Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Listen to This: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

Today, I wish to draw your attention to composer, bandleader, and extraordinary gentleman Darcy James Argue. Argue and his 18-piece big band, dubbed the "Secret Society," received a lot of attention from the jazz press last year, centered on the release of their debut album, Infernal Machines. Infernal Machines has a lot to recommend itself to listeners: a tight ensemble, some great solos, and Argue's deft compositional pen. Argue has also been held up as a poster child for establishing a fan base through the internet; long before Infernal Machines came out, Argue was putting up live recordings of his gigs and posting insightful commentary about the New York jazz scene at his site. Throw in a positively ecumenical mix of musical influences ranging from contemporary big bands to indie rock groups to post-minimalist composers, and it's easy to see why so many media outlets are eager to brand Argue's Secret Society as the fresh new face of jazz.

This is all very well and good, but doesn't fully explain why I hold Argue in such high regard. No, I've been harboring a composer-crush on Argue because he's a great composer, great bandleader, savvy internet marketer, and a big ol' geek. He's an avid comic-book reader, taking inspiration for his ensemble from Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He is unashamed about his enthusiasm for a marginalized and practically obsolete performance medium. And most notably, he turns these potentially stigmatizing attributes into virtues, calling his style "steampunk big band." And he really means it.

By "steampunk big band," I don't mean a big band that performs in Victorian attire with brass accessories, though Argue himself has been known to cut a dapper figure elsewhere. I mean that he has taken the steampunk conceit of using obsolete technology to achieve modernistic ends and applied it to the medium of the big band. In his music for Secret Society, Argue "evokes an alternate musical history in which the dance orchestras that ruled the Swing Era never went extinct, but remained a popular and vital part of the evolving musical landscape." To that end, he draws heavily on indie rock style and compositional practice. He cites as inspirations such bands as Animal Collective and Tortoise, and for the latter inclusion I should take notice simply as a matter of principle. (I should also listen to more Tortoise, as a matter of principle. I haven't heard much, but I like what I've heard.) Which is not to say that Secret Society is a glorified rock band; swinging hard and rocking out both come easily to the group. And if that's not enough, Argue also likes to build compositions around polyrhythmic and metametric techniques inspired by the likes of Steve Reich and the Bang on a Can composers. There's an awful lot going on in a steampunk big band, apparently.

But what does a steampunk big band sound like, you ask? Well, I don't have to try to explain, because Argue has been so generous with his recordings. As I said before, just about all of Secret Society's live performances have been archived online, and Argue's label, New Amsterdam Records, has been equally generous with Infernal Machines, allowing you to preview the entire album. I could easily get lost in the live performance archives, so let me walk you through the tracks on Infernal Machines:

• Phobos: Argue has said that he made a point of starting the album off with something that didn't sound anything like a conventional big band, and drummer Jon Wikan's intro on digitally processed cajón is a far cry indeed from Count Basie or Glenn Miller. But in my opinion, the highlight of this track comes at the end. In the last three and a half minutes, as Mark Small's tenor sax solo dies down, the horns come in with a gorgeous harmonization of the opening melody, leading into an ending which would suffer from any attempts at explanation.
• Zeno: This is one of those pieces that draws on the metametric techniques I mentioned earlier. Metametrics, to borrow a term from Dutch composer Samuel Vriezen, refers to the superposition or juxtaposition of rhythms suggesting multiple tempos. In this case, rhythmic subdivisions in 5/4, 12/8, and 6/4 all contend for dominance, creating an illusion of shifting downbeats which is perhaps meant to recall Zeno's paradoxes of motion.
• Transit: This song hews most closely to the big band tradition -- it is in a straight-ahead 4/4 swing feel most of the way through, and the overall structure is recognizably similar to the standard head-solos-head structure of most jazz tunes. At the same time, Ingrid Jensen's flugelhorn solo illustrates a distinctive feature of Argue's compositions: the use of improvised solos as an integral part of the arc of the piece. In most big band jazz, the arc of the piece is concentrated entirely in the written sections, with the improvised solos standing apart from the continuity. But in "Transit," Jensen picks up the arc and carries it most of the way through. In some of the earlier live recordings, it sounds as though the soloists are unused to this concept, but on /Infernal Machines/, they are uniformly solid in this regard.
• Redeye: If "Transit" is the most traditional big band composition, then "Redeye" is the closest to indie rock in sound and style. Sebastian Noelle's guitar is front and center almost the whole way through, while Argue engages in timbral explorations with the synthesizer and muted horns. The piece is in 7/4 throughout, but it's so seamless that you wouldn't know it without counting beats. "Redeye" also gets some of the most beautiful melodies on the disc.
• Jacobin Club: Another piece in a slow 7/4, but that's all it has in common with "Redeye." While "Redeye" is hazily beautiful, "Jacobin Club" is sharp-edged and sinister. The piece opens with tenor saxophone, trombone, and bass clarinet in sinuous counterpoint, and Jon Wikan's snare drum is a menacing presence when the rest of the band comes in. Sam Sadigursky and Mike Fahie improvise a conspiratorial duet together, and the intensity builds up to what I can only presume to be Robespierre's execution.
• Habeas Corpus: This is by far the darkest piece on the album. Dedicated to Maher Arar, a Canadian national who fell victim to the US's policy of extraordinary rendition, it ranges in mood from somber to desperate. Throbbing repeated notes in the band and James Hirschfeld's raw trombone solo anchor the piece.
• Obsidian Flow: This is the other heavily metametric piece on the album. Here, the rhythms all center around different subdivisions of 9/8, splitting 9 eighth notes into 3+3+3 or 4+3+2, and occasionally pitting one of these rhythms against a straight 4/4 beat, with a stray beat throw in every other measure to keep things even. And I have no qualms whatsoever with Argue's bass trombone writing, especially prominent in the ending.
  
  So that's Infernal Machines, featuring Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. I hope you enjoyed the tracks, and if you did, I hope you will support Argue by purchasing the album. If you look at the performance archives, it is clear that Argue and the Secret Society easily have another album's worth of material ready, and I for one would like to hear their sophomore release. But Infernal Machines was an expensive venture for Argue, and it would take a lot of support to make a second album a reality. Another way to show your support is by seeing Secret Society live in concert. They play a lot of gigs in New York, but this Thursday they are making their Boston-area debut at Regattabar in Cambridge. I'll be there; will you?

Since I had trouble keeping a schedule of updating every Tuesday, I have decided to be less rigorous about when I post my feature articles. Of course, I can't call them "Tuesday features" anymore, at leat not without a certain amount of irony. Since I'd rather save that irony for something that really deserves it -- I have no idea what, so maybe it's more of a strategic irony reserve -- the (hopefully recurring) feature articles will now be called "Listen to This." So, listen to this:

That's "Leeds United," from Who Killed Amanda Palmer, the solo debut of Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer. Everything I've heard from the album so far has been great, but "Leeds United" is what first got my attention. And actually, I nearly passed it over. The first time I saw someone post this video, I watched about 30 seconds, and thought "Meh, another stalker song." Besides which, the video was slow to load further, so I gave up on it. Maybe a week or so later, I heard about the flak Palmer had gotten from her record label about supposedly unflattering shots in the video. Sometimes I resist the urge to pay attention to something just because it's controversial, but reading others' reactions I got the impression that Roadrunner Records was trying to step on something good.

And it was good. Quite good. For starters, it's not just "another stalker song." Yeah, there's a stalker narrative, but it's more about the stalker's bitterness than the stalking itself. At least, I think so; I have trouble piecing together the lyrical throughline, particularly in the bridge. As an aside, I have generally been bad at parsing song lyrics, both in putting together the syllables to make words and in putting the words together to make ideas. So I generally don't dwell on the lyrics so much as the music. Thus, let me dwell on the music.

There's a lot for me to like about this music. One of the most obvious for me was the backing horn section, (first entering around 1:50) which may be my favorite since They Might Be Giants' "Museum of Idiots." I love the sound of the horns on this track, from their very first entrance. The horn parts are very much in line with the cabaret style of the song, but the sound itself is more like a college pep band, which adds to the raucous tone in the latter half. That may be a product of engineering and mixing, but the horn tracks were apparently recorded just as a demo that happened to make the final cut, so I don't know how much engineering was feasible in that situation.

The horn section is admittedly a quite conspicuous element on this tune, but there are a lot of tasty tidbits hiding in other places. Two things caught my ear almost at the same time in the refrain during the second verse ("Who needs love..." starting around 1:30). One is the voicing of the bass part. The chord changes in the refrain are pretty simple: Bb/Bb/F/Gmin, repeated. And the bass part conforms to this exactly, hitting the root of each chord on each downbeat with a pickup leading into it. But instead of just parking on Bb and then going up a step from F to G, the bass jumps all over the place:

I especially like the third and fourth bars, as the bass jumps down nearly an octave rather than proceeding stepwise from F to G. This downward leap in place of an upward step in the bass is not a new invention; bass players have been using that gesture almost since they were let into the band, and it's not unusual to find whole pieces built around that motive. Nonetheless, it's an effective gesture here, one that gives this section a relaxed feel, setting it apart from the previous eight bars (which used the same chord changes but featured a stepwise ascent at the same point in the bass line) and making the entrance of the horns twelve bars later that much brasher.

The other thing that struck me during this refrain was part of Palmer's delivery. Not the notes she's singing, but rather the opposite: the breaths you can hear between notes (You can hear her breathing in several places throughout the song, but this is where I first noticed it). A classical singer would take great pains to hide her breathing, but Palmer's gasps are front and center. If she didn't want those breaths to be audible, they certainly could have gotten edited out, but they stayed in, and I think that was an excellent decision. Here, her frequent gasps -- every three or four notes, and it's not like they're particularly long notes -- highlight the desperation behind the speaker's denial. And, I have to admit, Palmer delivers the notes she sings quite splendidly as well. She claims to have been in "NO SHAPE to sing," (emphasis hers; scroll down past the first big group of pictures) and I can believe it, but I wouldn't want it any other way. She starts out as a smoky cabaret chanteuse and is practically screaming by the end, but it's so much more effective than a "properly" polished performance would have been. One of the many advantages singers in almost any pop genre have over classical is the infinitely wider range of "acceptable" vocal qualities. I don't mean that in the sense of "Bob Dylan can get away with sounding like Bob Dylan," but rather that it's perfectly normal -- and often desirable -- to sing roughly, to have more than one sound. Palmer gets a lot of different vocal colors on the other songs from her album, bringing more personality to those songs than any but the greatest opera singers can muster. Again, this is not unusual for singers of her ilk, but I am particularly fond of the colors she chose, even if she couldn't help it in this case. And I can't think of any other song that uses the singer's breathing to such effective ends off the top of my head (but "Runs in the Family" offers an interesting comparison; I think it's closer to indicating emotion rather than embodying it, but I do like it when Palmer's two parallel vocal tracks have breaths in different spots.

If I wanted to, I'm sure I could come up with an awful lot of things I think Palmer nails in "Leeds United," but I'm trying to cut down on the length of these posts. So let me just say that "Leeds United" has been running through my head an awful lot this week, and it rarely fails to bring a smile to my face. The fact that the video is a madcap rumpus doesn't hurt, either. And there's plenty to like in her other songs. "Astronaut" has a wonderfully varied accompaniment, ranging from ambient to driving to pointillistic. "Runs in the Family" scores major points with me for its Glassian touches, especially the ending. Presumably, some props go to producer Ben Folds on those tracks. "Guitar Hero" manages to seriously rock and haunt at the same time, and I'm quite taken with the melodic phrasing in "The Point of it All." A great album, and from a Boston artist to boot.

P.S.: Do you suppose "Guitar Hero" will make it into Rock Band? That'd be a good use of the irony I saved up at the beginning of this post. Given developer Harmonix's interest in local bands, I'd guess that the main thing keeping the Dresden Dolls out of their games has been the dearth of guitar-friendly songs. "Guitar Hero" is actually primarily synth-driven, with some guitar licks from East Bay Ray on top, but that's not such an obstacle for Harmonix, who have included songs by synthpop band Freezepop in all their games.

P.P.S.: There's one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post. Don't listen to Nancarrow while trying to solve crossword puzzles, sudoku, and the like. Sometimes I simply could not think straight enough to fill in the little boxes. Just so you know.

P.P.P.S.: I would also like to point out that the trombonists on the "Leeds United" video are rather brave for marching their horns through the midst of a food fight (3:50 to 4:00 -- it's a planned and presumably somewhat controlled food fight, but there are plenty of projectiles nonetheless) -- particularly the bass trombonist, (freeze it at 3:58) who has quite a nice instrument. I hope no trombones were harmed in the making of that video.

This week, I continue my Tuesday feature series with a longtime favorite piece of mine, Music for Prague 1968 by Karel Husa. First, the basics: Music for Prague 1968, for symphonic band, was composed in the fall of 1968 by Karel Husa, a Czech composer living in America. The work is in four movements -- Introduction and Fanfare, Aria, Interlude, and Toccata and Chorale -- and a complete performance lasts 20 to 25 minutes. Movement 3, the Interlude, is scored for percussion only; the other movements all utilize the full band.

I have a strong personal connection to this piece, going back to my early musical development. My high school wind ensemble played Music for Prague during my junior year, and I rate our performance of the last two movements at our pre-festival concert as one of the most profound musical experiences I have had the fortune to participate in. Our full performance of Prague at our end-of-year concert was not as stirring; we did not have enough time to adequately work up the first two movements, and we got out of practice with the last two movements. Nevertheless, Music for Prague was among the pieces that inspired me to more seriously pursue music in general, and composition in particular, when I went off to college.

Not everybody in the wind ensemble shared my enthusiasm. Music for Prague is by no means an easy piece: it is one of the most technically difficult works in the band repertoire, and it is hardly ingratiating to the ears. Some of us reveled in the ear-splitting dissonances of the piece; our motto was "Prague is Power!" But an equally vocal contingent complained that this wasn't what music was supposed to be like. Music for Prague was so divisive that the yearbook article on the wind ensemble was entirely about the band's mixed opinions of the piece. But the starkest illustration of the difficulty of appreciating Music for Prague was the pre-festival concert I mentioned previously. We put together an amazing performance of the last two movements. Many of us held nothing back, and even those students who were less enthusiastic about Prague put in a great deal of effort. After the last notes of the closing chorale died away, the parents and family members in the audience responded with polite but clearly half-hearted applause. We followed that up with Who's Who in Navy Blue, a harmless little Sousa march notable only for the fact that we had the brass section sing the melody during the trio. And that brought the house down. I felt that Prague was by far the worthier performance of the two, but what do I know? Probably too much.

So Music for Prague was controversial, at least during my formative years. But that doesn't make it great. What makes it great for me? Well, aside from my personal history with the piece, there are several things:

Music for Prague is timely. It was written in response to the Soviet invasion of Prague following the Prague Spring, and the spectre of oppression which hangs over it has sadly remained all too relevant. If Music for Prague is dissonant, anguished, even violent, there is good reason for it. Music for Prague is a piece which decidedly exists in our world, rather than some fantasy world of motives and pitch relationships and rhythms which remains untroubled by reality. Of course, some people don't want that. I welcome it. Here, dense brass clusters herald the oppressive Soviet presence in the Fanfare section of the first movement.

Music for Prague 1968, movement 1, Introduction and Fanfare. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Music for Prague uses its materials well. Most of the piece is atonal, deriving from twelve-tone rows and pitch-sets which are often cause for the audience to walk out before they hear anything. But it's not merely a theoretical exercise that requires a PhD to understand; while the harmonies and melodies may be completely foreign to most listeners, they are not the only expressive elements in the piece. The is a lot of content in the rhythms, melodic contours, registers, and timbres as well, and you don't need perfect pitch or a theory class to feel the impact of those elements. And Husa is adept at balancing simplicity and complexity. The opening piccolo solo of the first movement is markedly atonal, but also clearly evocative of birdsong, which Husa uses to represent the freedom which Prague has seldom enjoyed in its thousand-year existence:

Opening of Music for Prague 1968, movement 1, Introduction and Fanfare. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

And while the disjointed melodies, implacable dissonances, and obsessive rhythmic tattoos of the Toccata in the fourth movement create an unmistakable air of terror and confusion, the chorale that follows is even more gripping for its primal nature, featuring the 15th century Hussite anthem "Ye Warriors of God and His Law"¹ symbolically rising over the tumult:

Transition in Music for Prague 1968, movement 4, Toccata and Chorale. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Music for Prague is an uncompromising piece for band. Concert bands gets a lot of flak from "serious" musicians, especially composers, for playing a lot of lightweight pieces. Bands definitely have one thing going for them: they play a lot of contemporary music, simply because there wasn't a lot of band music written before the 20th century.² But many of the pieces that get a lot of play on the bandstand are certainly more conservative than their orchestral counterpoints (and far more conservative than contemporary chamber music, which is where the action's really at). But harmonically conservative -- that is to say, tonal and mostly consonant -- does not mean musically inferior. My favorite band pieces tend to be those that do not compromise artistic expression for accessibility, regardless of their harmonic language: Holst's Hammersmith, Hindemith's Konzertmusik, Joseph Schwantner's ...and the mountains rising nowhere, Ron Nelson's Passacaglia, and large portions of Grainger's and Persichetti's outputs number among them, as well as Music for Prague.

Concomitant with the uncompromising nature of Music for Prague is the fact that Husa treated the concert band as a fully independent and versatile ensemble, rather than a poor substitute for orchestra, or a halftime marching band that happens to be sitting down. Music for Prague was Husa's first composition for band, although you wouldn't know it from listening. He gets a lot of great sounds out of the ensemble, and makes good use of the band's unique assets, especially the low woodwinds. Husa subsequently made an orchestral arrangement of Music for Prague, because, in his words, "in Europe this piece wouldn't have been performed with band". Frank Oteri, who is famous for being one of the most open-minded listeners in all of music, thinks that "it is through the forces of a complete symphony orchestra that [this work attains its] fullest majesty, mystery, and universality,"³ but I have to disagree. In the opening of the second movement, the low woodwinds give a doom-laden sound to the wandering melody in the original version, while the cellos in the orchestral version sound petulant:

Opening of Music for Prague 1968, movement 2: "Aria". Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Opening of Music for Prague 1968 (orchestral version), movement 2: "Aria". The Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting.

In the closing chorale of the final movement, it may be easier on the performers to transfer the trumpets' sustained high A to the violins, but it loses a lot of its immediacy:

Music for Prague 1968, movement 4: "Toccata and Chorale". Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger performing.

Music for Prague 1968 (orchestral version), movement 4: "Toccata and Chorale". The Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting.

There are many other moments where I strongly prefer the Eastman Wind Ensemble's recording to the Louisville Orchestra's, but these may be due to performance choices rather than the transcription itself: in the Louisville recording, I think the metallic percussion instruments are played too harshly, individual lines are singled out for undue prominence in some of the deliberately cacophonous sections, and when the full ensemble suddenly cuts out except for the ringing of the vibraphone, the effect is ruined by an excessive use of the vibraphone motor.

I in fact own four recordings of Music for Prague 1968, perhaps more versions than any other piece in my collection. In addition to the Eastman Wind Ensemble and the Louisville Orchestra, I also have recordings of my high school wind ensemble (with yours truly on the bass trombone, naturally) and the Duke Wind Symphony (before I joined, but in a performance conducted by Karel Husa himself). The Eastman Wind Ensemble gives a superior performance overall, and I fine the orchestral version superfluous on general principle, but the other two band recordings have their merits as well. The tympani are very prominent in Music for Prague, and I think my high school band offers the best rendition of the part -- we had an incredible tympanist, who was something of a cult figure in the band. And getting to hear Husa's own interpretation of Prague is quite a treat, though he makes some very interesting decisions -- he asks for the bass notes in the background of the opening of the second movement, which I believe are marked mezzo-piano (medium-soft) in the score, to be LOUD. Maybe he wanted the mood of the opening to be apocalyptic, rather than merely foreshadowing. Sadly, both of these recordings are on cassette, so I cannot share them with you. But I can share some more of the Eastman recording. I haven't yet featured any excerpts from the third movement, so here is the beginning of that Interlude:

Music for Prague 1968, movement 3, Interlude. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger Conducting

In some ways, this may be the best place to approach Music for Prague if all the dissonance scares you. There is very little pitched material here, so one would be inclined to pay attention to those other musical elements I talked about: rhythm, contour, timbre, and density. And these are the sort of things that you should listen for in the other movements as well, even if you cannot make sense of the pitch content.

So I think there are several reasons why Music for Prague 1968 is a great piece. But there's an even simpler explanation for why I love it: I'm a bass trombonist, and I love getting to play something loud and raw. Some people like heavy metal, I like thorny classical music. As they say, "Prague is Power!"

Music for Prague 1968, movement 2, Aria. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

And, for the curious, here's more information about the recordings I've cited.

Eastman Wind Ensemble Plays Husa, Copland, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting. Recorded in 1989. CBS (now Sony), MK 44916.

Karel Husa: Music for Prague 1968, Apotheosis of this Earth, Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting. First Edition Music, FECD-0009. The CD appears to be unavailable, though mp3s can be purchased online.

The recordings by the Duke University Wind Symphony and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Symphonic Wind Ensemble and not commercially available.

Well, I failed to get this posted on Tuesday by almost an hour, but at least it's a good bit shorter than last week's edition. See you next Tuesday!

1This song is widely recognized by Czechs, and is prominently featured in at least two other Czech nationalist works: Smetana's Ma Vlast and Dvořák's Hussite Overture.
2Although many band directors make up for this deficiency by programming a fair number of transcriptions of orchestral classics. I think that a reliance on orchestral transcriptions delegitimizes the existing band repertoire, sending the message that all the good music was written for orchestra. Of course, I don't really see the dearth of the three B's in the band world as a problem, so my opinion on this matter, as with Music for Prague 1968, may be an outlier.
3Quoted from the liner notes to the album Karel Husa: Music for Prague 1968 and Apotheosis of this Earth.