Tom Everett

The trombone fit me and had the variety; I've always been very eclectic in my tastes. Early on I heard some recordings of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra with the bass trombone of George Roberts. I heard a sound I identified with—a sound of relaxation, of singing on the instrument. Berlioz called the trombone "the noble instrument of God," but in some composers' work it could be threatening, menacing. Roberts's sound had a sonorous, reflective, and loving quality. Later, when I got to know him, I asked Roberts who he modeled his sound on. He said, "Frank Sinatra."
I find that one style of music has given me insights into playing a completely different style. In Brahms symphonies you have chorales with three trombones—alto, tenor, and bass. It's like playing a church hymn all alone. We would spend so much time practicing to get the tuning and balance perfect, blending our sounds to emphasize the beautiful sonorities. Then, when I played jazz, I noticed that everyone tended to emphasize the rhythmic feel and momentum: either you could swing or you couldn't. When I rehearsed with big bands, I'd say, "What about this chord here? Can we get this more focused or in tune?" Afterwards the bandleader would say, "What did you guys do? It sounds like there are twice as many of you." We knew we were onto something.
At all levels of musicianship people edit—a performer will make a decision to take it down an octave, or play a sustained note instead of a trill. Editing is not only acceptable but encouraged; it empowers a student who, for example, may not have the technique to play something exactly as written. Sometimes when the trumpet section is overbearing, I'll say, "Trumpets: at letter A, why not clean out your instruments there? The end result will sound better."
As the church organist in Weimar, Bach would write a new prelude and cantata every Sunday. He wrote a 20-minute piece each week and copied the parts himself by candlelight! There is every indication that frequently, Bach did not finish the prelude by the time of the Sunday service. So he would improvise. Fascinating. Performance, creation, composition, all tied into one.
Being a band director is very much like being a parent. Sometimes you step back and say, "They'll learn from this one without being hurt." Other times you step in and say, "This seems fine to you, but there's a contingent in our audience who will not appreciate this." If you let them have their creativity, when you step in, they'll listen.
The nature of youth is that they are drawn to high, fast, loud. You have to set up Harvard kids to play something slow, because the nature of their minds goes against counting out a whole note. Today you can take a synthesizer or digital piano, push a button, and get a tango beat—it's instant and it's perfect. But a clarinet player who takes up the instrument in grade five doesn't sound instantly good or perfect. It takes years to develop a concept of the instrument, to develop a personal, mature sound. It concerns me when people tend to jump from one thing to another, because these long-term, in-depth learning experiences are not as prevalent as they once were.
I don't think of myself as a teacher so much as a catalyst who creates an environment where things happen. The actual encounter with the music will present its demands emphatically, much more so than my telling them, "I want this."
You can't play architecture and you can't talk music—you've got to experience it. Music is something aural, yet we teach it visually. We learn by repeating, imitating. Kids often don't hear what they're doing. But ask them to imitate this sound, to play this. Then ask: Can you make it sound madder? Can you make it sound happy? Experience precedes theory. Allow the sound to develop first.
A student might come in and say, "Did you notice that tree that's dying in the Yard? It reminds me of the sparseness of the third movement of that piece we're doing." I'll want to go out and see the tree. They are combining visual and aural experiences; tying two things together gives you insight into both.

"You can't play architecture and you can't talk music--you've got to experience it."

Talk:Music

Three Maestros Talk Music
Conductors are known for their long lives—Toscanini, for example, lived to be 89. Three Harvard conductors—James Yannatos, Tom Everett, and Jameson Marvin—have also enjoyed professional longevity, waving arms and batons in Cambridge for 38, 31, and 24 years respectively. Yannatos, senior lecturer on music, conducts the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. Everett directs the Harvard University Band, along with its associated ensembles and jazz program. Marvin conducts the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the coeducational Collegium Musicum. Added together, they've been making music in Cambridge for nearly a century—working with and shaping the lives of thousands of student performers—and are still going strong.
As musicians, the three have contrasting backgrounds: Yannatos began as a violinist, Marvin sang tenor, and Everett has had a long and varied career as a bass trombonist. And each conductor has his own approach to the auditory adventure. In the following conversations, the three maestros, who also compose and/or arrange scores, share their views on music and how to make it.

James Yannatos

I grew up in the South Bronx. My father was Greek, my mother American, and her parents were English and Austrian. No one else in my family was musical, but my father used to put on the radio Saturday afternoons for the Metropolitan Opera. He had some Caruso records. My first love, at five years old, was a violin in a shop window. I told my mother, "I want that," and pestered her for three years until she bought it. I'd get up at six in the morning to practice violin so I could play baseball after school. I was a pitcher—another kind of conductor.

As a boy soprano, I sang in High Episcopal churches in New York. It paid! As a violinist I was concertmaster at Music and Art High School, but I was not very interested in a solo career. Conducting and composing were more attractive. I started writing violin pieces when I was 11.
I'm a violinist and I play lousy piano and monkey around with brass and winds. As a composer, if I want to use an instrument in a way that's going to be problematical for the performer, it's for a damned good reason. A professional orchestra will have maybe two or three rehearsals when they look at a new piece; if it is extremely difficult to play, it makes it that much harder to get the piece performed. That's a fact of life.

Composing music helps me as a conductor—it gives me a kind of insider's view of structural issues, orchestral issues. You want to conduct from a creative, or re-creative, position, rather than from a mechanical viewing of the work.

Instruments are an extension of the voice. If something doesn't sing, doesn't breathe, it's not real, not human. It has to be connected to our physical beings, to how we live. That's what makes people "musical"—the way they phrase. I tell the strings to think of the bow as their lungs—they have to breathe with their arms. Listen to the woodwinds—their phrasing comes directly from the breath.

There's the surface reality and then the hidden reality, the magic part of it. When the notes you've written are sounded by the instruments themselves, what they produce in terms of overtones and combination tones makes the whole picture more complex. Even a C-major chord, depending on what instruments play it—an oboe, a flute—sounds completely different. There's an acoustical magic that goes beyond what's visible in the score.

In performance, the acoustical aspect is essential. If the Bach Society does a piece in Paine Hall and the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra does the same piece in Sanders, there's got to be a difference. One group has 40 musicians, the other has 100—more bodies, more friction. There's no absolute!

There's a certain rhythm to preparing a work for a concert. We first read a new piece through, with lots of mistakes—you can't stop for each one. Then you look for broad structure, the movement of the larger sections. Next we go into more specific things like balance problems—melody versus harmony. You have to tune it, and make sure you don't overwhelm the predominant voice. I try to transfer all this through gestures, which stand as physical metaphors for the sounds the composers meant. In a way it's like dance: you must find gestures that communicate.

I'm frightened about the absence of music, and the cutback of music, in schools. And what music is done, is so dumbed down. There's so little contact with the classical tradition; everything is programmed to sell pop stuff. Kids are not developing one of their senses. They're hearing their pop stuff with big earphones —which, after a few years, make them deaf. It's dumbing down something that could be a tremendous spiritual source, opening up so many things in their lives.
There are dedicated teachers, though, who, in spite of the difficulties, engage their students in musical activities that are life-enhancing. There's this film, Music of the Heart, in which Meryl Streep plays Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras, who started string programs in Harlem schools. I think of myself, coming from the Bronx, and think of these underprivileged kids studying fiddle. Most of them trashing it at first, and then really getting into it, and having their whole family get excited as they see what it's done for the kid. School grades begin to come up, behavior problems disappear, and 80 to 90 percent of these kids go to college. To me, this is what ought to be happening. Music gives you another perspective, another way of viewing life. Especially given the world in which we live—it's not a luxury, it's absolutely bread and butter.

"If something doesn't sing, doesn't breathe, it's not real, not human."

MIR(Music Information Retrieval) Research in Japan

Introduction



The purpose of this page is to introduce various Japanese researches related to MIR (music information retrieval).





References



The following list shows English papers written by Japanese researchers in reverse chronological order. If you could allow us to cite your papers here, please make a contact with Masataka Goto .
QBH (Query by Humming):



[2003]
Sung-Phil Heo, Motoyuki Suzuki, Akinori Ito, and Shozo Makino: Three Dimensional Continuous DP Algorithm for Multiple Pitch Candidates in Music Information Retrieval System, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2003), pp.235-236, October 2003.



[2002]
Tomonari Sonoda, Toshiya Ikenaga, Kana Shimizu, Yoichi Muraoka: A Melody Retrieval System on Parallel-ized Computers, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Entertainment Computing (IWEC 2002), May 2002.



Tomonari Sonoda, Toshiya Ikenaga, Kana Shimizu, Yoichi Muraoka: The Design Method of a Melody Retrieval System on Parallelized Computers, Proceedings of the Web Delivering of Music (WEDELMUSIC 2002), December 2002.
[2001]



Takuichi Nishimura, Hiroki Hashiguchi, Junko Takita, J. Xin Zhang, Masataka Goto, and Ryuichi Oka: Music Signal Spotting Retrieval by a Humming Query Using Start Frame Feature Dependent Continuous Dynamic Programming, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2001), pp.211-218, October 2001.



T. Nishimura, N. Sekimoto and R. Oka, Auditory Scene Retrieval, Proc. of Fifth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol.VII, pp.291-297, 2001.



H. Hashiguchi, T. Nishimura, J. Takita, J. Xin Zhang and R. Oka, Music Signal Spotting Retrieval by a Humming Query, Proc. of Fifth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol.VII, pp.280-284, 2001.



[2000]
Tomonari Sonoda, and Yoichi Muraoka: A WWW-based Melody Retrieval System --- An Indexing Method for A Large Database ---, Proceedings of the 2000 International Computer Music Conference, August 2000.



N. Kosugi, Y. Nishimura, T. Sakata, M. Yamamuro and K. Kushima, A Practical Query-By-Humming System for a Large Music Database, ACM Multimedia 2000.



[1999]
N. Kosugi, Y. Nishimura, S. Kon'ya, M. Yamamuro and K. Kushima, Music Retrieval by Humming, Proc. of PACRIM'99, pp. 404-407, IEEE, August 1999.



[1998]
Tomonari Sonoda, Masataka Goto, and Yoichi Muraoka: A WWW-based Melody Retrieval System, Proceedings of the 1998 International Computer Music Conference, pp.349-352, October 1998.



[1993]
Tetsuya Kageyama, Kazuhiro Mochizuki, and Yosuke Takashima: Melody Retrieval with Humming, Proceedings of the 1993 International Computer Music Conference, pp.349-351, September 1993.

Acknowledgments

Masataka Goto (AIST) thanks the following researchers for their cooperation in managing this page: Tomonari Sonoda (Utagoe Co., Ltd.), Takuichi Nishimura (AIST), Hiroki Hashiguchi (Mejiro University), and Naoko Kosugi (NTT).

My space

Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence. Elements of sound in music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, structure, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.
The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and sub-genres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music can be classified as a performing art, a fine art, or an auditory art form.
Music may also involve generative forms in time through the construction of patterns and combinations of natural stimuli, principally sound. Music may be used for artistic or aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, ceremonial or religious purposes, and by many composers purely as an academic instrument for study.

Ancient

A range of paleolithic sites have yielded bones in which lateral holes have been pierced: these are usually identified as flutes[2], blown at one end like the Japanese shakuhachi. The earliest written records of musical expression are to be found in the Sama Veda of India and in 4,000 year old cuneiform from Ur.[citation needed] Instruments, such as the seven-holed flute and various types of stringed instruments have been recovered from the Indus valley civilization archaeological sites.[3] India has one of the oldest musical traditions in the world—references to Indian classical music (marga) can be found in the ancient scriptures of the Hindu tradition, the Vedas. The traditional art or court music of China has a history stretching for more than three thousand years. Music was an important part of cultural and social life in Ancient Greece: mixed-gender choruses performed for entertainment, celebration and spiritual ceremonies; musicians and singers had a prominent role in ancient Greek theater; music was part of children's basic education.[citation needed]

Al-Farabi (c. 872 - c. 950) wrote a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir ("Great Book of Music"). He played and invented a variety of musical instruments and devised the Arab tone system of pitch organisation, which is still used in Arabic music.[4]

Medieval and Renaissance Europe

While musical life in Europe was undoubtedly rich in the early Medieval era, as attested by artistic depictions of instruments, writings about music, and other records, the only European repertory which has survived from before about 800 is the monophonic liturgical plainsong of the Roman Catholic Church, the central tradition of which was called Gregorian chant. Several schools of liturgical polyphony flourished in the period after about 1100. Alongside these traditions of sacred music, a vibrant tradition of secular song developed, exemplified by the music of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger.

Much of the surviving music of 14th century Europe is secular. By the middle of the 15th century, composers and singers used a smooth polyphony for sacred musical compositions such as the mass, the motet, and the laude, and secular forms such as the chanson and the madrigal. The introduction of commercial printing had an immense influence on the dissemination of musical styles.

European Baroque

The first operas, written around 1600 and the rise of contrapuntal music define the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque era that lasted until roughly 1750, the year of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach.

German Baroque composers wrote for small ensembles including strings, brass, and woodwinds, as well as Choirs, pipe organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. During the Baroque period, several major music forms were defined that lasted into later periods when they were expanded and evolved further, including the Fugue, the Invention, the Sonata, and the Concerto





European Classical

The music of the Classical period is characterized by homophonic texture, often featuring prominent melody with accompaniment. These new melodies tended to be almost voice-like and singable. The now popular instrumental music was dominated by further evolution of musical forms initially defined in the Baroque period: the sonata, and the concerto, with the addition of the new form, the symphony. Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, well known even today, are among the central figures of the Classical period.

Romantic

Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert were transitional composers, leading into the Romantic period, with their expansion of existing genres, forms, and functions of music. In the Romantic period, the emotional and expressive qualities of music came to take precedence over the orientation towards technique and tradition. The late 19th century saw a dramatic expansion in the size of the orchestra, and in the role of concerts as part of urban society. Later Romantic composers created complex and often much longer musical works, merging and expanding traditional forms that had previously been used separately. For example, counterpoint, combined with harmonic structures to create more extended chords with increased use of dissonance and to create dramatic tension and resolution.