Improvised performance with Dong-Won Jeong, Henry hyung [Wife's Taste]

정동원 헨리 형과 즉석연주 [아내의맛]

정동원TV : Jeong Dong-Won TV

This appears to be some kind of TV program. I got the title of this post by plugging the top line of Hangul characters into Google Translate. Dong-Won Jeong is a young singer. Wife’s Taste? Sounds like a bad translation & I haven’t got a clue. The name of a TV show?

When the video starts he’s playing with a remote controlled model car on a large track. About 30 seconds in we see some character creeping around in the background. That’s going to turn out to be Henry. Maybe those women making comments from the sides are those tasty wives, as it were. Anyone, creeping Henry is discovered at about 01:36 and the side women are saying, “Henry?” “Henry?”

He’s been found out. At 02:10 or so we get a clip of him performing on two pianos. Then violin. And then we see Jeong on alto sax. Things and stuff. Things and stuff. They play with the cars. A bit after 6 minutes in they enter a music production studio with some kind of gaming table in the middle. Now things are going to get interesting. They unmask at about 7 minutes in and pretend they didn’t have a clue about who each other was – at least I think that’s what’s going on. They do a little mirror mine routine (07:22). They play at the table for awhile. The chat. Shake hands. And share a meal (we’ve been here before). Henry feeds Jeong. Jeong feeds Henry. Where’s this leading. Now they start singing to one another.

I hope all you anthropologists out there are keeping track of how ritualized this all is.

But when are then going to get down to some serious music making. We all know that that’s what this foreplay leading to, no? (Besides, I’ve peeked ahead, so I know.)

Something slipped. At 13:31 all of a sudden Henry has a violin in his hands. At 13:34 he doesn’t. And then at 13:39 they’re doing some kind of routine together. Did someone slip up in the editing room? But who cares? Let’s go on. At 14:30 they trade off singing while touching one another’s throats at the vocal chords. How long can they keep up with this musical foreplay? Back to the table to chow down.

While all this has been going on we’ve been getting side-commentary from men and women who are, in effect, acting as a Greek chorus mediating between the two jokesters in the middle and us, the audience.

And now we get a clip of Henry playing one of those pesky Paganini pieces all the kids are playing in Korea. Back to the table, Jeong is explaining something over background music. Now we see Henry with his bow and fiddle. Now (c. 17:43) Henry starts playing. And then puts it down for a bit of beat-boxing and popping. Now they’re talking. I haven’t got the foggiest idea of what they’re saying, but it sounds serious. The word “stupid” shows up several times in a row out of Henry’s mouth. He plays something on the violin while looking sad and pretending to cry (c. 18:45). Short stuff laughs and the Greek chorus gives us their 2 cents.

At last! At last! They get through with all this nonsense and step to the music area (19:38) of the room. We hear the word “feel”, it’s echoed in the chorus, and short stuff steps to the trap drums and Henry to the keyboard. Shake hands. Henry steps to the drums and shows that he can play them.

I'm glad Henry can play drums. Short stuff’s going to go into a beat box routine, then move into some dance steps. And they’re going to play around making music. The Greek chorus comes to its feet and applauds.

I’m going to go light on the commentary. We get a clip of Henry outdoors doing an industrial music routine (“Believer”). Back to the studio. More playing around. Some real-time musique concrète with duct tape and other things. They make music with whatever’s round. Sixty years ago these shenanigans were avant-garde performances for European aesthetic elite – or material for a Frank Zappa bit on Steve Allen's TV Show. Now they’re day-time entertainment for Korean housewives. The music segment ends at about 29:13. I don’t know what happens next because I didn’t watch it.

Why K-Pop Is More Complex Than You Think

From Jan. 16, 2020

Sound Field [PBS] 

From the YouTube description:

K-Pop has become a global phenomenon. BTS was the first K-Pop group to perform on Saturday Night Live and Blackpink was the first K-Pop girl group to perform at Coachella. While K-Pop may seem like traditional pop music, it's actually more complex. It borrows from a variety of genres like R&B, EDM, and Hip-Hop while maintaining it's own distinct sound.

Nahre Sol investigates why K-Pop is different from other styles of Pop music, speaks to K-Pop producer and songwriter David Amber and attempts to create her own K-Pop track.

Three performances by Henry Lau [remix, Korean style]

Having presented some of Henry Lau’s work with young musicians, I thought I’d take a look at the kind of music that made him a K-Pop star. Be warned, I know almost nothing about K-Pop. I heard about Psy’s “Gangnam Style” back in the day, but if I watched the video or heard it, I don’t remember. I’d never heard of BTS until I posted a TwoSet Violin video where they parodied BTS, with Eddie Chen doing the dancing. Afterward I went scouting for a BTS video and saw them dancing in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

So there’s a sense in which I don’t know what I’m seeing and hearing. Which is fine. But, as a consequence, I might say something that’s silly and/or stupid because I don’t understand the cultural context. But that’s the kind of world we live in these days.

Monti’s Czardas and Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean

This video is from 2014. I’m guessing this is not typical of K-Pop, as it consists of a violin and piano duet. They start out playing a classical piece, Monti’s well-known “Csárdás”, transition through something I don’t recognize [1], and then on to something I do, Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

Henry(Super Junior) & SHIN JIHO (Violin and Piano Perf.)

I’ve heard “Billie Jean” many times, though I’m hardly a Michael Jackson fan. I don't have anything against him; in fact I think he is terrific. I'm just not a fan. Back in the 1980s you couldn’t avoid “Billie Jean” unless you were dead. I even thought about arranging it for a band I was in, The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band.

I’m more familiar with the “Csárdás”, which I practiced for many hours as a young trumpet player. My first music hero, the great Rafael Mendez, arranged it and performed it:

I mastered (more or less) the first part. But I never quite got the hang of the second part (starting at about 2:02), the fast part (with those lyrical interludes). It involves a technique known as double-tonguing, which is tricky. Mendez’s double-tonguing boggles the mind – at least if you play a brass instrument and so know how difficult it is – it is so sharp. Note, however, that while I was astounded by Mendez's technique, it was his passion that attracted me to him, a passion that lived even in his astonishing virtuosity.

Is that what attracts Lau’s fans to his music? his passion, for passion is certainly there. And those dance steps, they go through Michael Jackson back to Bill Bailey and Cab Calloway. Many worlds flow through his music.

One of my favorite performances of this csárdás (the general name for a type of Hungarian dance), however, is one where the incomparable Victor Borge, a Danish-American comedian and musician, accompanies a Hungarian violinist named Anton Kontra. Borge knows the piece but has never performed it and doesn’t have any sheet music. What does he do? He does what Henry Lau teaches his young protégés to do, go free style and play what you feel. Borge makes something up.

Watch how the two men interact with one another. There are points where one or the other doesn’t know what’s coming up. So they have to look at one another to coordinate. From about 3:04 to about 3:09 Borge improvises a simple counter melody. Then he plays some elaborate sounding ham-handed nonsense while Kontra is sawing away on the fiddle faster than the speed of sound. And then, at 3:22, he gives us another little counter melody. Finally, I bet if Henry watched this he'd chuckle at the end where Borges gives us, not one, but two downward glissandos, something he taught Seo Yul Shin in Episode 6 of Henry Together (see this post).

The moral of the story: when Lau and Shin Jiho mix Monti’s “Csárdás” with other musical material, they’re simply doing what musicians have always done, mix things to suit their performance needs.

Getting released from Carmina Burana [Trap]

헨리(HENRY) 'VIOLIN INTRO + TRAP' Live (PUBG Mobile Club Open 2019)

While this performance is from 2019, the song dates from 2013.

As it opens, Lau is standing on the hood of an over-sized military-style vehicle (a bit like a HumVee). He’s playing electric violin. We get 20 seconds or so from Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as background, which pretty much everyone has heard at some time or another in some context, though I don't think it's yet made it into supermarkets and elevators. We hear this fragment of the lyrics:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis

Which translates as:

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable.

That’s how this song about being trapped opens. We're pawns in the hands of fate.

Now we’re left with the problem – for that’s what it is, an aesthetic problem to be solved – of making a transition to Lau’s original conception, which opens with him playing piano. What do we do in the music while Lau is moving from that HumVee to the stage where his piano awaits? This transition takes awhile, a bit over a minute. Lau plays the violin for awhile, and then at about 1:39 the stage goes almost dark for a minute (so Lau can get off the hood of that stage prop?), music continues, dancers get started (about 1:50), and then once again the stage goes dark, the music stops and...We hear piano chords (2:13), the lights come on and we see Lau seated at the piano. He plays a bit, starts singing, then grabs the microphone and jumps up onto the piano and continues singing.

At this point the performance format is much like the original 2013 version. Where that version began with Lau playing a short piano prelude this version begins with the elaborate “O Fortuna” violin tableau. Lau sings and also dances, along with background dancers. In the 2013 he shares the vocal, while he carries the vocal alone in this version. The choreography is different in the two versions, but the basic format is pretty much the same. In both versions Lau finishes back at the piano.

Beyond this, well, figure it out for yourself. As I said up front, I’m not familiar with this kind of music, with its conventions and routines. In particular, I’m not familiar with the elaborate staging; the simple presentation in the previous video is more my style.

What interests me is simply the use of “Carmina Burana” and the exploitation of Lau’s abilities as a classically trained violinist and pianist – I'm guessing that most K-Pop stars don’t have his classical training. Something very interesting is going on here. Maybe if I listen to 50 or a 100 more tunes I’ll have some idea of what it is.

Despacito [Fiddle Impossible]

The original “Despacito” had a vocal; this is pure instrumental. Nor is there elaborate staging – no props and costumes – other than some (fairly elaborate) lighting effects.

But there is a surprise. At about 1:05 he stops playing the violin and begins dancing to percussion. At 1:11 he plays a trill while the accompaniment plays the “Mission Impossible” beat and backing riffs. He improvises violin riffs, some dancing, and somehow he gets to the melody (1:42), such as it is (some repeated riffs). Riffs and dance moves to the end.

Again, we have multiple sources pulled together, a recent pop song from Puerto Rico and a now iconic movie theme written by the Argentinian composer, Lalo Schifrin. Is this eclectic virtuosity typical of Henry Lau’s music, or of K-Pop in general? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. But it has me intrigued. 

* * * * *

[1] [later] If I'd just read the onscreen text before I wrote, I'd know what that that unrecognized stretch was. Actually, it's two pieces, both from Phantom of the Opera, which I don't really know. I've heard bits and pieces every now and then, but not the whole thing.

TwoSet Violin – In synch and holding it in

I’ve been watching a lot of TwoSet Violin recently and wanted to bring two rather different videos to your attention. The title of the first is self-explanatory as, I suppose, the title of the second as well.

2 Boys 1 Violin

The premise is simple. One plays the violin with two hands, but do both hands have to belong to the same violinist? Not necessarily. In this video Brett and Eddy divide the execution chores between: one of them fingers the violin while the other wields the bow. They switch tasks back and forth between them from one composition to the next. The result is surprisingly good?

But what’s surprising about it? They’re both excellent musicians and, as such, have had a great deal of experience making music with other musicians. That requires close coordination. When playing in the violin section of an orchestra, all violinists in the section must necessarily play the same notes at the same time and with the same phrasing. That requires, among other things, that their left hands move along the fingerboards in the same way and that their right hands execute bowing motions in the same way. From that point of view it is an accident of physical circumstance that, for each violin, the fingering hand and the bowing hand happen to be attached to the same violinist. But that’s not a matter of logical necessity, only physical structure.

From my notes:

A number of years ago I saw a TV program on the special effects of the Star Wars trilogy. One of the things the program explained was how the Jabba the Hutt puppet was manipulated. There were, I think, perhaps a half dozen operators for the puppet, one for the eyes, one for the mouth, one for the tail, etc. Each had a TV monitor which showed him what Jabba was doing, all of Jabba, not just their little chunk of Jabba. So each could see the whole, but manipulate only a part. Of course, each had to manipulate his part so it blended seamlessly with the movements of the other parts. So each needed to see the whole to do that. That seems to me a very concrete analogy to what musicians have to do. Each plays only a part in the whole, but can hear the whole. [Here’s an old post spun out of this observation.]

In the case of these TwoSet performances we have, 1) a single violin instead of an elaborate electromechanical special effects puppet, and 2) Brett and Eddy instead of a team of half a dozen puppet operators. But the underlying principle is much the same.

In this video TwoSet in effect takes us behind the scenes two show us how this puppet (that is, the violin) is operated. What we see is, in effect, a single mind operating this strange double-body. Well, not quite. Their coordination isn’t perfect. For one thing, they aren’t the same height, and that causes problems here and there. And it seems that in at least one passage, they didn’t use the same fingering so bowing and fingering went haywire for awhile. Still, if they worked at it 40 hours a day, like Ling Ling, who doubts that they could blend the motions seamlessly?

BTS - Mic Drop Violin + MOST DIFFICULT JOHN CAGE

Here they did violin covers suggested by fans. They begin with a medley of Mary Had a Little Lamb and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, with elaborations, and then onto BTS’ Mic Drop, which I’m not at all familiar with; Eddie dances, and both of them fiddle around, throwing in some classical references. And then they arrive at the MOST DIFFICULT JOHN CAGE at 07:00. You can imagine what that is.

Yes, 4’33”. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

4′33″ (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three")[1] is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, 4′33″ being the total length of the first public performance.

Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds may constitute music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work.[9] The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes 4′33″ as Cage's "most famous and controversial creation".

And that it is, but it is not difficult in the sense that the word ordinarily has in reference to music, where it indicates technical difficulty. On the contrary, this piece is very easy to execute. The performers just sit or stand there doing nothing. It has a fairly extensive performance history.

Brett and Eddy make an elaborate show of not making any music (in the ordinary sense of the word). While they’re not making music – though Eddie does take violin in hand and is clearly fighting the temptation to play it while Brett stares at the ceiling – we see a digital clock counting out the minutes and seconds. Are they really going to stretch this nonsense out the whole four minutes and thirty-three seconds? Yes, it seems, they are. And they do. From about 04:15 to the end they are visibly suppressing the sounds of laughter, which breaks out at 04:33.

At this point I’m not sure what to say. I’ve known about this piece for decades. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a live performance of it, nor, for that matter, do I recall watching any other version on YouTube, though I’ve certainly come across them. Cage’s first book of essays, Silence, was very important to me in my undergraduate years, so I’ve got some understanding of and appreciation of the milieu surrounding Cage. A family friend, Jon Barlow, taught at Wesleyan University, where Cage had an affiliation. In the late 1990s when I was researching my book on music I visited Jon at Wesleyan and we performed one of Cage’s compositions. While it was only scored for piano, it was fundamentally improvisational in character and I was quite happy to play it with Jon (I play trumpet).

But all that’s incidental. It’s just my personal history, which now includes watching this video. I suppose there’s something to be said about the cultural trajectory that led from John Cage conceptualizing that piece in 1952 to TwoSet’s 2018 YouTube video. But that trajectory is a very diffuse one. It’s not as though there’s a single line of musical development that connects these two. In fact, one could reasonably say that there is no line of musical development between them at all. 4’33” is simply one piece of cultural material available to TwoSet, like Mary Had a Little Lamb, or Mic Drop.