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Comment from Shabizziq
Date: December 10, 2008, 7:26 pm

Wow. Calling it John Lennon’s “Blackbird” about 4 times. [The rest of this comment has been deleted by the moderator due to inappropriate content. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.]

Comment from maru p
Date: December 10, 2008, 7:44 pm

no reason to slag personally!
Just the infoL
The credit Lennon/McCartney was on my copy,and McCartney sang, And it was written not “here in America” - all Beatles were still living in England at the time…

from Wiki:The songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, usually referred to as Lennon/McCartney, is one of the best-known and most successful musical collaborations of all time. In an agreement reached early in their partnership, the pair agreed to use the shared credit Lennon/McCartney on all songs written alone or in tandem for The Beatles. Their output constitutes the bulk of The Beatles’ catalogue.
Lennon, with his cynical edge and knack for introspection, and McCartney, with his storytelling optimism and gift for melody, complemented each other. Lennon and McCartney formed a critically acclaimed and commercially successful partnership writing songs for The Beatles and other artists.[1]
A common misconception of Lennon and McCartney is that each of the duo composed his own songs alone and simply credited them to the partnership. While each of them did often write independently — and many Beatles songs are primarily the work of one or the other — it was rare that a song would be completed without some input from both. In many instances, one writer would sketch an idea or a song fragment and take it to the other to finish or improve; in some cases, two incomplete songs or song ideas that each had worked on individually would be combined into a complete song. Often one of the pair would add a so-called middle eight or bridge section to the other’s verse and chorus.[5] Lennon called it “Writing eyeball-to-eyeball”,[5] and “Playing into each other’s noses”.[6] This approach of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting team — with elements of competitiveness and mutual inspiration as well as straightforward collaboration and creative merging of musical ideas — is often cited as a key reason for the Beatles’ innovativeness and popular success.
The pair wrote songs together from 1958 until 1969.

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: December 10, 2008, 8:03 pm

Shabizziq, The point is perhaps to be less culture-bound, to listen to what’s irruptive, not to what is reflex-of-our invested knowledge-scheme. Growing means leaving the hash impulse claim of skimmed experience aside, listening anew, without clinging to the burning wreckage which we think of as our own (and everyone else’s) fixt knowledge. To listen is to suspend immediate judgement and that’s not a culture-bound set of prejudices. Ciao, T

Comment from Daniel
Date: December 11, 2008, 8:45 pm

Love the tattoos! And your demonstration of metric modulation. (you should give a shout out to your tattoo parlor, too)

Comment from Casey
Date: December 11, 2008, 9:02 pm

To me, this is what public radio is all about. Learning, growing. Expanding one’s horizons. And doing so in the able hands of Mr. McKnight and Ms. Sirota.

Having the two of you together is akin to the X-Men teaming up with the Justice League - a powerful and victorious combination.

Kudos on an excellent program! And Happy Birthday Mr.Carter!

Comment from The Jeff Next Door
Date: December 11, 2008, 9:26 pm

Nadia,

Thank you for turning me on to The National tonight. I’ve already bought “Boxer” from iTunes.

Wish I could stay up late enough to hear your program more often!

Comment from Rodney Myrvaagnes
Date: December 11, 2008, 9:32 pm

A splendid program. I don’t really care about Ms. Sirota’s tatoos but her discussion of Rythmic Modulation was terrific.

One minor puzzlement. The two tympani pieces were issued by the same company, but the first, “Canaries” was played with mylar drum heads, not possible in 1950 (I don’t think my ears deceived me). “March” sounded more like what I remember of tympani in 1950, with skin heads.

This is not a serious complaint, but since Mr. Carter is still around, I wonder if he sanctioned the change. If we can’t hear living composers on “original instruments,” what hope is there for anyone else?

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: December 11, 2008, 9:55 pm

Terrance, Nadia, 10/10 for enabling, for connective accessibility, and for contextualizing the history of operational composition. Of course, Carter still struggles with the intuitionistic demands of most of the concert public. His playfulness keeps his compromise eye-twinkling brightly. But there is no other advancing future than operational modernist methods, whether these are concentrated as minimalist or operated in indeterminacies. Identity will, unfortunately, persist in clinging to language. (Part of the public will always crave a “retro” future, as it were.) The antique forms rely on discredited ideologic frameworks that impute to music subject-matter of which it’s not really capable, and which ultimately have propagandist aspects (such as some-or-other cultural identityism).
The common assertion that operationalist work is accessible only to the “intellectuals” or only to “mathematicians” is belied by listening attentively to how polyvalence in one’s own imagination finds anchors and erodes as operationalist processes pull us away from entrainment, entrainment psychology and entrainment culture so that we must re-alert to new, unforseeable, foundations for our personal imaginative capacity. Carter is a monument in this… one of a good number now of mileposts. From smudged scores in Bb arises the voice of the cosmos, quite naturally! It’s quite reasonable to celebrate his searching record, his attunement, his ardor for relations. Good job, gentle friends. ::gassho:: Ciao, T

Comment from Frank Feldman
Date: December 14, 2008, 12:57 pm

I feel quite inadequate admitting that I respect but do not love Mr. Carter’s music. I do not have perfect pitch, but have very good relative pitch, so I’m always imagining a temporary tonic which Carter doesn’t intend and then following the notes as if they stood in a tonal relationship to one another. Ms. Sirota, do you believe perfect pitch is essential to appreciate this music? I’m a very good musician, but the only atonal music I truly love is Berg’s, and he’s constantly making tonal allusions. Any response much appreciated.

Comment from phil kline
Date: December 16, 2008, 12:26 pm

wikipedia notwithstanding, it’s long been recognized by beatle aficianados that lennon and mccartney grew more separate as the collaboration proceeded. usually, the one who sings lead in the verse is the one who instigated the song. you can often discern the stylistic difference. “michelle” is clearly the work of paul, “in my life” is john’s. in “we can work it out” it surely sounds like the verse is paul’s and the middle section (life is very short) is john’s.
by the time of the white album, john and paul had reached near total separation. “blackbird” is most likely all paul.