Filed under: mashups
When I recently rediscovered the art of the mash-up (via TheHypeMachine and some of the blogs linked from it) I thought that the best mash-ups were the ones that were based, solely or mostly, on songs I already knew. (Goldfrapp vs. ZZ Top! Green Day vs. the Timelords! Dire Straits vs. The Clash! and so on.) There's a lot of interesting stuff out there, though, and it'd be too limiting to restrict myself to old favourites.
Mind you, it's a slippery slope.
First of all I found myself listening to Gwen Stefani vs. the Soggy Bottom Boys (~6MB), an utterly splendid version of 'A Man of Constant Sorrow' from O Brother Where Art Thou, mixed with 'Hollaback Girl'.
Then Gwen vs. Sugar (~5MB). I'm a Sugar fan (saw 'em live back in the 90s, too) but not up to date with their more recent output. '(Tell me) What You Waiting For' mixes two songs I didn't know. Aren't I brave.
Finally, I decided to listen to some unadulterated Gwen Stefani.
I hated it.
The mashes are greater than the sum of their parts: they take the good parts — Stefani's voice, which has a nice timbre and occasionally reminds me of Kate Bush; competent pop beat and structure — of what's fairly tuneless, slightly rap-influenced pop, and mix it up with rock guitar / alt.country twang, and a bit of a tune. A good mash-up adds something new to a song I already like — 'A Man of Constant Sorrow', for example — but it can also induce me to listen to songs I'd never otherwise hear. And maybe one day I'll discover some new original thing I like …
Filed under: classical
I don’t know why it surprises people that I am as passionate about ‘classical’ music as about rock, pop etc. Here, I shall gush about a 6-minute polyphonic motet written around 1682: Biber’s motet ‘Plaudite, tympana’ [~9MB].
Although it belongs to the same manuscript as the Missa Salisbergensis, and is usually performed at the end of the mass, the motet ‘Plaudite, tympana’ — for two double choruses in 16 parts, plus double orchestra and double continuo — is actually a separate composition. I discovered it on the Musica Antiqua Koln / Reinhard Goebl / Gabrieli Consort and Players / McCreesh recording, 1998, and offer this small sample to encourage everyone else.
The Mass itself has a chequered history: probably written in 1681/82, probably for the 1100th anniversary of Christianity in Salzburg, probably by Biber. Forgotten for centuries, rediscovered in the late 19th century by the choirmaster of Salzburg Cathedral, who prevented his grocer from using it to wrap up somebody’s shopping. There’s some fascinating historical analysis here. It’s been suggested (partly on the basis of the motet ‘Plaudite Tympana’, which celebrates St Rupert, the patron saint of Salzburg) that the Mass might have been written to celebrate the eleven-hundredth anniversary of Christianity in Salzburg. I am not sure which date this is calculated from.
There doesn’t seem to be any discussion online (or in the CD liner notes) of this little motet, so you’ll have to bear with my imprecise terminology, and a certain amount of gushy rapture.
This 6-minute Motet is glorious and jubilant and tremendously evocative, for me, of a sort of sanitised 17th-century performance, all flickering lamps and arching white stonework and improbably cherubic choirboys. (I’m also rather taken with the notion of celebrating eleven hundred years of anything).
It begins with soprano and alto voices, sweet and clear, and the rest of the choir comes in gradually on the first part of the motet, along with trumpet fanfares, repeating and echoing a simple, almost monotone theme. Applaude patria, Rupertum celebra (Acclaim your fatherland, celebrate [Saint] Rupert.)
Then a fugue for male voices, which always throws me because, to my ear, it starts a bar too early. It’s a a quiet, subdued passage, echoing with organ and woodwind, that brings to mind elaborate wooden scrollwork dark with age: the kind of music that makes me want to stare at something intricate, following each curve with my eyes as the music loops and curvets*. Rupert’s noble mind triumphs in the applause of the blessed.
And then — just over 3 minutes into the piece, for the impatient or (like me this morning on the way to work) merely rushed — the magnificent fanfare, the brassy Baroque polyphony. Vive Salisburgum, gaude. That ‘gaude’ is the jubilant fortissimo pivot of this piece: the moment that never fails to send a galvanic jolt through my mind and heart. This is music about joy, and in its very different way it’s as joyous as the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
I wonder how many people in that first audience, lords and bishops and the great and good of Salzburg, burst into applause in the silent beats before the first part of the motet’s reprised?
*a word that apparently describes, specifically, the prance of a horse.
Filed under: mashups
Hello. *waves to audience out there in the black*
This is where I’ll be writing about music, and linking to MP3s I’ve found. To give you some idea of scope, I have things to say about Dean Gray, Biber, Kasabian, the White Stripes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rachmaninov and Steeleye Span. Whether I get around to all these, or go off on a tangent about some new mash-up I’ve discovered, is another matter.
Your starter for 10 …
American Edit is a mash-up of the whole of Green Day’s American Idiot, mixing in tracks by Oasis, Ashanti, Roxy Music, U2, Bryan Adams … plus Bushisms and miscellaneous samples. It was the subject of a Cease and Desist order from Warner Records: it’s non-profit and fairly easy to find.
This 7MB track mixes Bush, the KLF and ‘Holiday’, and it’s fab. Especially because the two main themes fit together without any murky dissonance; and because the final reprise of the chorus is such a cheerful resolution; and because it made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it, and laughter isn’t a common response to music.
