Week 4: 23 October 2023 – A-minor Prelude and Fugue and Trinity 21
Plus: was I wrong about Chuu? From Hip-Hop to Hit Pop, and more!
As always, we recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices.
This week, please enjoy this rendition of The Blues Brothers in Potawatomi, with specific reference to Chicago:
(h/t Corinne Kasper)
Week 4: 23 October 2023 – A-minor Prelude and Fugue and Trinity 21
Please save applause for the end of each set
Organ Concerto in C (Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar), BWV 595
Fantasia in C, BWV 570
Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt, BWV 1101
Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt, BWV 637
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 686
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 687
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 1099
Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543
If last week’s “Dorian” Toccata adapted the Vivaldian style for the form of a German organ Prelude, this week we inch closer to the original with an actual concerto arrangement. (Vivaldi himself will appear soon enough.) Just like the “Dorian,” this arrangement of Johann Ernst’s Concerto uses switches between manuals to create echo effects and to channel and structure our sense of musical time. But in this case, those echos presumably reflect actual alternations between soloists and orchestra in the original piece. (“Presumably” since the original is now lost.) And although the soloists don’t seem to have gotten much in the way of virtuosic fireworks—this is more of a grand ensemble concerto than a showpiece for one player—the piece, about two-thirds of the way in, does give way to almost a page’s worth of noodling for the first violinist. That is: unlike Bach, Prince Johann Ernst really seems to have preferred to stick fairly close to his Italian model, “mechanical scrubbing” and all. The result has all of the things that we (or at least I) love about Vivaldi: memorable hook, great sense of forward drive, and judiciously paced formal structure. More on Johann Ernst below.
How about following that concerto movement with a piece that has none of those qualities? The C-major Fantasy BWV 570 is one of the Bach organ pieces that comes closest to sounding like an actual improvisation (or at least the kind that I can imagine playing): it’s a somewhat shapeless, meandering piece that mostly elaborates a series of standard chord progressions in C. After Bach lands on a rhythmic figure he likes (long short-short), practically the rest of the piece consists of letting the various parts trade off different permutations of that rhythm. Still, don’t let this description make it sound like I don’t like the music. There are beautiful and surprising moments throughout the piece, and it’s reasonably concise. Not every piece has try to blow your socks (or ears) off.
Yet again, the chorales for this week get into fairly grim territory; Lutheranism in Bach’s day could have a pretty dark outlook on the world. First, two meditations on original sin: “Through Adam’s fall is completely corrupted…” and you get the idea. This practice recording of the “Durch Adams Fall” Neumeister Chorale is probably a bit too chipper:
Still, it gives you a sense that Bach, even at this early stage, must have taken this hymn particularly seriously. Like “Ach Gott und Herr” from Week 2, this chorale begins with a long introduction, although this time the music is clearly based on the chorale tune, which then sings out in long notes over the flowing sixteenths in the other voices. And about a minute and a half in, we get to one of my favorite spots in the Neumeister collection. After the motion cools down a bit in preparation for the second half of the chorale tune, Bach livens things up again with a flurry of repeated notes in each voice. That’s a sound I particularly associate with older organ music, from a time when there was a much blurrier line between works for organ and harpsichord; Sweelinck writes a lot more repeated notes than Buxtehude, who in turn writes many more than Bach. In fact, this is practically the only original organ work of Bach’s that makes use of this kind of figure. It goes by in a flash, but it’s a very special moment, matching a shift in the hymn text from original sin to redemption.
As cool as this moment is, it hasn’t succeeded in making the Neumeister “Durch Adams Fall” displace the Orgelbüchlein one among Bach’s best-known chorale preludes—if you ever read or were assigned Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, this is one of the pieces you read about to represent Bach as a whole. So why is this piece so famous? For starters, its distinctive sound, which is unrelentingly harsh, full of jagged dissonances and grating chromatic clashes. But probably more important is what those aspects of the music are meant to illustrate. The pedal line is constantly falling in a very literal fashion, repeatedly pushing us down the stairs with drops of a diminished seventh. And the chromaticisms come about from the keyboard parts constantly slithering downward. Get it? Get it?? On the other hand, the piece avoids being just a gimmick, combining these slap-your-forehead obvious instances of text-painting with a nicely balanced sense of form and some very beautiful harmonies.
If you thought things couldn’t get any bleaker: “From deep despair I cry out to you,” a hymn sung at the funeral of figures like Martin Luther himself. (If the text sounds familiar, it’s a version of De Profundis, Psalm 130.) With a text like that, it’s no wonder that this chorale inspired two of Bach’s most intense and forbidding chorale preludes, the black heart at the core of the Clavierübung III. The first is one of Bach’s few pieces in strict six-voice counterpoint, giving four parts to the hands, with the tune in the right foot and another voice in the left foot. The result is an almost suffocatingly thick texture, an overwhelming web of voices imitating the theme, fighting each other rhythmically and harmonically, with the only respite coming between phrases of the chorale tune. While this enormous piece emphasizes the “cry,” its austere companion (BWV 687) might stay down in the depths. One of Bach’s very few organ works in the “out-there” key of F-sharp minor, this somber piece offers a few moments of major-key consolation, but constantly returns to a desolate sound of strange harmonies, slightly off-kilter rhythms, and jarring leaps. At least there’s no double pedal this time (melody on top).
All that said, text doesn’t always determine tune, and the other “Aus tiefer Not” tune (used in the Neumeister chorale BWV 1099) might sound like an almost bizarre contrast. Not only is this a grand, major-key hymn, it even gives way to a sprightly jig in the middle. The text really is the same. Just like last week’s “Alle Menschen,” this chorale tune shows just how foreign Bach’s world can feel to us.
Liszt appeared in 1844 at the home of J. B. Laurens in Montpellier, with recommendations from Mendelssohn, [Ferdinand] Hiller, etc.
— “You have the reputation,” J. B. stated brusquely, point blank, “of being as big a charlatan as you are a great artist!”
He rather brutally took the bull by the horns. Liszt did not flinch and even took on a spirit of frank and witty amiability. J. B. drew his portrait. They lunched, chatting about so many of the most interesting things and musical celebrities.
— “I have to ask you,” J. B. said at one point, “to play for me a certain piece by Sebastian Bach for organ with obbligato pedal, the first in the volume with the six fugues, the one in A minor so difficult that you are without a doubt the only person in the world who can tackle it. This is a unique opportunity for me today that I cannot pass up.”
— “Right now?... How do you want me to play it?”
— “How? But...the way it ought to be played!”
— “Here it is a first time, as the author must have understood it, played it himself, or intended it to be played.”
And Liszt played. And it was admirable, the very perfection of the classical style and exactly in conformity with the original.
“Here it is a second time, as I feel it, with a slightly more picturesque movement, a more modern style and the effects demanded by an improved instrument.”
And it was, with these nuances, different... but no less admirable.
“Finally, here it is a third time, as I would play it for the public…to astonish, as a charlatan!”
And, lighting a cigar that passed at moments from between his lips to his fingers, executing with his ten fingers the part written for the pedals, and indulging in other tours de force and prestidigitation, he was prodigious, incredible, fabulous, and received gratefully with enthusiasm.1
To end, another “above-title billing” star. Already by the 1840s, the A-minor prelude and fugue was being acknowledged as one of Bach’s premier organ showpieces, suitable for displaying the skills of even a pianist like Liszt. And this is fairly easy to hear: both the Prelude and the Fugue include long, showy pedal solos, and both burst into flames with showers of thirty-second notes; the ending of the Fugue is barely even possible to make sense of harmonically. This is definitely virtuoso music, and would probably be among Bach’s most famous organ pieces if it were just that.
But it is also more: this piece is also one of the most extraordinary examples of Bach’s stylistic versatility. Take the Prelude, which begins with a long solo (almost like a solo violinist improvising) that gradually speeds up and intensifies over a long held note in the pedal. It’s a familiar opening strategy from North German organists in the stylus fantasticus tradition—if you like Dieterich Buxtehude or Nicolaus Bruhns, this kind of thing is your bread and butter. But after the pedal solo, we get a brief arpeggiated cascade that sounds much more like the French style brisée, the “broken style” of playing on the harpsichord in imitation of lute technique. And after that (more flurries of thirty-second notes), the music breaks out into something like the “Dorian” Toccata’s version of Italian concerto style, before returning at the end to North Germany. Yet the whole piece is based on a single musical figure (what the “violin” line starts playing at the very beginning). The effect is almost kaleidoscopic, a series of stylistic lenses each showing a different musical way to treat a simple idea.
Then there’s the fugue. A German Baroque organ fugue is in essence a kind of promise—or even a threat. Organists were the first instrumentalists to give performances that resemble modern public recitals, which means that organ music, with relatively few exceptions, has always been designed to be “publicly accessible” in ways that other keyboard music didn’t have to be. So when it comes to fugues, the structure of the piece is almost always exceptionally clear: each part will come in with the subject in turn, and the entrances will be reasonably well-marked. Most of the time, the theme will have a distinctive shape that makes it easy to spot when it comes in. And, since this is public music, the piece will often be hard, and hard in a way that’s easy to hear. That’s the threat: once you’ve heard the fugue subject, you know that the organist is going to have to play that with their feet at some point.
In the case of the A-minor fugue, that is another violin-like figure that could have been lifted almost directly from (again!) a Vivaldi concerto. This has the nice effect of bringing the Prelude and the Fugue quite close together in terms of both style (the Italian influence) and musical material (the opening figures). But it most importantly throws down the gauntlet to the player: as the subject unspools into a stream of sixteenth notes that range across a wide gamut, the only question is how long Bach will make the player’s feet run up and down the pedalboard. This is the only other Bach piece to use some of the techniques “taught” by the Pedal-Exercitium from Week 1. It’s ultimate show-off music. All that’s missing is the cigar.
Who was Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar?
Some of you are probably sick of hearing this story, but bear with me again. At one recital where I played Bach’s other Johann Ernst arrangement, I began my spoken remarks with the line:
I know what you’re all thinking: “Who…on earth…is Johann…Sebastian Bach?”
Dead silence, as you could only expect from an organ recital audience. (Thanks to all who’ve been coming for bucking the trend with your warmth and enthusiasm!)
Let me further kill what was already not the world’s funniest joke. The idea behind this punchline, of course, is that nobody needs to be told who J.S. Bach is. Everybody thinks they already know; and, as I wrote about last week, a lot of people would like to think that they know Bach very well, or even personally. Conversely, even organists and Baroque music specialists barely know Johann Ernst by name.
That’s a shame. (Of course I think it’s a shame; I’m writing this, after all.) Obviously Bach thought highly of Johann Ernst, arranging at least five of his concertos for harpsichord or organ. Telemann was also a fan, editing the Opus 1 collection whose title page I’ve used as this week’s thumbnail image. Other major musicians like Johann Gottfried Walther also spoke highly of him. And of course, if my notes above didn’t make it obvious, I think that Johann Ernst did a pretty good job of figuring out what makes the Vivaldi style tick without sounding like a mere imitator. His musical ideas are distinctive enough to make an impression, and he knew what to do with them.
By itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be a reason to care about Johann Ernst. But it seems that his importance goes well beyond what he himself wrote. Being a prince, Johann Ernst had more financial resources and leisure than most composers, which meant that he wound up in Holland exactly when Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico was published in Amsterdam (1711)—and he had the resources to buy the parts and ship them back to Weimar for his parents’ court musicians to learn. Those musicians included J.S. Bach, whom the young prince in all likelihood commissioned to arrange these concertos for keyboard. In other words, it seems very likely that Bach’s up-to-date Italian influences came from Johann Ernst—and I’ve probably made no secret of the fact that this Vivaldian Bach is my favorite part of his style. No Johann Ernst, no A-minor Prelude and Fugue; no “Dorian” Toccata; and, possibly, later down the road, no Brandenburg Concertos.2
Why isn’t Johann Ernst better-known? Well, here are his dates: 25 December 1696 – 1 August 1715. Auspicious birthday, but it didn’t get him very far. The Telemann publication seems to have been a memorial volume; and it might be that Bach’s arrangements of Johann Ernst’s music (as opposed to Vivaldi’s) were also done in memoriam and not on commission, although this is impossible to know for sure. A single volume of six pieces is not a huge æuvre to build a reputation on, and of course Johann Ernst never had the time to establish himself in the musical scene more broadly. It’s also not obvious that he would have done so in any case: had he lived to become Duke, he may well have ended up more like Frederick the Great, with music playing a clear second fiddle to the business of governing.
Still, it’s hard not to get a bit wistful for what could have been. For sure, Johann Ernst was hardly the only Baroque composer taken before his time (Georg Matthias Monn at 33; Nicolas de Grigny at 31; Giovanni Battista Pergolesi at 26). And, even if becoming Duke would eventually have made his composing activities take a back seat, it is hard to say that his creativity would have been stifled in the same way as that of, for instance, Princesses Anna Amalia and Wilhelmine of Prussia. In the same vein, there are other unjustly neglected Baroque composers I’d prioritize bringing into the spotlight—more Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, more Anna Bon!
All the same, I hope we can make a little room in our collective memories for Johann Ernst, a composer Bach thought worth memorializing, whose works I thoroughly enjoy playing—and who made the A-minor Prelude and Fugue possible.
What I’m Listening To
Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford – Idylle
I was really excited to see this project: a mezzo whose Handel I really like, together with a lutenist who almost mind-melded with Jean Rondeau in an absolutely bewitching French Baroque disc a few years ago. This isn’t their first collaboration: you can hear them together with Iestyn Davies and Dunford’s ensemble Jupiter on a wonderful collection of Handel arias and duets from last year. And, now that I’ve thought to look it up, this appears to be a wedding album for the two of them.
What kind of Idyll is it, then? Well, of course they’re love songs—but no Handel. Indeed, only a few of the tracks are airs de cour, the obvious choice for French “baroque voice+lute.” The rest of the album keeps the French theme but ranges much further: Offenbach’s “Amours divins” (1864), Reynaldo Hahn’s sweet “À Chloris” (1916), Mélisande’s aria from Pelléas (1902), Françoise Hardy’s “Le temps de l’amour” and “Le premier bonheur du jour” (1962/3), and Barbara’s “Dis, quand reviendras-tu?” (1964); Dunford’s instrumental selections include not only theorbo music by Robert de Visée but also music by Satie (ever wanted to hear the first Gymnopédie on theorbo?).
This all works out much better than you’re probably imagining. This is partly due to canny repertoire choice—airs de cour are probably the Baroque pieces that are most willing to verge on the saccharine with their tunes and chord progressions, and canny choices in the lute arrangements make the overall sound much more consistent than it might otherwise. Similarly, Desandre keeps a relatively consistent sound, not going too far with her Françoise Hardy impression, and not trying to make her Mélisande sound particularly like the Opéra. And conversely, like most recent historically-informed performers, she’s unafraid to use a full, luscious sound and vibrato in the Baroque selections. (Still, I’m also glad that they didn’t try to make “Le temps de l’amour” sound like Michel Lambert or Reynaldo Hahn; a little contrast is nice too.) The highest compliment I can pay to this album is that, when even a little bit distracted, I often didn’t notice the stylistic leaps between tracks—and yet, all of the performances feel like they do justice to the music.
Allison Russell – The Returner
Another exciting release; if you haven’t heard Russell’s solo debut Outside Child, you’re in for a real treat. (And you may know or love her work with Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters.) Russell’s singing is really a marvel: she easily accommodates a huge range of styles, never losing her gorgeous sound, but also never sacrificing her ability to communicate what are often searingly personal lyrics. (In both French and English; there’s a reason she has a song called “Montreal.”) And she can’t resist throwing in her (very musical) banjo and clarinet playing, although it never sounds gratuitous.
I haven’t named Russell’s genre yet, and that’s partly on purpose; she’s been called things like “Americana,” a terrifically vague label that manages to say almost nothing about the kind of music she makes. It also might be the best label possible for her music, which draws in the whole spectrum of older American sounds: there’s that banjo again, alongside Gospel, folk, rock, soul…. Outside Child mostly kept all of these genres together within the frame of “folk-rock singer-songwriter”; there’s a more or less consistent drum-and-guitar sound throughout the album. Maybe it’s not a surprise to hear that her second album is a lot less confined. Disco and funk grooves on “All Without Within” and “Stay Right Here”; banjo-picking bluegrass (and more) on “Eve Was Black”; synths and choirs everywhere. The lyrical themes are maybe a touch less heavy (yes, for Russell, “Demons / demons / comin’ up from behind / Demons / demons / been there all my life” counts as less intense), and the songs might come off as less “personal” to some; but I really love what she’s done with the music, and can’t wait to see where she takes it from here.
In Memoriam Carla Bley
You’ve read the obituaries by now, and pieces by people who know jazz and Carla Bley’s music in particular much better than me. So instead of adding to the pile, I’ll just ask you to do two things:
Make sure you visit her website again. I hope it stays online forever, but assuming it doesn’t, we should all do our best to remember what someone with an actual sense of play could do with the Internet.
Listen to Escalator Over the Hill again. From how I talked about the albums above—or Ohzora Kimishima, or Bach for that matter—it should be pretty obvious that I like genre-flexible music and musicians. Bley, and this album in particular, puts the idea of “post-genre” completely to shame, and it’s from 1971. It’s the only album that could possibly have brought together Cream’s Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, John McClaughlin, Paul Motian, and Linda Ronstadt (!) into an absolutely raucous, joyous noise. At the very least, make sure to stick around until “A.I.R. (All India Radio)”—just when you think you’ve heard everything….
TOMORROW x TOGETHER – The Name Chapter: FREEFALL
SUNMI – “Stranger”
CHUU – HOWL
Nobody told me it was going to be synthpop week!
Depending on your conception of “synthpop,” that might sound a little crazy; K-pop is, after all, associated with nothing more than “industrial-strength synths,” and synth-based dancepop is the sound of many of its defining hits. But without wading into endless arguments about genre labels, I usually find that people rarely want to use “synthpop” as an umbrella term that encompasses these harder-edged sounds, instead using it to refer more narrowly to the more cold-blooded and “arty” new wave-esque sound of The Pet Shop Boys and Erasure.
If we stick to that narrower meaning, then synthpop is a lot more unusual in K-pop. Aside from a few isolated (and extraordinary) songs, and aside from the Pet Shop Boys’ own collaboration with three-fifths of f(x) in 2015, this sound has to be most strongly associated with Sunmi, who’s developed her own version of it (blended with city pop and other related genres) in a series of incredible singles. The verses of “Stranger” keep to the trend pretty much exactly, and the prechorus does a fun job of ramping up the intensity with a tempo and instrumentation switch. Shame about the chorus, although it gets better on later repetitions. (I understand that the song is supposed to be something of a Frankenstein’s monster; I don’t have a problem with “chopped-up” by itself.)
In any case, I was not expecting more or less straight-down-the-middle synthpop from TxT; they’ve done disco/dance-pop and synth-forward pop before, but to me their best and defining sound is pretty guitar-forward—and pretty high-energy. Still, even without a particularly good climax, this song pulls the sound off; and at least they didn’t try their own version of Mixxpop.
Chuu’s take on synthpop has to be the most surprising of all, even if you (like me last week) fully expected her to pivot to a more “adult” image, and even taking into account the calm pre-release “Underwater.” “Aliens” is partly a surprise because it’s good—random B-sides on EPs from brand-new labels are supposed to sound like filler, not like atmospheric, groovy songs that would fit right into (or even elevate) any 80s pop playlist. And frankly—just like Jini’s solo debut last week—none of the tracks on this EP are filler.3 “Hitchhiker” has a great, danceable beat; “My Palace” has cool instrumentals and builds to a memorable chorus; and “Howl” does Imogen Heap-style vocoder work that I haven’t ever really heard in K-pop,4 before breaking out into its own version of synthpop. And both “Howl” and “My Palace” showcase a dizzying array of vocal effects and singing styles. Following the classic metaphor of “roaring” or “howling” as a metaphor for self-assertion through singing, Chuu really does seem to be using this album to stake her claim as a singer, and as an adult.
Well, mostly.
Yes, I think the animation is supposed to evoke Where the Wild Things Are. And her outfit is definitely some kind of schoolgirl uniform. I was starting to think about issuing a retraction for last week’s post already when Gabee talked about choreographing a “cute” concept for an upcoming Chuu music video. And really, maybe my first hint should have been her “onboarding” interview for the new variety show Star of Star Girls:
Still, I think it’s possible to salvage last week’s post, mostly. Even if she’s not abandoning “cutesy” (which maybe could just be impossible for her to turn off?), there’s a big difference between “Howl” and “Heart Attack.” The message seems to be something like: “even after all I’ve been through, it’s still me.” “Cutesy” can be something Chuu uses, not something she’s forced to identify with.
Maybe the clearest expression of this is in one of Chuu’s song choices from her debut showcase (at 1:18:53):
“Twenty-Three” is a violently sarcastic song, in which IU lashes out at a musical public that both wanted to objectify her like an adult and keep her imagery as “child-like” as possible—and then accused her of being “two-faced” for not conforming to either standard. (“Try to guess” which one she’d rather be after watching the music video.) For Chuu to pick this song is to acknowledge the image that’s gotten her to where she is—and even to express some affection for it—but also clearly to strike out in a new direction.
Of course, the tweet where I first found out that she sang “Twenty-Three” says: “Twenty-three for life? In my eyes, Chuu is a forever baby.” Some people will never get it.
Also liked…
Ana Carla Maza – Caribe
Reol – BLACK BOX
Bad Bunny – nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana
Thomas Adès – Alchymia
betcover!! – 馬
What I’m Reading
Amy Coddington’s How Hip Hop Became Hot Hits: Radio, Rap, and Race has one of those titles. It’s almost too perfect: utterly memorable, tells you what the book is about, avoids jargon or stale academic constructions. (I’m so glad its three-word subtitle avoids the “Methods, Queries, Notes” type.) I just hope that the title doesn’t overshadow the book—that people don’t think that they’ve read it just because they know the title and author. (But I guess there are worse fates than becoming another Imagined Communities or Musicking?)
That’s because this really is a pretty great book, and it’s the kind that benefits more from actually being read than from just knowing its broader claims. Nobody needs to be told that hip-hop went from pop music’s periphery to its core, or even when—rather, the carefully laid out history Coddington gives shows how that move was made, most especially by actors in music distribution (radio, chartmaking). This helps her move past some of the traditional narratives about hip-hop becoming pop. Yes, Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way” makes an appearance, but emphatically not as a star character. Yes, there’s excellent discussion of how Billboard and record labels tied musical genres explicitly to racial categories, but it also pays crucial attention to the role given to Latine listeners as major constituents of the “crossover” public. And while Coddington’s narrative puts the industry and radio in the driver’s seat, it also does a good job of exploring the consequences these shifts had on the actual music. That’s probably the thing about the book that most impresses me: it smoothly zooms in from abstractions about race and society in 80s America, all the way down to the musical textures of individual songs, without making you feel like the transition has been abrupt or unmotivated.
Above all, this book is just written really well.5 It’s super clear without being dry, well-researched and theorized without being heavy-handed. It’s quite short (140 pages or so without the notes), and reads quickly. This really is a book that I think most will be both enjoyable and informative for anybody who listens to or wants to understand pop, rap, or playlists of any kind since the mid-80s.
A few others:
Financial Times – Lego: can the brick behemoth rival Disney?
Hyperallergic – What’s That Oddly Shaped Stone in a 15th-Century Painting?
PNAS – Ancient Maya reservoirs, constructed wetlands, and future water needs
Texas Monthly – For Your Next Book, Buy Used—Really Used
WTTW – The Chicagoan Credited with Popularizing Caramels in America
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
Translation from Russell Stinson’s The Reception of Bach's Organ Works from Mendelssohn to Brahms.
Yes, Bach likely would have encountered Vivaldi and that style through his buddies at the Dresden court. But who knows how different things might have been if he’d first heard the music at that later date, without an employer paying him to get inside the music by arranging and performing it?
This seems to be a trend—even five years ago, you wouldn’t have expected random album tracks from even major groups to be any good. (Especially girl groups.) On the other hand, is the flip side less musical attention paid to lead singles?
Close calls: SNSD – “The Boys”; GOT7 – “Stop stop it”; INFINITE – “New Emotions”; CHUNG HA – “Snapping”; TAEYEON – “Something New”.
Even if the prose sometimes makes me aware that my own overuse of conjunctions to begin sentence is probably pretty annoying after a while.
Than ‘I’
Thanks