etnobofin

I really should write a follow-up on Joseph Stiglitz and ask what the heck happened to his report to Nicolas Sarkozy on redefined GDP measurement. But no, I got distracted by Punky Meadows Justin Bieber arriving in New Zealand this week.

Now I’ve got nothing against Justin Bieber in particular or teenage pop sensations in general. As music critic Graham Reid expressed on his blog today, the kids are going to scream at whatever they want to scream at. too. (Although this footage reaffirms why 13 year-old girls are still the scariest thing on the planet).

No, my point is about Auto-Tune. It’s clear that Mr Bieber can actually sing quite nicely in a radio-friendly monochrome fashion, and even plays the guitar – you can check out all the original YouTube videos if you want, but here’s JB on ITV in the UK back in January:

So why-oh-why do they channel his voice (and all of his right-on offsiders like Ludacris and Usher) through a freaking Auto-Tune on all his songs?

Auto-Tune’s been around for a while now. I wonder if in ten years’ time we’ll regard it as a hopelessly outmoded sonic token of the current decade. Just like all song titles at the moment must include the letters “ft.”, (as if artists are afraid to be heard performing without at least one celebrity friend), singers must warble through Auto-Tune’s digital downpipe in order to satisfy 2010′s well-tempered-robot aesthetic.

“Auto-Tune”, with its Bryl-Creem hyphen and teen-snaring smoothness, is like fins on a Studebaker: the fins serves no practical purpose, but made the car look cooler. Similarly Auto-Tune has become the indispensable appendage to modern pop.

In many ways, not a lot has changed since that shiny atomic age when asbestos was futuristic. In the first 8 bars of Baby compulsorily ft. Ludacris, Justin’s Ooooh-Aaaah resembles the same shoo-wop-doo-widdy nonsense as Da Doo Ron Ron in 1963.

And the rest of the song is based around the same I-VI-IV-V progression that has served so many chart-toppers well – 1964′s Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las, and 1961′s Stand By Me by Ben E. King…

I hope Justin Bieber survives the screaming hordes and that he grows up to be happy and fulfilled in whatever he does. Time will tell if his musical career will be durable and interesting.

Maybe one day Justin’ll make an album without Auto-Tune.

And maybe one day I’ll write that follow-up post about Joseph Stiglitz.

If I ever think that music has lost its power to move and excite me, I find some Frank Zappa. Here he is in concert in Barcelona in 1988, playing one of my favourite Zappa instrumentals, Watermelon in Easter Hay. Music like this proves Zappa wasn’t just a Stravinsky fan – he could write with glistening simplicity too.

It has been a wonderful Sunday, profitably spent achieving nothing in particular. I set off across the river with the vague image of lunch somewhere in the Marais.  First stop is shopping: a new pair of sunglasses (after 10 years I figure I can replace my old pair). I find the Ray-Bans I’m looking for in the  grand but soulless shopping centre under the Louvre.

Thence eastwards by Vélib along the rue St Honoré into the 4th arrondissement.  A halt outside the Hôtel de Ville allows time to locate the nearest Vélib parking station (yes, there is an iPhone app), where I drop the bicycle and head by foot into the narrow streets north of rue de Rivoli.

The 3rd and the northern section of the 4th arrondissements meander in a tight web towards Place de la République. No particular route through the quartier seems faster than any other, and you stumble across ramshackle hôtels particuliers and little green squares around every second corner.

The street names betray the mediaeval origin of this part of town. On the corner on rue des Hospitaliers Saint-Gervais et rue des Francs Bourgeois I stop at Le Voltigeur for a light lunch – coffee, croque-monsieur and salad. I read some Robert Sabatier while Bill Evan’s final album plays in the background. His version of Suicide is Painless takes on extra weight with the knowledge of his death within months of the recording.

Further north, in the heart of the 3rd arrondissement, rooflines jostle for position as if thrown up for the décor of a stage production.

Away from the busy pedestrian streets, little reminders of an older Paris can still be found.  Sometimes, you almost believe you’re somewhere in the “real” France, and you ponder what that phrase “real France” might actually mean.

Here and there, at the angle of a street where plane trees sprout energetically amidst the yellow stone, you get the impression that you are an intruder upon the afternoon calm of a village, where discretion is the better part of valour. This is the Paris I am coming to love – secretive and surprising in its silence even in the heart of the city.

Outside the Mairie of the 3rd arrondissement, I find a Vélib to take me south again to the familiar shores of the Left Bank. Across the Pont Neuf, a right turn onto Quai Conti, past the Pont des Arts and the gendarmes outside Jacques Chirac’s apartment, back to the street where the local accordionist has arrived for an afternoon of wine and approximate melodies.

Orchestre des Concerts Gais, direction Marc Korovitch
Concerto pour violon, Beethoven, Pierre Hamel
Symphonie #4, Schubert
17 et 18 avril 2010 – Temple des Batignolles, Paris 17e

It’s now Wednesday and I haven’t yet written about the weekend of concerts that marked the first “outing” (hoho) of Les Concerts Gais (et Beaux). If you can read French, I highly recommend diverting your attention towards the accounts of klari and zvezdo, which are far more detailed and wonderfully written than I could manage.

In the meantime, here’s a taste of what we played – although this version is performed by some random fiddler called Itzhak Perlman and an obscure German string-band conducted by Mister du Pré, (who is himself a part-time Argentinian pianist).

From my perspective, it’s been a most interesting and exciting few months being back in a classical orchestra – I’m of the firm opinion that your relationship to a piece of music changes utterly when you are allowed “inside” it.

Winter and spring in Paris for me has been punctuated by Saturdays crawling around within the frameworks nailed together by Schubert and Beethoven.  It’s been fascinating work, and we’ve eaten some good lunches too.

Playing in an orchestra in Paris is also very good for my French. I’m learning all sorts of great new words.

From a trumpet player’s standpoint, the music is not necessarily challenging – essentially we double with the tympani for most of the time, and because the parts were written for valveless natural trumpets, we play no melody at all – just declarative rythmic statements. In theory this gives you time and space to work on your dynamics (although as everyone knows, trumpet players only have two dynamics – LOUD and NOT PLAYING).

The trumpets’ three most important roles in the orchestra involve, counting bars rest; tweeting during the Larghetto ; and helping the timpanist not to get lost.  Great pleasure can be derived from doing such simple jobs well.

However, it was always a beautiful moment when, in the dying moments of the concert, Marc finally smiles at us in the 4th movement of the Schubert, and points his baton at us with a gesture that says ALLEZ LES TROMPETTES!

We know what we have to do.

FORTISSIMO!

If this post seems a little distracted, please excuse it. It’s been one of those weeks, with a lot happening and little respite in sight until Sunday evening. It all started with a having a fire at work on Tuesday, with real smoke and real firefighters and real evacuation.

Then French women insisted in putting dogs in baskets on the RER

The neighbours in my building started writing passive-agressive notes on the front door.

And then writing slightly irrelevant replies on the same notes.

I discovered that they are now advertising my favourite frozen pizza on the metro.

All of this while preparing for the inaugural concert of Les Concerts Gais (et Beaux) tonight at le Temple des Batignolles.

So, please accept my apologies for being slightly all-over-the-place at the moment. Once I find out what’s happening, I’ll let you know.

When I did my undergraduate degree, anthropology accidentally became my minor – there were a couple of interesting ethnomusicology papers I wanted to take, and somehow this interest metastisized into several extra courses in social anthropology. It’s not until recently that I’ve begun to appreciate how this introduction to social science has influenced the way I look at the world.

Being in Paris has allowed me to locate some of the source texts from my anthropology courses in their original language. Recently, my book for commuting has been Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. Written in 1954, Tristes Tropiques recounts how Lévi-Strauss became an ethnographer, in particular describing his expeditions into the interior of Brazil while working as a sociology lecturer in Sao Paulo in the 1930s.

Lévi-Strauss in the Amazon in 1935. The baby monkey clinging to his leg accompanied him for months.

It’s an extraordinary book that maintains coherence depite enveloping in one single volume a large helping of biography, philosophical musings on the nature of civilisation and detailed descriptions of the kinship structures of Amazonian clans.

The stories of Lévi-Strauss’s travels in the Mato Grosso and Amazonia are amazing in their own right – real Indiana Jones stuff. In 1935, the Mato Grosso was still so impenetrable it was necessary to take an expedition of 20 men, 40 bullocks and sufficient guns and ammunition to fend off jaguars, snakes and hostile Indians. Half the bullocks died en route.

It’s the little details that are most fascinating: in preparing to travel to meet the Bororo, Lévi-Strauss spent time at the St Ouen flea-market near Paris buying buttons, thread and trinkets to use for trading with a people whose previous contact with Europeans were Jesuit missionaries 50 years earlier.

Threaded into his tale of crossing hundreds of miles of jungle are two parallel narratives – Lévi-Strauss’s fortuitous escape from Vichy France in 1940 (he was Jewish, but managed to get a ticket on a steamer from Marseille to Martinique), and a voyage to newly independent India and Pakistan in 1950, which culminates in a long comparative analysis of the structural features of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

Lévi-Strauss has been criticised by some for spending very little time doing real “field research” – his contact with peoples such as the Tupi, the Nambikwara and the Bororo may not have lasted more than a few weeks in each case, and language difficulties may well have hindered Lévi-Strauss’s comprehension of certain aspects of their societies.

Nevertheless, the work that Lévi-Strauss produced based on this research in Brazil provided the foundation for some of the most important social science work of the century: analyses of human societies based on the shared underlying structures, and his intellecual epic 4-volume Mythologies.

Nambikwara dancer

Elected to the Académie Française in 1973, Lévi-Strauss died in October last year at the age of 100. Tristes Tropiques (also available in English) is a very readable introduction to the writing and ideas of a formidable 20th century intellectual. 50 years on, in an overpopulated world wracked by inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict, Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the relationships between civilisations, people and their belief systems seem more relevant than ever.

There were plans to write some big old posts about Easter and music this weekend, but got busy, then distracted, then got writer’s block (well, that’s my excuse). But I did enjoy rediscovering Taika Waititi‘s first short film, Two Cars, One Night.

Made in 2003, the film shows the story of a girl and two boys meeting outside a rural pub while their parents are drinking inside.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award, which in hindsight seems a remarkable achievement for a film made in the pub carpark in Te Kaha, featuring two old cars and inpenetrable Maori English accents.

Apparently Taika Waititi’s new feature film Boy is doing very well in the cinemas in its home country. It mines similar themes and settings to Two Cars, One Night, extending them into a full-length story of a family growing up on the East Coast of the North Island, and features music by The Phoenix Foundation and, of course, Patea Maori Club’s Poi E, the greatest song of the 1980s except for Michael Jackson…

I wonder if it’ll make it to cinemas in Paris, and what French audiences will think ?