Musical Space

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. Music: Bo Diddley, “Make a Hit Record,” The London Bo Diddley Sessions (1973) A lacquer is a disc coated with a proprietary material and shipped to cutters who scribe the music into a spiral groove with a lathe. It’s plated with metal and then destroyed when the metal layer is separated so it can be used as a mold for a disc called a “mother.” From the mother are made the stampers, which go into the pressing machine to make the vinyl. Stampers and mothers eventually wear out, so there’s a constant need for new lacquers, which can only be used once. Vinyl

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. Music: Iron and Wine, “Faded From Winter.” The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002) - From his first album Songs can’t only be about happy things: Pain and hardship can drive the drama and structure of a piece of music the same way a tragedy will move the plot of a novel or film. Art comes from strife, and winter has that in spades. The cold is a perfect metaphor for joylessness, lost love, isolation, bitterness, old age and death. You can hear it in the words — frozen hearts and cold graves. It’s a well of metaphors that never seems to run dry. Instrumental music can

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. Ninety-five years is longer than any composer can hope to benefit from their work while alive, but Congress has repeatedly extended the term, much to the benefit of rights holders like Disney and Time Warner. The latest extension, Sonny Bono’s law, also called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, gave 20 years of added income to publishers. Music: “Copenhagen” - Bix Beiderbecke and The Wolverines (rec. 1924) So it’s been a wait. But 1924 is now open to us. It was a fruitful time for American music: The jazz age was dawning and there was an explosion of new media in the form of phonograph records and radio. Music theatre was evolving and the Gershwin brothers had their first hit. So, what goes into public domain tomorrow? There

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. I wouldn’t have a decent double bass if it weren’t for a bizarre array of woods and a history of people who discovered how to use them. The top of my instrument is of red spruce from the Fiemme Valley of the Italian Alps, a unique climate that produces timber that rings like a bell. The back, sides, and neck are made of Bosnian maple, prized for its strength-to-weight ratio and unique figuration. The wood for my fingerboard is Indian or African ebony, one of the only woods tough enough to withstand the constant abrasion of the metal strings. My bow is of Brazilian pernambuco, very strong and so dense that it would sink

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. [Music: Foals, “On the Luna,” Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost - Part 1 (2019) - On the Hyundai Mercury shortlist this year] British pop is international at its core. Bands like The Beatles and The Stones fused American black music with a European sensibility to dominate the charts. The same has since been done with punk, hip hop, and electronic dance music - a string of roaring critical and commercial success for more

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. The quantity and quality of music that John Peel discovered for his listeners is staggering. He always managed to find the bands that were inventing new genres. With Pink Floyd it was psychedelic rock; with T. Rex it was glam. When punk rock was just coming across the pond, he was the first to play The Clash on the BBC. And in spite of a large number of complaints, John Peel was the one to introduce London to reggae and hip hop. To make his show even more relevant, he invited bands to play in the studio live

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. Most striking is the film’s many layers. It’s a movie about making movies: actors playing characters playing characters, history distorted through camera lenses as seen through camera lenses. The confusion allows Tarantino to live out a fan-fiction fantasy; he even gets to direct scenes from bad TV shows and genre flicks. But even though the plot sends our perception a million fun directions, it’s all tied together with a near-constant AM radio broadcast. More ubiquitous than the cigarettes and hairspray, the soundtrack sustains the energy through his signature long scenes, and keeps a sharp focus on hippie-era L.A. culture. “Jenny Take a Ride,

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. As it stands now, hiring a foreign musician means sending the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service a $460 fee and a pile of documents: a signed contract, proof of “extraordinary ability” — meaning awards, reviews and sales figures — and a “consultation letter” from a peer group, which typically costs another 250 bucks.

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. So if you’ve hired a string quartet, jazz combo, or Top-40 band for your wedding, congratulations, you’re carrying on a thousand-year tradition.

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.

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. Music can tie a film to a time and place: Punk Rock is what sets Repo Man in 1980’s L.A.; Black Orpheus uses Bossa Nova to put us in Brazil in 1959. Music: Luiz Bonfa ” Samba de Orfeu” From Black Orpheus (1959) (A studio version by the composer. This movie (and song) started the whole bossa nova craze) But more than just establishing setting, film music can be like a color scheme, putting everything into harmony. Wes Anderson’s choice of music is as painstaking and obsessive as his set design. It must have cost a fortune to use

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.