. Great filmmakers have a way of merging images and narrative with the visceral power of sound. It happens a lot in art-house films, like those you can watch on the new Criterion Channel. I’ve been perusing their catalog lately, and lots of titles have come to mind.
There’s a lot happening in the movie biz: Disney just bought 21st Century Fox and will be launching their own streaming service later this year. More interesting to me, though, is what’s going on with the most important distributor of serious film - The Criterion Collection.