Bulgarian Idol; Whitney Houston in Translation

The winner of Bulgarian Idol, Nevena Tsoneva:


This is so interesting, because she's using Bulgarian vocal ornaments as a stand-in for Whitney Houston's American melismas, and is totally rearranging the tonal feel of the song in the process. (The Bulgarian word for the basic sharp vibrato ornament is "tresene", I'm told, but I don't know the names of the other ones, nor the specifics of the tonality involved.)
She occasionally copies a phrase of Houston's melisma note-for-note, which is remarkable, because her ornaments and Houston's seem to be tuned and inflected very differently. When she does this, it's as if she is slipping into an American accent.

I Want You To Hurt Like I Do

The bar on songwriting is sometimes set so low that I forget what songs are capable of. So, here's a reminder:



Randy Newman, from Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" (highly recommended):

"I'm interested in regular stuff. Like what a guy who threads pipe does, what a carpenter does, and all the stuff they know. I like shows on television that are about things I know nothing about, like gardening. Or that guy who paints...I like hearing them talk, their accents. Like "This Old House" with Bob Vila. It's arcane to me. It's like the world, because I don't know how to do anything.
I like to know what makes people tick, what their mothers and fathers were. Why they talk the way they do; using this sort of word or that sort of word. What it all means. I've always had to listen very closely. I always have listened very closely."

Randy Newman will be playing at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 17, 2008.

First Past the Post

Hallo and welcome.
The first post is left to better writers:

"In comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely different type. Therein lies music's theological aspect. What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings."

-Theodor Adorno

"The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious."

-Lester Bangs