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Angels fall first

I went to the concert of After Forever and Nightwish in the Heineken Music Hall yesterday. Both bands I saw for the third time, so time for some observations.

After Forever is considered an one in a dozen gothic-metal band by a lot of metalfans. I do not agree with this vision, especially their last album, Invisible Circles, has some very strong songwriting material and I do really like it. Floor is a talented singer with a lot of possibilities, the band decent at least.

Their gig was a very special one, they played with old gorefest drummer/Arjen Lucassen' companion Ed Warby. After one number Floor announced their own drummer has cancer and has to stay in the hospital. This was quite a shock for the audience. The rest of the performance was delivered in a special, strange atmosphere, with an "Andre"-shouting audience, a crying (not disturbingly) singer and a different really powerful drummer. The band was good though.

Compared to the (light, fireworks and water) show from Nightwish, the lightning for After Forever was in my opinion too shallow. I understand that they were the support act, but this was a bit embarrassing, some more nice light effects and darker hall would have added a lot, while they definitely would not outshine Nightwish in show. Sound was good though, especially compared to the other halls of this size (Brabanthallen, Ahoy, Jaarbeurshallen, Statenhallen).

The headliner Nightwish is professional. No really, they make less mistakes then Marco Borsato (I guess). Perhaps too professional. A bit more jamming would have been nice. Tuomas, the keyboard player is the composer and writes almost all music. In previous gigs, he was also (after Tarja), the most visible element on stage. Yesterday he was not. This is a shame, because the rest of rather weak. His (very small) improvisations sound weird and his timing is rather a-musical at times. On their albums, you do not hear this (his guitar parts, written by the keyboard player, are nice and original, thus sound fresh on CD). Playing a Pink Floyd cover (High Hopes) however, is not very smart if your guitar player does not play equal or better than David Gilmour. Since the Century Child album, there are some additional vocal parts for the bass-player. On CD these parts work really well, live they were always false. But not this night! Despite the vodka, Marco sang really well.

Perhaps I am nitpicking. Nightwish is a world-class band and they gave a very good show. However, they are doing this for a long time already, so it is time to raise the bar a bit :-). I had a very nice musical evening!

[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music] [concert]

I cover the waterfront

In a few days, I will be on holiday in Tignes. So no e-mail will be answered, phone probably neither. If I recover quickly ;-), I will come back to you after February 6th.

In the past weeks I have been working on a cleanup of the NJBG site. Some people volunteered to maintain the site. Since we are talking about a youth association, this is probably a good thing.

One of the lasts hacks I did was a mailing list. Actually multiple mailing lists with a web frontend. Although it is not really solid yet, it basically works. With PHP, programming is actually too easy these days. I needed only one procmail line (to redirect the incoming mail to PHP) and about twenty lines of PHP code. That is it. After working with python for some projects, it struck me again how good the PHP documentation is. Associative arrays (called dictionaries) in python still are a small mystery for me. Where PHP has a lot of nice array_ functions, python provides me with .keys(), .items() etc. methods, which make live hard. I really prefer handling with the keys and values in the same abstraction depth. Perhaps this is the reason mailman is such a monstrous beast...

[Permalink] -- Filed under: [personal] [holiday] [linux] [web]

Let's party

Where november was the month of moving, december was the month of party's. Today I will combine these events in giving a house-warming/new-year party. After that (hopefully) more time will be available for some good old hacking. As a reminder for myself to fix the damned end-year-bug here a shell script which shows my calendar, created with this nice vim script in a year/month/day.cal format.

    dir="$HOME/diary"
    nrofmonths=2

    year=`date +%Y`
    month=`date +%m| sed -e 's/^0//g'`
    day=`date +%e`

    for ((i=$month; i <= (month+nrofmonths-1); i++)); do
	if [[ -d "$dir/$year/$i" ]];  then
	    for ((j=1; j <= 31; j++)); do
		if [ "$i" -ne "$month" ] || [ "$j" -ge "$day" ]; 
      then
            bestand="$dir/$year/$i/$j.cal"
		    if [ -e $bestand ]; then
                size=`/bin/ls -l $bestand | /bin/awk ' print $5 '`
		        if [ $size -gt 0 ]; then
                    echo -n "* `date -d "$i/$j" +%a\ %d\ %b` : "
                    sed -e "1!s/^/	       /g" "$dir/$year/$i/$j.cal" 
                fi
		    fi
		fi
	    done
	fi
    done

Happy 2005 anyone!

[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux] [web]

From classical music to pop song

Introduction

Pop and rock songs often borrow some parts of melody, rhythm or harmony of classical songs. When listening to (pop) music I sometimes notice, but later almost always forget the connection between the song and the classical piece. Since knowing useless facts can be fun, I have decided to write these "classical covers" down. On this page you can find my (very incomplete) list.

By no means do I want to judge the quality of the songs. I also do not condemn reusing music; reviving old masterpieces should be done more. Sometimes the original is better, sometimes the cover, and sometimes both are equally awful or heaven-sent; these subjective decisions are left out of this page as much as (humanly) possible.

It is very difficult to exactly pinpoint when a song is a "cover". Therefore I decided not to maintain a bare list, but also write a few words about the connection between the songs, ranging from a small theme or chord progression to a literary transcription in the same key. I try to mention the oldest occurrence in written music, which is very often from the Renaissance or Baroque, simply because mankind started most annotating around this time.

Feel free to contact me if you find mistakes, want to add something or have a question.

Music theory

Because in music theory everyone uses different terms for the same things, here I try to give a brief explanation of the terms as I use them.

Melody

Harmony

Guitarist are trained in reading chord schemes, like C-F-G, appointed with letters. These are absolute keys (actually they are not, but in modern times we kind of standardized on a=440 Hz, so I consider them absolute..). In this notation a C-chord consist of the notes c, e and g. This is a major chord. A minor chord (like c es g) can be notated in a lot of ways (Cm, c, etc.). I don"t use absolute notation here, so I do not have to choose.

I will use relative notation with I II III IV V VI VII as major chords and i ii iii etc. as minor chords. With this notation the scheme is related to the actual key (if the piece is in C, then I is the C major chord). I is often called the tonic, V the dominant and IV the sub dominant. In music theory there are often a lot ways to look at things. For example relative minor/major pairs consist of the same notes, but considered major/minor, because we accept a certain root key in it. (a minor and c major both only have whole notes).

Most theory "deals" with three note chords (triachonic(?). Of course it is no problem to play 2 or more notes together. Two notes are Lots of rock/metal music uses power chords (quint), which is played instead of the expected (usually) major chord. With distortion a power chord just sounds better and our mind fills the missed noted in automatically, so I will consider the "expected" chord.

When dealing with more than three notes, there is usually an explanation possible about the extra note (kept from melody, key, chord sequence or just belongs to the chord). C major is c e g, so if the fourth note is also a c e g, the chord is still c major.

Rhythm

Terms

The cover list

     I > V > vi > iii > IV > I > V
     - Ralph McTell - Streets of Londen
     - Coolio - Gangsta"s Paradise 
     - Pet shop boys - Go West 
     - Demis Russos  - Rain and Tears 
     - Nocturnal Rites - Ring of Steel 
    

     - The Beatles - Because (?)
     - Depeche Mode - Moonlight Sonata
     - Alicia Keys - Piano and I
    

     - Procul Harum - Whiter shade of pale
     - Yngwie Malmsteen - Air
    

     - Beatles - Black bird (saw mcCartney telling this himself) 
     - Jethro Tull - Bouree (Barre says in an interview that he learned 
          it from a music student upstairs (he can"t read notes))
    

     - Toy Dolls - Tocatta
    

     - William Orbit - Adagio for strings
     - Skip Raiders  - Another day
    

     - Rank 1 - Sensation Anthem 
    

     - Gerard Joling - No more bolero"s
    

    - John Williams - The imperial march (Star Wars)
    

    - Vangelis - Conquest of paradise
    

    - Eric Carmen - All by myself
    

Feel free to contact me if you find mistakes, want to add something or have a question.

• The www.coversproject.com contains a huge database of pop/rock songs covered by other pop/rock bands. Very cool site!
• Lots of info on guitar playing and music theory on Olav Torvunds website.
• Of course wikipedia has a lot of informative pages, on chords, harmony, tonality and an index on musical techniques.

[Permalink] -- Filed under: [music]

Mystery man

Added an interview (wrote it already, so why waste it ;-)) on this page about the NJBG.

[Permalink] -- Filed under: [personal]