| We still have two rows of laserdiscs. We're still gonna have some 8-tracks. | | | | |  | The late Malcolm Cecil (right) and Robert Margouleff with their massive and massively influential analog synthesizer TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) circa 1974.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | "We still have two rows of laserdiscs. We're still gonna have some 8-tracks." | | | | Not Enough Notes
Just because MOZART didn't finish that sonata, doesn't mean you can't. Finish Mozart's sonata, that is. In the classical world, that's called a completion. Example: Mozart scholar TIMOTHY JONES' just-released album of thoroughly researched completions of snippets left behind when the composer died 230 years ago. Thoroughly researched in the sense that, for example, Jones dated the works based on the paper Mozart wrote them on and then tried to finish them in the style of that exact year. Jones added a twist to the form, as the New York Times' ZACHARY WOOLFE reports, by completing each snippet in a number of different ways, suggesting different paths the original composer might have taken. A "choose-your-own-adventure approach," Woolfe writes.
Of course you don't always have to wait a couple centuries. Sometimes a composer will leave snippets behind on social media, like the six and a half bars JOHN MAYER posted a week ago to TIKTOK (he says eight bars but the last one and a half are merely implied). In his case, we have reason to believe the work isn't so much unfinished as not-yet-released, but that might not stop you if you're a young British singer/songwriter and amateur John Mayer scholar with some time on your hands. To wit, this truly adorable—and impressive—video of singer/songwriter MARY SPENDER rushing to complete Mayer's unfinished work while it's still unfinished. If I'm reading my calendar correctly, it took her three days to turn those six and a half bars into a song, record and mix her version and record and edit a video showing us in detail how she came up with this particular different path the original composer might have taken. (And then, within a day of her posting her video, my favorite YouTube musicologist, jazz bassist ADAM NEELY, chimed in to say he's going to reharmonize her song. God bless the internet sometimes.)
Amateur and not-so-amateur songwriters have been doing this sort of thing for years in one form or another. What is sampling if not reverting a finished song into its unfinished form and then refinishing it? What's this BEYONCÉ song if not a YEAH YEAH YEAHS completion on top of an ANDY WILLIAMS completion? But it's only been in the past few years that artists have been willfully putting song snippets out into the world via social media and it hasn't been that much longer that aspiring songwriters have had access to the same tools to produce their revisions and completions and post them to the same world. "Walls coming down," as my boss noted when he forwarded Spender's video to me. One of Spender's hopes is that her YouTube video will be de-monetized, by Mayer himself or by TOTO. She notes a resemblance between the former's snippet and the latter's "AFRICA," as if Mayer's song is its own kind of completion. I hope she properly releases her version, sharing the songwriting credit a la BEYONCÉ et. al., and I hope Mayer figures out a way to take something back from it for himself. Those backing vocals of hers are catchy as hell.
Plus Also Too
There's no defending artists who demand a piece of the publishing of songs they didn't write, and this is a persuasive Instagram making that point from a new account calling itself THE PACT which claims the practice is happening more and more often (nice followup here)... BOB DYLAN makes his case against the estate of onetime songwriting collaborator JACQUES LEVY, which is suing for a piece of his recent $400 million (estimated) catalog sale... After 10 weeks, MORGAN WALLEN has been knocked off his perch atop the BILLBOARD 200 by JUSTIN BIEBER, who's working on a streak of his own. JUSTICE is his seventh straight album or EP to debut at #1 in the US... Co-sign (Call Me By Your Name)... BELARUS has been disqualified from this year's EUROVISION for putting "the nonpolitical nature of the contest in question" with a song that seems to endorse President ALEKSANDR LUKASHENKO's violent crackdown on protesters.
Rest in Peace
Jazz musician, electronic music pioneer and synthesizer designer MALCOLM CECIL, who was half of TONTO's EXPANDING HEAD BAND in the early 1970s and who, among many other accomplishments, co-produced four classic STEVIE WONDER albums. Cecil and his partner, ROBERT MARGOULEFF, had a lot to do with why songs like "SUPERSTITION" and "LIVING FOR THE CITY" sound the way they do... OSO OSO guitarist TAVISH MALONEY... KALEB STEWART, former bassist for Gainesville, Fla, punk band AS FRIENDS RUST... Washington, D.C., jazz saxophonist AARON MARTIN JR.... San Diego rapper OG YD, at least the seventh rapper murdered this year; it's March.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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