Review – Eric Lemmon

Burning City Orchestra — Debut Album

In November of 2015, Burning City Orchestra (BCO) released its debut album after five years of hard work. The primary driving force behind this indie-rock release is Noam Faingold, who is a great friend of mine. With that being said, as a reader, you can rightfully expect this review to be a good one, so let me explain to you why BCO’s debut is worth the listen:

I first met Noam at NYU when he was a graduate student in the composition program there. At the time, I knew Noam primarily as a classical composer and was only marginally aware of his past in indie-rock and his work on the Noam Faingold Orchestra—the name of BCO many years ago. Listeners should not think that this makes the BCO some unwieldy foray by a composer out of his element (not directly comparable, but see John Adams’ I Was Looking at the Ceiling for example). The parts written for the BCO are genuine and idiomatic to the form, except with a prominent twist where, instead of vocals being primarily supported by the classic rock quartet formation of an electric guitar and bass, the body of the orchestration¹ is primarily fulfilled by a contingent of strings. Hence, Burning City Orchestra. The string parts are performed competently by Amanda Lo, Joshua Henderson, Patti Kilroy, Rick Quantz, Susanna Mendlow, Mike Midlarsky, and Pat Swoboda.

To provide readers with an idea of some of the string parts’ compositional creativity, I would like to use a few songs as examples of what string writing in pop and rock should aim to be. In the introduction of The Place You Go Before You Die, during one of the final choruses and the outro, Noam uses glissandos, harmonics, and pizzicato played at various distances from the instrument’s bridge to create a kaleidoscope of effects outlining melodic content from the song, flung across the ranges of the instruments. There is a fair bit of processing on the parts, and these played string effects were sampled and then locked into their intended temporal position to create a clear rhythmic picture.

In Allinmymind over this lyrical content:

There’s a sin that’s been waiting for a special occasion
There’s a masterpiece waiting to be given shape
There’s a train built for one destination to take

And a rat looks me square in the eye as I’m falling awake.
And the train comes to take me away, as my pen starts to ache.

Here, Noam breaks the repeating triplet figures that have persisted since the beginning of the song with a beautiful ascending progression which ultimately lands on an A minor chord with the cello suspended on the 4th which subsequently resolves to a D minor 7 chord with a major 9th, through which the viola shines through on the tonic of the key. The moment of harmonic richness lands as Noam sings ‘awake’.

Musically, the best moments of this album are when the entire texture drops into a quiet intensity before bursting into adulation. This musical gesture happens a few times through the course of the release, in Madame, Inspiration Hits Like an Atomic Bomb, What Sweaters are for in the Summer specifically. In Inspiration Hits Like an Atomic Bomb, this kind of moment, which is presented in the 1st chorus,

Inspiration hits like an atomic bomb
And I’m waiting for the calm
So I can tell you that you’re perfect
Inspiration hits like an atomic bomb
And I’m waiting for the calm
So I can tell you that you’re perfect
Tell you that you’re perfect

is extended through a somber bridge that leads to a full stop in the music. Here Noam sings alone before all other instruments explode back in with a restatement of the chorus. Another interesting aspect of this album to note is that the usual song structure of intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-etc. is eschewed. For example, the first chorus in The Place You Go Before You Die occurs at 2:03 in the track, and only has a single second (albeit extended) chorus segment. In What Sweaters are for in the Summer, the reflective track is divided into two parts, with the first part essentially a soundscape of electronic noises with some light violin harmonic arpeggiations thrown in for effects. I won’t spoil the entire album for you, you can buy the album and see more here.

1. Orchestration in the sense of how the instrumentation and composition intertwine.

Album Review Go: Organic Orchestra, Sonic Mandala

Jazz musician, composer and conductor Adam Rudolph’s latest album is a widely varied work that does justice to its own title. Sonic Mandala takes listeners on a journey ranging from free jazz, to north Indian tabla music, using instruments from many different styles and cultures. In a general sense, the most impressive aspect of the whole album is how Mr. Rudolph uses instruments that are not ‘of’ a style or genre of music, to create the pastiche that has been melded together from instruments at hand. By doing this, he creates a sound world that reflects instrumentation and players that he does not have.

The album itself jumps between sections that are alternately almost entirely composed jazz or world music pieces, to more openly improvised tracks that situate themselves nicely over a structured rhythmic section, to parts that sound almost like free jazz.

On my first listen through of the album, I found that the work’s focus on returning to the music of the first track was interesting, but structurally predictable. Initially, I questioned the choice entirely on the aesthetics of the return, as I felt that in the return to the primary material, a more apparent change should have occurred. But as I worked through the thick of the middle sections on re-listens, I found that the return was satisfying, and after reading the liner notes to the album and other descriptions about the work by Mr. Rudolph, the structure also made conceptual sense.

From the composer himself:

“The idea of a sonic mandala came to me because of the circularity I heard, felt and understood in many music cultures. As pattern-based music orbits around and around it becomes a call. It’s a call to center into the collective state of the moment…”

“Contemplation of a mandala returns us from the illusion of individual existence into a way of living in resonance with the wholeness of nature. In music we can call this practice Sonic Mandala. In it we generate ostinatos of circularity that play in a synchronized sound weaving of space and motion…”

The aesthetic stasis of these two outer movements (and the extended, three track, central movement, Part VII) were what I found to be the most fascinating. The textural, sonic, color tracks that make up the body of the rest of album remind me more of the space-time music of indeterminate or totally serial composers, where moments in music act as objects to be considered and then related.

With these outer movements and Part VII, Mr. Rudolph got in touch with his rhetorical side, where a line develops, and the fantastic rhythmic section takes us along on a journey that our ears can sit in with relaxed pleasure.

Review of BAM Lotus Viola Case

About a year ago, I decided to ditch the case that I got along with my new instrument and get a nice shiny new BAM case. The previous two cases I had owned were these massive tanks of cases, made out of wood and kevlar, had poor straps and were as heavy as an M1 Abrams. When I first looked into the BAM Lotus cases there were a ton of features about it that I really liked.

I thought the kevlar coating would protect the exterior of the case from all the unsightly scarring of the fiberglass you see on many of the straight hard-shelled BAM cases.
It had a huge exterior pocket for sheet music.
It had a smaller exterior pocket for easy access to a chromatic tuner, or some pencils
On the interior, it had 4 slots for bows, plenty of room for my rather large Bon Musica shoulder rest, and a pencil case that could easily fit any other extra accessories I needed in my day to day playing.

What I didn’t know was that the case is pretty shoddily made and one of the ‘features’ of the case (which I didn’t mention above) scratched up the surface of my instrument.

When I first purchased this case, I lived in Miami and had a car, so the case didn’t get much wear and tear at all. It was either at home, in my car, or at University of Miami where I was getting an Artist Diploma. Most noticeably, the first thing to break down with this case, were the feet on the back of the instrument like the picture below.

As you can see on the right hand side, there are four holes in the back of the case. Here used to reside the “feet” for the back of case, which looked similar to the feet you can see on the far left of the image which the straps are attached too. When they initially fell off. I thought that perhaps, I had been a little careless about taking the case out of the car and putting it back in so that it tore at the feet in an awkward manner and caused them to be pulled out. This was not the case though, as you will see in a moment when I discuss the ‘Subway Standing Feet’.

Here on the bottom left you can see my last remaining subway foot, which I kind of wish would just fall off at this point since I can’t balance it standing up while on the subway anymore. It’s hard to see, but there are three other screw holes in the canvas of the case where the other subway feet used to be and have since fallen off.

Now, back to my thinking that the case was just getting abnormal wear and tear from my carelessness or freak bad luck. The case was still under warranty at the end of my Artist Diploma, so when I moved back to New York City, I took my case out to the BAM warehouse in Jersey. At that point I had lost only one of the feet on the back of the case, and two of the feet for the ‘subway stand’. The customer service was great, they took it in and fixed that same afternoon, so there is no knock on them for that. But after it was fixed up, all of these same things started falling off again from standard use. I was not tossing my case around (the thought of doing so with my precious viola inside sends a shiver down my spine), or exposing it to terrible elements. Because of this, I think that the anchors for all of the feet were just really weak. Ultimately, it’s not a huge deal, because the integrity of the case is still good, but it’s annoying to have the feet not protecting the shell of the case on these two sides.

These weren’t the only parts that degraded over time though. On the inside of the case, the mechanism for changing the size of the harness for the instrument is velcro. Looking below, I am lifting up the harness to display the degradation of the case, but you can see that the harness is velcro’d to to a strip that is supposed to be super-glued to the bottom of the shell. You pick up the harness and move it around, sticking it back to the velcro strip on the bottom to make room for larger or smaller bodied instruments. All in all, a pretty cool mechanism, until the strip on the bottom falls off and there’s nothing holding the instrument in the harness anymore. Now, I wasn’t tearing at the velcro with the harness, I wasn’t moving it at all as I only keep this one instrument in the case. In fact, all that happened was I opened up my case to find the velcro strip on the bottom of the case had fallen off one day and no longer wanted to cooperate in keeping my viola safe. I have tried repairing this myself to varying degrees of success. The ultimate solution would be some sort of stitching rather than various adhesives.

These issues are ones that are extremely annoying, but they can be coped with. One final thing about the design of the case cannot though. When I first bought the case it came with a tube for holding fresh sets of strings. It also used a velcro system of attachment, but was connected around the hinges of the case as you can see below.

As you can see the ‘scratchy’ part of the velcro is attached to the string holder. So when you close the case, it can actually scratch up against the front of the body of the instrument!!!!!!! I had no idea how my instrument was getting dinged up at first (I don’t hold my extra strings in these tubes), but once I found out I immediately took the tube out. Thankfully, my maker operates out of New York City and was able to get my instrument touched up.

These are some serious design flaws from what most people consider to be the case makers who “Get It”, and I think that I’ll probably be letting other musicians test drive new BAM designed cases before buying another one.