Brett Milano, the Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll
Sep/070
I have seen a lot of Boston rock and roll, so it was a real pleasure to see that Brett Milano’s history of the Boston scene is now out. It’s called The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll. When I finish it I’ll have to review it here. I picked up my copy at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square. There was only one left on the shelf after I picked mine up. Brett is one of those people I call RRR (rock and roll royalty). I’ve been introduced to him a few times, but I don’t think he’s ever remembered my name, which is just as well cos I think I prefer that the RRR remain at a distance. He had a nice piece on Shepherdess today in the Phoenix — one of the best bands going locally right now, with the sublime Hilken Mancini (ex-Fuzzy) on vocals and lead guitar . . . but the Sheperdess album was not to be found yet at Newbury’s. Oh well. (For that matter, neither was the new Glenn Mercer, but they did have the new re-release of Young Marble Giant’s “Colossal Youth” . . .)
I’ll jump into the book in the middle, for the 80s scene I probably knew better than any of the other periods, though I am really looking forward to his take on the Remains and some of those other 60s garage rockers from Beantown.
The challenge with all of these scene histories is that they not let the players revise history. That was the problem with both the Legs McNeil book Please Kill Me and the Clinton Heylin book From the Velvets to the Voidoids. Both of those books let the subjects polish the past, which was especially wrong in the Heylin book because it positioned itself as more of a narrated history than an oral history. I doubt Milano will do that, because he is a real working journalist who knows how to get at the facts and the story.
Battling Intervals (Book Review)
Aug/070
Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battlefield for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (2001, 2003). $13.95. [Amazon]
Go over to your piano and play a middle C. Now play the next higher C. That’s an octave difference; the string for the lower C should be twice as long as the higher one. That’s a 2:1 ratio. Another ratio is to play the C, and then play the higher G. That’s a fifth, and the ratio of the lengths should be 3:2. Pythagoras — or his school — figured all that out in the 6th century B.C.E. But here’s the bad news. Produce a series of octaves where you keep halving the length of the string, and see what it sounds like after you’ve done it seven times. Now do the same thing with the fifths. This time, you will need to do twelve times. Pythagoras believed that you would arrive at the same final tone (i.e., tone with the same name) at the end. But guess what? You don’t:
The tones sounded by his two instruments were, however, almost the same, yet slightly — disturbingly — out of tune. The fact is, octaves and fifths, when created with Pythagoras’s pure mathematical ratios, are incommensurate: The further they move away from a common starting point, the more the structures built from these “perfect” intervals diverge. (40)
Thus ensues centuries of argument between those who seek to keep the standard octaves and fifths, and those who advocated something that came to be called “equal temperament,” where the distance between the tones are fixed, and, apparently, you can’t hear the slight dissonaces that are introduced. It’s this equal temperament that your modern piano uses. In this great argument are major players such as Descartes, Mersenne, Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo’s father), Rousseau, Rameau, and many others. They really go at it. I know these figures from the history of science and philosophy, and it was amazing to me to see how invested they were in music; this probably says something about how intellectual disciplines isolate their objects of study like so many individual bees — you forget the variety of flowers they serviced. On the one hand, it would seem, are those who might be called the Pythagoreans, who believe that there is some mystical force in the “just” intervals. And there are the moderns, who advocate equal temperament.
The first half of this book is great, as you see the Pythagorean ideal crumble when faced with the prospect of constructing a playable keyboard– the illustrations are outrageous (the key ones are woodcuts or engravings from Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universalle [1636-1637]; try as I might, I couldn’t find reproductions on the mighty Internet). The 2nd half gets a bit tedious, with many digressions, but still worthy if you can stick it out. There are nuggets all the way through, and having finished it, I can say that I’m just about dying to listen to a couple of things: Adrian Willaert’s Quid non ebrietas (16th century), which was apparently designed to show the pain of just intervals, and then some new pieces by Michael Harrison, a sometime collaborator of La Monte Young, which strives to evoke the mysticism and physical sensation of the early systems.
I’ll close this with a juicy quote from d’Alembert:
All freedoms are bound together and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music implies freedom to feel, freedom to feel implies freedom to think, freedom to think implies freedom to act. (223-224)
Amen.
