On this day in 1851, Moby Dick was published in the US. It is one of the greatest books ever written – highly recommended reading! First, you learn that all sailors are lunatics. Then, you’ll learn all sorts of useless whale facts as you crawl through chapters of classification and lore. Lastly, you get to endure tens of thousands of words devoted to the slow mental deterioration of an already bonkers-crazy ship captain. (Joking aside, it is a truly marvelous work.)

George Crumb is an American composer whom I deeply admire for his ability to be avant-garde without being off-the-deep-end. He uses all sorts of unorthodox instruments (e.g. toy pianos, tape loops, electronic effects) and extended techniques (i.e. using an instrument in a non-traditional way, like singing into a flute or bowing on the wrong side of a violin bridge) in his music. Many composers have done this, but most fail at making music, and instead make something more akin to organized noise (if you like organized noise, that’s fine. I don’t. When I want to listen to organized noise, I turn on my washing machine.) Crumb, on the other hand, makes music – it is otherworldly, but often astoundingly beautiful.

Among his more famous works is Vox Balaenae, or voice of the whale. On one hand, it’s exactly what you might think – weird underwater “moos” like Dory does in Finding Nemo. But once you get past that, it’s oddly pleasing, calming, and brilliant. The entire work lasts 20 minutes, and is for masked performers (seriously) playing flute, cello, and piano. This video is the beginning of the piece, a flute solo with a little piano to set the mood – both using a lot of extended techniques!

And, unlike Moby Dick, you don’t have to invest hours into it before deciding you don’t like it and quitting. (Joking aside, it is a truly marvelous work.)

Everyone seems to agree that this presidential election is unpleasant, depressing, stressful, etc. So if you’re sick of listening to all the political bullshit, allow me to give you some very different bullshit for your listening pleasure!

If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you’ve probably had some John Cage forced on you. I should point out that I like the guy, and I like musing over and talking about his ideas. At the same time, I don’t actually enjoy listening to his music; I think it’s main value is not aesthetic but philosophical.

Among the many cool ideas he had (I say “cool” because I don’t think it’s necessarily “good”) was to remove the human composer from the act of composing as much as possible. From here he began exploring other ways to challenge our ideas about music composition and creation (and, about ourselves and our social interactions). His piece Indeterminacy is a recording of Cage reading random sentences from selected stories, while his friend David Tudor makes random musical sounds with various instruments.

If the music were more typical, and the spoken words made sense, this recording would be same-old-stuff, perhaps something akin to a children’s story accompanied by music. But since both music and words are nonsensical, our initial response is “what the hell is this?” But, to a non-human, both same-old-stuff and the nonsensical-stuff might sound exactly the same. Who gets to define what is music and what isn’t, anyway?