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Music Appreciation | Monday, period 1

"Good morning," Hannibal greeted them all. He was dressed as usual in a three-piece suit of a fairly subtle plaid with a paisley tie and differently patterned shirt. It somehow all worked. "Welcome to the first summer term, and the first class of that term, Music Appreciation. Introductions are traditional, and we've the advantage you won't have gotten tired of them yet."

He waved toward a neatly set up table to one side. "Please, help yourself to coffee, tea, and pastries. As you'll all no doubt soon learn, I enjoy feeding people. I'm Dr. Hannibal Lecter; when I'm not teaching various other artistries, I often teach the culinary arts here."

The other teacher at the front of the room, the one in the black leather who was casually leaning back against the desk, arms crossed over a chest that was openly on fire - sorry, new students - gave a little nod at that.

//And I'm Jono Starsmore. Professor Starsmore is fine if you absolutely have to be formal, but I much prefer 'Jono,' really. Mostly I run the music shop in town and teach classes like music, live entertainment, surviving the end of the world...//

Typical school stuff.

//In this class, Hannibal - and I get to call him that even if you don't - and I will be bringing two different perspectives on music into our lectures, talking about classical and contemporary music and shared themes between them. If, ah, you can't guess which of us prefers which...//

Then you clearly weren't paying much attention. Or you eschewed stereotypes; good for you. (But you'd be wrong in this case.)

Hannibal smiled. "To begin with, now that you've heard our introductions, we should like to hear yours. Please give us your name, grade, and one song with an introduction you feel is memorable."

//It doesn't have to be something great or generation-changing,// Jono added. //I would pick Pearl Jam's opening to Alive as a song with an introduction that immediately grabs me, for example.//

Because of course he would.

"And I might choose Mussorgsky's Promenade to Pictures at an Exhibition," Hannibal said. "It's something many who aren't terribly familiar with Classical music will still have heard, and a theme that runs throughout the entire piece in one form or another, rather masterfully."

He nodded at the nearest student. "So, tell us your information and your memorable introduction. If you don't feel we'd know it, please play or sing or hum it for us." He paused to let the students introduce themselves.

//And that seems to be everybody, which actually brings us to our lecture of the day,// Jono said, giving a little nod. //Introductions. Overtures. Songs that set the mood for the rest of a set, musical, or album to come.//

It had seemed topical.

"What do you think it's important for an introduction to do?" Hannibal asked. "Should it grab your attention, make plain what's to come, or ease you into the music gently? For my pieces today, I have chosen the Overture to Gounod's Faust, the Overture to Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and the Einleitung, or overture, to Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, which some of you may have heard before. Listen to them, and see how they introduce what may come next, how they engage you, and what you might expect from the music after them."

//In more contemporary music, especially in the last few decades, modern artists have started a bit of a trend of opening their albums with a short track, usually less than a minute, that sets the mood for the rest of the music to come. They can be anything from instrumentals to short spoken pieces, can be dissonant or intensely symphonic, and might share nothing whatsoever in the way of composition with the other tracks to follow,// Jono said, picking up the ball from there. //So I've got a handful more than Hannibal to share with you today, because of their length, but also because of how diverse they can be.//

He reached for the remote and started clicking through the songs - or just the audio tracks - that he'd chosen.

//For example, the opening track on Our Lady Peace's Spiritual Machines album, R.K. Intro, is six seconds long, and is simply one man speaking some words. The same voice shows up a few more times throughout the album, tying everything together, making it into a bit of a concept album... we'll probably talk about those later. The Offspring use spoken word to a different effect in their intro track, Disclaimer, giving something of a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the content that the rest of the album will contain. The Gorillaz track, adequately titled just, Intro is an instrumental number punctuated by the sound of sirens, giving you a feel for the sort of image the band wants to invoke of themselves when you listen to their music. They Might Be Giants' Theme From Flood makes it very clear that you're listening to the album of a band that doesn't take itself terribly seriously, and Pink Floyd's Speak To Me... well, there's a mixture of heartbeat sounds, spoken word, and clock-ticking sounds that leaves the listener appropriately unsettled while presenting a unifying theme for the album yet to come.//

... He was done listing off intro tracks now. Of course he was cutting himself off with the creepy laughter cash register track. You're welcome, class.

//Intros have become a shorter and simpler beast than the overtures that used to usher in symphonies, but their purpose is arguably the same. Setting a particular mood, stirring up a certain mindset or tying what's yet to come together with a small taste of the rest of it. The songs that follow are often great in their own right, but if an album - or a symphony, or an opera, or any other musical experience - is meant to be listened to from front to back, a composer or band might feel that a primer is necessary, so that the audience is in the proper mood to appreciate the rest as it was intended.//

By the end of Jono's enthusiastic description, Hannibal was looking amused. Welcome to a class where the teacher without a mouth talked the most, students.

"So, what do you think of these various introductions? What is their purpose, and how well do they fulfill it? What, if anything, would you suggest they do differently? Let us discuss it."

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"They're kind of all about being loud or creepy," Tip noted. "Or both. I liked the Gorillaz one, but I think if I heard the disclaimer when I was trying to listen to music, I'd turn it back off."

She actually had several more things she could say about Jono's selections, and she hadn't even started on the classical stuff, but it was her first day of her first class, and she didn't want to end up labeled the brain immediately.

She was mentally trying to tally any intro type songs she might have on her phone, though. Janelle liked intros, didn't she?

//Which is completely understandable,// Jono replied, nodding along. He hadn't necessarily picked all of those intros because he enjoyed them, after all. //I think they were aiming for 'angry and disillusioned' in the wake of people being offended by their previous works, but to a lot of people it came off as snide or petty. Likely if that was the case, the music to follow probably wasn't going to be to their tastes anyhow, so in a sense, it did its job.//

Edited 2016-05-09 13:33 (UTC)

"I always thought those kinds of bands saw offending people as doing their job right," Tip said. "You know, because it's supposed to 'push boundaries' or whatever." If she sounded cynical about that, it was because she was. "I like the ones that sort of start to tell a story. I don't know if that Pink Floyd one is actually a concept album or anything, but you could get an idea of what story they want to tell with it anyway, with the creepy laugh and the cash register and all that. They were pretty angry and disillusioned, too, but they weren't mean about it."

Actually, the only Pink Floyd Tip was familiar with was The Wall. Which was about as angry and disillusioned as you got, really.

//The Pink Floyd Album that began with Speak To Me does actually follow a fairly unified theme,// Jono replied, shrugging his shoulders. //Without trying to sound pretentious or anything like that, the album was composed with the intention of taking a journey through the human experience. It ends with a heartbeat, as well.//

He did like the point she made, though, about the way they shared their anger and their disillusionment and he gave a thoughtful nod.

//Actually, one of the songs on the album makes the cash register into an important element in their music. Are you familiar with Money?//

Tip shook her head. "I might have heard it -- Mom likes some of that stuff -- but I can't think of what it sounds like off the top of my head."

//Actually,// Jono said, reaching for the remote and skipping the Pink Floyd album ahead a few songs until he landed on it, //it's another one of those songs with a memorable introduction to it. If you've heard it, you'd likely know just by listening to that.//

He gave it a play, leaning back against the desk and nodding along. It was catchy, blast it.

Tip listened attentively, her chin resting on her folded hands, and was soon nodding along to the beat as well. She'd definitely heard this a time or two, but she couldn't say she'd ever really listened to it. "They were before synthesizers, too, right?" she asked. "So they had to do that with an actual cash register, not just remixing sounds they found on the internet."

Well no, honey. They weren't that old. Though she was right about them not getting a sample from the internet.

Well, way to make Jonothon feel old, there, Tip. He reached back and scrubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly with one hand.

//Well, they used a cassette loop of the register sounds,// he shared, //splicing together recordings they made themselves. But this album was recorded in the early seventies, and synthesizers were in use in pop music as early as the sixties. There definitely wasn't as much synth influence when this album was released as we'd see nowadays, or even a few years later, when disco started to gain a foothold.//

Just wait until you heard about how old her mother was when Flood came out.

"Oh," Tip said, a little embarrassed herself. "Right, sorry. Phonographs have been around more than a hundred years. Of course they could record it." She shook her head. "That cassette thing still sounds way more complicated than just loading a clip into GarageBand, though."

//Just imagine how difficult it was to make music before Steve Jobs came along,// Jono said, a little bit wryly. //But you're right, it would've been a somewhat more time-consuming process to cut a record like this one, back then. Technology changes a lot of things. Even music.//

Edited 2016-05-09 16:38 (UTC)

"Makes it a lot more accessible," Tip said. "I mean, sure, you're getting a lot more crap online since anyone with an iPhone can make and put out whatever music they like, but it also means that people who wouldn't have access to studio time and instruments in the old days can still get their ideas out there."

"In this," Hannibal interjected, "Jono has both an advantage and a disadvantage over me - over time, much of the less memorable or skillful music falls away and is forgotten. It leaves a smaller selection of older music to choose from, but less to wade through as well."

He shrugged. "Unfortunately, it also means that most of the music that was preserved tends to be what those with power or money found worthy of preserving. It is an inherent bias to the medium."

"Well, the fancy classical stuff from Europe, definitely," Tip said. "Or it's the stuff that just happened to get stored somewhere that didn't burn down or get eaten by mold." Or erased by Boov guns, but Tip now understood that that probably didn't happen in her teachers' worlds. "But you're discounting folk music. We still know lots of old slave spirituals and work songs, and there's music all over the world that's been passed down a lot longer than Mozart's been played."

Yeah, she definitely wasn't avoiding that "class brain" title now, was she.

Edited 2016-05-09 17:21 (UTC)

She wasn't, and Hannibal beamed at her. "And folk music," he agreed. "The sorts that are so pervasive that they live on regardless. Of late, there has been interest in preserving it as well, but for the most part it was disregarded prior to the popularity of anthropology.

"The difficulty of studying folk music of the past - or even the present - is also its strength. It is a living artform, ever changing, and often with varied forms. Which version is 'correct', and how similar is it to earlier ones?"

Tip nodded thoughtfully. "I'm not sure 'correct' is really a term that applies to folk culture," she said. "It's like when people try to talk about what the 'original' fairy tale was like. There is no 'original' Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. That's just not the way stories -- or songs -- worked back then. The whole point was that it would evolve. Though I guess that does make it really hard to study the process of it and all."

"If you understand that, you are already ahead of a great many people," Hannibal told her. "But yes, it can make speaking of the past of the medium quite difficult. Although perhaps we can take a class to discuss some modern versions of older folk songs."

"Living with an alien gives you lots of practice at having to think outside your own paradigm," Tip said, preening a little under the praise. "They do say the past is like another country, which is at least more similar than another planet."

Hannibal grinned. "You'll get plenty of practice in both sorts of that, here. We have people from the past, the future, and other planets, not to mention very different worlds."

"I've noticed," Tip said. "No one here has heard of the Boov, and they were really hard to miss in my world."

"Are those the aliens?" Hannibal guessed.

"One of the species," Tip confirmed. "My best friend back home is a Boov who stuck around after the rest of them left. Which happened after humans managed to get rid of their enemies, the Gorg."

Hannibal nodded. "I can confirm that I have never heard of either of them. Although as different worlds go, mine would seem to be very much on the boring end of the spectrum - there were no aliens, nor magic, nor people with unusual powers there." Wearing this outfit did not count, Jono.

"I think I'd rather have boring," Tip said. "Well, except for J.Lo. My friend. Not the singer." She was going to be doing a lot of that for awhile. "The invasion was pretty terrifying, and a lot of people died. They only just started rebuilding things back home."

"But you couldn't have your friend without the rest of it, could you?" Hannibal pointed out. "My world may not have invasions, but people still die." Especially around him. "And there are no people like your friend, or Jono, or most of the students here."

"I also wouldn't have seen my mom get abducted by aliens while she was still stuffing my stocking on Christmas Eve," Tip said, then sighed and shook her head. "I know, there's no point thinking about all that. J.Lo even thought he had a way to go back and change some of it and it just -- didn't. You get what you get, I guess."

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Music Appreciation | Monday, period 1

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