1971: Another Day, Paul McCartney.
I have very vivid memories of any music associated with the Beatles both before and after their breakup. Hey Jude came out when I was in Kindergarten and I remember our school librarian writing a broad parody of the lyrics to remind us to return our books. I remember listening to Get Back at summer camp I attended with my best friend Andrew after Kindergarten. I loved the guitar sound even though I never consciously knew why I loved it. For whatever reason, it was probably the songs written or performed by McCartney that probably connected with me the most as a child. I didn’t really know that Another Day was a bad song or anything like that. I barely listened to lyrics at that time. Another Day had a slightly mathematical feel to it, there was a pattern or something that I figured was like some sort of game. A lot of McCartney’s songs have some strong musical pattern or logic to them apart from what the lyrics are trying to convey. I found this very friendly and reassuring to listen to as a child.

1972: A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done, Sonny and Cher
I started to really connect with music I heard on the radio in 1972, but but apart from a couple of songs early in the year, most of my intensive listening was done starting in the late spring and summer. A lot of what I heard around her house was whatever my oldest sister brought home. She was a Sonny and Cher fan so we had a few of their albums. Doing a rudimentary Wikipedia search, I see Sonny is attributed as the writer. I know Sonny wrote and produced a lot of their material as well as songs for other artists so I’m not surprised but I thought this may have been a cover of someone else’s song. I was too young to experience the duo’s emergence in the sixties, so all I have is the entertainment package for television that they provided in the seventies. It must have been really painful for the two to live so publicly in the seventies when there was so much strife in their personal life.

1973: The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia, Vicki Lawrence
As an American child with Canadian roots, I always paid attention to songs that had the word “Canada” in them. Well, I thought it said “Canada”. Wikipedai informs me the lyric is “Candletop”. Boy, this is a rather dark song isn’t it? It seems to be a rather unusual choice for Vicki Lawrence to cover. Well, not really. Vicki was then the wife of composer, Bobby Russell. As a ten-year old, the lyrics might have well just been about a power outage in Georgia. Power outages I knew about. We’d get them once or twice a summer and every 10 or 12 years or so, there would be a power outage bad enough to affect the entire New York metropolitan area and there would be TV footage of looters. I don’t think that’s what the song was about, though.

1973: Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’round the Old Oak Tree, Tony Orlando and Dawn
I really don’t get Tony Orlando at all. He had the whole thing going with Dawn with “Knock Three Times” and the much better “Candida”. Sort of a Latin/Soul/White-Guy-with-a-Mustache thing. This song just exploded when it came out, presumably because it resonated with the general public in the U.S. dissatisfied with the continuation of the Vietnam war. And he explores this whole Ragtime motif with this and a few songs that followed. I wonder if this song started the whole phenomenon using coloured ribbons to signify general awareness of a health or social issue?

1974: Bennie and the Jets, Elton John
At about the age of 10, I started to really like Elton John’s music while being generally unaware of the really special music he produced on his early albums. I mostly knew just the songs that made their way to AM radio like “Honky Cat”, “Crocodile Rock”, “Daniel” and the hits from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. A few things that puzzle me about Elton’s phenomenal success on radio- First, his songs were really long compared to the conventional hits on AM radio. He released a number of singles that clocked in at more than five minutes, and to my ears it sounds like a lot of them could have been shortened by a minute or more by reducing the musical filler. Second, I could never make out more than a few words of a Bernie Taupin lyric as sung by Elton. His diction was atrocious. But his songs were musically exciting and the music was varied. Elton was big on not repeating himself. And I love how he used the same musical trick as Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson, emphasizing non-root bass notes in chords.

1974: Eres Tu, Mocedades
Is it just me, or does anyone else think the opening riff was lifted from the Canadian national anthem?

1975: Philadelphia Freedom, Elton John
By this time, I was purchasing singles and albums on my own. The first album I ever received as a gift was Elton John’s greatest hits. Next two albums I either purchased or received as gifts for my twelfth birthday were Chicago VIII and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. The Elton John record came with a really cool comic book telling the story of Elton and Bernie. Philadelphia Freedom was one of my favourite Elton John songs of the time. This song probably reminds me of early 1975 more than any other song of the period.

1975: Lady Marmalade, Labelle
This was a fantastic musical production, which I grew to appreciate more as I got older. Because I was the only Canadian in the 6th grade and my classmates knew that Canadians knew some French, I would be asked for the translation of the line in this song. Thanks to Mom for providing the translation and giving me some social cachet with my classmates.

1976: Right Back To Where We Started From, Maxine Nightingale
An odd time in my life, before my thirteenth birthday and my Bar Mitzvah when my brain started developing the characteristic quirks that would define my adolescence and adulthood of living with anxiety disorders and slightly obsessive behaviours and thinking. I think I was mostly listening to CHUM AM radio at this time. I always liked this song, the string arrangement is pure 1976.

Jack: Let me be clear. I think that every songwriter is free to do whatever they want with their time and talent. Who are you to say that entering contests is a waste of time and energy?

Jack: Wow. Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed today. Why so grumpy? Are you still digesting all that beef from Passover? I never said songwriting contests are a waste of time and energy. My main criticism is this: as a method of trying to reach specific goals, such as improving your writing or selling your music, entering contests are an exceedingly inefficient way of going about it.

Jack: Wow. Talk about me being grumpy. Someone steal your flaxseed, old man? Why is it all about efficiency? Don’t we live in a culture that’s already fixated on efficiency and overloaded on information consumption? Songwriting competitions are a nice way of networking with your peers and seeing where your writing stacks up with other writers. And you can win gear, studio time, cash…

Jack: Yes, getting feedback is a warm and fuzzy process. But don’t you put a tiny bit of thought into the value of what the feedback ultimately means? Aren’t there more organic ways of getting feedback? If I place a song, isn’t that sufficient feedback? If writers and performers I respect go out of their way to compliment my writing or songs, isn’t that a good indication that my ego can rest for a day? Who are the people making judgements in these competitions? Are they the folks who would potentially make decisions about selecting music for a project, or are they folks who benefit in some way from being affiliated with the competition?

Jack: Can you even write one paragraph that doesn’t contain a half-dozen questions? How can you learn from repeated rejection with no feedback? If in making numerous submissions or song pitches you receive no response don’t you deserve some information to help you understand why your songs are not being selected?

Jack: That’s kind of like wanting feedback after failing to get a job after having dozens of interviews. In that situation, the valuable feedback for me would come from the person who is doing the hiring, not from some random folks who watch me practice my interview skills in a mock strategy session. Anyway, that’s not my main beef. My main beef is that the whole process is like a lottery. There is no real product, no real net value generated from these competitions. Money is made from a pile of songwriters who want a shot at instant validation and gratification.

Jack: Man, that’s harsh. Some of your peers are going to de-friend you! I know I would. What about the valuable prizes? Guitar straps? Studio time? Exposure? Paid gigs?

Jack: I’m not going to change your mind. I doubt I’m going to change anyone’s mind. But I think that life is competition enough. Figuring how to survive doing what you love or juggling doing what you love with doing what puts a roof over your head is enough competition for anyone, as far as I can see. The challenge I get is writing something that puts a chill through my spine when I finish writing it. I can’t control whether other people feel that chill. Certainly if I want to monetize my songwriting or my performing skills then I want to see what I can do to make my skills more marketable. If I need the affirmation, I hope I have friends who are sharing the journey of struggling to actualize what they love to do, too. But I don’t want to buy an exclamation point to put on my resume. I don’t want to pay people to say nice things about me. If they don’t I hope I have the courage not to give a fuck.

1973: Killing Me Softly With His Song, Roberta Flack
Listening to this song today, it’s easy to see how this song could have been successful regardless of what year it was released. It could adapt to a number of arrangements, and even though the seventies arrangement of this record is tastefully subtle, it is easy to hear it with production overkill that would be more suitable to later eras.

1974: Hooked On A Feeling, Blue Swede
This song was number 1 during the first week of April in 1974. Those Ooba-Chukahs, I’m telling you, really grabbed the ears of this ten year old. I had little awareness of the B.J. Thomas original. The production, to my current ears, represents a lot of what was happening around that time, and I’m amazed at how well this fits in with current American recordings of the time. Many songs were arranged with a significant number of horn and string players. Probably the majority of the songs during that time didn’t need full horn or string arrangements to serve the song well, but this song sounds really slick with the arrangement and production. I’ve never bothered to search online the origin of the Ooba-Chukahs; I have a feeling the real story would never live up to my imagination.

1974: Seasons In The Sun, Terry Jacks
The first classmate I ever really started to talk about pop music with was Alan Tillinghast. Alan switched to our school in the 5th grade, and he lived roughly in the same area as I did so we would sometimes walk home together and occasionally talk about music. Alan grew to be really close friends with a good friend from my elementary school days, Andrew Voelkel. Alan and I would sometimes sit together during vocal class because we liked to sing loudly. I remember talking with Alan about this song when it came out in 1974. Without understanding the full meaning of the song, I think we understood that there was a strong romantic feeling attached to this song that we probably both associated with grade school crushes. Some cool things I found out about this song in later years is that it was a song that was originally going to be released by the Beach Boys sometime in the early to mid-seventies. Terry Jacks, in addition to his career with the Canadian group The Poppy Family also sang backup vocals on recording sessions with the Beach Boys. I would imagine this would have had to have been for the Holland sessions. The Beach Boys ultimately decided not to release this, and Jacks was granted permission to record and release his own version. Terry Jacks’ voice is extremely distinctive, and I find his voice to be one of the most unusual I’ve heard in pop music.

1975, Lovin’ You, Minnie Ripperton
I don’t know how I would perceive this song today if it came out, but it felt to me at the time refreshingly sincere and unaffected. The high notes, of course, are the real hook of this song. I don’t remember coming across any parodies of this, but there must be several floating around. The video I’ve linked almost looks like a parody at the start, seeing the classical guitarist next to some kind of parakeet or budgie or something making the same kind of bird noises heard on the record. You can see the strong resemblance between Minnie and her daughter from Saturday Night Live, Maya Rudolph.

1975, Have You Never Been Mellow, Olivia Newton John
Had a huge crush on Olivia during her period where she recorded a string of hits in ‘74 and ‘75. I think I bought a couple of her singles, including this one. Objectively, I can understand why this has shown up on several Worst Song lists, and I think my favourites today are still the ones she did in ‘74 with John Farrar belting out the bass notes. I have a thing for distinctive bass vocal parts.

1976: December 1963 (Oh, What a Night), The 4 Seasons
Franki Valli made a huge comeback in the seventies starting in 1975. I love all of his comeback hits. What I love about this one is the bass line. I’m not a bass player nor can I sing a convincing bass vocal, but I am drawn to innovative bass lines in songs. Probably comes from playing a low brass instrument in school. I remember one female friend from school in Toronto digging this song because she imagined it could have been about her conception, had she born a year later. Doesn’t even make sense to me today, but we all had crushes on her so it sounded logical.

1977: Love Theme from “A Star Is Born” (Evergreen), Barbara Streisand
I think it was at this point in my life that I realized that songs from movies featuring big celebrities and really lush ballads was a really, really bad idea. I’ve never been hugely drawn to Streisand’s music, although I love her version of “Stoney End” as much as Laura Nyro’s original version.

1977: The Things We Do For Love, 10 cc
An old school acquaintance recently sent me a link showing the making of 10 cc’s earlier hit, ‘I’m Not In Love’ which caused me to realize I had badly underestimated the genius behind this group. There were a number of clever, catchy pop songs from the late seventies that I only really grew to appreciate more in later years including this one. I wrote a song several years ago based on this title called “The Things We Do For Lust” but like many songs that seem like really good ideas, I was never able to execute this one properly.

There are three central music experiences that defined my formative years through public school; one was the fact that my dad owned a record store during the prime of the Rock and Roll era, 1955 through 1973.  I thought this was cool and it definitely whetted my appetite for listening to current music in my late childhood/early adolescence. The second experience was my participation in the band program at King Street School in Port Chester, New York.  The introduction of music classes came along at at a time where I had significantly limited social skills and confidence.  About the only thing that gave me confidence to that point were my intellectual abilities- participation in music through group lessons and band rehearsals gave me a sense of social belonging that had been absent from my life to that point.  Third experience was becoming glued to the largest AM top 30 station in the New York area, WABC.  As those who know me and occasionally love me understand, I am a bit of a statistical junkie and when something captures my curiosity, like baseball or popular music, I can become a bit obsessive about gathering information about my interest.

What I want to do is present a series of blog postings sharing my experience of some of the formative songs from my youth from my non-censoring child’s perspective, when every piece of music I heard was new and relevant.  The prime formative music years for me were 1972 through 1976.  1972 was when I really started becoming glued to the radio; sometime around the period when ‘American Pie’ was released.  I stayed glued and obsessive about seventies AM radio until the time we moved from New York in 1975.  I still maintained somewhat of a keen obsessive interest for a couple of years.  What I want to do is focus on the music from 1971 through 1977.  Although there were a number of songs that pierced my consciousness and/or had a profound effect on me before that, 1971 is when my interest started to really grow.

I am first going to focus on songs that were on WABC’s weekly charts during the first week of April- I find it easier to recall feelings and impressions about songs when it is the same time of year as when I first heard them.  I am going to scan and choose one or two songs from each year’s charts for that week:

1971: Proud Mary, Ike and Tina Turner

I was too young to have a visceral memory of CCR’s original version.  I didn’t even know there was an original version until a few years later.  My oldest sister Sandy got this record on 45.  Sandy was my popular music mentor at the time.  She got the singles and albums that really interested me. I still have a lot of her old 45s.  She introduced me to the Beatles, Three Dog Night, and many of the other groups or singers I grew to love.  I didn’t really know what Ike and Tina were going on with on this record- it sounded kinda wicked to me, like I shouldn’t be listening to it.  But I loved the bass notes Ike hit in the opening part of the song.  I always wanted to be able to hit bass notes like that from that point on! And the transition from the slow opening to the fast part was just insane! This record was all I really knew of Ike and Tina Turner in the sixties or seventies.

1971: One Bad Apple
I’m glad that the Jackson 5’s singles hit me like a sledgehammer so I would never, ever confuse the imitators for being the real thing. I mean, I was only eight years old and I could smell something rotten with the Osmonds, who were a real family and kind of sounded superficially like the Jackson 5, let alone contrived imitators like the Partridge ‘family’. We had a boatload of Partridge and Osmond albums in our family collection. I love my sisters, but one of them fell down on the job introducing such crap into my impressionable young ecosystem. The apple imagery always struck me as a rather odd one to place in a song. I mean, I liked apples when I was eight. I never had really heard anything about a barrel of apples getting spoiled, and in fact I had never seen nor knew anyone who had ever seen an actual barrel of apples. I did watch the Osmonds with keen interest, because their younger brother Jimmy shares my exact birth date.

1972: Without You, Nilsson
‘Without You’ is one of those songs that kicked around the top of the charts for weeks. Even though I was always aware of this song, it never really penetrated my consciousness. Probably the most identifiable piece I could recognize by Nilsson at the time would be the theme song to ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father’. I remember that show because there was also a kid around my age in it. You remember those details as a kid. I didn’t know Nilsson as an extremely accomplished songwriter at that point. I assumed he wrote ‘Without You’, wasn’t some years later until I found out otherwise. Even though this song has kind of a sappy sound, it never sounded like your standard old person’s sappy song like an Andy Williams or Perry Como song. Even though I didn’t really know how old Nilsson was, I somehow knew he wasn’t one of those old guys.

1972: Rockin’ Robin, Michael Jackson
Boy, did I love Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson songs when I was a kid.  Strangely enough, I don’t think we owned any singles or albums by the Jackson 5. Everything they did was exciting. I don’t know why, I have a lot of memories of hearing Jackson 5 songs at the YMCA in Port Chester, where I sometimes hung out, took swimming lessons or watch the older kids play pool. I remember hearing this song there, as well as ‘ABC’ and ‘Ben’.  Every single they released up to that time was memorable.

I am currently working on converting some music notation leadsheets into a form that can be delivered online in an interactive format using a music-specific version of extensible markup language (XML). The leadsheets contain minimal information for guitarists or vocalists to replicate the performance of a song. The melody of the song is notated along with the accompanying lyrics, and above the melody are chords along with fret diagrams showing guitarists how to voice the chords in the same way as the original performer/composer. MusicXML was developed by Michael Good as a way of unifying the various methods for describing interactive sheet music. The sheet music description is ‘interactive’ because it bundles information for replicating the look of the musical along with information about how to generate an accompanying audio performance. The format can then by used by applications that can dynamically alter details of the score and the performance.

Many music notation packages now import and export MusicXML. The particular music application I am using to deliver interactive sheet music works best with MusicXML that is exported from Finale, one of the biggest mainstream commercial notation software packages. The music I am converting came from a book I published recently. I used a different music notation package than Finale to prepare output for the book, so the process of converting my scores to MusicXML is a bit complex. I used a couple of conversion tools to extract the score information and import it  into Finale, where I can apply additional formatting. Once the music is formatted into Finale the way I like it, I export the finished score into MusicXML. I am then able to render the MusicXML score with a test version of the viewer application that will deliver the music.  This allows me to spot any conversion or formatting errors.

The MusicXML file is a completely readable file containing instructions about how to render the music score and how to render the audio component of the music, along with other minimal formatting instructions. It mostly contains text and numbers.  As I began the process of converting the first wave of songs from the book, I noticed something peculiar with some of the guitar fret diagrams. Let me first say that guitar fret diagrams can be expressed completely in mathematical terms, once you’ve established how the guitar is tuned. A standard guitar contains six strings, so a guitar chord can be described by assigning a number to each string indicating where the fingers of the chording hand should be placed. For right handed players who use their left hands to make chords, you can describe some of the simple chords in standard tuning (EADGBE) as follows:

G: 320003
C: x32010
D: xx0232
A: x02220

The ‘x’ means that a string is muted. Once you get to know your way around a fretboard, you start to realize that some chords are movable either by playing a barre chord (a technique where the index finger is pressed along all strings on one fret and the remaining fingers press strings on higher frets) or by moving a guitar chord shape up the neck and keeping one or more stings open.

Here is an example of a movable chord- the regular E chord in standard tuning is played as:
022100

Moving this chord five frets up the neck, you can get an open-sounding A chord:
077600

When representing this chord with a fret diagram, you would normally display the E chord shape with a number to the right of the first fret to indicate the starting fret number of the played chord. This eliminates the need to have really tall fret diagrams for chords played up the neck.

What I found when generating the MusicXML was that chords played up the neck with one or more open strings are not converted accurately.   The actual chord shape that caught my attention is a G chord in DADGAD tuning. DADGAD, as the name implies, is a tuning where the bottom string is tuned to D, the fifth string tuned to A, fourth tuned to D, etc. The G chord as played by the artist whose music I am converting is played as follows:

G: 550000

The actual fret diagram shows the fifth fret as the bottom fret, with a roman numeral ‘v’ beside the bottom fret to indicate that this is the fifth fret. Here is how a correctly rendered Chord name with fret diagram would be expressed in MusicXML:

<harmony default-y=”75″>
<root>
<root-step>G</root-step>
</root>
<kind halign=”center” text=”">major</kind>
<frame default-y=”24″ halign=”center” valign=”top”>
<frame-strings>6</frame-strings>
<frame-frets>4</frame-frets>
<first-fret location=”right” text=”5fr.”>5</first-fret>
<frame-note>
<string>6</string>
<fret>5</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>5</string>
<fret>5</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>4</string>
<fret>0</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>3</string>
<fret>0</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>2</string>
<fret>0</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>1</string>
<fret>0</fret>
</frame-note>
</frame>
</harmony>

The <string> and <fret> tags tell you which fret number should be pressed for each string.  The fret values for the top four strings is zero.

Here’s how the chord is actually exported into MusicXML:

<harmony default-y=”75″>
<root>
<root-step>G</root-step>
</root>
<kind halign=”center” text=”">major</kind>
<frame default-y=”24″ halign=”center” valign=”top”>
<frame-strings>6</frame-strings>
<frame-frets>4</frame-frets>
<first-fret location=”right” text=”5fr.”>5</first-fret>
<frame-note>
<string>6</string>
<fret>5</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>5</string>
<fret>5</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>4</string>
<fret>4</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>3</string>
<fret>4</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>2</string>
<fret>4</fret>
</frame-note>
<frame-note>
<string>1</string>
<fret>4</fret>
</frame-note>
</frame>
</harmony>

The fret value for the top four strings is now 4. This indicates that the top four strings are pressed down on the 4th fret.

It’s a bug that I’ve reported and that will be fixed in an upcoming service pack; this is part of the hazard of doing this type of work with an emerging technology. Fortunately, it is all math; all I have to do is change a set of numbers in the MusicXML files to make this work. Inconvenient, but when you are using mathematical language to describe music, it is comforting to know that mathematical errors can be fixed.

Hi, I’m Jack Cooper, founder of BerLen Music.  I provide professional music engraving services and I am also a publisher of online digital sheet music.  That sounds a little bit vague, so let’s take another tack: What problems can I solve for you if you are a musician?  Let’s look at a few case scenarios:

1. “I’m a musician who has written some songs but I don’t have formal musical training. I’d like to provide charts for other musicians to accompany me while playing live or recording, or provide leadsheets along with songs I am submitting to publishers or for song placements”.

I can help.  I’ve prepared leadsheets of different songs in varying styles for many purposes.  I provided leadsheets for a successful applicant to the Berklee College of Music.  I prepared a leadsheet for a song that was a pastiche of other songs strung together.  Recently, I’ve been preparing songs in leadsheet format for a jazz musician.  I work quickly and accurately, my rates are reasonable and I can provide you with a quote on any project involving multiple songs that will suit your budget.

2. “I’m a professional musician, I read and write music fluently but I can barely find the time to spend on engraving my music- I’m too busy on other activities that are more directly related to generating income like seeking gigs, rehearsing for performances, touring, writing music, recording, etc…”

Okay. The majority of times that you hire someone to do a job for you isn’t because you are not capable of doing the job yourself but that spending time at the particular job or task isn’t the best use of your time.  So don’t think of me as someone who purports to be able to do something you can’t do, but rather as someone who offers a service to enable you to perform a task or series of tasks more quickly. I’ve undertaken two sizable music notation projects over the past year.  One project involved notating the score and vocal arrangements for a new musical.  The other project involved notating new instrumental works involving a variety of instruments.  In both cases the composer handed me handwritten charts that I used to notate using computer software.

3. “I’m a performer/songwriter/composer and people keep asking me for sheet music so that their choir/band/garage orchestra can perform my music.  I’ve thought that creating and selling pdf scores online would be a simple way to offer this, but I haven’t had the time to play around with this and I keep thinking there must be better ways nowadays for selling sheet music.”

There are better ways!  The technology for creating and delivering sheet music is evolving quickly. This is forcing a change in the traditional way of selling and delivering sheet music, which revolved around the archaic notion of charging for and restricting access to individual printed copies. I’ve been researching the latest trends extensively over the past few years and I now offer a platform for publishing sheet music online as ’static’ sheet music or as interactive digital music which can be manipulated and ‘played’ online.  I operate by entering a licensing arrangement with the publisher/composer of one or more pieces of music, which would allow the publisher/composer to receive a royalty as percentage of revenue from each sheet music sale. If you already have charts completed, you will receive a higher royalty than for music that we notate from scratch.  The technology that we employ delivers the music through a web browser to customers, and in the future the technology will allow music to be delivered directly to a variety of other devices.  I can help you quickly generate revenue from your music in the form of sheet music.

Commercial radio and advertisers plug in to what they think is our nostalgia for the literal songs of those earlier eras. But that’s not it; even though the songs can bring comfort, what we really hunger for is that experience of enthusiasm for new music, filtered and presented to us by a reliable narrator. I’ve used the fishmonger metaphor when describing what I feel is an essential part of the filtering experience offered by brick-and-mortar stores; aside from the actual irrelevant details of where a store exists, what business model it uses or how it is embracing technology lies the concept of a fishmonger, a merchant who knows what s/he sells, knows the details of where the products came from, knows the stories each product brings. Each of our early experiences of “non-commercial” commercial music involves a host or production crew that was able to convey a sense of deep knowledge and enthusiasm about the music they presented to their audience.

There is another element where something else is mistaken for nostalgia; usually our memories of music presented the way we think it ought to be presented stem from childhood. I don’t think this is coincidence; there is something that happens in our early development that heightens our receptivity to learning and to being open to new experiences, including music. As we get older, we prioritize. We have to pick and choose what we allocate time to in all areas, including listening to music. Or we limit our music experience to specific genres. Or artists.

There isn’t much music on commercial radio I enthusiastically listen to. My preferred choice when restricted to terrestrial radio is to listen to CBC Radio 2, which features singer/songwriters appealing to a younger adult demographic. At home I lock into the Galaxie Folk Roots station, only available through cable television. I usually reserve my nostalgic indulgences for satellite radio; I tend to split time between the 70s channel and the Springsteen channel. I only encounter satellite through occasional car rentals that include access to Sirius/XM.

CBC and Galaxie both play new music, and both are directly or indirectly connected to Public radio. Commercial radio is committed to the idea that older audiences are mostly drawn to nostalgia. I don’t know if that is a correct assumption, but I do know this; new music is just as good now as it has ever been. There is no reason to think anything has changed but our capacity to embrace new experiences as we age.

I’m working on a really cool project with a musician on Vancouver Island. The way these things go is usually by word of mouth; often a friend will talk about my services to a friend, they’ll know some other friend who needs some transcription work done, and in one out of ten times that may actually lead to work. This particular bit of work came indirectly from a friend of a friend. In addition to doing some jazz leadsheet transcriptions, I’ve also been asked to notate some new handwritten scores. The score I am currently working on is arranged for a Baritone (Male) vocal, piano, and a woodwind sextet. The software I am currently using, Finale, has some really decent sampling of instruments so you can hear a fairly realistic rendering of the instruments. So as I’m entering each part and starting to play back the music (to both hear what it sounds like and to locate possible errors) it occurs to me that what I’m doing is like a paint-by-numbers. I’m not creating artwork in any sense; but I’m following the brushstrokes created by another artist, and before my ears the creation is unfolding. I seem to be developing a rhythm for completing this type of work; the more I work with this particular musician’s handwritten scores, the easier it is for me to recognize patterns on how he scores.

Honest-to-G-d, I’d love to be doing this full-time or doing enough of it to lessen my dependence on other sources of work. So if you know of anyone who needs transposing; doing leadsheets, vocal score notation, or any other type of score notation, please pass my name along. I’m passionate about what I do and I’m fussy about producing high-quality work.