And now for a subject as yet untouched by this blog - photography.
I don't own an expensive camera, merely a modest but friendly little Olympus which has provided excellent service for quite a few years now. It does have certain minor foibles and irritations, particularly the needlessly complicated system to activate a macro mode which has caused me to miss shooting several moving objects over the years, but otherwise it suits my purposes nicely. Of course I'd eventually like a better and more powerful model with a zillion megapixels, preferably an SLR, with some flashy filters and a fisheye lens.
However, one thing that I can do on any camera is make a panorama - ie lots of pictures 'stitched' together to form an image impossible in just one shot. This in effect is the equivalent of having a wide-angle lens, or taking a picture with better resolution than the zoom would otherwise allow. It used to be done by little more than trial and error: a film camera would be mounted as steadily as possible, a series of pictures taken and then, as often as not, glued together by hand, trying to match the overlaps as closely as possible. This method had obvious limitations, namely that the focal point of the image (where the light enters the camera lens) had to be kept absolutely exact throughout the series of pictures, otherwise they would not match, and that anything moving between pictures (trees, cars, etc) would have to be carefully removed with a paintbrush. In addition, the exposure also had to be consistent. Computer programmes have made the job of the panoramist considerably easier, not least because digital pictures can be 'warped' to make them align with each other, exposures homogenised and moving objects corrected or digitally painted over.
As with so many things, there's an open-source (ie free) program available, called Hugin (named for a Viking longship), which does most of this technological wizardry automatically. I stumbled across it a few years ago and immediately started experimenting with sticking pictures together. The creation of nicely aligned high-resolution photos still requires the user to rotate the camera carefully and expect some discreet imperfections, but Hugin will then stick the individual pictures together, correct the exposure and select the best projection. After a little practice, I've got marvellous stitches from up the cathedral tower in Worcester, the hills of Surrey, Berlin streets, Oxford colleges and many other places. With a fisheye lens one can also create spherical panoramas, the 'bubbles' which were so fascinating to us when the school installed Encarta encyclopaedia in its PC labs.
To reiterate: 1. this technology allows me to take photos with the camera zoom set to maximum, giving a much higher resolution than the same non-panorama image taken in a single shot; and 2. it allows me to produce pictures which are much higher and wider than would otherwise be possible, or which have an artificial focal point many yards away from where I am actually standing. It is also, mercifully, not particularly hard to achieve good results.
As with almost anything, there are some people who like to take this to an extreme. The largest and highest-quality resolution image in the world was, until November 2010, a 360-degree panorama from the TV tower in Prague which is 192,000 pixels wide and 96,000 pixels tall. However, it has since been eclipsed by a 400,000 x 200,000 pixel photo from Centre Point in London. It took three days of shooting, and is of such high resolution that one can clearly read the license plate of a car parked over a quarter of a mile from the camera lens. Such endevours are not generally within the reach of the average citizen, requiring an expensive camera and motorised mount, software to control the shooting sequence, and massive amounts of computing power to stitch it all together.
You may see my rather more humble efforts via my Picassa albums, or else my Facebook photos taken any time after early 2009.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Bordering on the ridiculous
Background music is an essential element of film and television - indeed, it has been since its earliest days, when an underpaid pianist would be expected to elucidate the film with variously a) ascending diminished seventh chords; b) ominous chromatic rumblings in the bowels of the instrument; or c) a jaunty rag-time tune, as a) Harold Lloyd, aided and abetted by the Marx brothers, hung perilously from some lofty pinnacle ill-conceived for such a purpose; b) an implausible stop-motion prehistoric monster emerges from a styrofoam crevice and c) after a Deus ex machina frees them from the hanging clock scene, Lloyd, Marx et al saunter off to find a whisky joint. The prevalence of this proto-Gesumkunstwerk combination has not been diminished by the passing of time nor technological improvement; indeed music as a method of making very clear what our reaction to a visual cue should be is as important as ever.
Nowhere is this less prevalent than in giving audiences an instant heads-up as to where the action is taking place. From the earliest days 'eezee-locate' clichés were speedily developed and further honed by successive travel programmes and documentaries until quite a sophisticated repertory of aural manipulation emerged - none of it necessarily accurate in any respect, you understand. Anyway, in keeping with my penchant for lists, a geographically comprehensive survey of 'location-sounds' is as follows:
Most of Europe can be provided for by the squeezy-box family of instruments, coupled with ostentatious renditions of the more recognisable national anthems. England is obviously morris-dancing music (accordion and shaky-bell things), or else Arne's Rule Britannia! France, however, has no national music (La Marseillaise aside) other than a Parisian-cafe waltz for accordion. In Germany the same instrument will require the accompaniment of a tuba played by a comically overweight Herr in leiderhosen, providing a ceaseless oom-pah-om-pah accompaniment. Switzerland is basically indistinguishable from Germany - indeed additional cowbells, alphorns and comedy yodelling are interchangeable between the two. Russia, Hungary and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact are lumped into a sprawling concertina and-slightly-out-of-tune-violin musical culture (one synthesizer I played was possessed of a gloriously tongue-in-cheek patch entitled 'vodkaccordian') with optional national colour from the plucky-twang-strummy family of stringed instruments (cymbalom, balalaika, Lada handbrake mechanism). Italy alternates yet more free reed instruments with bel canto opera in roughly equal measure.
A few exceptions are Greece/Cyprus (bazooki music or other guitar-like instruments); Spain (guitars/castanets/melismatic wailing in the Lydian mode - unless it's for the Hogarthian binge-disco hell of Ibiza); Ireland (pipes, tin whistle and fiddle combo, which can also do for Scotland at a pinch); and Scandinavia/Holland/Belgium, which are represented variously by more accordions, folky-violin, or tinny drum-machine pop.
Nobody has any idea what Portuguese music sounds like, so it's either the same as Spain or the safe option of a slightly different squeezy-box.
On to Asia, and the musical stereotypes show no sign of letting up. The Middle East (Palestine/Iran/Iraq/Saudi Arabia/Egypt) introduces a stalwart of 'I don't really know what to do' soundtracking, namely the (catchily titled) 'female wailing over ominous-sounding bass pedal' music. This sees use in all kinds of scene-setting devices in documentaries, from the splendors of ancient Babylon to terrorists holding aloft bazookas from the back of an ancient Toyota. Medieval Europe even gets a go if the bass pedal is sung by very deep and sufficiently monastic-sounding voices. To my knowledge no actual music from the region sounds like this. Moving eastwards, India (and neighbouring Sri Lanka) can be conjured up by sitar-and-tabla combo or by Bollywood rock-bhangra hybrids. China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea and all other Far Eastern lands share an identical heritage of pentatonic reed-flute and plucky-thing music, a cultural appendage not helped by the catchy hook in disco classic Kung-Fu Fighting.
The whole of Spanish-speaking South America uses pan-pipes. By contrast Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, is better evoked by samba music or jungly-drum things. The Caribbean contains so many countless islands that it's easier to just assume everyone enjoys steel drums - apart from Jamaica (reggae) and Cuba (manic trumpet and conga playing).
It may be due to its dominant position in the global film and television industry, but the United States has managed to retain a surprisingly diverse selection of typecast musics. From East to West we have big band jazz (New York); banjo-and-harmonica-blues (The South); more banjos, with the addition of guitars, autoharps and warbling singers (Appalachians and the Midwest); Motown (Detroit, particularly over footage of 1960s civil rights protests); stadium-rock electric guitars (anywhere, really) or chilled-out bass-and-synth cruisin' music (somewhere with a beach, roller skaters and mass-produced convertibles, viz. Florida/California). Canada generally gets by on rock tunes or 'ethnic' drumming. Funnily enough, the hillbilly folk harmonica-blues can also be transplanted to Australia - throw in a didgeridoo if your viewers really struggle with geography (another variant of the 'ominous-pedal' genre). Oh, and Hawaii is the only place on earth the steel guitar has ever caught on.
Finally, Africa. The Islamic part of the continent is covered by the aforementioned 'wailing over pedal' style, occasionally augmented by one-string-bowey-instruments either tuned or de-tuned to Western equal temperament. Egypt often gets its own sub-genre of harmonic-minor oboe-y things (again with obligatory synth pedal note - Korg must have made a fortune from Tutankhamen) although many of these lands have as their introduction the dawn muezzin crying aloft from a teeteringly high minaret. Central Africa (Nigeria/Kenya/unspecified jungle kingdom) is as often as not drums and 'tribal' grunts, shoehorned into a 4/4 meter Westerners can understand (real African drumming exhibits strikingly complex rhythmic patterns and metric modulation) with occasional outings for mbira thumb-harps and xylophones (the above disclaimer also applies) or West African guitar-based pop (ditto). The southern part of the continent (South Africa/Botswana/Tanzania) is blessed with a rare accuracy in background music, being accompanied by African choral singing (not that in real life this is absent from more northerly lands, nor is drumming from here).
Like all stereotypes, most of these cliches of scene-setting have some basis in reality. More interestingly, they can actually become 'authentic' to a place simply by continued exposition. I remember reading of a 'folk dancing' performance in Hungary which had almost entirely been invented for tourists and was largely contrived to fulfill their expectations of what Hungarian peasant culture was like. Amazingly, this dance had been performed so many times and was so well-known that it had actually become an important part of the town's culture, despite being completely invented and having little basis in tradition.
As an afterthought, the possible Gilbertian conclusions of this scenario are fascinating to behold, with significant potential for hilarity into the bargain. An enterprising producer could in theory fabricate a complete culture for some uninhabited island, or else deliberately assosciate it with some cultural artifact from an utterly different (but equally unfamiliar) location. Entire tourist industries could spring up based on visitors flocking to see and hear total nonsense.
Possibly, there's a film to be made in that last paragraph. If so I claim copyright.
Nowhere is this less prevalent than in giving audiences an instant heads-up as to where the action is taking place. From the earliest days 'eezee-locate' clichés were speedily developed and further honed by successive travel programmes and documentaries until quite a sophisticated repertory of aural manipulation emerged - none of it necessarily accurate in any respect, you understand. Anyway, in keeping with my penchant for lists, a geographically comprehensive survey of 'location-sounds' is as follows:
Most of Europe can be provided for by the squeezy-box family of instruments, coupled with ostentatious renditions of the more recognisable national anthems. England is obviously morris-dancing music (accordion and shaky-bell things), or else Arne's Rule Britannia! France, however, has no national music (La Marseillaise aside) other than a Parisian-cafe waltz for accordion. In Germany the same instrument will require the accompaniment of a tuba played by a comically overweight Herr in leiderhosen, providing a ceaseless oom-pah-om-pah accompaniment. Switzerland is basically indistinguishable from Germany - indeed additional cowbells, alphorns and comedy yodelling are interchangeable between the two. Russia, Hungary and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact are lumped into a sprawling concertina and-slightly-out-of-tune-violin musical culture (one synthesizer I played was possessed of a gloriously tongue-in-cheek patch entitled 'vodkaccordian') with optional national colour from the plucky-twang-strummy family of stringed instruments (cymbalom, balalaika, Lada handbrake mechanism). Italy alternates yet more free reed instruments with bel canto opera in roughly equal measure.
A few exceptions are Greece/Cyprus (bazooki music or other guitar-like instruments); Spain (guitars/castanets/melismatic wailing in the Lydian mode - unless it's for the Hogarthian binge-disco hell of Ibiza); Ireland (pipes, tin whistle and fiddle combo, which can also do for Scotland at a pinch); and Scandinavia/Holland/Belgium, which are represented variously by more accordions, folky-violin, or tinny drum-machine pop.
Nobody has any idea what Portuguese music sounds like, so it's either the same as Spain or the safe option of a slightly different squeezy-box.
On to Asia, and the musical stereotypes show no sign of letting up. The Middle East (Palestine/Iran/Iraq/Saudi Arabia/Egypt) introduces a stalwart of 'I don't really know what to do' soundtracking, namely the (catchily titled) 'female wailing over ominous-sounding bass pedal' music. This sees use in all kinds of scene-setting devices in documentaries, from the splendors of ancient Babylon to terrorists holding aloft bazookas from the back of an ancient Toyota. Medieval Europe even gets a go if the bass pedal is sung by very deep and sufficiently monastic-sounding voices. To my knowledge no actual music from the region sounds like this. Moving eastwards, India (and neighbouring Sri Lanka) can be conjured up by sitar-and-tabla combo or by Bollywood rock-bhangra hybrids. China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea and all other Far Eastern lands share an identical heritage of pentatonic reed-flute and plucky-thing music, a cultural appendage not helped by the catchy hook in disco classic Kung-Fu Fighting.
The whole of Spanish-speaking South America uses pan-pipes. By contrast Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, is better evoked by samba music or jungly-drum things. The Caribbean contains so many countless islands that it's easier to just assume everyone enjoys steel drums - apart from Jamaica (reggae) and Cuba (manic trumpet and conga playing).
It may be due to its dominant position in the global film and television industry, but the United States has managed to retain a surprisingly diverse selection of typecast musics. From East to West we have big band jazz (New York); banjo-and-harmonica-blues (The South); more banjos, with the addition of guitars, autoharps and warbling singers (Appalachians and the Midwest); Motown (Detroit, particularly over footage of 1960s civil rights protests); stadium-rock electric guitars (anywhere, really) or chilled-out bass-and-synth cruisin' music (somewhere with a beach, roller skaters and mass-produced convertibles, viz. Florida/California). Canada generally gets by on rock tunes or 'ethnic' drumming. Funnily enough, the hillbilly folk harmonica-blues can also be transplanted to Australia - throw in a didgeridoo if your viewers really struggle with geography (another variant of the 'ominous-pedal' genre). Oh, and Hawaii is the only place on earth the steel guitar has ever caught on.
Finally, Africa. The Islamic part of the continent is covered by the aforementioned 'wailing over pedal' style, occasionally augmented by one-string-bowey-instruments either tuned or de-tuned to Western equal temperament. Egypt often gets its own sub-genre of harmonic-minor oboe-y things (again with obligatory synth pedal note - Korg must have made a fortune from Tutankhamen) although many of these lands have as their introduction the dawn muezzin crying aloft from a teeteringly high minaret. Central Africa (Nigeria/Kenya/unspecified jungle kingdom) is as often as not drums and 'tribal' grunts, shoehorned into a 4/4 meter Westerners can understand (real African drumming exhibits strikingly complex rhythmic patterns and metric modulation) with occasional outings for mbira thumb-harps and xylophones (the above disclaimer also applies) or West African guitar-based pop (ditto). The southern part of the continent (South Africa/Botswana/Tanzania) is blessed with a rare accuracy in background music, being accompanied by African choral singing (not that in real life this is absent from more northerly lands, nor is drumming from here).
Like all stereotypes, most of these cliches of scene-setting have some basis in reality. More interestingly, they can actually become 'authentic' to a place simply by continued exposition. I remember reading of a 'folk dancing' performance in Hungary which had almost entirely been invented for tourists and was largely contrived to fulfill their expectations of what Hungarian peasant culture was like. Amazingly, this dance had been performed so many times and was so well-known that it had actually become an important part of the town's culture, despite being completely invented and having little basis in tradition.
As an afterthought, the possible Gilbertian conclusions of this scenario are fascinating to behold, with significant potential for hilarity into the bargain. An enterprising producer could in theory fabricate a complete culture for some uninhabited island, or else deliberately assosciate it with some cultural artifact from an utterly different (but equally unfamiliar) location. Entire tourist industries could spring up based on visitors flocking to see and hear total nonsense.
Possibly, there's a film to be made in that last paragraph. If so I claim copyright.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Neglected composers (#1)
Frank Bridge (1879-1941)
As of this year, my Tuesday evenings are spent at orchestra rehearsals, specifically the City of Southampton Orchestra. Trying desperately not to look like like a shameless plug, the next concert on 9th April features Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Walton's Portsmouth Point Overture. What most delighted me about the programme, however, was the second item of the first half - The Sea by Frank Bridge.
The politics and indeed ethics of attempting to champion a figure whom one feels is unjustly neglected are fraught with dangers, toils and snares, and will almost certainly be dealt with in a future blog post. Needless to say, I feel confident enough about the merits of Bridge's music to stick my neck out.
Almost every potted biography begins with the line 'Frank Bridge is primarily known for having taught Benjamin Britten...' a cliché whose use is not without justification, for it was Bridge that encouraged Britten's interest in continental avant-gardists such as Schoenberg and Bartok, influences which also found their way into his own music. In fact, both composers show a distinct development in style as their careers progress, from late Romanticism and Impressionism to full-blown modernism, touching on much else in between. Britten obviously was sufficiently impressed with his teacher's work to compose the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge as one of his earliest mature compositions.
I first came across Bridge when choosing pieces for my cello diploma, back in what now seems like very opaque mists of time, and my then teacher suggested playing part of his Sonata for the instrument. On the strength of this, I not long afterwards purchased a record which featured, amongst other things, The Sea, and was mightily impressed. Hence my delight at having the chance to play the work in the coming weeks. The music is obviously a nod to Debussy both in subject and in style, but with sufficient quantities of Wagner and that elusive entity, Englishness, to maintain its originality. Bridge also happens to be a superb orchestrator, although again with a somewhat different palette to Debussy, something which became immediately apparent when we came to read-through the suite. The four movements had some of the best cello parts I have ever come across - very playable, interesting and demonstrating a skilful deployment of the section. This is not to say they were easy (in particular the Alpine Symphony-type chromatic frenzy of the 'Storm' movement, but that is not the point of good orchestration.
As is so often the case, Naxos and other independent record labels have risen to the challenge of providing performances of Bridge's music on disc. Mostly this consists of his chamber and piano music (the majority of his output), but the disc containing The Sea (and possibly his masterpiece, Enter Spring) surveys a sizeable sample of the orchestral music.
Oh, and to add weight to another thesis of mine, Bridge was a viola player.
As of this year, my Tuesday evenings are spent at orchestra rehearsals, specifically the City of Southampton Orchestra. Trying desperately not to look like like a shameless plug, the next concert on 9th April features Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Walton's Portsmouth Point Overture. What most delighted me about the programme, however, was the second item of the first half - The Sea by Frank Bridge.
The politics and indeed ethics of attempting to champion a figure whom one feels is unjustly neglected are fraught with dangers, toils and snares, and will almost certainly be dealt with in a future blog post. Needless to say, I feel confident enough about the merits of Bridge's music to stick my neck out.
Almost every potted biography begins with the line 'Frank Bridge is primarily known for having taught Benjamin Britten...' a cliché whose use is not without justification, for it was Bridge that encouraged Britten's interest in continental avant-gardists such as Schoenberg and Bartok, influences which also found their way into his own music. In fact, both composers show a distinct development in style as their careers progress, from late Romanticism and Impressionism to full-blown modernism, touching on much else in between. Britten obviously was sufficiently impressed with his teacher's work to compose the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge as one of his earliest mature compositions.
I first came across Bridge when choosing pieces for my cello diploma, back in what now seems like very opaque mists of time, and my then teacher suggested playing part of his Sonata for the instrument. On the strength of this, I not long afterwards purchased a record which featured, amongst other things, The Sea, and was mightily impressed. Hence my delight at having the chance to play the work in the coming weeks. The music is obviously a nod to Debussy both in subject and in style, but with sufficient quantities of Wagner and that elusive entity, Englishness, to maintain its originality. Bridge also happens to be a superb orchestrator, although again with a somewhat different palette to Debussy, something which became immediately apparent when we came to read-through the suite. The four movements had some of the best cello parts I have ever come across - very playable, interesting and demonstrating a skilful deployment of the section. This is not to say they were easy (in particular the Alpine Symphony-type chromatic frenzy of the 'Storm' movement, but that is not the point of good orchestration.
As is so often the case, Naxos and other independent record labels have risen to the challenge of providing performances of Bridge's music on disc. Mostly this consists of his chamber and piano music (the majority of his output), but the disc containing The Sea (and possibly his masterpiece, Enter Spring) surveys a sizeable sample of the orchestral music.
Oh, and to add weight to another thesis of mine, Bridge was a viola player.
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