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RIP Contra Sonic: The FSGW Monthly Series

12/19/2012

The last installment of Washington, DC’s Contra Sonic series is on Thursday, December 20, with a “Dark Side of the Earth” theme. It started as a monthly series in November of 2010 and was the source of several of my caller interviews and the home techno contra of dJ improper.

Some folks will say that the series failed, because it’s needed to evolve into a more sporadic, event-based format to be profitable for those involved.

I disagree.

Having My Cake & Eating It Too

9/18/2012

Mmm...cake.

Recently I was talking to someone whose views are very much on the "traditional music, dance-as-written" side of things, and who wondered why flourishers would bother with the contra dance part of it, if they were then going to add dips/aerials/flourishes/what-have-you.

Since this gets to why the heck my partner and I would be teaching flourishes every week, I think it's relevant to this blog, so I'll speak for myself here (and I won't presume to speak for anyone else, not even Steve):

For me, contra dance lets me enjoy music without having to be crazily self-conscious as I would find myself in a club, or a more free-form partner-oriented dance genre (or a more closed-off social scene), and I don't have to worry about it. The choreography is there and taught right before (and during) when I have to do it to stay with the group, and everyone else is doing more or less the same thing at the same time (so at least if I look like a goof, it's likely others do too, and that makes it okay). I can dance contra straight up, as written, with various different people through an evening, and I have a wonderful time.

On the other hand, if I have a bit of extra energy and a willing partner (or neighbor), we can do the dramatic dips or the dizzying twirls -- and as long as we're back where we need to be when we need to be there, we can pop back in and dance with the other folks in our set, regardless of whether they decided to embellish the dance on the previous move or not. And I also have a wonderful, albeit differently-energized, time.

But if for whatever reason I decide that I'm not up for flourishing, there's still a rewarding experience waiting for me in the choreography as written. That baseline does't exist as much (at all?) in other scenes.

I adore that flexibility and the ability to dance with the group, too, even if I take a moment (or phrase) just with my partner. That doesn't exist as much in other dance genres and venues, and while I may love the occasional dramatic dip in the space of a swing (assuming the room's not crowded) and share that connection with my partner, I also really like that I can pop back up from it and flow into a star with my neighbors and share that connection with them, right on time.*

That's why I do it, anyway. I know there are lots of other reasons. Flourishers, what are yours?

* After the fact, it occurs to me that this is related to why I like changing up the music from time to time, too. Being able to enjoy the music with familiar choreography as a touchstone and a relatively safe (and intergenerational, at least in my community!) environment has a lot of appeal.

Authenticity & Manipulation of the Tradition

8/21/2012

"Even inside the music itself there's a little moral code, I think, that's kind of built into it, kind of an artistic kind of morality we call it, or set of codes or what have you. It's like knowing the line between what's authentic and sincere, and what's manipulative and...what's not authentic. I mean, both for yourself in terms of something that's sincerely felt, and I think music being felt is probably the main thing, and that it be sincerely felt. Because, you can almost play anything if it's really true for you, you know? I'm probably long past being authentically East Clare...but being authentically East Clare at this point in my life is not as important as it was when I was 25. So being authentically musical, inside the tradition, is probably where I'm at now, and that encompasses a lot more than it did when I was starting out...."

--transcribed from Martin Hayes, "Sincerely Felt" track on Gerry Diver's The Speech Project album

I was listening to The Speech Project one day last week and my brain stuck on this passage from the track. (As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, The Speech Project is an album where Irish musicians were interviewed and the musical qualities of the recordings of their voices were used to arrange orchestral pieces.)

While Hayes is speaking here about playing traditional Irish music, I think to some degree it holds true for other traditional genres as well. I'm specifically thinking of contra here, and the ways in which the newer infusions are in their own ways authentic to the time in which we live, and yet still fall under the umbrella of the Tradition -- or at least, ostensibly they do, and this is what has created some interesting tensions within the community.

Fellow syncretists would argue that the new iterations do in fact fall under the "authentically musical, inside the tradition" idea. Detractors, on the other hand, would claim that pandering to modern tastes falls into the "manipulative and...not authentic" camp. But that implies, to me, that the purists think that syncretists are out to intentionally destroy the tradition for some as-yet-unarticulated reason. (For any purists out there, I would be genuinely interested to have a civil discussion about theories, started with the understanding that we are likely to agree to disagree at the end.)

Pondering Principles

7/2/2012

One of the reasons that some people see alt contras as a threat to the Tradition, rather than an extension of it, is the idea that somehow using any prerecorded sound will kill off the demand for live musicians of any ilk. For these people, live music isn't an aesthetic preference but almost a moral issue to defend on principle. (As has been made clear several times on this blog, I love both, for different reasons; I am also personally more concerned with the principle of community coming together than the principle of the source of the music with which they are joined.)

I came across this article on EDM while waiting for my train to Massachusetts this weekend and saw several parallels to the contra dance community's ongoing debate. It reminded me of some of the comments I've heard made about alt contras relative to this blog, especially the variants of, "I will never hire a DJ; they're lovely people, I'm sure, but they can't react in the moment to the room the way a musician can."

Let's put aside for a moment the erroneous assumption that there is no skill to DJing well -- even if you mix your tracks ahead of time, you still need to edit most of them for length, if not for speed and phrasing and that most certainly does take effort and skill), I do think that this complaint ought to be addressed. Some groups, like Double Apex, Phase X, and Firecloud address this by blending live and prerecorded sound; Perpetual e-Motion dodges the bullet entirely by clearing the loop machine before every gig and mixing their live sounds on the fly. Some DJs can get around this by freestyling through the entire dance, complete with the sort of phrasing and coming in armed only with samples. I would love to see more of that (and suspect we will as the genre evolves; we aren't to where this is the norm right now) but I also recognize that it requires something akin to the skill of memorizing several of Shakespeare's sonnets and reproducing them almost perfectly at the drop of a hat -- and then watching the crowd and well enough to vary the timbre of your voice to match at the same time. It's not an impossible task, but still a rather tall order.

One of the interesting things to watch with a fringe genre is what happens when it hits the relative mainstream. What do you see happening? Or, the bigger question, where do you see this all fitting in the years to come? Do conditions exist (even hypothetically) wherein an alternative contra could speak to a hard-line traditionalist whose issue with prerecorded music is moral rather than aesthetic?

Blogger’s Soapbox: Preserving the Past While Maintaining Modernity

8/31/2011

“Traditional music was not amp’ed because they didn’t have it.” -- Ed Howe of Perpetual e-Motion, interview with Contra Syncretist, published August 29, 2011.

I was thinking about what Ed said when I saw this post over on the Washington Post’s Classical Beat blog a little while back. In it, Anne Midgette talks about 24-year-old classical concert pianist Yuja Wang, who has drawn quite a bit of attention to herself in the classical music world lately by wearing rather starkly modern fashions while performing in her very traditional medium, most recently at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

RIP Contra Sonic: The FSGW Monthly Series

Having My Cake & Eating It Too

Authenticity & Manipulation of the Tradition

Pondering Principles

Blogger’s Soapbox: Preserving the Past While Maintaining Modernity

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