LIFE SINGS

yes it’s all too much isn’t it really I mean the whole thing you can listen until your ears hurt you can watch until your eyes bleed and you can eat until your anal sphincter either opens for too long or closes for too long there’s some kind of fine balance there that works all the way back up through the system like a sorry roadblock but unfortunately there is no public transport option the government doesn’t own your arse and it’s no place for an opal card and if you tried I expect you could be arrested for plastic abuse poor plastic it has such a bad name now even though it’s been our friend for so long people tend to throw it away anywhere instead of disposing of it in the correct manner what if people treated other people that way that would be great wouldn’t it going out for a nice walk and stepping over the occasional corpse left in the street why is disposal such a problem and why in particular are mcdonald’s wrappers ubiquitous on the streets of the western suburbs of sydney the street where I walk is paved with old hamburger cartons and festooned with mcdonald’s paper bags I sometimes pick them up if there’s a bin nearby and dispose of them as carefully as I can but they are often full of ants eating the remaining shit that sits in the bottom of the disposable bag discarded by some teenage idiot in some kind of car I think that all P plate drivers should have their ears surgically connected to the exhaust pipes of their stupid cars so they can be just as annoyed at the amount of stupid noise they make as all the rest of us sitting in our noise-polluted houses listening to the stupid motorbikes and stupid cars with their stupid decibels just waiting for about 2 am when they all seem to go away at last and finally there are a few hours of peace and quiet before all of the stupid noisy people wake up again they don’t know how lonely they will be when they are old and completely deaf sitting at the pub and pretending to be part of the conversation when they can hear nothing watching their friends’ lips move up and down and trying to construct imaginary words from the movement and all because they thought it was great fun to make so much noise when they were young and stupid and they wouldn’t be able to appreciate music very much either would they after all of that motorcycle noise and car noise destroyed the hair cells in the semicircular canals down in that tiny tubular organ that remarkably stimulates the nerves that link up to the brain and gives the brain the signals that make it think that it’s listening to music and why does the brain think it’s listening to music anyway for some reason music seems to be a universal human need doesn’t it for some reason and also you’ve only got to look at the fact that the original sounds were percussion sounds and drums and sticks were the first instruments and the only reason for that perhaps is that the essence of rhythm was somehow inspired or simply felt by the beat of the heart and all things in life have a beat or a repetition it is everywhere generations repeat over 30 years months repeat over 30 days days repeat over 24 hours hours repeat over 60 minutes minutes repeat over 60 seconds and seconds repeat about once every heartbeat and all of those numbers 60 30 24 they are all even numbers and for some reason we seem to like even numbers and we group the rhythms of the heartbeat into four beats per unit or two beats per unit and this is called 4/4 time or 2/4 time and almost all of music has these rhythms it’s absolutely ubiquitous it doesn’t matter whether it’s renaissance or punk it all has this 4/4 rhythm the next most common rhythm is 3/4 but it’s still an integer and we all feel rhythms the 3/4 rhythm is behind the waltz and the minuet but not behind most modern music that’s all 4/4 again although some of it has gone for prime numbers which is a refreshing change pink floyd’s song money is grouped into seven beats per bar and there’s a lot of other music using prime numbers particularly alternative rock and jazz that uses groupings of five beats or eleven beats per unit like Dave Brubeck I remember a piece once that had 20 beats per bar and you would think that’s nice that’s an even number that’s only five lots of four but they had divided it into six lots of three and then a two so it had a nice little kick at the end of each phrase like when you are rushing up stairs and you think there’s one more step and there isn’t but we also need to talk about melody don’t we because you can bang away with drums and sticks all you like but it’s not going to support or explain the human urge to sing and you know it is an urge you’ve only gotta think of the fact there is a stereotype of everyone singing in the shower well you might do that but I don’t there are enough dangers in the shower as it is with hot water and slippery surfaces and soap and all the other stuff and you’ve only got a small space to move around in and the last thing I wanna do is be occupying it with the shit sound of my voice and then the greeks came along god bless them and they began to experiment with the string and the vibrations of that string and the way that it vibrated in different fractions and that each fraction became one of the harmonics of the original fundamental sound and you can actually construct the chords and even the scales that we still use today in all music from the original harmonics that pythagoras and his followers discovered and it turns out the main reason you can tell an A played by a piano from an A played on a violin from an A played by an oboe is because the strength of the different harmonics in the background of those notes is characteristic of those particular instruments so you’ve got to give the pythagoreans a big tick for genius to think about doing all of those kinds of experiments twenty-five centuries ago rather than just letting people sing naturally without wondering about how it’s constructed or why and then of course music diverged into two different streams there was the sacred and the secular because the church began to impose its influence over society but common folk still had their own form of musical entertainment and so these two streams evolved in parallel over hundreds of years before they came back together again during the renaissance and the baroque notably with people like bach who wrote church music all of his life as well as secular music because by bach’s time it was just all music except that some of it was written because the church asked him to write it and some of it was written because the aristocrats asked him to write it and this continued for a while until we got to beethoven and he decided well fuck all of them I’m just gonna write whatever I like and he did that and he did it so well that although it was still very helpful if composers managed to get a sponsor very few ever went cap in hand to an aristocrat anymore so the wealthy didn’t tell the composer what to write oh no not now now you have to ask the composer to please write music for you and you pay them handsomely for it so the composer and music continued to evolve of course but it’s also always relied on repetition not just in rhythm but as a formal structural device do you like ravel’s boléro it is built on a twenty-four note rhythm played on the snare drum repeated a hundred and sixty nine times and over this is a long two-part melody which itself is repeated seventeen times so musical form is unlike a painting the form of which can be seen all at once whereas music reveals its form over a period of time and it needs some device to give it continuity so repetition is one of music’s most basic foundations la folia and pachelbel’s canon are famous examples bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues are one of the biggest musical repetitions he wrote a set of twenty-four such pieces and then he did the whole thing again a second time twenty years later please be aware that a fugue itself is designed around a repeated theme and of course he wrote all that because there was a way of writing music which had evolved along with the music itself as well resulting in that pattern of dots and lines on the page that must be very confusing to people who don’t read music but it still works and it’s also repetition but the whole idea of notation is another whole rant all by itself so I won’t bother doing that here but just back to the idea that musicians no longer relied upon aristocrats they are still sponsored by all kinds of people and corporations like the record companies that now sponsor musicians by the dozens and dozens I’m sure taylor swift for example has been sponsored by record companies and entertainment providers and it’s kind of a suspicion of mine that she’s actually been engineered by them because they needed to manufacture somebody in order to keep the gears grinding and the cash flowing and she is not the only commercially produced 3D printed artificial human to grace our humble lands because we know this kind of thing has happened before many many times throughout all of history where one sort of person is exploited and manipulated for the benefit of another as is illustrated in the battle between the bosses and the workers in an imaginary struggle proposed by karl marx in order to strengthen his own desire to defeat the ruling elite by becoming one of them and in a few vast countries that is exactly what happened and you’ve only got to listen to how bland the modern music in russia or north korea is today to realise that the whole idea of a single philosophy espoused by a single person with singular powers encourages a single kind of art where a single note can be the most important just one note and we call this a monotone and that is why music in those places is monotonous so we really need to appreciate how music has evolved and also devolved at times in history but still shines out from the human soul regardless of whether dictatorships or churches are trying to take possession of it for their own purposes but that will never be possible because there will always be counterrevolutionary movements in music and other arts like dada and jazz and folk and rock and we need to appreciate the vast sweep of history in which music has developed from where it was with sticks and drums and no music unless you did it yourself to where it is today with orchestras and bands and virtuosos and concert halls and a vast library of music that has been written and recorded and played over the centuries by common people and by geniuses so that we can get music now at any time and in any form we like over dozens of different electronic devices and we can still make the music ourselves with instruments that have evolved along with the evolution of music as well and it is a vast monument to the human urge for creation and communication that all of this music has been composed and ways of writing it have been developed and all of the instruments that play it have evolved and theories of how it works have been growing and histories and varieties of music have emerged and all because it is something urgent and necessary to the human condition something irresistible something vital to our existence something that originates from the basic biology of all life something visceral something created by the rhythm of the heart