From early days to OLTA

“I'd love to hear your thoughts on early stuff such as Precipitate and maybe their growth to now. –Josh”

- Before getting to Josh’s question, I’d like to briefly address the idea of musical form. Most songs are of course made up of verse and chorus (repeated cyclically: vs1-ch-vs2-ch, etc.), but with a band like Interpol, we hear a lot more sections in any particular song’s form than just verse and chorus. This in fact was one of the challenges for me in my NARC paper, what to call the individual sections of the song.

- Little did I realize at the time that NARC actually has a relatively (very relatively) simple song form when compared to many of Interpol’s songs. In particular NARC is fairly cyclical, in that the sections of the form re-cycle in the order in which they first appeared: verse 1, pre-chorus, chorus, verse 2, pre-chorus, chorus, after which point we get into less easy-to-designate territory (which I ended up for ease’s sake calling verse 3 and coda).

- Listening to early songs like “Precipitate” or “Specialist,” I’m struck by how “creative” I have to get in order to designate the sections of each song’s form, and also by how non-cyclical their forms are. “Precipitate” starts off with a version of the standard cyclical verse 1, chorus, verse 2, chorus, but this only takes up half of the song, the rest of which traverses on without repeating sections. This type of song form is one that we hear more often in Turn on the Bright Lights (“Stella,” and “The New,” for example) and in Our Love to Admire (“Pioneer to the Falls”) and less often in Antics, one of the reasons I’m guessing that some fans hear OLTA as a (often termed welcome) return to TOTBL.

- So, to answer Josh more directly: the preference of (please forgive me) “peregrinated” song forms over cyclical song forms is one of the ways that I hear Interpol’s earlier work as differentiated from Antics, and also one of the ways that I hear OLTA as harkening back to that earlier work. Even in Antics, however, Interpol’s songs stretch the norms of song form.

Thanks for the question, Josh. There’s a lot more to say on this, so I’ll be dedicating a few blogs in February to my findings on form and other musical parameters in songs from all of Interpol’s “eras.”

Until then,
Much love from,
Meg

P.S. Just to quickly answer this question from Ian:

“Did you discover the notes/chords on your own or did you use a "TAB"? –Ian”

- I transcribed the music into standard musical notation using the program Sibelius; I tried to be as true to what I heard as possible and managed to get the voice, guitars, bass, and keyboard down, but not the drums (haven’t quite learned how to do that yet, though I definitely want to include them in my transcriptions eventually). Once I get it turned into a PDF I’ll be making it available to any who’d like to see it. Thanks for the question!

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Carlos's compositions

As promised last time, a few thoughts on Carlos:

“What do you think of Carlos' orchestrations in Interpol as well as his solo compositions (ie, 'the Mortician' for HBO iPromo)?”

- I really love the way Carlos captures a particular style of composition with “Mortician,” one that is now nearly ubiquitous in the world of soundtracks (both in film and television), but that actually has roots in concert music from about 20+ years ago: I’m speaking here of composers such as John Adams (I highly recommend his work from 1980 called Harmonium), Steve Reich (and his 1976 work Music for 18 Musicians), and of course Philip Glass (his 1988 piano piece Metamorphosis was used to great effect in the new version of “Battlestar Gallactica”), the last of whom has composed several recent film scores (The Hours, The Illusionist, etc). I find it quite remarkable that Carlos, a self-trained musician, has managed in “Mortician” to both reproduce, and make his own, a style of music that is associated mostly with highly educated composers (Adams studied at Harvard, while Reich and Glass both attended Julliard).

- What really surprised me when I first listened to “Mortician” is how happy and up-beat sounding it is, as I’d always thought of Carlos as a “dark” musician, and just assumed that “darkness” was what he brought to Interpol. And in fact listening to this track one doesn’t necessarily hear a lot of “Interpol.” What does sound closest to me in terms of the Interpol sound occurs in the peak-moment around minute 5:00, before which a dramatic build-up has taken place. Such climaxes (i.e., those that occur about three-quarters of the way through the song) are quite common in Interpol’s songs. We then get this very clever return to the beginning material, which highlights the cyclical “time” theme that’s been apparent from the very beginning with the presence of the clock ticking. The clock fades away about 10 seconds from the end, and just as the music begins to swell dramatically again, the piece is abruptly over with a short pluck of the strings. I think we get a touch of Carlos’ sense of humor here: dramatic climaxes don’t last forever, after all. In general I think we get a taste of Carlos’ true personality in this piece, and thereby get a peak into which elements he brings to Interpol, namely an ear for drama and a flair for orchestration.

- The opening of Carlos’ orchestration of “Pioneer to the Falls” represents an entirely different musical style to me, more along the lines of Wagner or Mahler (both of whose music served as the basis for the majority of the film music composed in the first half of the 20^th century). The opening horn moment is quite emblematic of the so-called late-Romantic era of Western European music. What sort of confuses my ear with this orchestration, however, is the style-change that takes place when Paul’s voice enters, where Carlos adds plucked strings, piano, and xylophone; as a result we end up with something like a Danny Elfman/Gustav Mahler blend that doesn’t quite sit right with me. I think this blend would have been more convincing for me had Carlos put a little more sustained bass in the mix, as it feels a bit treble-heavy. However, I will say that I absolutely adore the timpani hit at 3:28 and his treatment of the “So much for make believe…” section, and the fact that I can be critical at all with this track speaks to its worth.

- I’ll just add (in case I’ve made you question my love of Carlos’ music!) that I’m looking forward to hearing more compositions by Carlos in the future, as I think these pieces are just a taste of what’s to come from his solo oeuvre.

Up next, a fan asks about Interpol’s development from early songs (such as “Precipitate”) to now.

As always,

Love from,

Meg

P.S. Just a reminder that my email is megwilhoite@gmail.com if you’d like a copy of my NARC paper.

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Karen’s questions #3: The Agony and Ecstasy of Analysis

“3) I’m glad to see someone has the interest and the analytical skills to dissect the music we all love. I’d like to do the same albeit from a psychological standpoint but frankly, I’m fearful of breaking the inherent mystery that’s so attractive to this medium.

Cheers, Karen”

- These comments from Karen certainly set some thoughts in motion for me: the vivisection of music, the psychoanalysis inherent in music-analysis, and the mystery of music. To be sure, I have often agonized over what it means to analyze (pull-apart) or even worse, perform vivisection on music. Though I enjoy zooming in on certain aspects of a song, and even find it helpful in my understanding not only of the music but also of myself, I am painfully aware that whatever I (or any music-analyst) come up with will never, ever be able to encapsulate in its entirety my total experience with music such as Interpol’s. I think this feeling of incompleteness ties into my inability to ever have complete knowledge of all that is going on in my consciousness when I listen to a song.

- And yet, as Karen and as other Interpol fans have said, we are glad to see Interpol’s music being treated this way, and I think we are glad because it means something we love is being taken seriously. Their songs do not feel like simple pop songs, but rather feel like complex and “organic” (as Daniel loves to say) entities, complete much in the way we feel a human being is complete. And just as a psychoanalyst strives to cognize and describe in words the complex human mind, aware that s/he will never fully understand what is going on in that mind, so music-analysts (many of whom draw on some sort of music theory for their descriptions) strive to cognize and describe in words the complex human creation that we call music. For me, much of this strife involves asking myself the question, “how does that [music] make you feel?”

- At the end of the day, Interpol are creating music, and that creation process is a long and arduous one; or so I gather from their interviews. The interviewer will ask “how was your break in between finishing touring for Antics and the release of OLTA?” and invariably one of them will say “well, we had 3 months off, and then went straight back to work.” I think this is where the mystery that Karen mentioned starts. How is it that this kind of sweat-of-the-brow, hours-long work suddenly produces an independent entity that seems to take on a life of its own? And how is it that this entity, this song, can make us feel and react in certain ways?

- Many thanks again, Karen, for your questions/observations, as they provided most satisfyingly food for thought!

Up next: a fan asks “what is your opinion of Carlos’ orchestrations?”

Until then,

Much love from,

Meg

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Karen's questions #2: Multiple layers and multiple listens

And now #2 from Karen:

“I can follow one instrument quite easily through a song and this might change according to input (mood, attention, etc), and other times perceive being surrounded or enveloped by all facets of the song schema.”

- I can certainly relate to these perceptual phenomena; that is, to the many different ways that my “mind” can receive and interpret music depending on my mood or level of attention. I’ve more than once had the experience of consistently latching onto certain hooks or instruments when listening to a particular song, only to one day inexplicably hear in the very same song something completely new that I had never noticed before. The process of transcription (taking the sound source and attempting to at least partially translate it into Western musical notation), in particular, makes one acutely aware of facets of the song that might otherwise go unnoticed.

- I remember when I would listen to NARC (before writing my paper), the falling bass line that first happens around 0:40-0:54 would break my heart, and I would attribute all the heart-breaking beauty of that moment to the bass line solely. To my astonishment, when I was transcribing the song I realized that my beloved bass line actually begins in 0:36, something I had never notice before. Why? I asked myself. I finally concluded that it was most likely the entrance of the strings in 0:40 which were signaling my ears in a significant way, and which somehow drew my attention to the bass line (which, if you’ve read my paper, had also a very convenient theoretical explanation for its expressiveness---it’s always gratifying when theory can actually provide plausible explanations for the way music affects one!). Thus, I decided that it was the strings and the bass line of that moment in NARC that was being translated by my “mind” as “heart-breakingly beautiful.”

- As a side note: there is actually an entire discipline, usually called “perception/cognition,” (see musicperception.org for example) that includes music theory as a related discipline, which purports to examine and explore scientifically how listeners respond to music. Unfortunately, though, it’s still a young discipline, and the work that has been done has mostly been done on “classical” music (Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, etc), and not on music like Interpol’s in which the added layers of non-acoustic instruments, recording and production (to name a few) would provide crucial aspects of any such study.

Until soon,

Love from,

Meg

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Working at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basle

I'm in Switzerland for a couple of months doing research in Basle. Here's a little video walking up the Rheinsprung (not best quality):



[Radiohead dubbed over]

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